The Open Planning Project hosted New Technology for Participatory Planning – an ‘unconference’ last Friday, and what a grade A way to spend a grey day at the end of the week. The crowd was a pretty even split of techies and planners – the Regional Planning Association co-hosted. So the room was full of smarty-pants (is the plural smarties-pants?).

Lightning presentations – following the 5-minute pdf slam Pecha Kucha model – showcased All Our Ideas from Princeton University’s Sociology department; Robert Lane from the RPA reverently quoting (bow down for the second time this week) Kevin Lynch and Laura Kurgan; a data orgy of dynamic maps of possibly the most mapped city – from DoITT, including the GIS NY City Map and others, like the urban research maps, exploring open public data sets.

Then, between insights-ever-so-constrained-by-140-characters tweets, Turnstone waded into a couple of fascinating break out sessions, one on (and I paraphrase heavily from the question that the NYC Transit specialist, Sarah Kaufman posed) the input monster that civic agencies create when they invite the public’s participation, the other on what’s wrong with the Request for Proposal process. To summarize a lot of intelligent, interdisciplinary, carpe diem discussion in these groups, here are some references, questions raised and other highlights:

• Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change by Neil Postman
• Community as functionality, a technology to understand itself (quoting from Lynch’s Image of the City)
• What’s the difference between drawing and mapping?
• What is civic engagement for? When is participation appropriate? What role, what value? To validate? Legitimate?
• What impact does the ubiquity of mobile devices have – on narrowing the digital divide? On recording public processes? On capturing site-specific participation (that is, enabling just-in-time input – comments or uploads – about something in a particular location)?
• Place still has primacy, as much as we like to run about with glee in information space
• Innovation in public policy and planning process is as crucial to the success of gov2.0/public data apps as any tech innovation
• The goals, culture, workflows and vocabulary of bureaucratic organizations is different from that of tech start ups. We need to recognize, celebrate, enhance or overcome these differences. Empathizing with the end user is a good way to unite them. Bring on the empathic user-experience design process into the mix…sure, call us the tile grout. It’s not glamorous or the thing you notice, but you sure as hell would have problems without it.
• Needs of gov agencies are not the same as wants of the public.
• Tech-mediated applications might work best (ie serve the public best) when situated in bigger experience ecologies, where other forms of media also form part of an integrated service experience. Jargon for: Beware tech-determinism and don’t separate analog from digital where both are appropriate.

Many of the rest of the big ideas are captured on here.

Last week, the New York Public Library launched its new logo, and Turnstone went along to take a look. The logo is a rather fetching lion (Patience? or Fortitude? That’s what the two on the steps at 42nd Street are called) and its launch prompted a rather lovely New York moment:

Later on the night of the launch, we pulled the obligatory logotastic schwag bag out to show a friend on the subway, and a man opposite us starts beaming and waving at us. It was Marc Blaustein, the art director of the Library, pleased as punch that we were waving his work about on the F train. So be careful what you pull out of your bag on the subway: Loose lips launch library logos. Talking of which, here are Turnstone’s, on (and on about) the logo on You Tube:

Er, we’re back. Getting a new computer is not unlike moving house. The boxes are all organized but in the wrong rooms, some crockery gets broken, any kind of normal day-to-day admin – including the odd blog post – seems like a luxury. But we’re here, surrounded by the online equivalent of popped bubble wrap, to report in:

This week we’ll give a full run down on the Open Planning Project’s most excellent Tech For Participatory Planning Unconference last Friday, which you can follow on Twitter if you look for  #planningtech.

Meantime, if you don’t mind Turnstone returning to our geographer roots: Get to the last day of the Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture this Saturday – David Harvey (bow down, po-mo geographers) is giving the keynote lecture at noon, at the Gair Building, No 6, 81 Front St in Dumbo (Brooklyn NY 11201 for those who are info-spatially-sensitive). If you want to blog about this here, let’s hear from you.

Turnstone is delighted to report that one of our favorite grad school exercises is busting out of the classroom next week: “Best Square Wins”, an educational ‘graphics exercise crossed with Survivor’, will be played out to the general public on Tuesday next week, as part of “The Public School for Architecture”, a project for public architectural education that Common Room are putting forward in conjunction with the Van Alen Institute. 

The exercise is the brainchild of architect, and absurdly original thinker, Don Schillingburg, a guest in the Service Design class at ITP this Spring. There, he gave our students a headspin with a round of BSW. As Schillingburg explains,
“Although the subject matter may appear to be quite boring (after all, aren’t all squares the same?), the exercise itself confronts the participants with the ambiguities of making and perceiving, where geometry hits performance (actually, no two squares are the same; the wheel meets the road when we have to decide why).

The debate draws out a wide variety of issues as the participants jostle each other to determine the “Best Square.” I have to admit that, comparatively, winning is a dubious distinction at best, but perhaps as architects know better than anyone else – the smaller the prize, the more furious the competition.

The experience is a mix between platonic disputation and a football scrum – in general, the outcome is quite unexpected and remains unresolved until the last vote is cast. You’ll never look at a square the same again.”

If your interest is piqued, head to the Van Alen Institute at 6:30-8pm on Tuesday, November 10 to see who will claim the title “Best Square”. No supplies, preparation or stretching is required, but signing up ahead of the event here is.

The team at Urban Omnibus shines The Architectural League limelight on Turnstone today: Rachel’s in-cab interview with Cassim Shepard, the blog’s editor, from back in the summer, is now available to read and hear, here. It’s one of many discussions about tech in taxis that we’ve engaged in over recent years, and our broadcast debut. Oh my, the London accent appears to be going off duty…

From grass-roots to ski-slopes, we’re shifting seamlessly from posts about London’s Bigger Picture to skip off to the New York Public Library Live event this evening (Tuesday 7pm): The Aspen Institute presents Capitalism and the Future, a light pre-dinner aperitif from the Institute’s President, Walter Isaacson, Black Swan author, Nassim Taleb, Harvard economist, Niall Ferguson, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo.

Here’s the third and final installment of Ben Reizenstein’s round up from The Bigger Picture, part of nef’s Day of Interdependence, which took place last weekend in London: 

I don’t catch the name of the woman who is suddenly standing next to the queue, talking to us, her captive audience, about local currencies in the Welsh Valleys.

An hour of time spent ‘volunteering’ gets you a Time Credit note, which you can trade for an hour of someone else’s time, or – and this is the science part – an hour of bingo or opera. In fact, the purchase of bingo and opera, two crucial fibres in the social fabric of rural South Wales, seems to provide a centre of gravity for the local currency and its economy.

Kids who might not be into bingo and opera (philistines) can spend their time credits on an hour of web access at the internet café, so if they want to read this blog, they’ll have to earn credits by helping out at the youth club. And so the local economy and the local community seem to be mutually reinforcing, with the local currency acting as a centripetal force.

As part of the regeneration of deprived post-industrial towns, it’s an exciting, and the experiments in urban areas are also worth keeping an eye on. In the UK, the rather beautiful Brixton Pound and the long-lived Lewes Pound have both faced the problem that they can summon more than face value when sold on ebay. If any major investors are reading this and looking for a new reserve currency…Before I can get carried away by thoughts of major capital inflows to South London’s hippest neighbourhood, another session comes to visit us in the queue.

This time the star speaker is Oliver James, British psychologist and author of the influential Affluenza, which makes the case that the Anglo-American relentless pursuit of wealth is making our societies mentally unwell. I resolve not to try to make a fortune selling local currencies on ebay.

Oliver James is joined by Stewart Wallis, Executive Director of nef, and together they try to persuade the queue that the recession is a hopeful moment, in which the absurdities and cruelties of a generation are being exposed. It can’t be too long, the speakers agree, before people start to stand up to the vested interests already trying to re-inflate the bubble economy.

I don’t mean to complain, but given that I’ve been standing up since the early morning, and it’s nearly 6pm, and given that we’re all here ready and willing to overthrow the old guard, it’s slightly disappointing that we’re not being incited to revolt here and now, in a queue in the rain under the OXO tower – a vignette almost worthy of V for Vendetta. Instead, we get the deferred promise of inevitable, significant, society-wide change. It sits uneasily with the localism agendas that have formed the largest part of The Bigger Picture so far. If anything, I realise, that has been the lesson of today’s festival – if we want a big change, we may have to start out small.

Before the third and last segment of Ben’s review of the Bigger Picture, a pre-Hallowe’en interlude… A few months ago we wrote Hey Ladies, about women’s experience of work, queen bees and wannabees with a paycheck. This, on a related topic from Harvard Business Review blog, caught Turnstone’s eye. It’s about working with colleagues who, short of stealing your lunch money, are still flexing their inner Lindsay Lohans at their desks, and how to deal with it.

Intent on preserving our sense of humor about such things, we suggest our own antidote for anyone livid in lipstick: Make Il Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti your company song (apologies to Rossini). Happy Friday. The good stuff begins at 1′19″:

In this second installment of our review of The Bigger Picture Day of Interdependence, Ben Reizenstein picks up where Anna Minton left off: He too suspects that an impression that it’s the middle class who stand to benefit most from alternative ways of doing things is an illusion worth fighting against. With UK English spelling, which Turnstone is leaving intact, he continues:

Unfortunately it’s a growing suspicion that follows me to the next session: Fink Club, a fast-paced debate with several 3-minute speeches and a lot of audience participation. It’s lively, it’s interactive, I’m late, everyone’s psyched, and Andrew Simms, Policy Director at nef, is being a boisterous and noisy compère.

What is the future of work, he wants to know, and how do we get there?

One of nef’s answers is that we should simply work less, and get out more. Why use increasing productivity to grow the economy at huge environmental cost, when we can use our increasing productivity to work less, and live fuller, happier, greener, healthier lives? Isn’t that what technology was always meant to be for?

Panellists tell us about citizens’ wages, longer weekends, the damage done by specialisation, and an experiment with 4-day working weeks in Utah. Faced with the threat of job cuts, employees across the world have opted instead for reduced hours or pay across the workforce, and Toyota, for one, is interested in this win-win situation. Perhaps unavoidably, one speaker quotes Marx from a little black moleskine. After all, he’s looking for a future where, ahem,

“…society regulates production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

But it seems clear that the crowd isn’t full of Marxists fomenting revolt. We’re white collar, not blue collar, and that’s exactly the problem. How can we share this proposed revolution in quality of life with employees of Wal-mart and Kraft, who haven’t turned up en masse to this event, rather than with researchers, policy wonks, designers, hipsters, free-thinkers and alternatives, who have?

As it turns out, many people in the crowd (especially those working for nef, it seems!) actually enjoy their jobs, and work long hours voluntarily. There’s not enough wage-slavery in evidence. As we leave the session, a girl in the audience tells me about the Cuban tradition of the lector de tabaquería. I’m glad that someone’s thinking about these issues.

I wander the rooms for a bit, picking up the odd bit of litterachur, taking a quiz on energy and climate change, riding a pedal-powered television, watching a pedal-powered washing machine. I overhear some beat poetry, get stuck with some stickers, drink some free coffee and end up in front of designer and visionary Christopher Pett, who is discussing the Reeechair. Here is a photo, for those who haven’t seen it before:

That’s correct! It’s a chair made from recycled Playstations: 9 games consoles to one chair. The consoles are bought from Sony, who had previously been paying for someone to take them away. Is this another win-win-win situation for People-Planet-Profit? Pett is enthusiastic about life-cycle thinking. Made of post-consumer plastic, the Reeechair is itself designed to be simple to recycle. Is it possible to imagine taking the old furniture you don’t want to a store where it gets remade into the new furniture you covet? Pett is considering all options. He has found that the oval cutouts made by masons installing sinks into marble kitchentops need very little work before they make ideal tables. He’s measured the carbon footprint of his products from their birth as ore and chemicals, through their rebirth as furniture, and beyond. Definitely a charming English geek, he is most animated when talking about the concept of the product and material life-cycle. Pli Design, Pett’s company, seems to be living proof that one company’s waste is another company’s blank canvas.

But by now it’s time for me to leave and take part in the 350 global day of action. Just beneath the London Eye a group assembles in a huge 5 for an aerial photo. We’re going to be joined by a giant 3 in Sydney and a giant 0 in Copenhagen – yes, that Copenhagen – to make one of over five thousand actions spread across all the countries on earth. I’m secretly glad that I’m not in the zero – losers. That’s me in the centre of the 5, in a dark shirt behind the pram.

It always takes forever to organise any kind of group photo, and by the time I get back to the Bargehouse the queue to get in has hundreds of keen heterodox thinkers waiting patiently for their brain food. I stand in line.

The final installment of Ben’s review will be posted here this weekend.

While Turnstone is off to polish a class syllabus, and a massive master (Ms?) list of the trickle-turned-into-a-flood responses to our question about women in tech, it gives us great pleasure to hand the mic over to a guest contributor.

We dedicate the next three posts to a detailed review of the new economics foundation’s Day of Interdependence, ‘The Bigger Picture’ that took place this past weekend. Thanks very much to Ben Reizenstein for being our voice from London. Here are his impressions. More follows tomorrow, with pictures.

The South Bank of the Thames, London, Saturday October 24, 2009: It’s the morning – sporadic rain looks set to hang about all day. I’m among a group of people assembling under the OXO tower, preparing for a day of discussion, performance, debate and experiment pulled together by the UK luminaries nef – the new economics foundation, no capitals.

Our venue is pretty telling – The Bargehouse is an old, crumbling, 4-storey riverside warehouse, now suspended somewhere between step 2: reclamation by poor, well intentioned arty folk, and step 3: soulless commercial redevelopment. Like a bug trapped in amber, it’s stuck in this recessionary moment with all its potential glory visible and intact. It’s an awkward shape, with narrow staircases and terrible acoustics, but it serves as a good reminder of the weird, post-traumatic moment we’re in.

Above all, we’re here to do some serious reimagining – of the economy, finance, society, the environment, work, how it all fits together. We’ve had enough complaining about the failures of a decade of faulty thinking, and we want to see The Bigger Picture (which, coincidentally, is the title of today’s Festival of Interdependency). There are some tough questions that need answering: what does the great transition to a brave, sustainable future look like? How can we revalue our lives – recognise the costs of wealth and the value of free things? What the hell is a no-growth economy? How can we be green, happy and healthy, while still looking good? The first session I go to is called ‘Tales of how it turned out right: How communities in the US fought back and won’, and it’s a discussion between Anna Minton, a British writer on urban space, and US organizer Stacy Mitchell, from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

In Britain we like to think that all the terrible things happening to our public realm are directly imported from America, but the session points out that when we adopt terrible approaches and habits, we really make them our own. The UK has more Starbucks per capita than the US, more CCTV cameras than anywhere on earth – we lead the world in the sanitisation and privatisation of public space. It’s nice to have a claim to fame. Against this, pockets of interesting resistance are appearing in both countries. 400 new independent bookshops have opened across America in the last 5 years – as compared to their scary decline over here; the local branding and solidarity movements that we’re just picking up on have been flourishing – keeping Austin Weird and Portland Independent; there are signs, from the Local Business Alliances that Mitchell supports, that the beans-in-beans-out model of centralized distribution networks could give way to a re-establishment of local supply chains in food, building materials and more. Once transport pollution costs are included, both panellists agree, the world will realise that local solutions offer the best value for everyone involved.

The discussion plays nicely into nef’s territory. Local supply chains encourage local wealth, local identity, local ownership of public space, reduce transport emissions, traffic, consumer alienation, grow small businesses and generate social mobility. It sounds too good to be true, so I start being difficult. What about LA? What does a post-car Los Angeles look like? It seems impossible to imagine without the Age of Cheap Oil… And isn’t all this talk of artists occupying derelict store-fronts, and local ethical shopping a bit middle class? In the UK the price premium on local organic vegetables, or Fairtrade coffee, or books from indy bookstores, is part of its self-punitive pleasure – but that means they can’t be the obvious choice in the Age of Austerity.

Stacy tells us that over the last 2 years driving has decreased across the US, and that older, pre-automobile towns are seeing population increases. There may not be hope for LA, but elsewhere, it seems pedestrianism is booming. In part, this is due to the oil price spike, which served as both a warning and a proof that life is not inconceivable on public transport. Already there are signs that the dip in driver miles may be over. But the price of oil is only going one way, people, and it’s not down. As for the impression that many proposed alternative solutions seem to work best for the middle class, Minton tells us it’s an illusion we need to fight against. And then it’s time to wrap up.

More from Ben Reizenstein at The Bigger Picture, tomorrow.