Hasta La Ideas

This is the first in a 3-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School’s Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability.

The United States is proud of its commitment to competitive markets as efficient ways of organizing society. But as we all know—from every time we catch a flight, or go to the doctor, or try to negotiate a new wireless or wifi contract—the United States is far from efficient, let alone filled with elegant human-centered experiences. This is especially the case in larger-scale or infrastructure-related contexts, like much of city-life.

This is also not a new complaint about the United States. King C. Gillette, before and after designing a way of shaving that required less skill (but that could only be affordable if disposable), was fed up with the inefficiencies that he felt arose from competition. The response he worked on tirelessly throughout the end of the 19th Century into the first decades of the 20th Century, pitching the idea to President Roosevelt and Henry Ford as well as the general public, was the establishment of a People’s World Corporation, a single company that would build the one metropolis needed to house the entire US population in identical towers of serviced apartments near its hydro-electric power-source, Niagara Falls.

King C. Gillette’s World Corporation

Perhaps our current problem is that we live in failed attempts to realize Gillette’s ambiguous utopian designs. Our cities comprise dense apartments poorly serviced by pseudo-monopolies. And perhaps this is why our current faith seems to be now on the opposite kind of design: not the modernist total design, but evolutionarily aggregated micro-designs.

For example, consider the number of attempts to ‘crowd-source’ city redesign just this year in New York City alone:

A. is for Amplifying Creative Communities
A Rockefeller Foundation funded 2-year project of the Parsons DESIS Lab [of which I am contributing researcher] exploring sustainable social innovations by communities around New York City, and how design could make those innovations more robust and more widely adopted.

B. is for By the City/For the City
A competition and festival produced by the Institute for Urban Design (also in part funded by Rockefeller Foundation) that solicited public ideas for improving public space in New York City.

C. is for Change by Us
A platform initially developed for the Bloomberg Administration in New York City by Local Projects, resourced by CEOs for Cities and the Rockefeller Foundation (the contemporary heirs to Gillette’s social vision?) that allows citizens to identify urban betterment needs that the platform then connects with appropriate government agencies and community groups.

These are, in addition to already existing platforms for co-re-designing cities, such as ioby.org (crowd resourcing platform for environmental improvement projects [I am on their Board]), kickstarter (here’s their page on urban redesign projects put together by the World Resources Institute), and openideo.com.

Stepping back to overview all this, it would appear that our urban problem is not lack of ideas. In a way that King C. Gillette would recognize, there is almost frustrating redundancy in not only what people think should be done, but places in which they can express these desires. The issue is rather how to realize all these ideas, or even just some of the good ones.

Compared to the first year of the Amplifying Creative Communities project, which took place in the Lower East Side, this second year’s exhibition pays more attention to the stories of individuals who are fighting to materialize their innovations in Northwest Brooklyn (neighborhoods that include Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick). As Lara Penin, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design and Co-curator of the exhibition and its workshops this November, notes, the narratives of heroically creative people, if you can find and capture them, are inspirational, and more appropriate to the United States’ approach to social innovation.

What emerges from these stories is a rich picture of what it means to attempt change in dense urban contexts. They provide lessons for what a networked approach to social change demands, as opposed to Gillette’s total designs and the competitive market’s nondesigns:

There’s not much room /
There’s always space somewhere

There are lots of different kinds of cities, with different horizontal and vertical scales and densities, and within each of those cities are lots of different kinds of conditions. But in cities like New York, the number of people keen to be there means that nearly every square foot is programmed, usually with something expensive enough to deliver a growing return on investment to the owner. Further, what is there is invariably set in concrete, either literally, or, in the case of property rights, metaphorically. This means that urban change is difficult. Since there is no room to add onto the existing systems or structures, the task is one of ‘unbuilding cities’ (to use the nice title of a book), which is very difficult.

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