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.

Italy should be the best country in the world, it really should. It has abundant riches in terms of culture, history, food, weather, urbanism, architecture, industry, craft, design, literature, football, cinema, language, and almost impossible beauty in its landscape, terrain and people.

But it isn’t the best country in the world. It’s far from it.

The Economist put it rather succinctly recently, but its issues run deeper than even their artful skewering suggests. Long-time readers will know I rate the Australian writer Peter Robb hugely, and he has written several books about Italy, casting a net far more broadly than the Berlusconi years. Its turbulent waters do indeed run deep. I admit I'm fascinated by Italy partly because of these torrid dramas that have been unfolding throughout this apogee in the reign of Berlusconi, the self-described most accused man in the universe, but Robb's work almost implies some complex symbiotic relationship between that beautiful everyday and its rotten structural elements.

John Lanchester, in his book I.O.U., recalled "something I once heard a political scientist say about Italy. That country, he said, makes you understand what an anarchy would in practice look like: it wouldn’t be a society with no laws, but one with thousands of laws to which nobody pays any attention."

And yet having worked a little in Italy over the last couple of years—with Experientia in Turin and Domus in Milan—I see another side of Italy, the side that almost lives up to the promise. The easy, everyday pleasures of working in, playing in, and simply being in, Italy make it all too easy to forget the greater dramas being played out there. (Yes, this is across a series of short visits rather than any attempt to set up a life there.) At times it does feel like the best country in the world.

It's all too easy to write about those more obvious pleasures. Or at least they're well understood by anyone who's spent time there. But another kind of episode stays with me, for some reason. it is perhaps an unlikely highlight, but that's why I'm writing about it.

During a visit to Experientia for a workshop on Low2No, Experientia's Mark Vanderbeeken took my colleague Léan and I for a walk through the centre of Turin to the Partito Democratico festival, aka Festa!, that was taking place in the city that week.

In a total reversal of the UK or US political convention model, Festa had taken over the city properly, and was essentially composed of everyday people first and foremost, with the professional machinations of the party as a backdrop at best. It was lively, friendly, highly social and totally unpredictable. It was part-circus, part-arcade, part-promenade, part-feast, part-rally, and part-party.

Festa was centred on a large park, which carried most of the stalls and tents, but blurred into the city's primary piazzas. Here, the political debate was at the core of this temporary transient city within a city, carried across several impressively large and well-equipped stages, with live broadcast of numerous debates. Further debates were distributed across the camp of tents and stalls in the park.

Yet the bulk of the event is the city coming together, a huge diversity of activities and people gathered around a more everyday sense of politcs and political engagement than I'd seen for a while. For sure, some of the participants—the circus?—may have had little engagement with the Partito Democratico, and were really there because, well, people were there (though it was nice to see a circus strongman, I must admit. It had been a while.)

But—and here I admit I may be reading into it what I wanted to see—it seemed that most of the event, most of the people, were there through a sense of political engagement. This was the difference; it felt like, say, Adelaide's Garden of Unearthly Delights, to pick any old urban festival at random, and yet it was political in origin, in nature, in realisation.

It seems worthy of remark as falling political enagement across Europe is, of course, creating dangerous vacuums. In the UK (and Australia for that matter) this lack of engagement may even be related—inversely proportional, even—to the increased professionalisation and 'control' of similar political gatherings. Here, the political engagement felt natural, and a core component, alongside many others, of a full life well-lived.

Leaving aside the particular political persuasions involved, Festa felt democratic in a sense now alien to the over-professionalised machine codes of Anglo political gatherings. The security was virtually non-existant, or at least virtually invisible, and the overall spatial organisation of Festa so porous such that the entire thing felt open, at least in terms of access. The city blurred with Festa, and vice versa. The distinct lack of control was actually engaging and exciting, with the sheer ordinariness of some of the participants and their contributions a joy to see—a vacuum cleaner salesman posed with his product; a double-glazing firm sets up next to a sweet stall next to a bookshop-on-trestle-tables; a local radio station waves and calls out to Mark as he walks past. 

The party stickers or posters were there or thereabouts, in the background, but really, the party was no more than a platform for social interaction. This lack of professionalism, this everyday commerce, this untrammelled, raw participation, would simply not be allowed at a British political gathering. It would all be too 'off brand'.

Of course, this being Italy, if politics was central, food was too.

The food stalls had the condition of impromptu market squares, as if any significant critical mass of Italians will generate a piazza-like condition wherever they gather (like Mike Davis's Magical Urbanism thesis, but instantaneously, like Instant Citta). Families sprawled over multiple generations and multiple tables.

We end up sitting next to two jovial men who raise a plastic glass to us, and with whom we embark upon faltering but good-natured conversation. The food is great, in an utterly paysan sense. Hunks of meat, potatoes, simple salad. Served on paper plates, and attacked with plastic cutlery, it still tasted good, and only cost a few euros.

Since moving back to Europe, I've been more aware of the rituals still present in everyday life here. Perhaps by virtue of the brevity of summer here in Finland, it's peppered with ritual, squeezing out as much as possible, from Juhannus to crayfish parties. It's quite enchanting, particularly having grown up in UK culture, and then with recent experience of Australia, where both societies (at least the more Anglo elements) are somewhat bereft of this kind of ritual.

I'm aware, as an outsider, that I'm romanticising what I saw; that an Italian, or an Italian political veteran, would've seen it all before, have pointed out the disproportionate number of elderly participants, or the diminishing impact that the event might be having on the political agenda, or the lack of any coherent 'political agenda' at all in contemporary Italian life. Or indeed that aforementioned sense of a country of immense potential being frittered away.

I'm sure this is the case. Yet I remain intrigued and heartened by the participation on display, by the vigour and passion of the political debates, by bounteous public feasts, and by a city coming together. As with my work experiences, this was a different Italy to that we see in the news, and all the better for it.

All photos from Partito Democratico Festa [Flickr]

In short: Our team, the Strategic Design Unit at Sitra, has just published a new book, In Studio: Recipes for Strategic Design, written by my three colleagues. More here, context below. But now ...

“There arrived an invitation to the North Pole – at least, that was how he described it to himself and everyone else. In fact, the destination was well below the eightieth parallel, and he would be staying on a ‘well-appointed, toastily-heated vessel of richly-carpeted oak-panelled corridors with tasselled wall lamps’, so a brochure promised, on a ship that would be placidly frozen into a semi-remote fjord, a long snowmobile ride north of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. The three hardships would be the size of his cabin, limited email opportunities, and a wine list confined to a North African vin de pays. The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change, and conveniently, just ten miles away, was a dramatically retreating glacier whose sheer blue cliffs regularly calved mansion-sized blocks of ice onto the shore of the fjord. An Italian chef of ‘international renown’ would be in attendance, and predatory polar bears would be shot if necessary by a guide with a high-calibre rifle.”—Solar, Ian McEwan (2010)

Last year, I too was invited to a place near(ish) the North Pole, to a gathering comprising of illustrious people plucked from all over the world, in which we were given a week to devise a pathway towards carbon neutrality for the host country. Yet the event I participated in could not have been more different to that being offered to Ian McEwan’s odious anti-hero Michael Beard.

Instead, the setting was Helsinki, and the week-long event hovered around the idea of strategic design and its ability to unlock the particularly interlocking problems around climate change and carbon, with Finland as the pivot. The patron in my case was Sitra, the Finnish Innovation fund, and in particular its Strategic Design Unit, which I would later join. The food was good, since you ask, but we saw neither Italian chefs nor polar bears.

And the week, under the Helsinki Design Lab programme, was fascinating, instructive and, it would later become clear, a transformative experience personally. More importantly, it was genuinely productive. Sitra’s unique position—self-funded and independent, though under the auspices of parliament, and so both arm’s length from government and embedded at the same time—means that initiatives it creates can actually begin to get traction right away. This is in stark contrast to most workshop-led consultancy, which often pitches ideas in from outside, despite the presence of 'inside' in the workshop. These subsequently bounce off the host organisation’s shields of indifference or institutional inertia as, beyond a certain scale, an organisation’s first instinct is often to protect itself against transformative ideas. (fig.1 below)

In particular, much strategic work for government clients in particular suffers from a major flaw—the lack of a ‘hinge’ connecting the work to a clear pathway to projects, or further work. If the workshop is free, as it often is in new, challenging, transformational areas where there is no clear understanding of value from previous efforts, it's particularly difficult, Here, the client is barely a client at all in one of the moremeaningful senses i.e. they haven’t paid for it, they don’t have ‘skin in the game’.

Equally, studios can usefully bring together multiple stakeholders. Yet with complex interdependent problems requiring holistic thinking and action—e.g. climate change, health, urbanisation, education—this can lead to no one body taking responsibility, and so potential solutions fall through the cracks between organisations or within one organisation's architecture (fig.2 below) i.e. education is no longer the sole responsibility of the Department of Educaiton; it's more complex, hybrid, layered, networked than that (add your descriptor of choice).

Finally, workshops or studios lend themselves to a particular kind of focus, based on conversation and collaboration—yet they rarely provide the depth of analysis to tightly define an issue such that it can be developed into action. This often requires subsequent work, by which time the potential client has left the building and achieved escape velocity, easily side-stepping momentum generated in the workshop. The workshop model, which is often the foot-in-the-door for consultancies in this field, is intrinsically flawed.

The Helsinki Design Lab studio model is designed to side-step or otherwise deal with many of these problems. This is partly due to the nature and position of Sitra itself, particularly if strategic connections can be generated across relevant government bodies. Sitra has, to some extent, the capacity to can reach into and manipulate the 'dark matter' of organisation, governance, culture, industry (fig.3). [PS. "Dark matter" is a phrase I've been using in recent presentations and conversations (drawn from Wouter Vanstiphout in a great interview with Rory Hyde) and one I'll return to. It's not as bad as it sounds, just like real dark matter. Though it can be.]

This embedded nature of strategic design is one simple way of differentiating it from the consultant’s model of design thinking, and a key facet. (I should really write up my thoughts on the value of organisations having internal design departments, rather than outsourcing design to consultancies and agencies in the first place, with reference to great internal teams like the mid-century London County Council architecture department, for instance, never mind most industrial design efforts, or some of the great teams I was lucky enough to work with and lead at the BBC.)

With Helsinki Design Lab, the week’s work concluded with a presentation to representatives from the Finnish parliament, Aalto University, Sitra and the European Parliament, who variously stated interest in several of the initiatives right away, with one of the proposals in particular acted upon very quickly. 

Even with a week, which is longer than most workshops could take, it is of course difficult to create coherent strategies with the depth most public sector clients feel they need. However, according to Joi Ito, in a fine presentation at Nokia yesterday, contemporary venture capital thinking is beginning to realise that it's now costing more to assess the risk involved in an investment than the cost of the risk itself. So you might as well just do it, particularly if you can look to reduce the cost of failure while deriving valuable learning from it.

Government projects are different to start-ups—'ROI' is far more complex and risk more meaningful—but part of the rationale with the studio is to change the tenor of the conversation around risk, and so action. This might include suggesting a more iterative model, akin to a portfolio of investments in rapid strategic prorotypes, each based on clear strategic orientation as opposed to a fixed strategy. The studio model tends to generate several compelling strategic orientations, recognising that orientation has to change in response to learning from execution, but that a clear strategic orientation at any one time is necessary either way. This is different from having 'a strategy', which can sometime be an inhibitor i.e. if you want to get to the North Pole, you don't need to know true north to get going; you just need to head in a northerly direction and take it from there.

The Helsinki Design Lab approach, which we're developing rapidly now, is an attempt to flesh out many strands of strategic design that we're pursuing. This first aspect, the studio, is about sketching vision. The idea of studio itself is at least three-fold, simultaneously conjuring up the idea of a space, a team or organisation, and an act of being 'in studio'.

I won't go into the details of the studio week I was part of, as a design-led culture tends to generate such extraordinary attention to detail it could, well, fill a book. Plus, there's a dossier for the outcomes. But some quick hits: at last year's Sustainabilty studio, our team was superb, and ably led by Alejandro Aravena of Elemental in Chile. The invited speakers were almost all extremely interesting and useful—a very high hit-rate. The field trips likewise. While the visit to an extraordinary kindergarten-in-the-woods was perhaps the most influential, almost in a visceral sense, the trip to the City Planning office was perhaps the most revealing.

Interestingly, the dinners really were a core feature of the structure, in terms of processing the day’s inputs as well as building relationships and informal reflection (and the experience of Muru cooking for a dinner/discussion at Alvar Aalto's house will probably stay with me forever.)

I could say much, much more about the composition of the week's events, and its follow-up at HDL Global later that year, but fortunately, I don't have to, as my now-colleagues Bryan Boyer, Justin W. Cook and Marco Steinberg wrote it all up in a new book, In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change, which we've just self-published. You can find out more about it here.

Bryan has a good summary of the book:

"In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change is a book about crafting vision. It's about how to take something big, messy, and complex and very rapidly begin developing a way to respond to the problem. It gives an introduction to the what and why of strategic design, documents the studios that we hosted last year, and then offers a practical "how-to" manual for hosting your own studio."

I didn't have anything to do with the writing—I wrote a very tiny bit, but 99% of it was already done by the time I joined, thankfully. But I've read every word, pored over every diagram, and discussed most of its content for over a year now, and I can attest to its quality with a little objectivity at least.

I think, I hope, that it suggests one possible meaningful way forward for design itself, as well as suggesting new cultures for the public sector, for thinking about complex, interdependent problems, and for rapidly creating practical yet compelling visions built on a clear understanding of 'the architecture of the problem', as we call it. 

Huge credit must go to the estimable Bryan Boyer, who led the effort, contributing much of the writing and handling all the production. It was a pleasure to see that quality of thinking and execution at close quarters. Graphic design is by the excellent firm Two Points in Barcelona, who have helped create a genuinely valuable object to sit alongside the download. We're using the physical book as a token to generate interactions—you have to come and meet us to get one, either through talking to us when one of us is in your city, or coming to one of our events, or visiting us here in Helsinki. (This is another strategic design tactic we're writing up now, and which I spoke about a little at my recent talk at CIID for Copenhagen Design Week i.e. the alibi, or Trojan Horse, where the book is a mere detail, in a way, working as a physical hook that can generate something else. Low2No is another example)

The book includes the studio briefings, which were coordinated and written by Bryan, Justin and others, and there were numerous other contributions from inside and outside Sitra, in terms of getting it over the line. Geoff Mulgan of NESTA wrote the foreword, and Sitra's president Mikko Kosonen wrote the afterword.

I should add, the details in terms of designing the spaces of interaction, presentation, reflection, idea generation were absolutely crucial, and are unpacked in detail here. Likewise the rhythm of the week, the variation in events, modes and levels of intensity. Even the catering. Very very few workshops or consultants think carefully about these details, and yet we would argue that they are profoundly affective.

More fundamentally though, we intend that this is the first in a series of projects which describe how design can be used beyond these details of production of space, realisation of product or service. Often, of course, design is used in this traditional if limited role of process improvement and problem solving—the realisation of 'the thing'—without addressing the core issue, the core strategy, the vision and organisations behind 'the thing' in the first place. We think design has a role to play before we even know what the questions are, never mind the solutions. That's what this book begins to address. Subsequent projects—some products/services/things, some events, some discussion—will develop this idea.

Bryan's written a little about the production, and about the work he and I did on creating the 'superstructure' around the book, in terms of promotion, distribution, events, interactions and so on. Books are not easy, and ironically this is made harder by self-publishing, self-distributing, and not charging for it. We try to make as much of our work as legible as possible—as usefully seamful as possible, to remember an old phrase. This is part of the work itself, rather than a separate activity.

It was also good to make a (very) short film again, and we're looking forward to doing more of that to document the next projects, starting very soon.

So the book contains all of the above and more, unpacking in detail the design of the studio approach, detailing how we think about the relationship between idea generation and spatial qualities, the composition of teams, the importance of synthesis over analysis, how to balance preparatory briefings with what I call the 'Le Mans start', what those preparatory briefings look like, why you should be able to find five days to ‘solve’ climate change or healthcare, and why dinner is so important.

It's a form of manual as much as anything, and we produce these things in part to understand what we're doing, but we hope you find it useful too. And please do tell us what you think—details of how to do that are on the book's page at the HDL site, and if you're lucky enough to obtain a physical copy, you'll find a Wonka-esque golden bookmark inside also asking for feedback. The PDF version's cover page has a similar function. We thought that producing these 'hooks for comments' would serve as a kind of lo-fi instrumentation for the book, prompting more feedback than one would usually get. Please prove us right!

About a year ago, I helped design and run a workshop for the City of Melbourne, as part of Arup’s agreement to run a series of workshops for the C40 ‘climate leadership group’ of cities (the C40 is in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, and is a consortium of what could be described as the world’s leading cities.) The workshop was free for each city, and they get to choose the topic.

To my delight, Melbourne chose information visualisation, real-time data and social media, and their role in enabling behaviour change around energy use, water use and so on. We ended up calling all this ‘Melbourne Smart City’. (Despite some issues with the ‘smart’ word, it can at least began to illustrate how pervasive the approach could be to the client, when applied broadly across the way they see the city. And it has some meaning in their networks already e.g.)

I won’t go into the detail of the two-day workshop itself. Suffice to say, it took a lot of effort, it was good—well-attended and with great contributions from participants—and has helped change aspects of the way the city is being run, subsequently stimulating associated strategies and policies (including the forthcoming transport strategies, as well as their ICT-led work), to prototypes and pilot programmes (including projects around street trees and urban noise), to even altering the vocabulary used across the organisation (altered ‘corporate’ vocabulary is always a useful bell-weather, often indicating the genuine absorption of new ideas into an organisation.)

Likely to be of more interest is the final report that I produced for the City, and which emerged from the Melbourne Smart City workshop. I wrote this, with contributions from my colleagues Léan Doody, Volker Buscher and Mark Watts at Arup London, and Andrew Wisdom at Arup Melbourne. This in turn led to me re-writing it more broadly, to become Arup’s Smart Cities strategy in general. (Michelle Tabet at Arup Sydney also helped with this aspect.) Matt Willcox and Alex Fearnside at the City of Melbourne were also instrumental in shaping the report and preceding workshop. Additionally, I’ll go into the visualisation sketches that my team produced (Jason McDermott, Pei-Hong Jessie Hsu and I, at Arup Sydney.) Here's the report, as PDF (I was in the middle of a H+FJ Vitesse phase, as you’ll see).

It's perhaps timely to publish this here at the moment, even though it's almost 18 months old in a fast moving sector, as New York City's Roadmap for the Digital City was published recently, with typical (and appropriate) chutzpah. While New York's is a good piece of work, and indicates the value of a city getting behind digital 'from the inside', it focuses mainly on the basic services of web, mobile, public wi-fi and so on. No criticism, as those are exactly the right things to focus on (and New York probably has a head start here with their Chief Digital Officer in place, valued, and probably doing all the hard work managing upwards and sideways within the organisation. In fact, in the year since our workshop, several US cities have moved through over this early terrain quite rapidly, not least with Boston's bravely-named and interesting Office of New Urban Mechanics.)

But the Melbourne work we did assumed that web, mobile and wi-fi are the easier things to get right—or at least that they ought to be—and focused more on the ways in which digital might manifest itself physically, in terms of informatics, urban spaces and architecture, as well as touching on the organisation of the city itself. This work should lead ultimately to a complete reconfiguration of what urban governance is, and although we couldn't go there with this, that was something we wanted to move the conversation gently towards. 

This is partly due to the paradox at the heart of the web - that internet-based 'digital-only' products are services are both immensely transformative yet easy to ignore, uninstall and move on from. Whereas internet-infused physical products and services may be intrinsically more valuable, due not least to the extra investment and invention required when working with atoms as well as bits. And civic services have an even greater value proposition—to public and civic life, and an overarching long-term responsibility in terms of citizens themselves. There should be more to Gov 2.0 than Web 2.0. Without understanding that, web and mobile services simply skate over the veneer of big, ugly problems like the city, without genuinely engaging.

Or, as my colleague Bryan Boyer and I have taken to saying, 'matter matters'. 

The report outlines a smart city strategy for a city like Melbourne, beginning to make the case for its relevance, value and likely effects. It also gave the City a conceptual framework for understanding these various activities, from the more tangible informatics-led ‘feedback loops’ on the street (which are now also apparently all the rage), through to the strategic and organisational aspects of what Arup calls an ‘urban information architecture’. (This latter part is really service-oriented architecture-based ICT consultancy, led by our London team. This is blended with elements suggesting what some would call ‘change management’ consultancy (though I wouldn’t) which attempts to ensure the organisational aspects are recognised as being at least, if not more, important than any particular technology. You can't design a transformative service without redesigning the organisation.)

You’ll see some core concepts, like the “CIO+” position, who uses ICT to address strategic goals within the city, as well as indications of how such technologies and their associated cultures may well change most aspects of how we live, work and play in contemporary cities. In particular, the report is oriented towards enabling low carbon urban activity, as both climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. It suggests changes in architecture and infrastructure, operations and maintenance, and the core interfaces with citizens. This takes it well beyond (pointless) smart meters and into the infrastructure of everyday life.

It’s peppered with case studies throughout, in order to give the intended recipients (City of Melbourne; policymakers and officers at C40 cities) the sense that none of this is science-fiction—even though, in reality, there are still very few working examples of these ideas deployed strategically.

Those who don’t deal with city councils regularly may not realise how foreign some of these concepts can be. Those who have never tried to genuinely pitch urban informatics at city CEO level may not realise how difficult that foreign and untried aspect makes it for cities to commission such work. Much of what you see described as ‘urban informatics’, ubiquitous computing etc on the internet—which is really student work or other academic work, or client-less proposals by design shops—would not make it past a real city’s natural defences against such things. Often quite correctly.

Hence the time taken to outline the strategic imperative for cities (and this report is really only the tip of the iceberg in this respect). Note also the strategic roadmap, which pins smart city work over a rough timeline and within the context of existing city strategies (which is absolutely crucial, and we didn’t get it quite right here, I must say). However, the report falls short of getting into the genuine value cases of investment and return, which is a serious shortcoming that hindered its progress - albeit unavoidable in this particular job.

Anyone who’s seen me speak in the last 18 months or so will recognise phrases like “IT is too important for the IT department”, which is at least explained here, alongside numerous other points around the importance of soft infrastructure, working with information at the civic scale and not just the individual, “data as the connective tissue in urban systems”, and so on. There are also many open questions, including some suggesting that the very form of urban governance itself will need changing, a thought continued into my current work.

Having pursued this work for three or four years now it’s impossible to underestimate how difficult it is to get smart city strategies through. As with the built environment business, there’s little innate incentive for innovation within government—in fact, quite the opposite. 

Genuinely Powerful Companies like IBM, Cisco, Siemens, General Electric, Accenture et al are in the ear of city governments virtually every day, yet few have landed any major commissions, despite the vast amounts they’ve spent (now leading to IBM offering ‘city in a box’ offers; actually a smart move, but also a little telling.) Startups like Living PlanIT have made ground on highly specific projects, yet it’s not clear how they’ll scale to others, or how the philosophy underpinning their ‘operating system’ will work in the muddied waters of existing government (and other) data ecosystems, with their various legacy environments to deal with (I think a 'small pieces, loosely joined' philosophy is more realistic; though again, often equally difficult for cities to sign up to.)

Getting design or strategy ideas across in this context is about understanding short-term political priorities and realigning political will, as well as the ‘big pictures’ outlined here. So please bear in mind the report is only one part of an approach to a city as complex and multi-facted as Melbourne. And note that this implies that—surprise, surprise—it’s never a technology problem. It’s cultural and political, first and foremost, and then design-led (though that approach also needs justifying heavily in an environment not used to it.)

And this is hugely challenging for clients (in this case, city governments.) When I noted earlier it could lead to a complete rethinking of what urban governance is, that's the last thing they want to hear. What seems an appealing train of thought to the external designer is probably heading to completely the wrong station, as far as the client is concerned. Their life is going to get more fluid, more complex, more disruptive, even more responsive? No thanks. Short-term political concerns are far more powerful drivers in the first instance, as are realistic models given the higher investment (in every sense) required 'when matter matters', and this is something many working in and around urban informatics are yet to understand. 

To put it another way altogether—and perhaps in somewhat glib fashion—it's easier to crowdsource a revolution than a light-rail system. (See related discussion here.) This is because projects like infrastructure are not simply about short-term political capital gain, but also long-term responsibility (and financing models) including the ability to make long-term investments. This requires a far more refined understanding of politics, citizenship and public life than is usually seen in either smart city or 'internet of things' rhetoric. Not understanding this, and seeing the influence of social media in the recent 'Arab Spring' revolutions, have led some commentators to overestimate the usefulness of social media in collaborative decision-making about the city.

(Equally, few of the recent and genuine revolutions have not really been crowdsourced as such—the rhetoric ignores the strong political drivers that actually motivate change and over-focuses on the technology platform, as well ignoring as the more important urban infrastructure of ancient market squares and walkable streets for that matter—but using social media to basically arrange meetings (albeit with an agenda, and covertly) is what it's built for. It should really be no surprise that such a tool can be used in that way - but it's an ask to redeploy social media and its biases for these very different uses, however. Redeploying it will be a three-pipe problem, not a natural stretch.)

This, from the person that wrote about emergent urbanism and bottom-up planning. And I believe in that idea too—the recent initiative to use Kickstarter to create funding for a feasibility studies into the materials for a public swimming pool in the Hudson River is particularly interesting. I can't wait to see how that turns out, and wish it luck.

But the problems with this approach are evident in the other Kickstarter-project-du-jour, the Robocop Memorial for Detroit (an excellent account is at Domus.) Here we see an attempt to take a well-meaning, entertaining and intriguing idea and spin it into physical space irrespective of whether 'Detroit' wants it or not. Read Nate Berg's article and you find that some people in London, for example, essentially think it's funny that a Robocop Memorial might end up in Detroit.

I'm in Helsinki, and wouldn't presume to know what Detroit needs (though I have an idea that it might be more than the infrastructure of cultural tourism.)

The platform, brilliant as it is, can also suggest an unfortunately radical separation of funding and responsibility—if we chuck enough money at it, could we really build a Robocop Memorial in Detroit? (What else could that money have been used for? The social, legal, ethical, cultural and political foundations of democracy, which we might assume, broadly speaking, would apply to Detroit and its physical space, infrastructure and economic development, are more complex than a 'Donate' button on a website, and quite rightly.)

Essentially, it's an example of taking a bias, as Rushkoff might call it, of internet culture and deploying it into physical and civic space without thinking through the implications, or tougher still, standing by them. (Note also that the Kickstarter +Pool project is not to build a pool, but to develop a filtration product that might enable a pool to be built, which is not how it's being reported elsewhere. You couldn't get away with that level of confusion with public procurement.)

(NB. There is a further, essentially liberatarian, bias here, which almost instinctively undermines the role and status of government, which I think is particularly damaging.)

This dislocation between action and responsibility, easily enabled in this case by micro-financing and social media tropes, may be fine if the only collateral involved is a movie, a website, a book or comic, as with most Kickstarter projects. But as it begins to move into civic space, something else needs to kick in, to connect action to responsibility, connect democracy and public interest to funding sources.

These small vignettes suggest the deep currents moving through some cultures, but also the danger of not understanding that, well, matter matters, or that government itself may need to re-assert itself post-internet-of-things, rather than be disintermediated. A richer form of governance could be part-enabled by a collaborative, networked platform, but something attuned to shared physical space and shared responsibility—more Brickstarter than Kickstarter—but there's more to it than software.

I'm not saying we got there with this workshop. But we used informatics as an 'alibi' in this workshop, in order to move towards that conversation, rather than making informatics products and services the ultimate goal of the work. That seemed to be the right thing to do, in terms of avoiding a technology-led discussion.

Having said that, you have to convey the ideas somehow, in order for the alibi to work. And so you find yourself in the slightly awkward situation of persuading people that this is important, whilst not having the answers to difficult questions like "How much will this all cost, exactly?" and "What do I get in return, exactly?" (never mind the usual: "And where has this been done before?")

The great Brisbane-based architect Timothy Hill said, “One third of my job is persuasion.” I feel the same. It’s a truth of being a designer that is rarely taught at school, but unless you’re the kind of designer that sits and waits for the brief to come to you, and then unblinkingly delivers to that brief (and really, what is the point of that?) then you’re involved in persuasion for a huge amount of your time, ideally about a better brief, to begin with, than a better solution, but persuasion nonetheless.

This particularly applies in areas on the edge of new disciplines, new ways of living and working, new forms of organising society and culture. Which all of this is.

But in the spirit of the sketchbook, it’s worth dwelling on some minor aspects of ‘practice’ as more traditionally understood. In particular, the ‘sketch visualisations’ that we (Jason McDermott, Jessie Hsu and I) produced for the workshop. These are a very rudimentary form of ‘design fiction’ perhaps, in that they depict products and services that don’t exist yet—but could—which enabled us to both explain and explore urban informatics with the City. They were used in the context of workshop exercises, as pivots for conversations, with participants asked to critique them, and build upon them. Ideally, they would’ve been Timo-esque videos, perhaps, rather than static images, but that was beyond the budget we had (and our skillset, if I’m honest.)

Having said that, they worked well as A3 boards on foamcore, offering a kind of easy tactility and malleability; people were even able to scribble additions and comments on them, hold them up in discussion, spread them out over the table etc. They were open in that sense, and were another example of the value of exploratory sketching in collaboration.

The use of photomontages also does something very basic—they help situate the ideas in the city of Melbourne by using the actual city as backdrop. I’d done similar photomontages for the City of Sydney a year before, working with Brigitte Buchholz at Arup Sydney, which still crop up in the papers when the City discusses its Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, for better or worse. Some images develop a life of their own:

Jason and Jessie did a lot of the work on many of the following Melbourne-based mock-ups, with me design directing, though I had a direct hand in a few too.

It should be noted that we were quite unusually screen-focused in our work here. I’m usually in favour of avoiding urban screens wherever possible—research indicates they are largely ignored by citizens, and you can see why—and if one is using displays at all, to work within the context of architecture, as per our work with Low2No, such that it shares the architectural vocabulary of a building or space, and is genuinely integrated. Timothy Hill (again) would always test my ideas for the State Library of Queensland by getting me to think more in terms of sculpture, or articulated physical objects, than screens. And I’m entranced by the ideas of Mayo Nissen and BERG in terms of retrofitting old infrastructure (paper) with new data.

Similarly, my team and I were extremely concerned with getting data visible, with systems showing their seams in useful fashion (and building on some old thinking here), and with getting data away from personal, individualising mobile screens and into civic space (whilst respecting privacy, security and right to anonymity, it goes without saying.) So this meant more of an engagement with physical and architectural representations of data than simple web-based views rendered for screen.

However, with the workshop in mind, one implication we wanted to make clear was that the following could indeed be retrofitted to existing spaces and buildings. In reality, that is a tough proposition; but this was for a workshop exercise helping the City critique the concept, positively and negatively.

So many of these are screen- or display-based, despite our better instincts, though there are a few exceptions like Jessie’s water sculpture, which borrows a little from Ratti et al’s Water Pavilion, yet uses projected light to make visible water quality.

Similarly Jason’s ‘net’ installation idea is hung above Federation Square—I’d suggested building on existing spaces for public art, and working within the near-iconic ‘Melbourne laneway’ form, and we’d sketched out the idea of addressable lights embedded into cables forming nets on an earlier project proposal in San Francisco.

We’d done lots of work around mobility-related interfaces for public transport environments—principally for the Sydney Metro project in 2009-10, which I’ll post separately—and here we saw examples to deploy real-time transit network patterns into a form of loose-fit signage, projected throughout the city, as well as intensifying at bus/tram-stops, building on the existing displays to offer bolder visual language, as well as switching actual language for tourists or ESL residents. We also couldn’t see why trams themselves shouldn’t get a piece of the action. These various mobility-based visualisations, including a mobile delivery system on augmented bikes, are by me.

Not all of visualisations are 'recommended' ideas e.g. the so-called ‘Rectangular Stadium’ visualisation by Jessie is actually intended to start a debate about how to handle data from a behavioural psychology point-of-view. If a stadium were to display the number of people biking in Melbourne, it’s entirely likely to have an adverse effect on non-cyclists propensity to start cycling. Over the last couple of years, through working with behavioural psychologists like Naked Communications, I’ve learnt of the power of social proof, but also would guess its converse is true. Indicating that, say, only around 2% of journeys-to-work are on bike would actually dissuade people from cycling. This visualisation was intended to start that conversation—about how to actually enact behavioural change with data visualisation—rather than propose it be built. (Note, using the stadium for visualisations might be a good idea, however; the skin of the Rectangular Stadium could be embedded with LEDs at a finer grain than they are currently.)

Similarly, the screens that Jessie designed to hang outside apartment blocks or municipal buildings are a little rudimentary on purpose, produced quickly to generate discussion as to the value of conveying a block's overall performance—in terms of behaviour change amongst residents or observers.

The 'urban dashboard' indicates a tacit attempt to appeal to the client too, by giving them a sense of  what kind of data such an approach might generate (here, modelled for a sustainability officer) as well as how it might integrate with existing office systems like Outlook and existing data-sets and applications within the organisation. Elements of this to be projected in elevators and lobbies, squirted to mobile apps etc. Fast-moving data (from sensors, web etc) is at the top, slow-moving data (from census etc.) is towards the bottom. (I rapidly mocked-up the dashboard i about an hour of Omnigraffle and then pasted-and-transformed into Photoshop, and it shows somewhat. It draws from City of Melbourne's current identity.) The 'Activity Monitor' is by Jason, and indicates potential output from our mobile phone monitoring prototype (a real project). 

Putting the screenshots into the context of monitors in a generic office setting (actually from colleagues’ desks at Arup Sydney.) was another tactic to make it everyday and now, rather than The Future.

The physical installation is perhaps most extreme in the moving bicycle sculpture across the roof of this made-up bike garage. Another one of mine, this is actually built on an image of a vacant lot next to Federation Square—please excuse my formulaic ‘architecture’, or faceted, Fed Square-style Melbourne ‘talkitecture’, but that was hardly the point of this sketch. The ‘building’ was constructed from some nicked bits of facade from Federation Square proper and heavily processed in Photoshop, after a couple of false starts in Sketchup. Here's the 'building' before and after. Don’t give up the day job etc.

Here, the position of the giant bikes relates to how full the bike garage below is—I like the idea of them as neon and metal tubular elements (like many signs in Melbourne from the 30s to 60s) slowly cranked across the roof. Slightly awkward, distinctly mechanical; analogue representation of digital approximations of analogue activity. They’d look great at night, which is the idea to be discussed here—to assess the possibility of data viz as urban spectacle, as well as ‘useful’ at-a-glance from-a-distance interface. How would the city handle this kind of 'architecture'? Cyclists who can't see the landmark viz are aided by a distributed set of small signs on cycle routes and intersections, telling them which garages currently have most spaces.

The night shot (above) is made from exactly the same photo, and heavy use of Levels and Burn tools in Photoshop, with a slice of blurred car-taillight-smear as an accent (taken from a photo elsewhere in Melbourne, adjacent to this one), and with a few stars and street lights added by hand.

Finally, in terms of further ‘design fiction’ (sort of), the fake newspaper is something I’ve done on most projects over the last few years (actually continuing an idea we developed at the BBC in 2005, where I made a fake copy of The Economist for the BBC’s strategy to 2015.) Here, the poorly disguised copy of local paper The Age—the Melbourne Daily Reporter no less—puts the smart cities rhetoric into something plausibly everyday, helping the City understand how it might be communicated, as well as its value. It's a useful test to consider whether your design, service or strategy, could be plausibly conveyed in a newspaper article. It's also a good test for the designer to be able to convey their ideas through this kind of writing.

(I always sneak a few essentially unnecessary details into these things—here, a feed or gauge of various urban indices, almost a general environmental data feed, including ‘Economy: Upbeat’ etc. and a made-up social media index called ‘Natter’. The paper is also priced in RMB as well as Australian dollars, for good measure. I sometimes think these details are for my own amusement, but they tend to catch the interest of participants too, who also can't resist debating whether newspapers will exist in this form in a few years—this is all good engagement for a workshop.)

A few months ago I wrote a piece on retail for Architectural Review Australia, now published in the June 2011 issue as 'Local Rules: The Death (and Rebirth) of Retail'.

As is becoming common practice here, I'm posting the longer 'director's cut' version below. Thanks to Maitú Ward for commissioning the piece in the first place. It also gave me a chance to get my story straight about all this before I appeared on ABC Radio National's By Design show, talking about online retail in the context of what they called 'self-direction' e.g. airports where you check in by yourself.

If you're in Australia or thereabouts, do check out the physical version of the June 2011 Architectural Review Australia—it's always a good read, and this issue features a slew of different tangential perspectives on 'shopping', including writing from old colleagues, friends, cohorts and correspondents David Neustein, Claudia Perrin, Russell Fortmeyer, Lee Stickells, Maitú Ward and others.

The piece below is not actually 'just about retail', as it touches on distribution patterns, fabrication, local economies and localism, and of course cities—but this is partly as retail is so core to what cities are about. I don't mean that as any kind of paean to consumerism at all; far from it. More a recognition that cities are about exchange, either cultural or commercial (or both), and that the marketplace, and its descendants, has always been a core component as a result.

The article was written with Australia as the focal point, as you'd expect, and many of the specific examples are drawn from that culture, but its general arguments probably apply more widely, and draw from experience elsewhere too.

However, the Australian market is characterised by a few key players who dominate the scene, which makes for a particularly tasty comparison with both independent retailers and online shopping. They include 'self-made men retail characters-types' like Gerry Harvey and Frank Lowy, responsible for dominant consumer electronics stores and malls respectively; and the behemoths of Wesfarmers and Woolworths—aka Coles and Woolies—who exert extraordinary control over the everyday lives of Australians. Watch this short ABC-produced infodesign-heavy movie to see how they have far more influence than, say, Walmart does in the USA. Harvey in particular led an ill-advised campaign essentially against online retail itself—I know—last year, before doing a U-turn.

(I'm also posting this in light of the news that the brilliant bookshopkeeper James Daunt has been appointed to take over Waterstones. Also a conversation earlier today, spiralling out of the fact that we have some Ikea furniture (a bed) in a shipping container somewhere, travelling from Australia to Finland, and the thought occurs that Ikea could replace that physical shipping by simply sending a copy of the bed from the Espoo store, and picking up the old one in Sydney. A form of fabrication possible with their already distributed network of components. And also posting as a marker of enjoying the ongoing discovery of numerous small, independent stores here in Helsinki. That, combined with the fact that Sundays here are largely retail-free, and so you remember the joys of a weekend not engulfed in pervasive shopping, a sensation now alien to much UK or Australian life.)

Spoiler alert: the core argument of this piece, as so often here, more or less comes down to this: 

"Physical experience had better be bloody good if it is to withstand the force of the internet. It now has to have a reason to exist, over and above simply being there by default."

And I write this as a positive and optimistic call-to-arms—as a design challenge, a strategic challenge—for those interested in digital/physical hybrids and systemic change, and from one who believes that the power of physical experience is essentially unrivalled.

Local Rules: The Death (and Rebirth) of Retail'

In around 1999, I think, I bought a Nike fleece top from then-internet shopping sensation Boo.com. It didn’t fit. I sent it back.

Boo.com was perhaps the most famous European victim of the ‘dot-com bubble’ of the late-1990s. The Swedish founders and London-based team burnt around US$190 million of venture capital in just six months, during which time Boo.com spectacularly careered from much-hyped launch to much-analysed receivership in 2000. The site featured Miss Boo, an interactive avatar sales assistant—think Microsoft’s ‘Clippy’ played by Natalie Portman—and rotating 3D views of its designer sportswear.

The site didn’t fit the internet culture—and the available bandwidth—of its time any more than the Nike fleece fitted me, and along with the other dot-com detritus from that first boom, it probably set back the idea of shopping online by several years.

Now, however, surveying the rapidly fragmenting retail landscape in Australia, we can see that Boo.com was maybe just in the wrong place at the wrong time. For one thing, in addition to Boo’s demise the year 2000 also witnessed the rather quieter birth of a similar operation, Net-A-Porter, now hugely successful and recently sold to luxury conglomerate Richemont for around $500m.

If this seems like idle tittle-tattle from the high end of the retail market, the ramifications of all this are actually at the core of how our cities function, and what they are. For various internet-based technologies—not simply online ordering—may be about to completely re-orientate the way that Australians consume. This could potentially help rebuild local economies and radically alter patterns of settlement and occupation of space.

At the very least, the emerging confluence of social media, online retail, smart home delivery networks, and fabrication may deliver services that far outstrip the current retail offer for most Australians; which is, after all, a shopping mall of increasingly homogenous nationally-owned franchises. Yet they may also contribute to local economic resilience, lower carbon footprints, increased social capital and reduced car dependency.

Commerce and exchange remain at the heart of cities, and so at the heart of civilisation itself. After all, the marketplace has traditionally been perhaps the key node within urban networks, providing a centre for exchange and interaction, a public space in which the city’s output and interests became legible, tangible; a place of theatre, innovation, debate, delight. Peter Ackroyd described London’s markets as “a Niagra of voices”, within “a city devoted to consumption in all of its forms”. We would recognise the great Asian cities on the same terms, but this feels a long way from the homogenous, controlled malls and high streets of contemporary Australian city. 

But looking across that landscape and taking stock of the last few months, we have witnessed the demise of the Borders and Angus & Robertson book chains—though probably not solely due to online retail and e-books—as well as an extraordinarily ill-judged campaign, essentially against internet shopping, spearheaded by Gerry Harvey (boss of consumer electronics giant Harvey Norman). The latter only served to highlight both the often enormous savings that customers could make online as well as the comparatively prehistoric approach to online retail taken by many of the major chains in Australia.

For most retail environments in Australia perform poorly in comparison to alternatives worldwide, either in terms of quality of service and experience, or simply price. Stores like Harvey Norman are an odd combination of low quality and high prices—pile it high but don't sell it cheap. Shopping here is often a car-dependent activity, with all that entails (the spread of Wal-mart supercenters has been directly linked to obesity in the US.)

And this is before the terrible twins of peak oil and climate change really start hitting supply chains and price points. The reasons for this are multiple, including the overweening market dominance of Coles and Woolworths (See ABC's 'Hungry Beast' for more on this duopoly), as well as a handful of chains across each sector, combined with the traditional but increasingly erroneous claims about ‘Australia being a small market’ and ‘the tyranny of distance’ both preventing innovation in service. If the wider strategic question is what form of retail is good for the city, few can argue that the current incumbents on Australia’s high streets and malls are doing a good job. 

Online, the situation is just a bad. Simply compare the online stores of a theoretically high-end retailer like David Jones with its UK equivalent John Lewis. Click around. One is good, one is bad. You can tell which is which within a few seconds. One is focused on websites promoting its stores, almost brochureware; the other is genuinely retailing online. And where is the food delivery service to match Ocado? Look at the brilliantly conceived Net-A-Porter iPad app, or its male companion Mr. Porter and then pause to consider Richemont’s stated intention to move into the South-East Asian market, and imagine the shiver running up Frank Lowy’s spine.

But it’s not all bad. In terms of small independent stores, Australia can perform well. Shops like TITLE record store in Sydney or Swensk clothing in Melbourne for instance, seem to be thriving. (Likewise Via Alley, Potential of Hydrogen, Published Art etc. etc.) These stores seem to implicitly understand their local community of interest, and so issues of provenance, craft, identity and service, in ways that national chains simply cannot.

Yet when the dread word ‘disintermediation’ is rolled out, the local stores are placed just as much in the firing line by the likes as Gerry Harvey. As with many utterances and activities from this increasingly anachronistic generation of retailers—see also Lowy—they’re increasingly out of step with the 21st century. Underlying these warning signs on the dashboard, there are assumptions that iTunes kills off record shops, that the Kindle kills bookshops, that social media kills newspapers. But previous patterns don’t indicate this. Most older forms of almost everything meaningful still survive, and experiences and services are rarely purely digital or physical, but increasingly hybrid. The human race is additive rather than subtractive, for better or worse.

What does happen is that superceded forms become smaller, more distributed, localised, both physical and digital. This is what will probably happen to newspapers, for instance, but what would it mean for retail?

A huge opportunity, that’s what.

The local independent store is far more useful, from the point-of-view of urbanists, than the national chain. Research from the US indicates that between 54 and 58 cents of every dollar spent at a locally-owned retailer stays in that local environment, as they tend to employ a local accountant, a local delivery service, local web designer, local graphic designer, advertise in the local paper, and so on. A national store contributes only 15 cents to the local environment for every dollar spent, as they tend to centralise those same functions in order to induce greater efficiency.

Similarly, further recent research—also reported by the New Rules Project—indicates that areas with ‘buy-local’ campaigns have out-performed those without for the last four years running.

So local independents contribute disproportionately to local economies. This is not to say that national chains have no place; simply that they must take on and understand those qualities of provenance, innovation, craft and embeddedness of the local store, and work within, rather than against, local networks.

An example: Thornton’s Budgens is a local North London branch of a national chain of UK supermarkets, where Budgens is the chain and “Thornton” is the name of the manager of that store, Andrew Thornton. This might seem a cutesy nod back to locally-owned stores when it is no such thing, yet Thornton has significant control over how his store works, to the extent that he has brokered deals with other independent stores in the neighbourhood, such as the baker directly opposite, and sells their bread in his store with a clear marker indicating it’s from over the road.

This is good for the baker, who has quite effectively increased the real estate in which their bread can be sold without losing their own store, as well as for Budgens and Thornton. The rest of their store is labelled up accordingly: fish from 30 kilometres away, from this fleet, beef from 25 km, from this farmer, and so on. The economics of the New Rules project research suggest that bread sold solely at the local bakery will not contribute as many pence to the local economy, but agglomeration theory suggests that both stores can co-exist happily, even supportively, producing a greater overall sum. And this embedded local identity means that the area’s DNA is also reinforced with every purchase.

Thornton’s Budgens is now moving into urban agriculture, growing vegetables on its roof which are sold downstairs every Friday, engaging 20 local volunteers as well as the heat from the supermarket in a form of lo-fi symbiosis.

Compared to the previous model—local baker goes out of business; supermarket homogenises and dominates through suppressing local innovation—this is a major step forward, and a slow dissolve of the chain model either way, reinforcing provenance, craft, social capital and localism. The Architecture Association’s Lawrence Barth uses Thornton’s Budgens specifically, as an example of contemporary local innovation economies.

However, this store is in posh Crouch End, and It’s possible to critique the schadenfreude over the demise of Angus and Robertson—some have seen this as privileged inner-urban view, from those who are surrounded by the independent stores of Surry Hills or Carlton or New Farm, whereas outer suburban dwellers only had the Borders and Dymocks of shopping malls as their sole bookstore.

Yet there is little genuine argument there—are we to suggest that suburban residents should simply be thankful for that low quality retail offer in some way? Equally, it is possible to critique the likes of Net-A-Porter, or inner city farmers’ markets, as offering nothing to the broad mass of suburban residents, which is where Australia actually lives. Yet decades ago, fashion in general was solely the preserve of the rich, just as a decade ago organic food was. Fashion has long since become mainstream, organic food or locally-sourced equivalent is also becoming so. 

Moreover, recent natural disasters in Australia and Japan have viscerally demonstrated how brittle the supermarket-based food supply system is, with stores losing all produce within hours, with little chance of predictable re-supply.

So we need to find a way of sustainably re-localising production and distribution either way. Rediscovering a cultural memory for growing food locally is one thing; distributing and buying locally is just as important. Thorton’s Budgens offers but one model; there are numerous others. What they all have in common is their pattern: in the argot of the internet, “small pieces loosely joined”—distributed, localised if not locally-owned and carrying their DNA with them.

And the reality is that the alternate offer from “retail kingpins” Harvey and their ilk is incredibly poor in comparison to either contemporary internet shopping or retail, never mind the possibilities of physical experience in general or of these new models. And it is this that will be found out.

Put simply, physical experience had better be bloody good if it is to withstand the force of the internet. It now has to have a reason to exist, over and above simply being there by default. Books and magazines have had to re-capture what is good about their physical incarnation—and newspapers have to figure this out—as the internet meant they were no longer the default way of shipping editorial or narrative.

Successful ones have done so; others are now simply carried online. This pattern will apply to much retail just as much as it does to media.

Fortunately, the smaller independent retailers are those who find this easiest, being innately resourceful, and in it for the love of it as much as anything. Leaving aside high-value flagships, like the exemplary Apple Stores or OMA’s store for Prada in Manhattan, it is to local independents that we tend to look for experience, difference, quality and innovation.

And these experiences are increasingly digital/physical hybrids, with both online and physical brands used for research, for browsing, for testing, for advice, and for purchasing and for after-sales. In a world where more objects are connected to the internet than people, physical experience is becoming more meaningful, and this applies to the torrents of innovation in retail as much as anywhere.

Perhaps ironically, the impact of the ‘internet of things’ might usher in an entirely new emphasis on sensory design and spatial intelligence.

You visit the physical store for physical experiences—to squeeze the kiwi fruit or poke the beef, to get specialist personalised advice on which of six pairs of jeans fits best, to see a band play live or hear an author speak, to run your fingers over the embossed cover of a Marian Bantjes book. Unless you are of a particular persuasion, you don’t need to squeeze the toilet rolls, or thrust a new kitchen towel to your nose and breathe in …

Much of ‘the weekly shop’ can be handled far better online, meaning it largely ceases to exist. You shop physically for enjoyment, or for quality, on an as-needs basis, and the rest is essentially automated.

Indeed, with delivery via bike or electric vehicle, the impact of displacing this unnecessary time and movement could be enormous, in terms of carbon and oil, road accidents, congestion, air quality, health, time sovereignty, you name it. Local markets and retail strips can offer local delivery services, enabling citizens to travel by public transport, walk or ride, select their produce, and have the goods delivered to their home at their convenience. It's an old model—the grocery boy on the bike—overlaid with a contemporary distributed networks model and interface layer.

(One wonders how supermarkets performed this bait-and-switch in the first place. We once had local networks of fishmongers, butchers, bakers on high streets, with produce delivered on bike by grocery boys. (Or see the prototype Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation ‘Deliverette’ delivery van at the Melbourne Museum.) Now, we have to do the logistics around shopping; drive to the store, carry the heavy bags back to the car, and then sit in traffic driving it all home. How did that happen?)

More profoundly again, fabrication technologies might completely derail existing carbon-hungry and expensive distribution models altogether. If each house has a small fabricator in it, everyday household objects like homewares are produced in situ, on-demand, side-stepping retail altogether. If each street has a a larger fabricator, in the newsagent, say, products like bikes, furniture or components for white goods and consumer electronics can be manufactured in-situ, to designs downloaded locally or globally. Ship the ‘recipe’—the digital file—source the materials locally, and distribution is only over the last few hundred metres. The impact  of ‘local fabbing’ could close the loop first hinted at by the internet’s emphasis on participation, re-distribution and networks. (Note this vision is also resource-heavy in its own way, with an equally complex cost and distribution model; more to consider here.)

How will Gerry Harvey even sleep when he hears about that?

Still, the small, resourceful local store persists. An editorial brand like Monocle is quietly building a global network of tiny but high-performing retail outlets in their key cities, supported by a carefully curated selection bespoke goods sold online. The stores also provide physical networking opportunities for loyal readers, a place for digital networks to become physical. One can easily imagine Net-A-Porter/Mr. Porter popping up a few small stores in Hong Kong, Sydney and Osaka, as physical extensions of its digital brand.

What a purely digital experience can’t do, rather obviously, is physical. And again, cities are about physical exchange as well as digital exchange, and always will be. Facebook has increased and reinforced physical social ties, rather than replacing them. The reality is, in the words of Clay Shirky, that the internet is used as a dashboard for physical activities—for real life—as much as anything. What it does is reallocate patterns of activities, with what Doug Rushkoff calls an inherent bias, rather than replace.

So for lazily undifferentiated chains, the tide is only going one way. Let’s not shed a tear for that. For independents stores with a genuinely distinctive or local offer, the internet offers an extension of their brand, or their footprint, or their experience. Let’s give a cheer for that. For wider strategic concerns, new patterns of local production and distribution may produce resilient, low-carbon, distributed economies. Let’s get behind that in particular.

The journey from Boo.com to Net-A-Porter has taken just over a decade. In that time, Facebook has emerged to lure at least one-third of all Australians into using it, and ITunes alone is responsible for at least 25% of all music sales in the USA. That’s all music sales, in less than seven years. These are transformative forces, far more disruptive than the existing Australian retail industrial complex actually realises, and easily capable of overcoming their intransigence, hegemonic power and lobby groups. The challenge is not to shore up that installed base, but to instead reinforce and direct the potentially positive patterns within internet retail, to work with the grain of this new culture such that it produces resilient local economies and communities, richer patterns of production and consumption, and, as a result, better physical experiences.

Perhaps more importantly it’s the first day of my new job: I’m now a Strategic Design Lead at Sitra. I left Arup last week, where I’d had a happy and productive three years, and have relocated with family to Helsinki.

The Strategic Design Unit here is, to my mind, conducting some of the most exploratory, interesting and important work associated with design, innovation and culture anywhere in the world, and I’m hugely honoured and excited to be able to join this small but high-powered team.

I struggle to find good analogues for Sitra anywhere. Here’s how they describe themselves:

“Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, is an independent public foundation promoting the well-being of society under the supervision of the Finnish Parliament.

Sitra’s responsibilities are stipulated by law. Sitra’s duty is to promote stable and balanced development of Finland, qualititative and quantitative growth of the economy and international competitiveness and cooperation. Sitra’s activities have a strong international dimension in sharing knowledge, exchanging best practices and participating in innovative projects.

Sitra’s aim is to help Finland prosper as a global pioneer of systemic changes that generate well-being. A systemic change is a broad far-reaching change of the kind that simultaneously affects the structures and practices of society and the everyday lives of its citizens. Sitra is a visionary and an enabler of such changes: to see is to do.”

So Sitra is at once a research function, an investment fund, and a body that runs experimental and development projects. It belongs to the people of Finland, as an investment in the future of the country, by the country.

The Strategic Design Unit within Sitra is a newish function, set up by Marco Steinberg, Bryan Boyer and Justin W. Cook a couple of years ago. I haven't written much about my work with this team over the last couple of years at Arup, though I suspect all that's about to change - besides, anyone who's heard me speak over the last year will know I've rattled on about little else. Their work has been exemplary, and thoroughly inspirational to those of us who have been grappling with systems, governance and culture(s) at urban or global scale.

It’s not exactly a Victor Kiam situation, but having worked as a designer on two of the SDU’s primary projects - Low2No (easily one of the most interesting urban development projects anywhere) and the ambitious and brilliantly executed Helsinki Design Lab (tiptoe-ing softly in the mighty footsteps of Buckminster Fuller, Juhani Pallasmaa, Victor Papanek, Christopher Alexander et al) – I’m incredibly pleased to find myself working from the inside now. From designer-as-consultant to designer-as-client, and more besides.

Strategic Design is, to me, potentially the most interesting recent development in design. It's neatly defined at the Helsinki Design Lab site:

“Helsinki Design Lab helps government leaders see the "architecture of problems." We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working—we call it strategic design.”

It feels (and is) quite different to design thinking, which is a term and way of thinking I think will fade quite rapidly, for some good reasons (the incorporation of its basic tenets into everyday processes) and bad reasons (the lack of rigor, awareness and responsibility on the part of many who have been actively pushing it in recent years). Either way, strategic design feels like something else, and its careful, integrated and thoughtful focus on meaningful, systemic challenges like health care, education, and climate change is particularly relevant. It's also sketched out well here.

Since being part of Helsinki Design Lab, I’d realised that this was work I’d been doing for a while - that there was a small but growing group of people beginning to breathe life into a new practice - and I quickly began to address is as such in recent projects (not just Low2No but also major urban developments such as Knox Central and Maribyrnong in Melbourne and Tonsley Park in Adelaide) as well as in recent thinking/writing - the 'Same Old New World Cities' piece for AA, re-posted here recently, takes this approach, trying to address "the architecture of the problem" of Australian cities and use design strategically to focus on and articulate the right questions in the first place.

To me, it might do nothing less than give design a genuine point once again. It’s not simply about moving design ‘up the food chain’ in order to draw out the true benefits of its practice at the most useful stage – rather than simply the end delivery of a product or service, which is often a position of little influence – but about reconceiving how we address these systemic challenges in the first place. As Marco puts it, we have 18th century institutions facing 21st century problems – this in itself is a genuinely important design challenge.

The chance to work more intensively with Marco, Bryan Boyer and Justin W Cook and future as-yet-undiscovered colleagues is also a huge draw. I'm looking forward to being in a very small, nimble team again, and these guys are as good as it gets in terms of thinking and capability. I’ve also known Bryan for many years now, and always been hugely impressed by his work and thinking, so it’s a particular pleasure to finally get to work with him properly (see also my write-up of his talk from Postopolis! LA, and his great projects Our New Capitol and Shadows and Straws).

I don't have to write too much about my interest in Finland at this point; that will all come out in the wash, as we say. Suffice to say the reasons that Newsweek chose it as 'best country in the world' last year are probably all valid - even accepting the faintly ludicrous notion of such a ranking system in the first place - and there are many other more subtle reasons too, not usually captured in ranking systems. But such qualities also need identifying, articulating, assessing, developing, nurturing, and shaping - and these ideas of national identities, cultures, facets, and characteristics is something I'm looking to engage with (as my recent thinking made clear, I hope.) 

But the very idea of the Nordic model is attractive enough to warrant a closer look. The reality of, for instance, one of the world's best basic education systems being effectively universally free and public is so counter recent orthodoxy in Anglo-Saxon countries that it barely seems possible. I'm interested in exploring how these models work, under what conditions, when they don't, how they will continue to prosper and thrive, and so on. And again, using design as the lens through which we look at this. And for education, read healthcare, public transport and mobility systems, public space and civic life, manufacturing and knowledge economies, businesses and industries, entrepreneurship and social values, governance and social responsibility, agriculture and food culture, craft and design sensibilities, architecture and urbanism ... 'Culture' in both the Raymond Williams sense - as in a way of living - and in terms of cultural production and consumption; in short, the instruments and components of everyday life.

It's also an interesting time to move to Finland, of course, with some domestic political upheaval on the scene, almost a return of politics itself after many years of consensus, and part of a pattern repeating across much of northern Europe. Suffice to say I’m attracted to Finland for deeper reasons than are being played out in this current transition; for a small population, it punches well above its weight, having continually produced a environment that values innovation, culture and the very idea of civic and public life. It’s a high-functioning society that ‘just works’ in many everyday ways (public education, healthcare, transport, childcare etc.), with a diversified economy that has retaining manufacturing capacity whilst embracing high-value services, and in particular a strong design and craft culture. It appears to have an ability to create increasingly good urban environments – and Helsinki in particular is a city I’ve wanted to live in for a while, due to its numerous subtle charms – whilst retaining a deep, near mystical connection with nature and rural environments. And it posesses a ‘strategic position’ as a key hinge between east and west, and is highly integrated within European and global networks.

I’m not unfamiliar with its potential issues, challenges and limitations too, however, though I’m looking forward to seeing how these can be nudged and calibrated. Again, as a "delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much larger machine, perhaps. Respectfully, and bearing in mind that 'you can't design culture', that’s the job now.

This is also about moving back to Europe. For all its very real issues, being clearly expressed now as much as any time in its modern history, the notion of Europe itself is still beguiling and entrancing. Working with the reality of Europe is often different, but this idea and this reality converge often enough and approximately enough to keep striving for the ideals underpinning it - almost as a "militant Europhile", in the words of Fernando Savater. I'm hugely looking forward to assessing and engaging the old continent again, this time from a different vantage point, further north and further east.

Finally, a word for Arup, and Australia. While I'm incredibly excited about the move to Sitra, I have mixed feelings about moving on from Arup. They're a fantastic firm - the best in the built environment business - and I'm immensely proud to have worked there. They gave me a fabulous platform upon which I could pursue my ideas, and I'm immensely grateful for the support; I learned a huge amount. And a word for my great team too: Jason McDermott, Michelle Tabet and Pei-Hong Jessie Hsu. Watch that space; they're going far. 

As for Australia, we had four great years there, and we leave with numerous fond memories. Some have suggested that my previous essay was a parting shot of sorts - it wasn't that at all, or at least it wasn't written consciously as that. While it does summarise some strategic thinking about Australia, it in no way captures the warmth I feel for the place, and for our numerous good friends and able colleagues there. I leave with several grappling hooks still embedded in the old rock, both professionally and personally, and so we're happy to leave in the knowledge that we're retaining connections with Australia too. We'll miss it, but I'll be back from time to time for sure. You move on from places, but you never really leave anywhere.

But enough of all this high-minded commentary; tonight, I board a plane for Lapland, and tomorrow a meeting at Santa Park!

It's a new map, new terrains, new cultures, new work, new ideas. What could be more exciting?