I didn't think that a humble flower bed could have quite this effect. The verges - for they numerous, every few metres - turned out to be the key feature of the streets of Shöneberg, Berlin, where I was walking with my colleagues on Friday morning.

We were being given a tour by Dr Dieter Genske (Fachhochschule Nordhausen, Universität Liechtenstein, ETH Zürich etc), one of Europe's leading experts on the relationship between cities, communities and renewable energy, particularly in Germany. And, it turns out, an excellent tour guide. Schöneburg was the subject of our tour as it is in the midst of an increasingly fierce gentrification battle, and so providing a concentrated demonstration site for examining civic action, urban regeneration and urban development.

And Germany was the subject of our visit as — perhaps with Denmark — it has the most interesting (and arguably most successful) energy policy in Europe and beyond. Germany has created an energy infrastructure which is, amongst other things:

• highly distributed and localised (minimising transmission loss),
• increasingly based on a diverse set of renewables (doubling its share of overall energy production from 10% to 20% in only six years), 
• generates hundreds of thousands of new high-value jobs in R&D, services and manufacturing, 
• and most interestingly of all, the infrastructure is majority-owned by communities themselves (individuals, small towns, villages, community associations.) 

This is part of a historic turn away from nuclear power and towards renewables for the country; importantly, described as part of an "energiewende" (energy revolution, or turnaround, roughly), a phrase that has echoes of German unification; and so the implicit idea that this is a national mission shared by all Germans.

We were there, as part of Sitra's Brickstarter project, to explore these relationships between systemic change, governance and citizen participation (we also saw Design Research Lab at Universität der Kunst, Renewables Grid Initiative, and Eclareon (more on all this on our Brickstarter project blog soon, as well as a quick post here explaining what Brickstarter is all about.)

Back to those verges. Schöneberg has as rich a history as any neighbourhood in a city that's seen more history than most, but the verges were the first thing Dieter pointed out. Almost every verge we saw was maintained by citizens — usually those in the adjacent block, or business — and this is agreed either formally, through asking the municipality, or informally i.e. just doing it without asking; "the Berlin Way", as Dieter had it.

Most of these flower beds are around the base of mature street trees (something else this neighbourhood benefits from.) Each is different, due to each block having different people in them. Simple.

Here a kind of meadow has formed in the middle of the road. What cities would allow this?

Some are beginning to grow herbs and other edibles (of course, community gardens are rampant in Berlin at the moment. For example.)

Sometimes a cafe has built a wooden bench around the base of a tree (strong enough to resist late-night clumsiness) to act as a 'bar' for waiting customers on summer nights. Here we see the name of the adjacent cafe — 'Soleil' — spelt out in flowers. (Should be on page one of any branding textbook, this one.)

It's an entirely small thing, and yet thoroughly inspirational. Of course, Berlin's governement is notorioulsy cash-strapped, and has been for years. Intriguingly, this does not seem to affect the city itself too much, which is as appealing as ever (a thought worth reflecting on, in terms of the hand-wringing over debt and austerity both here and abroad.) But it means the city has probably never turned down a request from citizens to look after their street.

For all the emphasis on major urban projects - on buildings, infrastructure and branding - it is through such entirely small acts that the healthy, resilient and enjoyable city is daily constructed.

How does a city engender this positive form of civic pride and activity? Can it work in London, say, with its fraught social contract, individualist culture and preference for a moan over action? Could it work in Helsinki, say, with its rock solid social contract meaning a instinctive outsourcing from citizen to state of such activities? How to balance this civic activity and individual responsibility alongside that of a community - an extremely diverse community at that — and a strong sense of governance, an effective state, a "big picture"? (For what is key here is that Germany is doing the large-scale policy work too.)

Given that Germany's communities (and small governments) across the nation have actively started build their own energy infrastrutures — and we spent much of the 36 hours in the city unpicking exactly how — is this model capable of translating from country to city, and of scaling up from a block's "shared ownership" of a verge to a block's shared ownership of a heat pump to provide the block's hot water from its waste water and of electricity from photovoltaics on the block's abundant free roof space? Could this enable a similar patterning of resilience here too?

These small patterns of plants, woodwork, mulch and ornamentation ask some serious questions.

Schöneberg itself was a genuine delight. Dieter noted how the area was, to some extent, demarcated by "male prostitutes in that direction, female prostitutes in that direction, and transvestites over there", a form of municipal boundary that is exactly how citizens think of cities and exactly not how administrators and politicans do.

We walked from U-Bahn Nolldendorfplatz around the corner to one of the most perfect streets I've ever seen. This is how much of Berlin was before the war's bombs, and indicates the elegant Paris-inspired plans laid by James Hobrecht, the city's urban planner in the mid-nineteenth century (Dieter points out that Hobrecht was Prussian, but in a region that is now Lithuania, and whose mother was called "Johnson", and so a foreigner one way or another - as is the current head of urban design (a Swiss?); this is something other cities, particularly Helsinki, might benefit from.)

Ernst Kirchner, "Nollenddorfplatz" (1912)

This street, with avenue of trees perfectly situated within the 22-metre high line of buildings, has a quiet grace that is near impossible to beat. We wander into a few of the open courtyards, which are also perfect little oases of sandpits, greenery and recycling bins.

It's here, also, we see a small office of a community group organising a very local resistance against the increases in rent in the area. It's "very local" as the badges on the window indicate a couple of cafes across the road have chipped in, as has the City of Berlin and the European Union. (You don't often see a set of sponsor's logos that scale from a cafe over the road via city hall to Brussels and the continent. Quite good.) The protest against the rents rising in this 'kiez' - an old slavic word for neighbourhood, apparently - seems active and well-organised.

Dieter, Karoliina and Bryan

Elsewhere in Scöneberg, the patterning of architecture is more varied, with streets often displaying most if not all eras of Berlin's rich history simultaneously, World War II's bombing punching holes in older blocks, sometimes rebuilt as part of the post-war effect (and marked with a plaque accordingly), sometimes left as pocket parks, playgrounds, and all covered with trees already flush in the full green of summer foliage. The only happy outcome of that bombing is that Berlin is now an intensely green city.

Although Berlin's form partly resisted the truly devastating effects of the incendiary attacks then in vogue in the Allied bomber command, the hammering the city took left Churchill to describe the city as being "nothing but a chaos of ruins". British Air Marshall Arther Tedder, who accepted the Germans' surrender, thought that Berlin would never be rebuilt. In fact, most of the rubble in what would shortly become West Berlin was driven to the edge of the city to create the vast man-made hill of Teufelsberg ("The Devil's Mountain"), carrying the western powers' surveillance equipment throughout the Cold War; 75,000,000 m3 of rubble, some of which would have been from these streets, was driven west and dumped on top of Albert Speer's incomplete Nazi technical college, which had resisted Allied explosives. Every brick round here has a story to tell, but perhaps only Berlin can pull off this kind of story.

And like any good city, the stories are still being written. We are led to what looks like a large vacant pseduo-modernist housing block, on a roundabout with a fine fountain, the local high school and some other more elegant blocks. This is effectively gentrificationcentralen, as it turns it out is not unoccupied, but has two residents left in it (one of whom is a lawyer, and holding out.)

The building is owned by a large construction company, and due for destruction, but many residents fear that the inevitable replacement will lead to rent rises throughout the area. The first sign is a curiously smashed phone box outside the building, incongruous compared to the generally immaculate streets elsewhere. A low metal fence outside the building is covered with fluttering tell-tale sellotape fragments.

A few days earlier these were holding up posters from the local community protesting against the block's imminent demise. The other obvious feature here are the freshly cut tree stumps, indicating the removal of the mature trees that surrounded the block.

The vast blank facade now looks like a rotten tooth, and you expect it's about to be extracted either way (but then I'm used to the way that British and Australian developers are allowed to throw their weight around; perhaps this is a more even battle. I know one thing: a British property owner would've had the roof off by now, to rapidly rot the structure from the inside.)

It looks this partcular battle is already lost, to be honest, but talking around, it's clear that Berliners will simply move onto the next one. So battles are won and some are lost, but the importance of standing up in the first place — of a community defining itself through impassioned discussion and civic action — is a more important form of soft city than this particular block.

A hand-made 'School - Go slow' sign. Many cities would have removed this.

Wandering around, we see many plaques to famous residents like writer Christopher Isherwood, the legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and several others I know nothing of (but we often see the exquisite sans serifs of Berlin typefaces that inspired a current favourite, Metric, by New Zealander Kris Sowersby.)

As my once-Mancunian-now-Frankfurter friend Taz later pointed out on Facebook, this was also where David Bowie holed up to create his hugely influential 'Berlin trilogy' in the mid-'70s (with housemate Iggy Pop looking after the domestic arrangements. Sending Eno out to pick up some falafels, that kind of thing.)

(Bowie lived here "because of the friction", apparently. Other famous Schöneberg residents include Marlene Dietrich, Blixa Bargeld, Albert Einstein, Helmut Newton, Klaus Kinski, Billy Wilder, Ralph Steiner etc. etc. and so on. This gives a sense of the kind of area we're dealing with.)

It's also completely clear the place is regenerating itself, to some degree. Building sites are visible every few hundred metres, alongside smaller renovation work, builders and carpenters piling old wood in the streets.

It's rather different to the Schöneberg of Isherwood's day:

"From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."  ['A Berlin Diary 1930', in "Goodbye to Berlin", Christopher Isherwood, 1939]

It isn't just that the urban fabric has transformed since Isherwood wrote that famous "I am a camera" line. His Berlin novels initially describe the fervent chaotic transgressions of the interwar years, but increasingly reveal that "the whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear", and that Berlin was "in a state of civil war."

"Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs, or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines ... 

Our street looked quite gay when you turned into it and saw the black-white-red flags hanging motionless from windows against the blue spring sky. On the Nollendorfplatz people were sitting out of doors before the café in their overcoats, reading about the coup d’état in Bavaria. Göring spoke from the radio horn at the corner. Germany is awake, he said. An ice-cream shop was open. Uniformed Nazis strode hither and thither, with serious set faces, as though on weighty errands. The newspaper readers by the café turned their heads to watch them pass and smiled and seemed pleased." ["Mr Norris Changes Trains", Christopher Isherwood, 1935]

OK, we're just wandering through - simply skimming the surface - on a particularly sunny spring day, with the economy doing fine, but these same streets could not feel more different. It's a tribute to the city's ability to transform itself, and a defiantly optimistic signal about the possibility of recovery, of progressive change, and, well, of the arc of history tending towards justice.

On a particularly elegant street, with a rich diversity of housing types, Dieter points out a 'refuge' for young gay men who are often trafficked here from Eastern Europe. It's run (funded) by the community itself. As our colleague Karoliina points out, in many cities there would be a NIMBY response to such amenities; here, in this case, a YIMBY response (this "YIMBY over NIMBY" theme is the core of Brickstarter.) There is a temptation to suggest that an openness to difference(s) is simply a function of a big city, as opposed to a medium-sized city - that it is almost a question of statistics, of volume - but there's more to it than that.

The site of a previous protest, but now this new building is apparently accepted

For instance, will this well-meaning togetherness continue as the neighbourhood changes? Signs of active discussion — some coordinated by the the city; some entirely emergent — are all around us, and it is this gives real hope that the area might maintain its diversity whilst changing. Apparently local politicians are at least aware of the role they might play in enabling this delicate balancing act, which is also heartening to hear. One is stating the absolute necessity to enable low-income families to afford the rent in this area, according to Dieter. Too often western politicians have abdicated sole responsibility for their city's mix to the market, with damaging gentrfication the inevitable result (the untrammelled market only ever tends to inequality, after all). Whilst the morality of this city's architecture is often the focus, given its history and the obvious target of dumb stone, it is in fact the flow of capital, that driver of architecture, that should be constantly in question.

Here, with Berlin's identity always in flux, these questions are scribbled on the streets themselves, in the actions of its citizens. On this unseasonably warm sunny spring day, it's good to witness the traces of such activity, from the fluttering tape surrounding the near-vacant tooth of a block to those well-kept flower beds.

Whilst all large cities are necessarily diverse, some actually implicitly celebrate it (again, culture over statistics). Berlin feels like one of those. Indeed, James Hobrecht talked of the diversity of the 'mietskaserne' (tenements) in response to criticism of his plan in the late nineteenth century.

"In the Mietskaserne housing estates they are next-door neighbours - the children from the basement flat goes along the same hallways to the free school just as the those children from the upper class go to the grammar school. Shoemaker Wilhelm in the attic and the bedridden old Mistress Schulz in the backyard tenement with her daughter running a meager seamstress business they will be the best-known persons on the first floor. It allows to pass on a dish of the day, to help in times of sickness, to give away a warm jacket, and bring in incentives for additional schooling. From all that which will come out as comfortable relations between so differently socialized people it allows the giver to ennoble himself on the situation. In between the extremes of the social classes the poor from the second to fourth story will be nurtured by the cultural life of the civil cervants, artists, professors and teachers. This will come out as beneficial to the society even when it would only be that the latter would have a daily silent example in their sight of those which were mixed among them." [Hobrecht, quoted here]

Beautifully put. The idea of "ennobling" oneself through daily contact with difference is a sentiment that was not so widely promoted at that point, or indeed since.

I'm reading Richard Sennett's latest, "Together", on cooperation. It's his second in his "homo faber" trilogy, following the excellent "The Craftsman" and preceding the final, on making cities, which will be a kind of culmination of these and other threads. The new book starts with a mention of Robert ("Bowling Alone") Putnam's research on how people react to living with diversity. Based on a giant study, the findings remain brow-furrowing, to say the least. They appear to indicate that "first-hand experience of diversity in fact leads people to withdraw from these neighbours; conversely, people who live in homogenous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curoius about others in the larger world" (Sennett 2012, writing about Putnam 2007). 

A while ago, from a London birthing ward, I wrote of "The condition that makes the city the greatest of all human inventions: ensuring people encounter diversity and difference in the space that they inhabit." That sentiment was me drawing directly from Sennett.

"Cities are places where learning to live with strangers can happen directly, bodily, physically, on the ground. The size, density, and diversity of urban populations makes this sensate contact possible - but not inevitable. One of the key issues in urban life, and in urban studies, is how to make the complexities a city contains actually interact."

This detail of "actually interact" is perhaps key. Sennett says that Putnam's study is based on attitudes rather than actual behaviour. Their behaviour appears to indicate that people are "obliged to deal with people we fear, dislike or simply don't understand." We might live and let live, but our attitudes harden with diversity. According to Putnam.

I'm intrigued to see where Sennett takes us. (Watch this video of him speaking — carefully, slowly, brilliantly — at Harvard GSD earlier this year.) From a European perspective, it's tempting to write this off as merely relating to American data and so drawn from a country which is increasingly unravelling, belying its rampant and worsening inequality and inexcusable social immobility. Or that the obvious inferences are just too obvious, and we're missing some complexity in the data. But we know that the European context is quite capable of unravelling too, and this finding of Putnam's is entirely counter the orthodoxy of the "civilising function" of cities. I'm looking forward to seeing where Sennett goes with "Together", in terms of making a case for cooperation enabling the "ennobling" described by Hobrecht.

Walking through Schönberg's elegant avenues, as the slow Friday lunches begin to gently occupy the leafy street corners, it's hard to see Putnam, and rather easier to believe in Sennett and Hobrecht. Long may that continue, as this particular neighbourhood, in a city of very particular neighbourhoods is caught in the throes of gentrification, and let's hope beyond hope that this is not simply wishful thinking. Getting a glimpse of the social fabric overlaid onto these streets, and as an inveterate optimist, I don't believe it is.

We sit down for lunch at a café, looking out onto its carefully maintained flower bed on the pavement.

[Many thanks to Dieter Genske for the excellent walking tour, and his insights in general. It's possible to believe that most problems might be cured by taking the protagonists on a good walk around a good city, followed by a good lunch. More detailed reflections on the possibilities of community-led energy infrastructure, in the context of German energy policy and culture, will be later noted on the Brickstarter project blog.]

See also
All photos from Schöneberg walk [Flickr]
Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes
"Berlin, because of the friction"

Most landscapes are transcendental from an airliner; Australia’s are particularly transcendental, if that makes any kind of sense. Flying up from Adelaide, towards Singapore, we pass over what I think is Lake Eyre, a body of water that is only sometimes water, a 10000 square kilometre salt pan.

It’s as if Australia’s terrain is designed to be seen from the air. From the ground, as Robert Hughes and others have pointed out, Australia’s landscape has a beauty of its own, but it is not one that can be easily drawn from the lens of western aesthetics. From the air, however, the vastness of its systems can be quickly appreciated. It’s beyond Burtynsky.

Similarly, flying into Singapore, we can sense the scale of the world’s economic systems, as with most of the eastern cities at this point. The water is full of tankers, container ships and smaller freighters, queuing to get into the port, patterns stretching towards the horizon. As the dark waters give way to land, suddenly everything is the pristine green of manicured golf courses, peppered with clubhouses.

As I said at the time:

Flying into Singapore under steely skies; sea full of container ships, land full of golf courses. Entire history of modernity right there.

— Dan Hill (@cityofsound) March 25, 2012

Of course this transcendental, strategic scale hits the all-too-down-to-earth reality of airports at some point; well, at numerous points. I started writing this in the altered realities of Singapore Changi airport, but when I got to Adelaide, on Integrated Design Commission business, I saw an artwork by the Russian collective AES+F which further “unpacked” the experience of airport—as purgatory—in "Allegoria Sacra" (2010-11)

At the Art Gallery of South Australia, in a wonderfully-curated 'International Art Series' show alongside pieces by the Chapman Brothers, Goya and a 16th century Japanese screen depicting a civil war, "Allegoria Sacra"is difficult to describe in terms of content—we were fortunate enough to be given a superb, florid and articulate introduction to the piece by gallery director, Nick Mitzevich, which took around ten minutes—but technically it consists of a 39-minute three-channel projection, composed essentially of animated digital stills at the scale of a gigantic tableau (this was apparently projected from the street, onto the gallery itself, for the opening; a smart attempt to turn this archetypal Victorian interiorised ‘house of art’ inside out.) Everything is in this piece; do take the chance to see it, if you can, in Adelaide or anywhere else. This video gives a hint of it, but no more, obviously. You have to sit down in front of this thing and soak it in:

I’ve written about airports many times before, finding them endlessly fascinating, but a year or so ago, I wrote a piece for Domus that focused more on the experience of flying an aircraft—which I’ve never done, I should hasten to add (not that this stopped me from writing it). But the editor (Joseph Grima) asked me to write something about the developments in interfaces for flying, aka avionics. It sat alongside an article by an aviation expert which focused more on the developments in aircraft design, but I was to take an interaction designer’s point-of-view on the design of the avionics systems interfaces.

Here I also wanted to capture the sense of an interface’s possibilities: not merely in the functional, but also in conveying the sensation of flying — which is present as a passenger, never mind a pilot. This, despite the relatively mundane outcomes of avionics design, which are quite rightly risk-managed to the hilt. Hence the allusion to Ballard’s extraordinary book, "The Unlimited Dream Company", amongst other things. That particular allusion should also suggest that this is a fairly exploratory, speculative piece.

There are a lot of question marks in this piece, perhaps tellingly, and as ever, this is the longer original edit, not seen in the magazine version—the ’30 Rock auto-pilot' edit.

Interfaces for the unlimited dream of flying

“Fly with the confidence of knowing where the sky always begins.”

So says the marketing material for Garmin Cirrus Perspective multi-function display. It’s a rather poetic turn of phrase for what are essentially a couple of displays mounted in a cockpit. But this is the paradox of interfaces for flying, or ‘avionics’—what happens when something as ethereal and other-worldly as the act of flying becomes experienced through hardware and software environments more commonly found in the grey cubicles of a Cisco branch office?

In fact, whilst they are rarely multi-touch interfaces (yet), contemporary avionics systems, such as L-3’s SmartDeck or the Cirrus Perspective (below) suggest a convergence not simply with personal computers, but with the latest multi-touch devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Android and so on.

This is in stark contrast to the impossibly complex array of controls and indicators that used to stud the cockpit of aircraft. To sit in a Dassault Falcon 10, a popular corporate jet throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, is to sit amidst an orchestra of dials, switches, knobs, levers, sliders, joysticks, warning lights (below). The pilot is
conductor, carefully and constantly calibrating the ‘plane’s performance.

Dassault Falcon 10 interface

Without data processing to generate abstract models of performance—”Is the engine working correctly or isn’t it?”—aircraft could only report on the state of each individual component, and the pilot had to build the abstract model themselves (”This is the reading from the fuel pump, this is from the aileron, this is the air speed, this is the altitude and attitude—this, overall, means that everything is probably OK.”) The cognitive load on the pilot was considerable, given the number of components, and their relatively complex interactions. It’s also a physically demanding environment—a glance at the primary engine controls reveals a thicket of levers to be manipulated and coaxed into position.

The cockpit for Concorde (below)—though now we're really comparing apples with oranges—is more complex again, with virtually every centimetre of every surface an interface, as compared to the clean surfaces of the Cirrus Perspective's automobile-like shell.

Concorde interface

A contemporary commercial aircraft, such as Falcon 2000DX EaSy, still looks extremely complex to the untrained eye, although clearly simplified (below). But as an interaction designer used to working with purely digital experiences, it’s a particular joy to see the sheer physicality—the full body experience—still evident in the ‘interface for flying’ that is the cockpit of a commercial aircraft.

Falcon 2000DX EaSy interface

Yet there has clearly been a significant shift in that interface. Looking at the L3 SmartDeck system (below), the cockpit, increasingly moulded and oriented around the pilot’s body, is dominated by tablet-like displays arranged in a something of a cross, as if an altar of information.

L3 SmartDeck

The aesthetics of the interface, of the space, are increasingly refined; again in comparison to the Falcon 10, which was almost the plane’s raw engineering on display.

However, it’s still a highly functional environment, and still actually quite different to the dashboard of that of, say, a BMW 7 Series or the home screen of an iPad. There are two distinct schools of interface design at work here. We have the human-computer interaction (HCI) camp, which essentially predates the internet and forms part of the first wave of computer science as a discipline and practice. This was primarily an engineering-led discipline, injected with a strong dose of cognitive psychology, and can be seen at work in these older Falcons. And then we have the interaction designers, comprising those who matured as designers in line with the development of the web and other internet technologies, and whose closest understanding of that other world is perhaps through rudimentary flight simulators on the Spectrums, Commodores and Ataris of the mid-1980s. This later school does not seem to figure much in the world of avionics, yet. Note the launch video for the SmartDeck, which talks of engineers, pilots and human-factors, but not 'design' as such:

But looking at these new avionics systems, we recognise them. In a continuum between aircraft cockpit of 1950 and an iMac, they are of course only moving in one direction. The screens are full of data, but capable of switching mode or focus almost effortlessly. And screens increasingly control everything. There are on-screen ‘buttons’ with faux-bevels, GPS-driven maps provide navigation, and the systems themselves are essentially platforms, installed across multiple ranges of aircraft. The avionics systems—hence the suffix EaSy in the Falcon 2000—do the processing for you, and flying can essentially become a question of lining up a series of indicators on-screen.

The benefit of all this abstraction is safety and precision. In theory, it enables the flying experience to be safer than ever, enabling the pilot to concentrate on other things. Yet is this the step forward claimed?

Decision-making on auto-pilot

There is a chance that the screens become so effective—they become by far the best way to perceive the location of a runway on a foggy night—that they override the complexity, the reality, through the cabin windows. And if commercial aircraft are increasingly flown automatically, perhaps much of this interface could fade away altogether. The residual interface seems there to cajole, to reassure, almost as a form of in-flight therapist rather than a controller that requires manhandling to generate necessary the shifts in air pressure.

(In US comedy ’30 Rock’, Matt Damon’s airline pilot character, in an argument with troublesome passenger (and troublesome girlfriend) Tiny Fey, angrily shouts at her: “Maybe you just wanna fly the plane yourself. Well good luck. You trying pressing (counts on fingers) take off, then auto-pilot, then land!”)

As avionics interfaces approach the condition of consumer electronics interfaces, they become less physical. The levers, buttons and switches evaporate into LCD or LED displays. These technologies are perhaps designed to enable you to enjoy the experience of flying, yet the dislocation from the physicality of flying means a disassociation with the reality of flying. As with soldiers operating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in battlezones thousands of kilometres away, could this lead to a form of desensitisation? It might at least lead to a form of disengagement from flying itself; just as some motorists argue that cars with automatic transmission are not worth driving. “It’s steering, not driving”, they say dismissively.

While augmenting or extending human capacity in this way seems the right thing to do, at what point do these systems actually inhibit agency, learning and engagement? Perhaps they actually reduce the experience of flying, in attempting to make it easier, safer.

Do such interfaces even need to be there at all? Indeed, as Matt Damon’s exasperated outburst implicitly suggests, given auto-pilots do pilots even need to be there? Are we reducing the need for both pilots and interfaces in unison? The latter is only requred for the former.

Given that the passengers never really see them flying, it’s almost as if pilots could be played by actors most of the time. Ironically, Qantas’s in pre-flight safety announcements were delivered by “Qantas ambassador” John Travolta for the last few years, dressed in full captain’s regalia (admittedly, leaving aside the Aussie soft power own-goal, Travolta is an experienced pilot.) . As with doctors, might passengers one day hear the message “If there’s a pilot on-board, could you make yourself known to one of the flight attendants?”…

With commercial airliners, perhaps safety would be increased without humans — to a point just this side of HAL, that is. Given that the repetitive nature of airliner flying is such that no amount of engaging experience would make it appealing, it might as well be automated. If so, are we in effect making interfaces for things which don’t need to be interfaces?

There are parallels further back in the cabin of airliners. Here, the in-seat entertainment system now also controls much of the passenger’s immediate environment. You can end up navigating to a menu on a screen 100cm in front of you in order to switch on a light 20cm behind you. This is reminiscent of the control systems installed in hotel rooms around the world, which virtually involve “user training” before you can turn on the TV or dim a light. There is no need to reinvent the light switch, and airlines deploying in-seat lights with more usable and tactile physical switches will become valued for only making digital what ought to be digital. Designers are designing on auto-pilot, funnily enough, making interfaces because they can.

(The in-seat system on Finnair flights displays aircraft performance data during take-off, but via an interface which conjures the 1950s, all analogue dials set in chrome bevels and rivets. What is going on here?)

In-seat display during take-off, Finnair

While simplification in avionics is there in order to reduce information to the absolutely necessary input, to reduce stress, and to enable better decision making, it could be that the first two aspects are done so well that the last, decision making, is actually obviated. This is not necessarily a good thing.

As a result of contemporary building control and informatics systems that automate seemingly mundane processes — automatically closing windows, turning off task lights, shutting down sleeping PCs — I would argue that people become passive rather than active “citizens”. It reinforces their lack of engagement in systems and spaces. In reducing allegedly unnecessary tasks, it inadvertently reduces active decision-making, The “smarter” alternative in buildings may be systems that require more active intervention from people, which —depending on the climate and context— may require less automation rather than more: as Glenn Murcutt once said, “If you’re cold, put on a jumper. If you’re hot, open a window.*

Might there be a parallel in avionics which reduces engagement, and decision-making, from pilots to the point where it is dangerous? Does it speak to a wider problem about a society on auto´pilot?

Rapid iteration at 30,000 feet

Innovation in interface design for commercial aircraft is a complex proposition. On one hand, the level of risk involved in flying necessitates a steady hand on the tiller, minimising risk through standardisation and gradual incremental improvement. Although these software-based cockpits could update their firmware as regularly as an iPhone can, in theory, the need for rock-solid system behaviour mitigates against this happening. If the Blackberry Playbook has low latency, it won't sell; if a plane’s new interface has low latency, you might die.

Compared to the proliferation of interface innovation in the last 20 years, post-web, post-apps, the cockpit of the aircraft has moved at glacial pace. And yet given that aircraft are not really a mainstream consumer proposition, their interface idioms could develop more quickly than, say, that of the automobile. There, the basic interface for driving—steering wheel, pedals, gearshift, indicator stalks—has remained essentially unchanged for a century or so (as the MIT CityCar project showed most clearly when it attempted to reinvent that interface from the ground up.)

So in comparison to most cars, aircraft interfaces do seem to moving more rapidly towards device-land. It’s not as if you expect to see trending topics, Words with Friends, and Facebook feeds to be appearing on the L-3 SmartDeck, 30,000 feet over the Pacific—but it could.

Their magnificent flying machines

While that might be a recipe for disaster, how should avionics interfaces take advantage of contemporary interaction design thinking?

One of the perennial debates in interface design is around so-called “natural user interfaces”, in which the interface layer itself effectively disappears altogether. For instance, using physical gestures and multi-touch, a user might select, stretch, pinch, or rotate ‘objects’ directly, rather than via a separate, almost prosthetic device like a mouse. Those who use multi-touch devices are aware of the liberating feeling of touching the content directly, rather than through a proxy.

Yet older aircraft - with all that ‘engineering on display’ - were also a kind of natural interface, with switches connected directly to actuators, as if the pilots were thrusting their hands into the body of the machine itself. Physically, their limbs became extensions of the levers, cables, struts and pistons of the aircraft’s mechanics, pilot and plane almost conjoined as one entity, rather than dislocated via avionics.

Would it be possible to retain the physicality and engagement of flying whilst benefiting from the increased levels of safety and precision that contemporary avionics introduces?

Apologies for bringing it up, but arguably the most influential interface in recent years is not necessarily that of Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, but an interface that is not even real, in almost any sense. The science-fiction movie ‘Minority Report’ featured a large-scale multi-touch environment designed by John Underkoffler, where the physicality of movement and gesture involved almost put one in mind of a new Olympic sport.

A few years hence, the firm Underkoffler works for, Oblong Industries, have developed the g-speak platform:

Here, the interaction is physical, embodied, multi-sensory; again, manipulating information and action as if conducting an orchestra. In that, there are echoes of how pilots describe the act of flying in the old ‘stick and rudder’ days.

Instead of continuing on its trajectory towards the PC, perhaps avionics could leapfrog the disengaged device model to this richer form of interaction, and in so doing, re-capture some of the physical, embodied aspect of flying, in effect enabling a richer communion between “man” and magnificent flying machine? Recall the unwieldy early prototypes of aircraft, in which pilots were sometimes ‘standing’ upright, harnessed in a deeply mechanical contraption; ludicrous, yes, but somehow wonderful too.

Rather than the slightly denuded interaction seen in contemporary avionics, this might be a full-body experience; relying on the subtle interactions of physical gesture, or multi-sensory feedback—across touch, hearing, proprioception as well as sight.

Here, the plane itself becomes an interface again, as a genuinely embodied interaction (after Paul Dourish’s phrase). No more prodding of on-screen buttons—buttons that are not even buttons. Instead, the pilot is immersed and integrated with the aeroplane itself, freed from the fear of flying through avionics, yet free to experience the physicality of flying through a more embodied form of interface.

Thus, the act of flying might become closer to the elegiac state described in JG Ballard’s "The Unlimited Dream Company", closer to the eternal dream of flying itself:

”I saw us rising into the air … benign tornadoes hanging from the canopy of the universe.”

What kind of interface might enable that feeling?

[A version of this article first appeared in Domus magazine, issue 946, April 2011]

For what is not a great movie, by most measures, Bullitt is an influential film. What it gave us is more textural than textual. It has its moments—the car chase most obviously—but delivers moods and stylings rather than narrative or structural innovation: the blankness of McQueen; his look, and that of Jacqueline Bisset’s; Lalo Schifrin’s score; the pace of the cop movies of the following decade, involving laborious observation of detectives at work; the way that San Francisco is shot, including some handheld but also carefully sanitised of any of the social ferment present in the city in 1968.

The chase scene has three lead characters, none of which are human: McQueen’s Ford Mustang Fastback; the bad guys’ Dodge Charger; and the city itself. The actors are, in the words of Alfred Hitchcock, treated like cattle, mere action figures swapping places with the scenery, the latter foregrounded over the former. The scene won an Academy Award for best editing, but the sound design is also strong, with the explosive roar of the engines still quite shocking. They’re like external combustion engines.

Not the full chase, but close. There are hundreds of tributes and reedits on YouTube, including dull attempts at recreation, recreated in Lego, in Hot Wheels, or in Matchbox, and the ultimate accolade, a reference in The Simpsons. See also this obsessive comparison of then and now.

On the flight on the way to Adelaide, I watched Drive, at Boyer’s recommendation. This, in some ways, features contemporary Los Angeles as a character, much as Michael Mann’s Collateral did. As Mann noted, digital HD camera technology enables Los Angeles, that city of electric lights, to be ‘properly’ shot at night, and both Drive’s and Collateral’s best driving scenes are at night (whereas Bullitt’s San Francisco has rarely looked so sunny.)

Drive’s Ryan Gosling has the same studied impassive voidery of McQueen, actually ramping up the mute to new levels somehow. The driving is just as good as Bullitt, or indeed Collateral, which is at least one large part of what these movies are about. The city is the other part. Drive is a portrait of LA, just as Collateral was (and many more before it, as discussed in that old Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality post.) 

I enjoyed it hugely, as I tend to when movies are portraits of cities, rendered through mood and texture, actors as cattle.

One scene—in that hazy golden LA sunlight, actually—features the Los Angeles River as the backdrop for some mild Gosling-on-Carey Mulligan flirtation. They get out of the car, and throw stones in one of those pools of water significant enough to throw stones into, amidst the wild scrubby foliage that grows through cracks in the giant concrete culvert that forms the body of the modern river.

“Nic wanted something different and romantic for [Driver and Irene] to do. I’d heard that you can actually drive up the L.A. River,” Gosling recalled. “So we tried it, and it worked—until we got to this one spot where out of nowhere there was this patch of shrubs and trees and you couldn’t go any further. There was no reason for it to be there. It was kind of magical.” (LA Times)

Here’s the scene, 1’25” in. Again, there are lots of videos of people driving the LA River at YouTube, for example these kids, but also some kid doing commentary on driving it the river in the video game LA Noire.)

It’s a similar setting to that the impromptu "happening" I wrote about a few years ago, when I first figured out there was such a thing as the LA River. And of course the river has been the setting for numerous other movies.

Seeing this unique infrastructure again in Drive inspired me to dig out my notes on the LA River, half-written a couple of years ago. Here they are:

Walking (a bit of) the LA River

After Postopolis LA, I had a day or so in the city, and generally had a ball, walking around, taking buses, reading, writing, photographing. Having learnt a bit about the river, after that first naive post on the happening, I asked one of the local participants at Postopolis LA where I could go to see it, maybe even get into it. What I knew of LA's interwar and post-war history was filtered obliquely through Chandler, Ellroy, Polanski, Mike Davis; and the city's troubled relationship with water was as much a key character as any of Chandler's blondes or Davis's Latinos. The least I could do was go to see the river.

The next day I walked through downtown, towards Sci-ARC and the rail tracks that mark the eastern edge of what passes for the centre of LA. Sci-ARC is in a long low building that mirrors the railyards it sits in front of, and indeed the LA River, which the rail runs alongside. The size of the river’s concrete bowl indicates the flood potential of the river, even if flooding seems a little impossible given the comparative trickle of water at this point, more like an elongated puddle. Still, this part of the river has more water in it than most, and a few miles downstream the water grows in volume before becoming a vast estuary heading out to sea.

(For more on the river itself, I can highly recommend two essays in “The Infrastructural City”, 2009, Varnelis (ed.) by David Fletcher and Lane Barden. The river's story is utterly fascinating, of a natural habitat being shaped on an almost tectonic scale. There have been numerous proposals for the river, most recent schemes pivoting around the idea of returning the river to its “natural state” or “revitalising it” Leaving aside the issue that its natural state is a highly variable flood plain, hardly conducive to hosting modern American settlement patterns, the idea of returning such radically re-shaped environments to a natural state is almost always flawed (see also former Australian PM Paul Keating's harebrained ideas for Barangaroo, Sydney, a project I worked on for a while.) These environments have been altered so much that they have undergone a form of irreversible state transition. Fletcher's piece in particular makes clear the "freakology rather than bucology" of the river, pointing out that it is really a "fully engineered flood-control system" rather than a naturally-occurring system. It is also a twisted mess of legislation and governance, with no single entity controlling the river.

Given this, the focus ought probably to be on a post-natural hybridised environment, working with the river both as it is now and in the drier Southern Californian future. Fletcher's and Barden’s essays, the latter accompanied by a compelling photo-essay that tracks the river from valley to sea, from trickle to port, make this case clearly, based on a deep understanding of the river’s history and geography.)

The sun is hot and bright, and the water is cobalt blue against the bleached white of the old concrete. It’s the colour of Chinatown streets in a James Ellroy novel, or so I imagine. The structure is just giant slabs, slammed together, the most basic form of engineering.

Standing on a bridge looking downriver, it’s quiet. (East 1st St Bridge?). As is often the case when I’m walking in cities not made for walking, there is virtually no-one around. Very few cars, even. I can hear east LA from here, which I’ve only really experienced through movies, novels and hip-hop, so I’m not sure if I can hear the squeal of tyres and wail of sirens or whether I’m making it up.

The warm wind whips through the struts supporting the bridge, the cables singing softly in the heat. The bridge has charming little extrusions every 10 metres or so, civic cut-outs from the concrete balustrades, big enough for people to stand in, to pass the time. They’re currently filled with rubbish, however. One has the remains of a filthy sleeping bag, another a dead bird.

I keep walking and head over to Union Station. I have to navigate a knot of freeways that is around 15 lanes deep in order to get from the clutches of low industrial buildings and garages on this side, over to the station on the other. It’s more difficult to ford this thing on foot than it would be to wade through the river.

Somehow on the other side, I approach Union Station, which is just spectacularly beautiful of course. Where the river’s structure, and the bridge, had been cracked and blanched, the parched white of a skeleton in a desert, Union Station’s white is creamy, pristine against the deep blue sky, offset by rich terracotta roofs. The architecture is something of a melange of the Americas, and delicately done, with perhaps the most spectacular structure on show the monumental wooden chairs in the waiting area.

I’m here for the relatively new light rail line, recently established out the back of the station, which is smooth and efficient. It feels odd in this context, this high quality, contemporary public transport. Locals look slightly incongruous on something so, well, “European”. Like seeing Ice Cube cooped up in a Fiat 500, Paris Hilton on the number 73 bus, Liberace on the tube.

The station discreetly suggests the outlines of some long lost halcyon age of American rail travel, and although this light rail seems almost Jetsons-esque, sliding into the sidings, the hefty, awkward Amtrak trains remind us of the reality of most transit on rails in the US. (As noted in Tony Judt’s memoirs, it’s as if Amtrak is kept alive on a paltry life-support machine of just-enough funding only to continually demonstrate the folly of not privatising public goods. It’s transport as political tool, run into the ground to illustrate that public transport cannot work, a hegemonic journey as much as a physical one.)

(Interestingly, the LA Metro is slowly, very slowly, re-building the network of streetcars and rail lines that once served the city, known as the Yellow Car lines around these parts, which were systematically removed in the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, a scandal which happens to form a sub-plot in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Everything is a movie round here.)

I believe I hopped off the train at Lincoln/Cypress station. As the Metro Gold line is in part elevated, I’d been able to loosely follow the river on the journey from Union Central, and so walked from the station down to a road of industrial units alongside the trees lining the man-made riverbank.

Some of the old industrial buildings looked disused, though one had some sort of managed studio space in it. The newer industrial units were all set back to make way for large parking lots. I think I’m around movie business infrastructure. Some of these newer units had the distinct air of illicit, or at least immoral, behaviour about them. A sleek car with mirrored windows slides inside an automated gate, as two girls in not so many clothes lounge outside what may be a studio door, all legs and heels (I think I’m around here somewhere.)

I turn a bend and find a railway crossing, with a fine view of the hills behind, but realise—somehow—that I’m moving away from the river. I double-back. Even though the buildings are low around here, and spottily placed, it’s hard to spot a river when it’s been so thoroughly tucked out of sight. I can really only head for what looks like a line of trees and hope for the best.

I find a road running over a bridge perpendicular to the river, itself under another freeway snaking overhead, and head over to the fence leading into undergrowth.

I look in vain for gaps in the fence. At the end of the units, I walk over a road leading to a bridge over the river, thinking I can at least get a look at it from there. Yet here I see a gap in the fence.

I climb through, push past some bushes, and find myself walking at the top of the concrete culvert. There’s a clearly defined path up here, with bushes, trees and fence to my right and culvert dropping down to the left. The road bridges cut across at a daigonal.

The river is nothing more than a stream here, snaking down the middle of its concrete setting. I contemplate scrambling down the side of the culvert to get to the water, but it’s actually quite an incline, and I worry I won’t get back up. I’m wearing the wrong shoes for this, and I remember my family back home. I'm now a father. It's not worth it.

It’s here that I look back to the bridge, and notice a figure in the crisp shadow underneath it. It’s standing there, down by the water’s edge at the base of the culvert. It moves forward and bends down, and starts washing some clothes in the water. I turn and look up to the next bridge, and see two figures under that one too. I’d read that people live down in the river, and here they are.

I keep walking along the top of the culvert. It’s quiet up here, though I can see across to the other side, over thickets of trees, perhaps eucalypts, to a busy highway. Here, though, it’s a peculiar environment and actually appealing. Although I must admit to being slightly tense, having seen the people under the bridges. (Though, of course, I am probaly safer here than walking alongside the freeways.)

The foliage is thick, and vibrant. I’m sometimes walking along a well-trodden path through long grasses. Other times through gobbets of gnarled trees and bushes. There is rubbish strewn around, particularly collected around the base of the fence. These elements are twisted around each other, with vines growing over, through and around shopping trolleys, milk crates and plastic bags. The plastic bags, which after a storm adorn the higher reaches of foliage in their thousands, are known as "Los Angeles moss". (I saw the same "moss" in Melbourne on the Maribyrnong river, after a good storm there.)

It actually feels relatively harmonious, as if the fence, crates, vines, grasses and bushes have merged into one hybrid ecosystem. They're certainly better integrated here than on the (in theory) more inhabited bridge by SCI-Arc. There are wild flowers in the grasses, and no doubt animal wildlife all around. As ever with SoCal, the foliage reminds me of that found in and around New South Wales. Fletcher's essay makes clear what a gloriously productive and fertile "artifical ecology" the river now supports, or is.

Given the proximity to the freeways, the rail, the enormous concrete channel for the black squiggle of water, this feels surprisingly close to “nature”, whatever that means. If you look down and straight ahead, it’s like a wilderness trail; look up and left or right, and you’re in low-rise light-industrial LA suburb, threaded together by 1950s infrastructure.

Again, it's quiet, despite the adjacent freeways.

I carry on walking. The river is still a trickle, a little shameful really. It’s hard to believe that this stream can turn into raging flood, but it can. Naturally, it’s a wide-ranging, diffuse body of water; the brute force infrastructure of Los Angeles forced it into these tight channels, having tapped it at numerous points up stream. The river has been knocked around so much that it couldn’t actually flow at all without human intervention in the form of sewage and run-off from streets and industry. You half-wonder whether the artificially-enriched water is responsible for the abundant flora. The water in the river is greener here than at SCI-Arc.

I walk through a couple of punctured fences and under a couple of bridges, elegant examples of civil engineering from an age where engineering could be somewhat civil. They're also training grounds, so-called "graffiti universities". The language suggests the patterns of Latino-led magical urbanism increasingly shaping Southern California.

I’m keeping my eyes down to check for syringes in the dry grass and sand, but I don’t see any. I look up to see a couple walking towards me.

The man has dark glasses, straggly hair and a canvas fedora. The girl is dressed in not so many clothes, though is decent enough. I decide to look “natural” (there’s that word again.)

“Hey,” man says, with a smile.
“Hey,” I say, with a smile.

We pass by each other. I carry on walking. No idea.

The foliage is opening up a little, which means I’m more visible. The freeway is running right alongside the river, on the other side. It’s a good feeling finding this haphazard home-spun walking trail running through these long arteries of concrete. The bank to my right sometimes drops down, such that the fence running along the path has flowers either side.

Parts of the trail really are rather lovely. sheltered by the odd bridge, trees and bushes. For some of the way there's a fence on the left too, securing the concrete 'riverbed'; at other points, it would be possible to scramble down. Again, I don't fancy it.

It's a shame that the this unique, highly pleasurable experience is so difficult to access. As I noted before, walking in Los Angeles—specifically, where you are not really supposed to walk—is one of the most appealing urban encounters I've had (and yes, I'm aware that it may be appealing to walk here because it is difficult to walk here.) Although Reyner Banham famously said he learnt to drive in Los Angeles so he could "read it in the original", and while I too have learnt much from being driven around LA, there are other ways to read this place, equally "original", if you like. This is sublime.

There have only been a few gaps in the fence along the route, so I decide to walk back. In that peculiar way of things, it seems like no time to get back simply because I know where I’m going this time.

Again, I see dark silhouettes in the deep shadows under the bridges. I cannot imagine what that life must be like.

As I approach the road, I have a quick look through the fence, so as not to startle anyone. I slip through the gap and step out onto what passes for a pavement around here, as cars zip by. I turn my back on the river and walk away.

The river quickly slips out of sight again. I walk back towards Lincoln/Cypress station. I had walked a very small section of the river, but it was one of the more memorable urban walks of my life.

It’s possible to see the river as a sorry state of affairs; the waterway that made the city, to some extent, and whose water was the subject of so much controversy, corruption and capital, has been effectively neutered. You might see that it has been brutally manhandled such that a mighty regional-scale ecosystem has dwindled to a concrete-encased dribble.

Yet this is a romantic view. The river is still a mighty regional-scale ecosystem; but it is now a hybrid system, reinforcing itself with human inputs and outputs. It has become something else. The question of whether it is “sustainable” is moot; it just is, and so it is sustainable. The river is no longer a “natural” system in a pre-human sense (by which we at least 8000 years ago) but it will always be there. It now has different performance, and our perceptions of what “natural” is need to be radically recalibrated.

Los Angeles was enabled by the river, at least in part, and now Los Angeles in turn enables the river. The idea that the way forward for this environment is to somehow attempt to recapture some kind of natural, pre-human state should recognise that the river is comprised of effluence and affluence as much as anything else.

In fact, the river exists as a constant flow only because of these human interventions. Fletcher's essay states that the river was actually dry in summer, and then flooding in winter; only in forcing the river down the channel, and enhancing it with run-off and sewage, does it achieve this "steady state". Fletcher says, "In the sense that the river has more continually running water than it has had in its post-colonial history, it is by many definitions more a *river* today than it ever was."

Equally, contemporary thinking about ecosystems—such as the second part of Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace"—suggests that nature is not some harmonious, steady-state system, with zero waste and maximum design efficiency. Fletcher also describes this updated thinking:

"Stability in nature is an illusion; moreover, non-natural factors such as urbanization, global warming, and the heat-island effect all have to be included in the ecological equation. Thus the native versus exotic debate is oversimplified; the landscape assemblages should not be mistaken as the cause of environmental degradation, when they are actually an ecologically appropriate result." (Fletcher, in The Infrastructural City, Varnelis (ed.), 2008)

The river has cultural value as much as environmental, as indicated by the numerous movies and other artefacts that have used it as scenery. At this present time, it is in an in-between state, a form of linear liminal zone. It is both accessible and inaccessible; movies like Drive suggest that it is some kind of gilt-edged urban park, the ideal place for a young family to play on a Saturday afternoon, albeit a getaway driver’s young family.

The movies indicate that it is one of the most spectacular settings in a city made from celluloid, and yet it is also sometimes mundane, banal, largely forgotten. At its clearest, I will never forget watching the paradox of people cleaning their clothes in sewage. It is hybrid. It is not something we can clean up. In an interesting adjacency, it occurs to me that “revitalising” or “recovering” the river might be as flawed as the idea of “the recovery” that Benjamin Bratton had taken down at Postopolis LA a few days earlier.

Walking the river as it is now is essential to understanding these kind of urban systems, essential to thinking about how to take hybrid environments forward, rather than work against the grain of history by looking backwards.

Rivers tend not to go backwards, after all. And resilient cities also adapt, finding new ways to flow, just as rivers do.

All photos of LA River [Flickr]
The Infrastructural City [Amazon]

A quick word about a new series I’m curating for Domus, the Italian art, architecture and design magazine. Called SuperNormal, it’s an attempt to ‘sketch’ a different kind of technology journalism, recognised how cultural it is. 

A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget who—said something like “Is a 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status from her mobile phone as she walks down the street ‘IT’?” Of course it is, but more importantly, it isn’t. It is more than that; contemporary technology is deeply cultural. We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is.

So with Domus, Joseph Grima and I saw an opportunity to write in a different way about everyday technology. Domus has a long tradition of writing about such things, driven by the strong Italian heritage of post-war industrial design, covering Brionvega radios, Elica hoods, Vespa scooters, or Olivetti typewriters, for instance. 

But as I suggest in my series opener (below), perhaps a culturally powerful contemporary equivalent of these things now exists in the form of social media, mobile phones, web services, information graphics, smart cards, personal informatics, robots, and so on.

It might be a stretch to suggest that these things are the equivalent of an Olivetti Valentine in a number of ways, but not in terms of the way such things now shape our lives. Yet the vast bulk of journalism concerning this everyday technology is dominated by the technology press, which is rarely critical in the sense that Domus is, rarely covers design aspects with any depth, and rarely attempts to place developments in a wider cultural context. While I have no problem with the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, Wired and the rest—not that they’d notice either way if I did!—there did seem a gap in the market here.

Conversely, this was also a way to introduce discussion of the recent design disciplines of interaction design, experience design, service design and information design, to this more established strata of design media. For what it’s worth, my motive for doing this—discussing the technology in terms of culture, and discussing its design in the context of other design practices—is in order to try to understand it better; which is in turn in order to design it better, to realise it better, to procure it better, and so on.

(By the way, it’s a huge honour to work for Domus. There can have been few more influential titles in design history since its inception in 1928 and Joseph Grima, who I first worked with on Postopolis, has repositioned the magazine at the forefront of media once again, for me alongside Eye and Idea as the best design magazines out there. It’s also been a pleasure to work increasingly closely with the designers, Salottobuono, and particularly Marco Ferrari.)

The series will run in the magazine and online. We’re using the website to carry more in-depth versions of the print articles, and including video and other contextual information such as interviews where relevant.
I’ve written the first two articles to frame the series.

The first covered the Nokia N9 (and to some extent its successor, the Lumia running Windows Phone) but pitches that in the context of the wider skirmishes in the mobile phone market, tactility, sounds and ocularcentrism in cellphone design, the hegemonic power of Apple, the importance of materials and the “dark matter” of licensing and logistics, European design history and entrepreneurship, via Roland Barthes and the Citröen DS19.

The second piece concerns Facebook Timeline, and so timelines, information design, social graphs, identity and representation, and so on —but also the broader context of a shared social memory, and how that might affect the way we forget and function. (Additionally, Facebook were good enough to get us an interview with Timeline’s lead designer, Nicholas Felton—he of Feltron Annual Reports fame)—and his early mockups of Timeline, to accompany this article. Thanks to both Nicholas and Meredith Chin for that.)

These initial articles are markers, sketching out the trajectory and territory of the series to some extent. But as the series opener suggests below, the terrain should get increasingly rich, diverse and fertile and I’m lining up a set of great writers ready to explore it and map it. More on that to follow. I’ll pitch in from time to time too.

Have a read of the first two—‘Portable Cathedrals’ on the Nokia N9 and ‘In Praise of Lost Time’ on Facebook Timeline—and let me know what you think: here; at Domus; or elsewhere.

And here, below, is the original text for the series—which I’ve dubbed SuperNormal, in respectful homage to Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa’s great book and exhibition, noting its title Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary. This text introduces and frames the venture, and is a slightly different version to that which appears on the Domus website and in the magazine.

SuperNormal

The humble form of the mobile phone galvanises culture and design like few other products ever have. 

Well beyond its original brief of connecting voices in real-time, and now dissolved in social media substrate, the mobile phone is essentially a tool for cultural production and consumption, for the everyday projection, dissembling or articulation of identity itself. As such, the cellphone represents an entirely new form of industrial design; it is intimate physically, psychologically and culturally, as well as framing the city and its activities. It can only be understood in the context of the few genuinely new design disciplines of the last two decades: the overlapping circles of interaction design, experience design, service design. 

And for mobile phones, read Facebook Timeline’s interface design, the organising principles underpinning operating systems like OSX and Google Chrome OS, the platform service ecosystem of iTunes+iPhone, an RFID-based airport check-in system, the architecture of Angry Birds, what XBox Live says about community; what transport data apps say about contemporary urbanism; what the Microsoft Word interface says about our approach to tools; how the design strategy of the New York Times sketches the future of journalism, how Spotify follows in a lineage of music experiences from Brionvega to Technics …

When Domus started, there was no equivalent of these kind of devices, these kind of platforms, these kind of issues, although Domus has a long history of reviewing the products of everyday life, particularly through its coverage of industrial design. The publication absorbed these daily objects from its earliest days, particularly placing domestic products, furniture and office equipment on its pages. These are technology too of course. But now we must see beyond furniture to the glowing devices lying upon them. The iPhone, Facebook and Chrome are the descendants of Sottsass’s Olivetti Lettera, in a way. Perhaps Sottsass sensed this:

“My furniture is a trivial thing and doesn't matter at all. But the idea would be to invent new total possibilities, new forms, new symbols …” (Ettore Sottsass, Domus, 1965)

It turns out that these are the new objects, products and services of everyday life, the “new total possibilities”. They are ‘Super Normal’, though perhaps not in the sense that Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa intended in their exhibitions of 2006-2007. Our reading of the situation attempts to move beyond the traditional frames for assessing industrial design, and assesses designs that are intended to be usable, functional, meaningful, personal, productive, strategic, participative. 

In the introduction to the accompanying Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary book, Gerrit Terstiege mentioned the 1976 Darmstadt exhibition ‘Das gewöhnliche Design’, and in particular the opening talk by Bazon Brock, professor of Aesthetics in Wuppertal:

“We must analyze and understand our contemporary world as if it were the everyday world of a historical society”. (Bazon Brock, 1976)

This would entail critically unpicking the social and cultural meaning of everyday products, not simply assessing their form, material or technical characteristics, but getting to their point; what each product says about our time and place.

So the cultural potency—the sheer relevance—of products like mobile phones, social media, and operating systems, has prompted Domus to start a new form of technology criticism, in a series that politely and respectfully hacks the name ‘Super Normal’.

Our idea is to offer an alternative to a discourse dominated by the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, DPReview, Gizmodo et al. Sites like these cover products and services in unparalleled levels of technical detail and with respected in-depth knowledge. Yet they rarely discuss design in any meaningful way or the wider cultural impact of such things. 

Domus won’t cover technical details, as they are ably covered by those sites, but it will assess what these products say about contemporary design. It won’t pore over unboxing videos, but it will try to unpack the wider issues that these products imply for contemporary culture. It won’t attempt to second-guess business strategy, but will describe how products and services are now linked as never before to the spheres of economics, logistics, environment and community.

So this is no buyer’s guide, but it may be a user guide of sorts, to the key products and services of the 21st century; the things that surround us, yet are currently not on the radar of design criticism. Stay tuned.

“Super Normal is already out there, out in the open; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available. We have only to open our eyes.” (Gerrit Terstiege, 2007)

SuperNormal: series opener [Domus]
Nokia N9: Portable Cathedrals [Domus]
Facebook Timeline: In Praise of Lost Time [Domus]
Interview with Facebook's Nicholas Felton [Domus]

I swear I can still taste the coal dust in my mouth, nine hours later. Marco had noticed the soot in the snow first. Looking down from our vantage point on the 14th floor of our tower in Ruoholahti, we get a good view of the Finnish-registered coail carrier, the Alppila, unloading its cargo into the hoppers on the dockside of Kellosaari.

The hoppers direct the coal down to a tunnel, which then stretches some 700m to the west of Ruoholahti. The coal is then subsumed into the Salmisaari power station, a 1953 job owned by Helsinki Energia. Even though the distributed system of energy generation and district heating is profoundly smart for any modern city, and particularly a city with the heating/cooling loads and geography of Helsinki (see this earlier descent into the depths), I hope I don't need to point out the (now inexcusable) problems with coal-powered generation.

Despite growing up in the north of England, it's a strange feeling to see a large chimney billowing smoke above a neighbourhood. You just don't see that in those post-industrial cities anymore, and haven't done for decades. The air from Ruoholahti chimney may not be as dirty as it once was, although you'd hardly want a toke on it, but the days of recent persistent snow suddenly made legible this form of energy. (You may know this chimney from the Nuage Vert installation.)

Leaving aside the carbon footprint of these old stations, what struck Marco and I was its more immediately apparent footprint, suddenly highlighted by the combination of snow-covered land and frozen sea with bright sun, even from a kilometre away. The Alppila was clearly sitting in a large and growing halo of black coal dust, a smudge on the pristine white seascape. 

I went for a walk with my camera. Approaching from the north, and still several hundred metres away from the dock, I could immediately see that the snow downwind of the Alppila was covered with a thin film of coal dust. This is an entirely unnatural landscape at the best of times — Ruoholahti is essentially 1910 landfill joining three or four islands — and people need energy, but still.

Along the banks of the canal to my left, I see miniature landscapes of snowy striations drawn by the wind whipping up from the bay.

There's something awful and beautiful about these patterns, and particularly the grainy grey sweeps of soot falling across the sea frozen solid around the ship.

The white of the newer snow on the Ruoholahti canal easily offsets the black ridges on its banks. Still well downwind of the ship, the air suddenly starts tasting of coal.

I plunge my hand into the deep snow to describe the difference. There's a crust of black particulate covering everything. Closer, on the now-filthy bridge adjacent to the Alppila, I step in up to my knees to take a photo of the sea - each footstep plunges deep into pure white, clearly marking how dirty the bridge is afterwards.

The ice around the ship is bright white on one side and deep grey on the other, the wind curling the black dust around the lee side of the ship, a cruel sketch of what at first looks like a shadow, but is simply a thick coat of coal dust on snow and ice.

Tracking the Alppila on marinetraffic.com, it looks like it's come in from Vyotsk, Russia. Vyotsk was a minor strategic node in the brutal battles between Finland and Russia during World War II, but is now a small town with a major strategic port shifting oil and coal to the west, with over 2 billion tonnes of the latter exported last year. But the coal carrier is not going to see Russia anytime today, sitting gripped by thick ice generated by the last few days of -20C temperatures. It's a brutish looking thing, described in the evocative language of shipping as "Lloyd’s Register +100 A1 Bulk Carrier, Ice Class 1 A Super", but the entire Baltic is sold as far as the eye can see.

There's no-one visible on-board the ship. I stand on the tram bridge perpendicular to the ship, along with a few others 20 metres away towards the boldly cantilevered F-Secure building, watching what looks like an automated operation, ship as robot. Smoke billows from the ship announcing another dumper of coal swinging gracefully through the cold air.

The Alppila's black cranes continue to empty coal into the hoppers and down into the ground, soft clouds of soot drifting over the residential neighbourhood downwind.

Coal landing at Salmisaari [Flickr]

In Tallinn recently for a conference, I took a chance to go for a long walk from the old medieval city centre to an ancient forest to the east. I took a meandering route to Kadriorg Forest, along the oversized roads and undistinguished housing blocks that are the typical stains left by Soviet-era planning guidelines; wide enough for tanks, and possibly aircraft, and little use to the contemporary city.

While there are several distinguishing features along the route—the appealing wall-bound statues that fuse bust and typography, a vaguely Metabolist housing block opposite a thrusting modernist chapel, a great deli and coffee shop, and some lovely old wooden houses and masonry blocks, half of which are disintegrating, half are being renovated or rebuilt, near the stadium as you approach the park—I was heading for the KUMU art gallery and an installation in the trees.

Heading beyond the ponds, playgrounds and formal landscaping around the palace at the edge of Kadriorg park, the forest itself is immediately quietly extraordinary. It’s been there for centuries, and there’s something graceful and majestic about the scale of the trees, particularly with autumn ablaze in the leaves, viewed from the long avenues cut through the woods.

KUMU, designed by Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori, was excellent, but the installation was magical. Designed by Tetsuo Kondo Architects, it was a floating ramp hoisted up into the forest, a 95 metre long white steel walkway suspended from the trees themselves. Rather than sitting on columns, it was simply supported by brackets attached to tree trunks.

(In this, it reminded me a little of Australian architect Andrew Maynard’s proposal for treehouses I wrote about five years ago, co-opting his protest structures for Battersea Power Station.)

Given its slender profile and lack of columns, the ramp was barely visible until close up. There were only a few signs, with a smart silhouette identity, to announce its presence. I was lucky to catch it in autumn—I'm not sure how long it's around for.

I’d heard about it via a Domus article, where Tetsuo Kondo writes:

“In the elegant woods of Kadriorg, we added a path. The path is supported by the trees as it floats through a forest that is over 300 years old. I feel that the appearance of the woods changes slightly when you walk along this path. We are no longer looking up at the trees from the ground but we come closer to the leaves and glide through the branches.”

Of course, the batteries on the Olympus ran out just as I approached, so all these shots, and the video, are from an old iPhone. Apologies.

You do glide through the branches, as the designer suggests, and the structure is surprisingly firm, given that it's slender and light. The white steel had become a little muddy, as you'd expect, but not a problem—a half-decent shower would fix that. The ramp twists its way through the trees, and bends round on itself several times, as this lovely diagram from the Kondo website indicates.

It ascends high enough above the ground to feel like you're part of the forest's canopy, rather than simply walking through it. Memories of climbing trees as a kid come flooding back, of the sudden shift in perspective afforded by sitting on a gnarly branch, high off the ground. The video above closes with a walk along the entire structure.

I’ve been a little mean about installations and one-offs recently, seeing as they generally do little to change the city in meaningful terms. But it was a pleasure to be reminded of the joy in the temporary and the transient, of the frivolous idea of a path to nowhere that almost wafts you up into the trees, of a playful intervention that opens up a new aspect on a familiar experience, at least for a moment, of climbing trees like a kid.

And it’s such as simple design that it could be replicated in any reasonably sized copse of trees elsewhere, lending a replicable aspect that extends the idea a little beyond the ‘mere installation’.

The forest itself remains the most extraordinary thing around here, and always will, but Kondo’s suspended ramp actually helped underline that fact, by lifting me further into the trees.

All photos of Tetsuo Kondo's Suspended Ramp [Flickr]
Tetsuo Kondo's Suspended Ramp [Domus]
A Path In The Forest [Tetsuo Kondo Architects]

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in an event called the “North House Salon” (see previous entry: Passport Control to Pimlico). These salons are organised by Dr Sarah Caddick, neuroscience advisor to Lord David Sainsbury (ex-Minister for Science and Innovation in the UK government) and the Gatsby Foundation, and bring together various “expert groups” with select groups of neuroscientists. It was an absolute privilege to share a conversation with some of the UK’s leading scientists—for a start, it’s always fascinating to see another discipline at work, and we were also fortunate that they were all great communicators as well as great researchers.

This particular event was a collaboration with one of my old bosses at Arup, Dr Chris Luebkeman, Director of Arup's Global Foresight, and it concerned the potential correlations between our emerging understanding of the brain, and our understanding of cities. (Perhaps we should also say our emerging understanding of cities?) The event was dubbed "The Urban Nervous System"...

As Chris put it in his intro, we do have an increasingly shared vocabulary and way of thinking emerging about the systems of the brain and the systems of cities. This may partly be due to biomimicry shaping design discourse, partly the vogue for “smart cities” strategies, and partly because of recent advances in “brain science” (note: neuroscience is to some extent now seen as part of a continuum including behavioural psychology, behavioural economics, neurology, developmental biology and others. I'll be using the term "brain science" as short-hand for all that. At one point, we tried to discuss the limits of neuroscience. We didn’t get very far.)

Team Neuroscience (not that we lined up as teams, of course) consisted of Doctors Peter Latham (UCL), Semir Zeki (UCL), Daniel Wolpert (Cambridge University), Troy Margrie (National Institute for Medical Research/UCL), Dmitri Kullmann (UCL), Steve Wilson (UCL) the aforementioned Sarah Caddick, and Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute). (Note that Geoffrey is not a neuroscientist but a physicist, and could probably swap sides at half-time, should he want to, at least to some extent; again, boundaries were intriguingly eroding.)

On Team Urbanist we had Mark Bidgood and Duncan Wilson (both Arup), Robin Daniels (Living PlanIT), and me. Actually, the “teams” really were non-existent; the presentations were mixed up, as was the conversation—in a good way. (Unfortunately, as you can see, the gender (im)balance was not good, although that's partly because a few people couldn’t make it, sadly.)

The format was papers sent beforehand (I sent this, this and this), and on the evening, three-minute presentations from all participants—some slides, some not—followed by drinks reception and talking, followed by dinner and more talking, followed by pub for a few of us. (Sidenote: I think all the scientists used Macbook Airs or iPads. Make of that what you will.)

So how did the conversation start? The presentations in order …

• Mark Bidgood (Arup) talked of Arup’s work in civil engineering and infrastructure, overlaying a set of biological metaphors—buildings as organs; power,water, sewerage as vascular system; information and communications technologies as the nervous system … He talked of his work in Riyadh (with Carlo Ratti and others), and mentioned Masdar as an exception. He saw the real value in retrofitting existing cities. But in terms of the relationship between brains and cities, he noted that physical utilities infrastructure doesn't tend to self-repair, learn or adapt (instead, focus is on robustness, reliability, repairability; and so huge networks are underground and highly simple.) He also talks about the biggest roadblocks: the commercial & regulatory side, and generating the political will for change whilst enabling people to have freedom of action and choice. (I like this last point in particular; resonated with my talk, later.)

• Duncan Wilson (Arup Foresight) talked about the internet of things, based on his long-standing interest in autonomous networks. He notes haven’t exactly become ubiquitous in the physical world, yet they have on the internet. In this context, he was interested in feedback loops and behaviour change, and so was looking for a better understanding of cognition to aid system design for behaviour change ie. how people might pick up, absorb and act upon cues. (I’ve worked with Duncan for years, and he understands as much about the potential of sensors as anyone; good to see him looking deeper into the psychology.)

• Peter Latham (UCL) took the cue directly: giving what he described as a naive answer to “what brains tell us about urban planning.” Latham delivered a rapid-fire, entertaining talk, casually noting we have 100 billion neurons and around 8 million kilometers of wires (axons) in the brain. He then extrapolated to transport systems (which is the natural, if problematic, thing to do—given that information transfer does not necessarily imply physical transportation these days), so he quickly painted a picture of local roads within neurons, and large spaces (parks and trees, in Peter’s city) in between dense nodes of “highrises”, or concentrations of activity. So a brain scientist ends up making a case for density too, which is good to hear. (Peter was of course much smarter than his deliberately “naive” answer, and was constantly insightful and entertaining all evening.)

• Robin Daniels (Living PlanIT) said his interest is in managing data, and particularly in smart urban environments. He talks about Living PlanIT’s work in big regeneration projects, aiming to use resources more efficiently, via sensors that collect data, and then manage it in better way. He talks of their platform, and makes an analogy to the iPhone: he says the applications are what make it interesting. Their apps (“PlaceApps”) could “control everything from luminaries to transportation systems”; the data could be self learning. (To be honest, I haven’t been impressed with Living PlanIT’s vision so far, and there was little this evening to change my mind; to be fair, it probably wasn't the right setting for them.)

• Semir Zeki (UCL) is developing the field of “neuroaesthetics” of UCL (and his paper, particularly “The Disunity of Consciousness”, was perhaps the most interesting reading sent around beforehand.) He noted that a quarter to a third of the brain is devoted to vision, and is interested in how these layered activities of perception combine to give us a uniform view of visual world. He describes how we see colour before we see visual motion, for instance, which then brings up the “binding problem”. How do we arrange a unity of vision? Are we asking the right question, even, he says. And then throws in a few examples: What are the minimum conditions necessary for visual consciousness? What does art tell us about the brain? If neural mechanisms are important in the experience of beauty, are there any common characteristics in our experience of desire, love, beauty ...? What can we learn about the brain by looking at beauty?

• Daniel Wolpert (Cambridge University) is researching how the brain controls movement; in fact, he sees the brain as essentially “about” movement. He talks rapidly of how control of motion is so hard to understand or reproduce, because of multiple interacting components, entirely non-linear processes are, long time delays (relatively) and noise, and so on. He then describes Bayes and his algorithms (which I remember from my Comp.Sci degree), and in particular Bayesian decision theory—how you deal with uncertainty. This enables a form of thinking about “probabilistic actions”, which perhaps underpin motion control. Wolpert then switches gear to  the idea of “priors”, which may be genetically encoded. In other words, we may be hard coded for some priors—gravity, for example. He asks, intriguingly, whether it’s important to understand “urban priors” (what priors do you need to possess to instinctively understand Tokyo or Los Angeles, for example.) He suggests the richness in a statistical/probabilistic model of the world, noting you can't control everything, and asks whether there are good generative probabilistic models of cities? (It’s been an emerging field for years, and still is). Is a Bayesian perspective used in urban planning? (With the Black Swan in mind, I’m wary but fascinated.)

• Dmitri Kullmann (UCL) is a neurologist, and so a little different. His expertise is in how nerve cells talk teach other. Like Zeki, he’s also interested in this idea of a unity of consciousness. He vividly describes how the actual connectivity and wiring in the brain is entirely relevant to this question, and the brain’s ability to “flip between streams”. We hear of the plasticity of synapses, and the plasticity of functional component. He talks about a theory that oscillations can control information flow, as there is evidence that different areas of the brain start oscillating together (this is called “coherence”), such that they’re able to exchange information if they oscillate together. But he notes that there is no good science on how this works. Can we use computational models to "spike a neuron", he asks? (As with the way that the scientists interact, I hugely enjoy the language at play here, and am immediately intrigued.)

• Troy Margrie (National Institute for Medical Research/UCL) works in mitral cell diversity, exploring the intrinsic biophysical diversity, particularly in the olfactory bulb, which processes smell.) He shows us the immense diversity in the biophysical property of mitral cells, whereas the cells that wire together networks tend to look similar, in comparison (they are the same functional network.) They explore these things by creating transgenic mice, and looking at the homotypic property that reflects the processing of specific functions. (Margrie is another that lets slip some wonderful language, perhaps inadvertently eg. “The nice thing about working in mice is that we can make mice. So we made a mouse, a transgenic mouse.” And so on.)

• Steve Wilson (also UCL) is a developmental biologist rather than neuroscientist as such—though again, the genres are blurring heavily here, which is good. He studies how the brain gets to be in its mature form, or in particular, how the vertebrate forebrain develops. He notes it starts simply but over time forms an incomprehensible number of connections.) He’s looking in particular at asymmetry and lateralisation in developing brain (how does left side become different to right, for instance.) They work in little fish embryos, he says, looking directly into the brain when it’s at its most simple, and only consists of a a few neurons (tens, hundreds etc), as opposed to the complexity of humans. Why does the brain work in an asymmetric way; language processing is left side, right-handedness is behavioral motor asymettry; etc). The “little fish brain” (a couple of days old, but has vision, can respond to sensory information) already has left-right asymmetric epithalamic circuitry (this is the major output pathway of limbic system, one of the older systems in our brain) (see zebrafishbrain.org for more.)

• Last but not least, Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute). Many of you will know West through his research indicating a strong correlation between the “metabolic rate” of cities and certain indicators of urban performance. His background is actually physics (working on dark matter, string theory) and then as a physicist working in biology. He eventually ended up researching the idea of “a science of cities”—can there be probabilistic mechanistic science of cities? Are we just looking at biological metaphors, or is it serious science? (He describes the latter as quantified, mathematised and predictive, I seem to recall.) He starts with the now well-known 'body mass against metabolic rate' graph, and then extends this rapidly into the mathematics of networks. He says you can derive all scaling laws—in a “coarse grained average sense”—across a wide range of indicators and essentially all the many cities he's measured. You can read more about his work here.
  
  Basically, West sees cities as networks; the physical city is a representation of networks. (Picking up my cue, he also talks about culture as a form of network of networks.) Looking at these scaling laws, he can be given the size of a city and accurately predict the number of petrel stations, say, alongside pretty much all other physical  infrastructure, socio-economic qualities like wages, crime levels and so on. He can predict how fast the average person will walk. Based on this consistent systemic scaling behaviour, he suggests that doubling the size of the city systematically increases income, wealth, patents, number of colleges, number of creative people, AIDS cases etc etc. by 15%. 
  
  (We immediately get into a discussion here, as West is a good communicator, the data is compelling at face value, and the correlation seems almost magical. West notes that density is not particularly taken into account in their calculations, because there is so little good data about cities (a general problem, he adds.) He knows it’s not irrelevant (though personally I think it's even more relevant than he suggests.) He is also pressed on why the scaling is .85 for infrastructure and 1.15 for patents, for example. I also find his data to be like much traditional analysis ie. It tells you the way something is, without necessarily uncovering “why” in a really useful way, or suggesting what to do—if you were a mayor, you wouldn’t double the size of your city, even if you could, to gain a '15% increase in patents generated' if it also meant a 15% increase in crime and AIDS cases, right? To take a step forward you need synthesis, not analysis. Still, this is not necesarily the job of science, of course, and in conversation, I found Geoffrey to be more engaging than his data—and he is of course right on the necessity of having more thorough, more insightful data on urban performance. What to do with it is another matter.)

• Chris Luebkeman (Arup) then gave his take on the subject, and the discussion so far. Chris is interested in “What is normal?”. He’s fascinated by the next 20 years, and trying to understand how “normal itself” develops over that timeframe. Partly this is Arup projects often take that length of time, if not to develop, but to mature, and so, as he put it, “How do we be sure that life of a project is going to be a full one?” Recalling what he had just heard, Chris said he was fascinated by how the brain is able to adapt, adjust, be plastic. So this adaptation was key: how do we adjust to the new normal? How do environmental factors impact on adaptation? How will a resource-constrained world affect us?What's driving change - how we understand change? And how do our brains change? How do we perceive that?

• Sarah, summing up, talked about her own interest in how the brain works in this context Ie. What can we learn, in terms of urban systems, by observing the brain’s ability to work as a finite entity that can bring resources online when it needs them, looking at the somewhat controversial “silent synapses” as potential points of connection coordinating this (I’m extrapolating a bit here, which is dangerous to say the least.) She ended on a poetic note, recalling how flying over Prague once, before coming into land at night, the city below looked like nothing more than a “basket cell” (a neuron) (See also the juxtaposed illustrations from Steven Johnson’s Emergence, reproduced above, with their allusion to the plan of Hamburg and an illustration of the brain.)

My own little presentation, in between Wolpert and Kullmann, focused only on a few things (unusually for me!) and avoided images and movies (ditto). (You can download a copy of the simple presentation here [PDF] should you wish.)

I briefly mentioned our own smart services work on Low2No, but my core point was that we need to step back and think about the question we’re trying to ask here—why were we gathered here today? I suggested that ideas themselves are not particularly relevant; that the idea of optimising urban infrastructure as a no-brainer (an odd phrase to use in this setting, I admitted.) (I also nodded to Zeki’s paper, which I’d learnt a lot from.)

But then I made the claim that the city is not psychological or biological, but cultural, and that if anything is holding us back from “better cities” (if that’s our goal), it’s not ideas or technology, but our cultures of decision-making (which is the focus of our work in the Strategic Design Unit at Sitra.)

In this sense, I mentioned my boss Marco’s contention that we have 18th century institutions facing 21st century problems; that we need to preference synthesis over analysis (analysis tells us why things are, assuming it’s not too narrowly focused, which it often is; synthesis tells us how things could be); that people are more convinced by narrative than data (if we're trying to convince peolpe of something); that we need to address the “dark matter” of organisations, culture, policy, as well as physical matter, and connect the two together via prototypes and projects. So data is not enough to actually get things done. I tried to position this as no challenge to the collective knowledge capital in the room, but instead to open up an angle oriented towards “what to do”. So my closing questions were: how can brain science help us better understand the architecture of problems, and what might we learn about cultures of decision-making?; 

(I’ll be expanding on these ideas in a forthcoming publication; you will be kept posted.)

To the discussion, which was freewheeling, entertaining, and well-hosted by Sarah and Chris. Ultimately it was the kind of conversation that is difficult to sum up, so I’ll list some key points I remembered (this is, of course, my interpretation.):

• Ultimately, I’d say we failed to make any particularly deep insights or connections in terms of overlaps between brain science and urbanism. We all learnt a lot, but it felt like an opening conversation which might lead somewhere, rather than an immediate destination. While it was fascinating to position two sets of thinking and experience alongside each other, while the connections leapt across the divide as if electric, they didn’t sustain a meaningful connection. While urban processes might look like neural processes if time-lapsed and sped up such that centuries last seconds, the differences - particularly between urban fabric's inert and cumbersome physical nature and the brain's elasticity - are fairly significant. Of course looking at how culture happens would be more interesting, from both perspectives.

• We came up with numerous metaphorical insights and correlations between brains and cities, but as a way of communicating as much anything (which is immensely valuable of course.) For instance, as the brain scientists tried to describe their theories, they would have to resort to metaphor to convey the content to us—so this was “like an autobahn”, or this was “like a tree”, or this was “like a railway station”, and so on. In the ability to make the metaphor, though, it’s clear that cities have many similar characteristics. The interesting stuff would be the things that there was no metaphor for; yet how would it be communicated over dinner?!

• Even when someone was stopped to explain something, they might say something like “Oh, well, a silent synapse is an excitatory glutamatergic synapse whose postsynaptic membrane contains NMDA-type glutamate receptors but no AMPA-type glutamate receptors, yes?”, which we all realised was unintentionally hilarious and ultimately slightly absurd. We tried to keep up the best we could, though the gulf was as deep as it ever has been, even in my experience of being parachuted deep in areas of expertise I initially knew little about.

• Metaphors are useful, as they enable the thin skein of connectivity between bodies of thought; yet they are also a leaky mechanism, potentially losing much richness from original concept to translation. If we were able to spend more time sharing ideas, we might get somewhere. The danger, after all, is that systems and concepts are built around analogies, rather than anything truly deep.

• Long, good discussion over whether the brain has, or is, substantively changed. Someone brought up how contemporary cities might be affecting people in a neuropyschological sense, and, of course, video games came up. Here, the neuroscientists were all clear that video games were not “changing the brain” in any substantive sense (that that would take tens of thousands of years), although what people were doing with their brain, on the same hardware, as it were, was different—and that an increased ability with multi-tasking, due to these new characteristics, was an indubitably positive thing.

• Chris had an excellent question up his sleeve: if you could change one thing about the brain, what would that be? One immediate answer was “memory”, as “we have a terrible memory.” Interesting, but I also suggested that forgetting might be equally important.  Probably something in Frances A Yates’s The Art of Memory about this; also, this line recently caught my eye: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times."

• Another answer concerned deterministic versus probabilistic responses (as the latter seems inefficient and energy-intensive, perhaps)—I didn’t fully understand this, though hung on by my finger-tips. There may be something in this probabilistic (Bayesian) algorithms, at a basic level of infrastructural decision-making.

• The fact the brain hasn’t changed much despite recent advances was underscored with the memorable line, “We basically have the same brain as a well-fed Roman”. (A friend of mine later tweeted, upon hearing this, that he also has the body of a well-fed Roman, which isn’t true but could be if he put his well-fed mind to it.)

• While I focused here on the brain science side of the conversation, we did of course discuss cities a lot. It felt that there was often a mischaracterisation of contemporary urban planning in play; not with any intent—just exemplifying the popular notion that urban planning is still working in 1950s mode (to be fair, it often is in some places.) So people were often unaware that, for example, generative models of cities already exist and are used in some circumstances; that it is an increasingly multi-disciplinary and holistic process; that long-term engagement might be catered for; and that ideas of human-centredness are also taken on by the business (again though, to be fair, the entire built environment business has at least a couple of decades to catch up here.)

• Several times the brain scientists reinforced what little they actually knew about the brain. It was quite humbling to hear this, given how much they did clearly know (collectively, hundreds of years’ worth of experience in the room) and yet how little they felt they really knew, compared to what the brain must actually be. This is an incredibly important point, given the tendency of expertise to overstate its value (see Taleb etc.) and the danger in building understanding based on limited information—so it was both reassuring and powerful to see this humility and reason on display.

• Zeki and I had an interesting exchange about resilience and cities, after I brought up the example of Beirut of a resilient city, inspired by Adrian Lahoud’s theories of post-traumatic urbanism. Zeki spoke wonderfully about the human qualities of cities like Beirut, as I'd reinforced their essential resilience through network redundancy; yet he also felt London was terrible in several places I would disagree with. In fact, the subjectivity of the urban conversation was interesting, in comparison to the apparently more objective brain science; West’s theories of an “urban science” didn’t seem—to me—to be the way forward in terms of leading or decision-making, although his wider urban data projects might contribute incredibly valuable analysis. Ultimately, the subjectivity of cities is what makes them so compelling, perhaps. Slippery little buggers, in that respect.

The emerging discussion I personally found most interesting—and tested on Geoffrey West and others, who were receptive—was this idea of how we make public decisions. Given our cultures of decision-making, from the individual to the institutional, were designed in another time, is it any wonder these systems are struggling to deliver the kind of complex, longer-term, interdependent decisions we need to make today? Equally, we now know rather more about the way the individual and society works, and so have some idea that fundamental systems within the brain, such as the limbic system, seem to preference short-term decisions, for example, amongst a series of other unhelpful characteristics.

So the thought occurred: how can we better design our approach to public decision-making, in such a way that the structures and cultures mitigates against our inherent “limitations”? (Please note the inverted commas there, indicating the obvious value judgement.)

In no way would I want to suggest that we construct systems around what we understand about the brain, given that a) we clearly still understand so little, and b) designing systems based on biological and psychological structures seems inherently dangerous—see note on ‘ecosystem thinking’ below; or Will Davies on the folly of pursuing self-organising decision-making structures derived from ants—given that culture and politics are “higher-order functions”, if I can put it like that, which differentiates us from, well, ants. (With all due respect to ants, and admitting none of us have ever checked with an ant what they think about all this.)

For instance, emergence is a powerful form of organisation for certain contexts, and we might learn much from such processes, but I’m yet to be convinced that it should  be primary driver of our public cultures of decision-making. That's quite a leap: potentially pointless; potentially dangerous.

However, perhaps it might be fruitful to use brain science as one core input into the redesign of our cultures of decision-making? (We are already looking into the contributing roles of space, experience, community, social interaction and other facets.)

How to mitigate against our short-termism? How to understand our intrinsic irrationality in decision-making—as Daniel Kahneman’s book does (and see this review) —and yet build systems that enable coherent, responsible, decisive and resilient decision-making nonetheless? How could we construct approaches that mitigate against the likelihood that humans tend to feel greater sympathy for those that resemble them (racially, for instance)? How to compensate for the “planning fallacy”, the demonstated over-confidence of experts in their abilities, and numerous other cognitive biases that might shape public, representative decision-making? Given research indicates these characteristics, are we sure our current approaches might absorb and compensate for these instincts appropriately? How do we foreground conscious and rational decision-making when our subconscious and irrationality apparently shape our decision-making? What kind of structures and cultures might flex smartly in tension with these forces?

A series of great conversations with Steven Johnson in Oslo last week reinforced my interest in these ideas, as did David Brooks’s recent book The Social Animal, which started to approach the idea of re-calibrating policy-making based on our advancing understanding of various aspects of brain science (though do read this excellent critical review in the New York Times, which also attempts to keep science in check, whilst learning from it; and I don’t buy the Brooks’s perception of the limits of social policy, which seems very US-context-driven, put it that way.)

It’d be interesting to take such science and not have it tend towards “self-help” psychology on personal decision-making, but something more nuanced, public and systemic, (or indeed get misinterpreted into “techniques” like brushing your teeth left-handed to promote mental flexibility, or debating with a full bladder, a bizarrely medievalist notion endorsed by the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and with such winning results.)

Note again the desire would be to re-engage with politics, policy, the state, and the richness of our various formal structures and informal cultures of decision-making, as a primary contribution of humanity, rather than deny it or side-step it as previous such approaches have. I see this as a design challenge, at least with a contemporary understanding of design which is not solely tied to the limitations of "problem-solving": to design a series of prototypes that enable us to learn by doing, in properly blending the natural sciences with culture, social science and the reality of politics.

Quite a few of the neuroscientists in the room seemed intrigued enough to pursue this ideas, and I certainly mean to. Any critiques, ideas and leads welcome.

Just a thought.

Finally, on the way out of the building, chatting with a couple of neuroscientists, I floated that loose critique of ecosystem thinking—as in, denying the idea that “nature” (however defined) is an intrinsically better way of organising. I asked something along the lines of whether it is the case that the brain, and other natural systems, tend towards any kind of balanced equilibrium, or efficient use of resources, or useful steady state?

They smiled, and said something along the lines of “Of course not”, that such systems are often very “wasteful” (even allowing for a construct of conscious thought to be applied to something that clearly isn’t.) 

Cities are also systems that thrive on instability and imbalance. They never, or rarely, tend towards any kind of equilibrium or steady state—which challenges much of the philosophy (though that’s hardly the right word) which underpins many models of urban sustainability, including smart cities with its banal emphasis on efficient use of resources through feedback loops.

(Do also watch Adam Curtis’ second episode in his BBC series “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace”, in which he carefully dissects—and then utterly trashes, with his inimitable VHS-spattered sturm und drang—the entire idea of “the ecosystem” as useful metaphor, as well as most similar “systems thinking”. Curtis points out that, as opposed to efficient equilibrium, “the history of nature was full of radical dislocations and unpredictable change … a raw chaotic instability”. See also this peice in The Guardian.) It may be the brain is also this way—it would make sense if it was, after all—but rather than be disheartened by this, maybe that might be a fruitful avenue to take in terms of our understanding of equally unstable cities? To not search for harmony and equilibrium, but understand instead this raw chaotic instability, and find ways to work with that, within a resource-constrained, inreasingly diverse and dynamic world with a greater need than ever to make intelligent long-term as well as short-term decisions.

This doesn’t mean that there will not be fruitful approaches drawn from the ideas of smart cities, of course, just as I gained immeasurably from this exploratory conversation with brain scientists—just that the insights will surely not be obvious, will not be immediate, and will require a more concerted, deeper engagement.

I arrived in London on the day of the national general strike, the scale of which no-one could seem to agree on: it was somehow both the largest strike since the 1970s “winter of discontent” as well being as “a damp squib”, according to the Prime Minster. Even this disagreement is a manifestation of the deep schisms running through Britain at the moment.

I’m in town for 24 hours, for a meeting of neuroscientists and urbanists (notes on that here), at Lord North’s offices in the shadow of Westminster, and so I’m heading for a hotel in adjacent Pimlico. Despite gruesome warnings (media in disaster junky-mode) the strike certainly had no effect on Heathrow border control. I’ve never been through there so quickly; there were more staff on duty than usual (overtime increases in real terms in an age of austerity), and they were more or less waiving people through. A good day to be an illegal immigrant, not that I was. Anyway, it was a surprisingly efficient journey from plane to train to cab to hotel.

As I’ve pointed out before, London seems to have its own malevolent momentum, and so it’s sometimes difficult to trace the effects of the Great Recession here, at least on the surface. As the capital of capital it just keeps rolling on. It’s too big to fail, to re-coin a phrase. It’s been doing all this for a millennium and shows no sign of stopping any time soon. You can see evidence of the Great Recession of course, but you also see its counterpoint everywhere (though this may partly be due to Britain’s extraordinary facility with entrepreneurship in service industries like food and retail, and its exemplary media and marketing businesses, which are still perhaps the best in the world.) 

Moving outside of Central London, you’d see more breakdown, of course (as was all too horribly clear in August's unprecedented urban and suburban riots) but overall the capital is performing as it has done for centuries. 'Tis but a scratch, a flesh wound. The rest of the UK—where most people live, after all—is not so fortunate, and so it is often bleak up north. And east and west. And south-west.

But London steamrollers along. I lived here for a decade or so, and it retains a pull on me. Even somewhere like Millbank and Pimlico—two dormitory suburbs in microcosm, caught in the gravitational pull of Westminster’s political capital—feel charming. This despite the blankness of the permacast sky overhead, the cold and damp of light mizzle (that’s a Northern sub-genre of drizzle, just so you know), monochrome avenues of pollarded trees, and the relative lack of activity on these perfectly scaled streets at the heart of the 10m+ person city.

The built fabric round here is very appealing: what look like unusually successful modernist housing blocks (squashed ziggurat-style streets of modular dark brown brick) sit alongside elegant, tall early 20th century public housing, improving on Shoreditch’s Arnold Circus prototypes of a few years earlier, and this all cheek-by-jowl with Georgian terraces such as those tucked around the back of the Tate Britain. This is all good, achieving a density of high potential energy at an easy human scale. (Not that I like the term "human scale"; it’s a little subjective, ironically. However.)

The problem is how these things hit the ground plane, or the street in layman's terms. The early 20th century stuff has no room for services, amenities and shops. Round the back there is a fascinating sunken gully for washing lines—you can imagine kids doing a BMX-based re-enactment in miniature of the Terminator truck race along the LA River down here—but little else.

The latter 20th century stuff has some built-in, which is good (although you get those awkward faux-English ye-olde-pub trappings screwed into the modernist brickwork that you see all over the country eg Park Hill), but no real critical mass.

So Pimlico lacks an obvious sense of activity—it may also suffer from the largely-empty-second-home renting pattern common to many areas surrounding parliaments and similar institutions—and so it fails to present an identity, at least obviously. There will be fascinating histories within all these spaces and places—this is London, after all—but strolling through you struggle to identify any there, there.Yet it still appeals. Save for the horrific bypass surgery imposed by things like Vauxhall Bridge Road, the streets are nice and tight, and easily claimable by people and bikes, and there is life around—just not quite enough of it, given the possibility the fabric affords.

The issue is probably those second-homes, as it is in all major cities (including Helsinki, where for Pimlico read Töölö.) I cannot see any justification for allowing second-home-ownership on any scale, particularly from an urban policy point-of-view. It completely undermines cities, and as cities are the lifeblood of virtually everything now, that’s not very smart. It merely views cities as potential pieces on a Monopoly board, which is the thinnest, meanest and dumbest slice possible through the layers of productive activity that a city enables. (Oddly Pimlico is even absent from the Monopoly board, by the way, despite its propinquity with London’s various centres.) 

From a fiscal policy point-of-view, I’m sure preventing second-home-ownership on any scale wouldn’t be a strong proposal; but again, any good urban policy is essentially a fiscal policy, and the increased business and capital of all kinds generated by people actually inhabiting areas like this in the numbers the built infrastructure affords, means this urban policy scores as fiscal policy too. Just not one based on property value.

London throws all this at you, even when you’re just wandering around largely empty streets. The devaluing of genuine value that the city (and City) has often stood for can’t be ignored on its empty streets (it’s why they’re empty) or its busy streets (it’s why they’re full.) The streets that are full today, here and now at 1600, are full because of the strike, and in particular, an entertaining little skirmish on Panton Street ostensibly between the CEO of Xstrata (which in actuality turns out to manifest itself as police) and what are reported as various Occupy offshoots.

The idea of austerity underpins and drives all this at the moment, as the government attempts to drive through radical reform with little mandate (arguably). I’ve been reading the late historian Tony Judt’s memoirs recently—‘The Memory Chalet, (2010)—which are a wonderful read in many ways. With the perspective of a long life well-lived (albeit one tragically cut short by Lou Gehrig’s disease, which he also writes about movingly), I found Judt particularly interesting on austerity, in comparing what it used to mean, in those years following the end of World War II (remember Ballard saying it was as if Britain lost the war), to what it means now. A taxi driver I spoke with earlier reminds me how it feels when “the benefits of austerity” are being extolled by Old Etonians.

“I don’t think I fully appreciated the impact of those early childhood years until quite recently. Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic …. In politics (now), (the) ceaseless chatter and grandiloquent rhetoric mask a yawning emptiness. The opposite of austerity is not prosperity but luxe et volupté. We have substituted endless commerce for public purpose, and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders. Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we deserve from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order.” (Judt, 2011)

But note that Judt's austerity is very different to that on offer now. By the way, Judt is also good on the merits of meritocracy, what he describes as “the incoherence of meritocracy: giving everyone a chance and then privileging the talented”, as well as his comfort with his own socially-informed and socially democratic ‘elitism’.

“Universities are elitist: they are about selecting the most able cohort of a generation and educating them to their ability—breaking open the elite and making it consistently anew. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are not the same thing. A society divided by wealth and inheritance cannot redress this injustice by camouflaging it in educational institutions—by denying distinctions of ability or by restricting selective opportunity—while favoring a steadily widening income gap in the name of the free market …” (Judt, 2011)

Note the idea that an elite can be remade anew through elitism, albeit one diversifying through a productive "incoherence", and also the idea that education cannot be a sticking plaster over an increasingly unequal market-based organisation of society.

But I also read Michael Young, who actually invented the word ‘meritocracy’ in his novel of 1958, as a warning more than anything, and in particular his 2001 article on what had happened since, written during the Blair government. Young was an interesting man, and also lived a life full of genuine achievement. (Unfortunately, the lustre of his achievements have been tarnished a little, as he also begat Toby Young.) 

His warning as to meritocracy was that it just doesn’t work in practice; the ladder is drawn up behind those who benefit, through systematised testing and selection at too early an age, in too heavy-handed a way, which intrinsically reproduces and reinforces the existing distribution of power, rather than build in the diversity and broader representation that Judt sees the possibility of.

“The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself. The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment. They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves. It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that. As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality.” (Young, 2001)

This was written a decade ago. In his article, Young compares the Atlee and Blair cabinets, in particular looking at the achievements of those such as Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin. Imagine if he’d had to compare it with Cameron’s coalition? (This Telegraph article is telling in oh-so-many ways, but perhaps only if you're English.)

Pimlico’s proximity to Westminster is felt even when those gilded palaces slide out of sight due to the deceptive curves of the River Thames. With the sight of police on street corners all around, and the sound of police and media helicopters beating out their incessant drumming overhead, it’s difficult to stop thinking about Young’s warnings over meritocracy reproducing the same elites over again, or Judt’s understanding of the importance of morality and ethics underpinning austerity. For all the value in Occupy Everywhere (which is significant) and in reforming public service (which is also significant, if it was done another way), the deeper, essentially English cultural systems still pervading Pimlico’s empty and darkening streets are not being addressed in either these skirmishes or these reforms.

Related: Journal: Of brains and cities: neuroscience and cultures of decision-making

Kings Cross and Darlinghurst is the most Sydney bit of Sydney, perhaps. The streets are small and tight, but busy with cars anyway. Cars are poured through this city as a kind of sealant, filling all available gaps. Straight off the flight through the night from Singapore, the sunlight is on full beam. Ridiculous. The kids are Eurasian and effortlessly hip, dressed in Sydney Skinny Black and shades, somehow slouching and taut at the same time, like slender cats skulking around the shade of the street, (black) asymmetric t-shirts, (black) strappy tops, neon-shades of flip-flop. 

In between a few choice examples of faded glamour it's scruffy as hell, and far from beautiful. It's noisy, a bit dirty, but the place feels busy, alive.

The apex of Kings Cross, under the Coke ad, is a nasty tangle of heavy traffic from all directions, but still fairly thrilling. Ironically, as a side-effect of all these arteries converging, the built fabric suddenly drops back and the overhead opens up and the streets fall away down William Street towards city's skyline, framed against a rich blue sky above and various strata of traffic below. The pavement here is all movement: a drug-addled girl on crutches calling out “Mac!” as she skitters along: languorous businessmen without jackets strolling in to work, carrying themselves with the faintly self-important air of resources wealth—they can't even be bothered to pull off a mild swagger; various distended hulks lumbering out of the Fitness First above the Coke sign; the aforementioned hipsters, slinking around, presumably waiting for the sneaker stores to open. Amidst the movement, a few static characters: I've already seen more homeless people in three hours than I have in six months in Helsinki.

Off the main streets, down in the winding lanes around St. Vincent’s hospital, the foliage, on this sunblest morning, is just impossible. Canopies of ferny trees virtually glow lime green, jacaranda create pools of purple, draped over parked cars. The trees are full of screeching birds, so raucous after Northern Europe's timid and well-behaved avian life. I'm reminded again of how Australian urban terrain always felt like a Ballardian fantasy; overgrown, crumbling, reclaimed by megaflora. The jet lag, combined with the early morning heat, is making me a little woozy, I'm sure.

It's genuinely nice to be back. I realise elements I miss, things I’d forgotten I missed. The hole-in-the-wall coffee bars and bakeries, predictably, but also the muscular CBD in the distance, the small, curving, climbing streets and tight patterns of housing around here, painted in bright colours, crumbled and pastel-ed by the intense light and heat. That peculiar mélange in the common architecture: English colonial, South Pacific and sub-tropical, European émigre modernist, European émigre vernacular, Featurist Americana, corporate Asian, and somewhere underneath, or emerging from within, Actual Australian. It’s so distinct.

Bill’s is a totally predictable stop-off for sure, but it's difficult to argue with a bowl of poached pears and home-made toasted granola. Plus the first real flat-white in half a year. The occasional waft of cool air from the open doors. Only sunshine can create all this. It’s bloody seductive. Service is (again, predictably) excellent. The chatter around me is Mandarin mum, American tourist, and generally Aussie. It's set to a musical backdrop that is disappointingly Americana (though at least good: Bonnie Prince Billy, Beirut, Low, ’O Brother’ soundtrack.) This is off-set by the outside coming in, the stop-start snarl of combustion engines idling at the lights and then roaring up the hill. 

The idyll is shattered by a sudden crump across the road—a couple have spun off their Vespa, which is now a great lump of red metal lying on its side. Around 10 people had quickly rushed to their aid, kindness of stranger-ing them out of the road and onto the pavement next to the noticeboard for Darlinghurst Public School (“WE STRIVE TO ACHIEVE AND WE ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE”). Minor cuts and bruises, no real harm done, though the woman is appropriately wobbly and has to sit on a bench outside the adjacent recycled designer fashion store for a bit. Though it's a bit cruel to point it out, particularly right now, they're both old enough to know better.

On the table, Smith Journal looks like a good new (Melbourne?) mag. All the other papers are full of the usual nonsense, instantly reminding me why I no longer live here. But while I'm waiting for my hotel room, this bit of Sydney is reminding me why I did live here.

("Happy feelings at the awakening of Finnish Spring" being one of the alternative titles cheekily used by performers of Sibelius' Finlandia in its early performances, in order to escape Russian censorship.)

We arrived in Helsinki in the Finnish Spring, fresh from the Australian Late-Summer. Before long, the Finnish Summer announced itself with glorious sunshine and warmth creeping across southern Finland. Helsinki in summer could be surprisingly warm, touching the mid-thirties on the streets around our apartment. On holiday in the UK in July, I found myself saying something I thought I never would: I miss the heat of the Helsinki sun.

By September it was deeply Autumnal, though. Up in Lahti a month ago, the gutters were already lined with soggy piles of decomposing leaves. To the south, here in Helsinki, we're in a schizophrenic state in which summer and autumn co-exists from one hour to the next.

The next punctuation mark in the seasonal calendar here is ruska, a word which has no particular counterpart in English as far as I can see. Perhaps the diametric opposite of the week of cherry blossom in Japan. Ruska is the one week in which birch, larch, rowan et al really explode into russet tones, turning to richly saturated peaks of purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before rapidly shivering off their leaves for winter. This phenomenon is connected to the level of sugar in the leaves, apparently, which is in turn to do with particular temperature ranges. Some years are more ruska than others. (This may happen in similar climates elsewhere, like Maine perhaps, though I don't know if it has an apogee of one week in this way.) Ruska will already have occurred in Lapland and is making its way south, arriving here in Helsinki around mid-October.

Seasonality is far more pronounced here than in the UK or Australia. Various popular rituals still dot the calendar, particularly in summer, which is a real pleasure. Juhannus (midsummer) was spent on a small island in the Tammisaari peninsular with around thirty Swedish-speaking Finns. The landscape and seascape was as simply beautiful as anywhere I've ever seen. Another presumably pagan ritual marks the end of the season: a crayfish party in the shared garden of a couple of adjacent blocks in downtown Helsinki. Also magical (if fuelled somewhat by schnapps and unintelligible drinking songs poking fun at the Swedes, the Russians, and—Finns being Finns—the Finns.)

The seaons are more pronounced in the food, too. The good stuff anyway. At a dinner at Muru in early September, the dishes were emblazoned with a particular kind of local redcurrant, in season for two weeks only. The berries sequence themselves for our pleasure: strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, whitecurrent, redcurrant, gooesberry, seabuckthorn berry, cloudberry, and many more I've never heard of.

Restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen—the best in the world—have utterly transformed the idea of Nordic cuisine, in doing so emphasising local, seasonal produce like no other equivalent operation. Indeed, the staff spend the morning foraging for ingredients to be used in the evening. While this is an excellent and welcome game-changer in the region, it's hardly replicable at scale. Yet seasonality is more evident in even near-mainstream food culture here than in the UK and Australia. It's a foundation to build upon.

All the time, we’re aware of WINTER looming in the background. 

If I had a Euro for every time someone had asked, with a malicious twinkle in the eye, “And will it be your first Finnish winter?”, I’d have around 28 Euros. The sheer duration, depth and weight of the WINTER projects itself deep into August, no matter what the weather outside is. We all know it’s coming.

"The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight. 
The sea lay asleep under the ice, and deep down among the roots of the earth, all small beasts were sleeping and dreaming of spring. But spring was quite a bit away because the year had only just got a little past New Year's.
At the point where the valley began its soft slope toward the mountains stood a snowed-in house. It looked very lonely and rather like a crazy drift of snow. Quite near it ran a bend of the river, coal-black between ice edges. The current kept the stream open all winter. But there were no tracks leading over the bridge, and no one had touched the snow drifts around the house.
[..]
But he could no longer forget the one terrible thing—that the sun didn't rise any longer. Yes, it's true; morning after morning broke in a kind of grey twilight and melted back again into the long, winter night—but the sun never showed himself. He was lost, simply lost; perhaps he had rolled out into space. At frist Moomintroll refused to believe it. He waited a long time."
—Moominland Midwinter, Tove Jansson (1957)

Can't wait.

That is so different to the months we've just had, which were characterised by hot sun and rich blue endless skies and seas, dusty city streets and islands covered with lush birch, larch, pine, soft green moss and great sun-warmed, mineral-streaked hunks of granite and gneiss. Still, it's good to be in a place with such sharp contrast between seasons, described not least by a 50ºC temperature swing.

We are beginning to enquire after boots of a sturdiness never previously thought of, after coats of such firmness and commodity that they are virtually architecture. As the other mammals around us begin preparing for winter—and by other mammals, I principally mean the local red squirrels with the long ears, scurrying around collecting nuts in-between posing for photographs, as John Updike memorably described their stop-start motion—we don’t so much gather foliage as idly browse Tretorn and Woolrich websites, or wonder about the efficacy of Artek's new SAD-countering white lights.

Back in May, however, it was that splendid Finnish summer that was rearing its pretty little head. A couple of weeks after arriving in Helsinki I was asked by one of my old employers, Monocle, to write the piece accompanying their selection of the city as their no.1 in 2011's urban quality of life survey.

It felt somewhat odd to write about the city having just arrived. Yet I had visited many times, with several deep engagements in the last year. Plus, I still maintain it's possible to capture the essence of a city from fleeting impressions, even if true depth of understanding takes years.

Since writing the piece—and I'm posting the original, longer edit below—my experiences have served to back up most of what I wrote, at least to my mind. Our apartment in Ullanlinna sits at the epicentre of an entirely walkable, entirely liveable existance, exhibiting exactly the kind of naturally high yet everyday and affordable quality in services, amenities and infrastructure that the Monocle index is interested in. More importantly, this sits within a society with modernity and equality at its core.

Yet perhaps paradoxically this even provision of quality is also the root cause of Helsinki's occasional shortcomings. (This also applies by extention to Finland, to some extent.) The outcome of 'spirit level' economy and society is complex. It's essentially A Good Thing: ethically sound; no-one left behind; a comparatively sustainable economy predicated on equality; high-performing across numerous indices. You wouldn't want it any other way, almost.

There are few things more quietly appealing than walking your kids to the local päivakoti (daycare) 10 minutes away down by the sea, bumping into friends in the street on the way and taking a couple of minutes to chat about what's just opened in the neighbourhood as people scurry past on their way to the tram, just before you pass a playground full of kids clambering over climbing frames, wearing fluorescent tops emblazoned with the name of their päivakoti, past miniaturised bits of municipal cleaning equipment buzzing around a square surrounded by well-made 8-storey blocks of stone painted pink, yellow, blue, grey, with shops and cafés at their ground level beginning to glow a warm orange as their day starts ...

It's like a bloody RIchard Scarry book come to life, sometimes, it really is. (And not Cars and Trucks and Things That Go either.)

Yet the same spirit level that produces the evenly distributed daycare, the clean streets and occupied shops, the dads sharing childcare and the mums in work, the pervasive public transport, the squares, the parks, the playgrounds is also a complex, slightly impenetrable system in terms of stimulating 'spikes' of innovation or difference.

It's a system that, as compared to much of the deregulated West, still has effective policy levers to pull, and effective services on the end of them. Thus it's possible to engender positive systemic change rapidly, at least in theory. And yet the same system can also, often inadvertently, resist diversity, difference, external influence, and experimental pockets of change or exceptional quality. And an ecosystem that resists diversity and change is arguably lacking essential resilence. Understanding how to access sweet spots in the middle of the spirit level will be the key to unlocking this place.

This is really something for another day, but you can sense elements of this in my writing below. Critique is not what this piece was about, and so it's difficult to subtly elide notes of caution, hesitancy or equivocation into what had to become <1000 words on Why Helsinki Is So Good. But there are some notes in the mix nonetheless. These are really a concern of the day job, in the first instance, although I know Monocle would be happy to hear more about how the city could incrementally improve.

Monocle's Tom Morris did a brilliant bit of editing to take the following piece and carve it to the required word limit, whilst also Monocle-ising it somewhat. I'm not sure how editors do that.

Evidently.

But what I try to get at in this longer version is the idea of the tacit city, or opaque city. There is a strong element of this to Helsinki. It's possible to visit, and miss the point entirely. It doesn't offer itself up easily at all. The peculiarly distinct language exacerbates this, of course, but there are other ways in which the city remains opaque—cultural, social, environmental. But I argue that that makes the city more interesting as a result, just as it is at a different scale with London. You have to work harder at it, but it's more rewarding.

Although Helsinki has been a constant delight in our few months here, it's not immediately obvious to the visitor with preconceptions about what a city is, or some other prejudice to resolve.

"The officer shifted his gaze towards the city, turned his back on me and replied.
'This isn't just any city. It is an encampment of Mongols who surfaced at the other end fo the continent by mistake; savages whose only thought is to get drunk, even on ethyl alcohol if they can't find anything else!' Pleased with his words, he turned around and drew heavily on his cigarette.
'Welcome to Helsinki!' he added sardonically, then walked away, tossing his butt end into the sea. Perhaps he had had those words stored away for me right from the beginning of the voyage."
—New Finnish Grammar, Diego Marani (2000; English translation 2011)

This, from Marani's majestic little book, of which more later, is of course chosen here as the most ludicrously oppositional counterpoint to my ode below. But some really don't see why Helsinki was chosen as Monocle's #1. To those proffering indices and rankings I'd say there is no objective city (hence, partly, the deliberately subjective criteria behind the Monocle ranking.) Cities are, after Raban, soft, in that they reveal as much about the observer as anything. You get out what you put in, and perhaps Helsinki exemplfies this more than most.

"“For better or worse, (the city) invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them."
—Soft City, Jonathan Raban (1974) 

When the tacit knowledge prevents urban processes functioning, as can be the case, there's a problem to be resolved, but often you're only a couple of clicks away from unlocking something rare, something so uniquely Helsinki that it's a pleasure to discover in an increasingly homogenous world.

This opacity is also balanced by a form of gentle civic urbanism, humble almost. One of my favourite quotes about the Finnish character is about the peerless footballer Jari Litmanan (of Ajax, Barcelona, Liverpool and Finland fame), drawn from the recollections of Ajax team manager David Endt: 

"The press conference is over, and in comes Jari Litmanen, from behind the door. And I looked at his face and I looked at his eyes, and I recognised something in those eyes. And I thought, this is a man with a great willpower. Because he was not shy, not timid, but he was modest. He is not a man who will raise his voice, or bang with his fist on the table and say, ‘We do it this way.’ No, he was more of a diplomat, not wanting to be a leader, but being a leader."

This feels entirely familiar: a leader, but not appearing like one. Again, all the issues pivot around this slightly mysterious, enigmatic character, as well as the assets.

At the level of built fabric, this means that the city's architecture is really all about details and interiors. If I were to start wrting about the componentry—the doors and door handles, window frames, typography, house names and numbers, signage, particularly skyline silhouette, brickwork, ornamentation, lighting, emblems and so on—neither of us would be out of here any time soon. So I've sublimated that desire into a Flickr set about it instead, much of which draws from the 'peculiar ugly-beautiful Jugendstil thru' functional modernism' of our immediate neighbourhood. Enjoy.

There is no particular signature architecture—save several Aalto gems—but this is the corrollary of everything else achieving that spirit level mean. On the whole, I'd rather have this than sprawling mediocrity punctuated by jewels. (And on the whole, I'd rather have a high-functioning spirit level society than exemplary architecture anyway, even allowing for a symbiotic relationship between the two.)

But again it means the genuinely fine craft is only visible at the second glance, or even the touch, and hidden in courtyards, tucked under oxidised copper awnings or inside a gloomy threshold, decorating the roofline well above your head. This is most evident in the Richard Scarry City of downtown Helsinki, replete with pre-modern romantic megastructures that are almost aircraft carriers of such componentry, but that craft is also a relatively straight line drawn clean through modernism and beyond.

As Juhani Pallasmaa pointed out, the door handle is the handshake of the building. I've enjoyed countless such introductions with buildings since moving here. It's an everyday experience of quality in building which is absent in those cities studded with more precious jewels. It may be drawn from the pragmatic need for shelter in a city whose winter can touch -25ºC, but the spirit level means everyone, virtually, has an entirely everyday, taken-for-granted, often subconscious pleasure in building craft. This care for detail doesn't extend in all directions though, and again, sometimes struggles with the new, different or foreign, but if I were to build a city, I'd start with the door handles of Helsinki and work my way up from there. (After the jobs of Shanghai of course.)

Enough context, on with the ode. Here's the full, original version of my essay on Helsinki for Monocle, issue 45, July/August 2011. It should go without saying that this is me writing in Monocle mode. Many thanks to interviewees Martti Kalliala, Mayor Jussi Pajunen, and Ville Relander, whose quotes have a little more space here. (No photos for this piece as, really, where would I start?)

Helsinki: Opaque City

“Medium misery is the highest level of Finnish happiness that you can hope for.”

The architect Vesa Honkonen wrote this in a letter to American architect Steven Holl, to “explain the behaviour of the Finnish people”.

This melancholy air may speak to an older generation, but does not ring true in the activities of a younger, more ebullient Helsinki set. Already a genuinely great city, Helsinki is transforming itself from within. The city’s food culture is thriving. Entrepreneurship and innovation is present in a young, highly-skilled and technically proficient business culture emerging from the ecosystem around Nokia, as well as through public institutions like Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund.

The city's hardware generally performs like a dream, as you’d expect from the high-functioning country in which highly trained engineers make up a sizeable proportion of the population. For example, despite metres of snow and temperatures reaching -25ºC, Helsinki Vantaa airport has only shut down for half an hour in the last eight years, and that was due to an chance combination of snowstorm and technical failure. (Hello Heathrow?)

But it's the softer, intangible, ineffable qualities that make Helsinki a joy to live in. These encompass and enliven the city’s compact core, its increasingly cosmopolitan civic life, an international business culture, and the close proximity to forest and water that the Finns hold dear. 

The city is certainly on a roll. Helsinki will be World Design Capital for 2012, taking over from Seoul, though most Finns are still revelling in Team Finland becoming world ice hockey champions for the first time since 1996, beating arch rivals Sweden 6-1 in May’s final. The event was commemorated by delirious naked Finns jumping into the chilly Esplanadi fountains throughout the night.

These very different indicators suggest Honkonen’s stereotype of the melancholy Finn is changing, with Helsinki in the vanguard. 

Looking down from the traditional vantage point—the bar atop Hotel Torni, allegedly designed in 1931 as a mooring post for zeppelins—it's clear that Helsinki has a compact urban form, with a consistent distribution of building height in the optimal 6-10 storey range, which combines the rich possibilities of tight, medium density (serendipity, daily contact with difference, active street frontages, transit and other infrastructural efficiencies) with a walkable, human scale. 

But beneath this appealing medium-density canopy, the city is also a little opaque, at least at first glance, in that many of the city’s real assets are hidden in the tacit knowledge of its residents. It’s a city of secrets.

It's perhaps no accident that the best cities are a little opaque. Manhattan is big, brash and obvious whereas London's secrets reveal themselves to you more slowly, almost unwillingly. But it's worth the wait. Where Sydney's glorious harbour dazzles the tourists disembarking at Circular Quay, many of Melbourne's best bars are upstairs, behind unmarked doors down nondescript laneways. Ditto Osaka, São Paulo, Los Angeles, Seattle. 

Helsinki is certainly opaque in this sense. The elegant parade of Esplanadi ends up in the somewhat leftover South Harbour with its hulking ferries to Tallinn and Stockholm; the language is largely impenetrable to non-Finns; the winter is nasty, brutish and long; several of its key assets are underground; and the city tumbles into a sea dotted with tiny islands, containing who knows what.

Yet a relationship with an opaque city is deeper as a result of all this mystique, and Helsinki handsomely rewards those who choose to live, work and play here. Yet each of the above actually offers an advantage. Winter can be stunning; a crisp monochrome terrain and cloudless blue sky, the ice-coated trees almost crystalline, and the frozen harbour extending the space available to the city, used for outdoor markets or skating. 

Minus 20ºC is barely a problem. A high-functioning city, Helsinki is simply built for it. Interiors are cosy throughout the winter, predicated on a glorious firmness to the architecture and rooted in district heating: Here the conversation can revolve around whether you triple glaze or quadruple glaze your windows. The craftsmanship of contractors is generally exemplary; you will be colder in a Brisbane home than in a Helsinki apartment, guaranteed, and as their neighbours in Stockholm say, "There's no such thing as bad weather. Only inappropriate clothing."

The underground 'infrastructure' ranges from the tourist destinations like the rock-church Temppeliaukio—as if Ken Adam had designed a chapel for a Bond villain with a conscience to assuage—to district heating and cooling networks, and data centres that provide further heating produced as a side effect of handling Finland's massive bandwidth requirements. Uniquely, the city even has an underground masterplan, with the intention of planting as much infrastructure in Helsinki's hefty bedrock as possible, freeing up space for street life above. Cities like Singapore are following suit.

And the islands? They indicate how Helsinki is perhaps unique in its ability to conjure natural surroundings out of the urban. Walking along the shores of Seurasaari or Suomenlinna, it is entirely possible to find oneself amongst larch, birch, clear clean water, soft cool moss growing on granite boulders, dappled sunlight picking out barnacle geese squabbling with the long-eared local squirrels. The noise of the city just drops away. The same scene under snow is perhaps even more magical.

Last year's exemplary brand strategy for the country has a goal of making all of Finland's lakes drinkable—where else would this thought occur? The challenge for Helsinki will be to further draw biodiversity into its harder urban spaces, whilst conversely densifying and urbanising its sprawling edges, but currently few other cities are as capable of pulling off this trick.

Back into urbanity, the building stock is often elegant; refined rather than set-pieces (though there are a slew of Alvar Aalto classics). It’s a city of Jugenstil courtyards and componentry as much as exterior forms. The local architectural master Juhani Pallasmaa has said you can tell a lot about a city by looking at its door handles. In Helsinki, they're by Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, Alvar Aalto and other less well-known but apparently equally gifted craftspeople.

This is not a city designed to be driven through, where such details would be lost in the noise, but a city designed for walking, and careful observation. Small independent shops, services and studios dot the streets of Katajanokka, Ullanlinna, Puonavuori and Eira, each neighbourhood a particular example of the highly walkable mixed-use districts that urbanists tend to dream of, threaded together by trams. Again, the window displays can often be a little opaque, just as the most interesting shops are often hidden in a courtyard or underground, but the black-and-white Design District Helsinki stickers are usually a useful indicator that something of value lies inside. (In between, flower shops and hairdressers appear in huge numbers, somewhat mystifyingly.)

Another example of how these small details add up: the City of Helsinki’s Variotram low-floor trams are designed by local industrial designer, Hannu Kähönen. Kähönen also designed the city’s smart litter bins and Abloy keys that subtly support the daily life in Helsinki. Once you start simply noticing, it’s a delight to discover how the city’s design culture subtly pervades the details of daily life, as well as enriching the local economy.

Amongst Eurozone economies, Finland has accelerated strongly out of the global financial crisis, alongside Germany and the Netherlands, with high GDP per person and low public debt. Within a successful 'spirit level' culture—high income equality, broad tolerance, exceptional education and healthcare results—Finland Inc (or Finland Oy, in Finnish) has also generated a series of brands that punch well above the weight suggested by a population of a little over five million people; from Iitalla, Artek and Marimekko to Nokia, Kone and Fiskars. Though not all these household names emerged in Helsinki, the city is essentially the crucible of Finnish business, generating a third of the country's GDP.

But there is change afoot. While Nokia may still be able to ride out their current storm, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that other high-value Finnish business will continue to emerge. (See 'Bright Young Finns', Monocle #43, but most obviously developers Rovio, creators of that curious strain of Finnish soft power, Angry Birds: 300m downloads and counting.)

Monocle spoke to Jussi Pahunen, who has been mayor of Helsinki since 2005 and seen businesses come and go.

“The hard fact is that most of our new employment will be in startups and SMEs, so in order to be a dynamic city we must enable small companies to succeed. One key concept is to collaborate with the universities to enable students to shift easily from education to startup, and then to provide such firms with all the help they need. We are trying to make the city a launch pad for businesses.”

Yet Martti Kalliala, a local architect and writer who also has a thriving musical career ‘on the side’ under the sobriquet Renaissance Man, suggests that the various local institutions aren’t really set up to deal with Helsinki’s creative industries. “There’s an acute lack of understanding of what it means to support certain kinds of businesses,” he says. “While it’s surprisingly easy to acquire space to start up a business, the culture for entrepreneurs in Finland is not that supportive.”

But Helsinki’s architecture and design scene remains very strong by international standards, with Kalliala and other small architectural practices like ALA and NOW doing fascinating work. “There are distinct advantages to Helsinki, such as the healthy competition culture, which is a good viable avenue to establishing yourself as a young architect,” Kalliala says. “Also, the flatness and compactness of Helsinki/Finnish culture means it’s easy to gain access to media and political powers, though this is generally an under-utilised asset by designers and architects.“

Mayor Pajunen has some clear ideas about the value of the design business to Helsinki, well beyond next year’s World Design Capital.

“We had decided to become a design-oriented city before bidding for the WDC, and we see next year as having a ‘snowball effect’, based around a series of pilot projects that have lasting effect in terms of increased competitiveness, better public services, and better design in all parts of a more liveable city. For us, it’s only the first step towards being a design city.”

Yet as strong as the local design culture is, the scene could benefit from foreign influence. The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Steven Holl, is still the only significant building by a non-Finnish architect in the entire country. A proposal for a hotel at South Harbour by Herzog + De Meuron was cancelled by the city last year. So the recently announced new South Harbour “open international ideas competition” will be key weathervane in this respect (the presence of Holl on the jury is a promising sign.) 

Mayor Pajunen: “It is the most important future development, next to the old centre of Helsinki. We want to keep passenger ferry traffic at the heart of our city, unlike other cities worldwide who’ve moved the passengers out. It’s fundamental to us that we retain this old historical connection between the Baltic cities. But we need an ideas competition—beyond traditional architecture or urban planning—to explore how we keep the logistics of passenger movement yet free the streets of drunk people and cars in order to open up the South Harbour to different kinds of people and activities. We’re interested in new functions, not new plans.”

The harbours of the 'Daughter of the Baltic' have been a place of cultural exchange for a long time, in part due to the city's key strategic position - the Swedes and the Russians ruled here for several hundred years, taking turns to use it as naval base and trading post. 

Now the city finds itself located at a new hinge between Europe and the further eastern economies. The Finnair flight map is a crisp graphic revealing only two solitary red lines heading west of Europe—to New York and Toronto—juxtaposed with a flurry of routes headings east, fanning out across Asia on over 250 flights per month on the shortest, fastest route between Asia and Northern Europe.

But there should be more to Helsinki than hub, as useful as that is. The city had record visitor numbers last year, with over 1.3 million staying overnight. The challenge will be to ignore the potential folly of an 'aerotropolis' strategy—in which visitors would barely leave the airport hotel en route to Shanghai—and lure them instead into the city for a richer experience.

Of course a shorter journey to one of the BRICs can be found at Finland's eastern border. Traditionally, it's fair to say that Finland has had a complex, if not fractious, relationship with Russia, but the Finns are a pragmatic bunch, and the opportunities emerging here cannot be ignored either. The new high speed 'Allegro' train from Helsinki reaches St. Petersburg in three and a half hours.

Kalliala again:

“The idea of the hub won’t benefit the city much outside of Finnavia. Our home market is small, at 5m people, and with an architect’s services are targeted at an urbane clientele, it’s even smaller. So Russia is great opportunity - St. Petersburg in particular - if we can overcome the cultural barriers.”

Another weathervane indicating why we’ve picked out Helsinki for the top spot this year is the city’s burgeoning food scene. After years of basic fare, Helsinki is now home to an increasingly rich set of small bars, coffee shops, smart restaurants, and pop-up cafés that were simply not there a few years ago.

Monocle talked to the City of Helsinki’s project manager for its food culture strategy, Ville Relander. 

“It’s certainly a younger generation that is driving this food revolution,” he reinforces. But the City has a stake in it too. An organic grocery store owner most recently, Relander says that he never expected to be working for the City on something like a food culture strategy.

When asked why the City needs such a thing, Relander gives one clear example right away:

“We serve tens of thousands of meals every day, through our public kindergarten system, and we have an aspiration for at least half of this food to be organic by 2015. Not only would this be healthier but more sustainable, and we’d be able to set an example to the rest of Finland, affecting the market in a good way.”

But Relander says the City will be equally active in ensuring that the small-scale independent scene is also nurtured. The City has traditionally had stringent health and safety laws which some claim have hampered innovation. Relander says wryly, “Maybe we calculate a bit too much.” Consequently, the City is tacitly (of course) supporting initiatives such the recent Ravintolapäivä 'pop-up restaurant day' as well as what Relander calls “a prototype market” emerging from the regenerating Kalasatama in the summer of 2012, in conjunction with the World Design Capital, drawing inspiration from markets-as-destination like London’s Borough Market or Barcelona’s Mercat Santa Caterina.

So this balance of small-scale cultural entrepreneurship alongside large-scale systemic innovation indicates the palpable sense of possibility in contemporary Helsinki. The city is getting both the small things and the big things right. 

A wider challenge is for the city to address its previously homogenous cultural composition in equally creative fashion. The proportion of non-Finns in the city was only 6.7 per cent in 2009, though that increased to 7.5 per cent in 2010. While this doesn’t seem like much, a move from 6 to 7 per cent here is certainly more significant to the city’s culture and fabric than, say, Sydney shifting from 30 to 31 per cent.

But these issues of Finnishness, tradition and openness have been rattled recently by the success of the nationalistic ‘True Finns’ in the most recent elections, with around two decades of political consensus appearing to unravel fairly rapidly. Yet some feel “the return of politics” may not be a bad thing for a political scene that had perhaps become a little complacent and passion-free, and a weak national government may have to force further emphasis onto ‘the street’ as a source of innovation for the city. 

However, perhaps the primary contributing factor in our assessment that Helsinki is moving forward where other top ten perennials were standing still is in the redevelopment of its former seaports.

Moving the goods traffic to a vast new port at Vuosaari in East Helsinki has freed up, in stages, almost an additional third of Helsinki’s centre. Whilst several new districts have been, or will be, created by this smart strategic move, Jätkäsaari shows the most immediate promise, predicated on mixed-use neighbourhoods combining commercial, residential and retail spaces and activities, linked through sustainable infrastructure. Kalasatama, the former fish markets and where the city’s asymmetrical haircuts currently hang out, will be the next cab off the rank, with more to follow. 

Martti Kalliala sees huge opportunities in these developments, as both an architect and a resident

.“Helsinki urbanised relatively late compared to other European cities, and Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama indicate a form of still ongoing urbanisation. In terms of new built volume in the city, over the next 20-30 years, it’s quite exceptional. It’s a good place to be an architect!”

Mayor Pajunen agrees:

“It’s an extreme change in our urban structure. It is building towards the sea and the archipelago, but in a way that is sustainable, based around public transport and new building projects like the Low2No mixed-use block, which will feature timber construction methods. This is quite convenient for Finland.”

Pajunen suggests that the city had learnt from earlier successful developments, such as the rapidly growing district of Arabianranta. “In Arabianranta, I get applause even when talking about budget cuts,” he laughs.

”But our key lesson there was not only good architecture and urban planning, but that Arabianranta had a soul, and in that case the soul was design. With Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama, the soul is first of all to do with the meeting point between the city and the sea, and secondly, with sustainability. It will be a major investment in our fight against climate change.”

When asked about how Helsinki can afford these massive developments, when apparently other cities worldwide cannot, Pajunen counters.

“It is a great challenge to do this scale of public work, but the key point is that the areas are ex-harbour, and so the City owns the land. When you are the land owner, you can make an investment on the basis of the value of the property increasing.” 

So Helsinki is pulling levers that other cities have simply sold off. It’s the sense of ambition Helsinki is demonstrating with these urban renewal projects, in both scale and quality, that has pushed it up the list this year.

But again, we come back to the small details, the everyday secrets, that make the city such a pleasurable place for people.

For instance, beyond first glance again, it turns out the city is tailor-made for families. Neighbourhoods are dotted with playgrounds and parks of all shapes and sizes. Throughout the summer months, some of these parks serve up daily free lunches for local kids and carers. (There are separate parks for dogs which is something other cities could learn from.) Stockmann, the John Lewis/David Jones equivalent, provides free babysitting for parents to enjoy hassle-free department store shopping. If you’re pushing a pram, public transport is free. Apartments are designed with families in mind, as well as for single person households, and it’s a highly safe city.

The daycare is inexpensive and high quality, with children encouraged towards free play, day trips and maximum time spent outdoors, rather than being pushed onto the treadmill of Anglo-American overly-structured education models or situated within a litigation culture that prevents day trips altogether. Here, Finland's results probably speak for themselves - Finnish education usually ranks between one and three in the global PISA rankings.

Beyond the beautiful parks, none of this would be immediately obvious when disembarking at Vantaa or South Harbour, but instead these intangibles slowly unfold and reveal themselves as you make a life here. Monocle feels that it's time that Helsinki, the secret city, is secret no more.