Jeremy Myerson
Welcome back. Before tea we were talking about economic development through the history of cake from an agrarian to a service economy and then an experience economy. It was pointed out to me over tea that actually we are now in a post-experience economy because not only do we not bake a cake or use industrially produced components to bake a cake, or even buy a cake, or even go to a restaurant where they throw the cake in, we don’t eat the cake at all because we’re all in moral panic about getting fat. So on that note I am now going to hand you over to my good friend John Thackara. John Thackara and Friends is not in fact a bad folk group from the 1970s but this very distinguished panel. A little about John, obviously you will know that he is the Programme Director of Dott 07 and responsible for all the really exciting things that have been going on in this region in recent months. He is also very closely associated with Doors of Perception which really, globally, is one of the most interesting design and technology forums in the world. John has a background in journalism, consulting and he has assembled a really interesting group to ask the question: ‘As designers are we guilty of killing the planet?’ So, over to John.
John Thackara
That headline is just sleazy to get you all to come back from the tea because I want to focus our discussion pretty much overwhelming on my friends here and to discuss the kind of creative and positive work that is happening in this region. I know I missed some of James’ comments before the break. The miner’s boot, I could hear it thudding into our body from a long way away. We in Dott, and inspired very largely by the work that has already been going on before Dott got here, sustainability in this parts of the world is not driven by moral panic, it’s not driven by anxiety, it’s not driven by fashion. It is driven by the kind of innate creativity and energy to renew that is endemic in this part of the world. So that will be the overwhelming focus of our discussion this afternoon.
But where we do connect, I think, a lot with the themes of this conference is that the role of Dott and projects of that kind is not any longer to do with looking for blue sky ideas or to create a complete blank canvas, but as several of the speakers today have already talked about innovation and even design itself is very much to do with connecting together the ideas people, organisations and projects that may already exist. The reason I’ve had just the most amazingly fun time over the last two years, in coming to Dott and coming back to where I was born, is to find so many people and projects and ideas that I had not encountered before. Absolutely truthfully, and I think you’ll see it reflected downstairs, the overwhelming part of our work has been to add bits and pieces of energy, of new people, a bit of money, a bit of communications there. But all the energy and all of the excitement that I have experienced, and I hope you can share some of that downstairs, is based on things that were already happening here. So I thought that when Kevin asked me to do a kind of Dott moment, that rather than kind of reiterate what is already on show and you’ve got the manual and so on, is to introduce some of the people that I’ve met in the last two years that, not all of them are involved in our projects directly, but are examples of the kind of fresh thinking and the new ideas and the new understandings of know-how, which is the theme also of this conference.
So that is what we’re going to do for the next 40 minutes or so. Please feel free to leap in and ask questions if things are not clear and we’ll have plenty of opportunity for that as well so we’re not going to make long statements. Let me just go along the platform and tell you who my friends and guests are.
Andy Mace leads the sustainability team here in the North East for Arup. Arup, if you don’t know, is probably the world’s leading, it used to be called engineering but it is called engineering but it’s doing much more than that now, it’s a kind of legend in its own lifetime as a place where the best thinking in practice is developed. I thought that I was going to be talking to Andy about Dongtan because this is the city in China that is a model of build a whole city based on ecological principles. But he tells me that he is as active here in the North East and also in Moscow, which we’ll come onto. But tell me, what is the size of the sustainability team? It’s no longer describable as a civil engineering team presumably?
Andy Mace
No, as a company we like to say that sustainability is part of all of the work that we do, but what we’re finding is that there is a real need for more generalists, in a way, who have got a very broad overview of sustainability and then to sort of drill down into the specific areas of the firm and the specific expertise that we need to apply to the project. So in the team for us here in Newcastle there is about 15 of us related principally to general sustainability, transport planning and environmental work and then there is a huge trendset across the whole of the UK of various people I can call on when I need social scientists, behavioural scientists, all the different other non-engineering things that we need to bring to our project.
John Thackara
So putting up green buildings is not a major, it’s a part of what you do or it’s all part?
Andy Mace
It is a part but sustainability for us and the projects we do range from UK National Government advice through master planning projects, for example Dongtan and working in Russia as you mentioned that I’m doing. Then all the way down to the building specific elements and even products within those buildings.
John Thackara
So we’re going to come onto that in the discussion this notion of does one have any justification for putting up buildings in an era of trying to increase resource efficiencies, so that’s part of the things we can talk about. I know we’ve already established there were disagreements about that subject.
Jane Blackburn from Joined Up North, tell us what you do.
Jane Blackburn
I’m a Cultural Consultant that likes living and working in the North East better than all the years that I lived in London because there’s more scope, it’s more exciting here, you can do more things. Incidentally you can also get paid more which you might be surprised to hear because you can do more things for more people. You can invent a project, you can make the project happen, you can hand the project then to somebody else and then you can start all over again with another project. So it’s a really, really exciting place to work. I’m a private consultant, but most of my contracts are with the public sector, not too daft because they have this need to do large amounts of cultural work so that’s what I do and it’s a great place to be.
John Thackara
But you’re not an enthusiast of large shiny cultural buildings?
Jane Blackburn
Well, oddly enough I’m not, despite the fact I think this one and The Sage and other example of buildings that I’m involved in myself in Northumberland, I have this sort of mixed view about it. I believe in people more than I believe in buildings and I think because I work quite a lot for Local Authorities the worry that I have with Local Authorities’ and politicians’ needs is that they want to build buildings they can put their names over. That I have no interest in at all. I think the buildings that you see around you today, I think Gateshead Council is not an example of that, I think it’s about a long-term strategy to do very big things which change the way that people feel about themselves in this part of the world and I think Gateshead have been incredibly successful with that. If you look across the river tonight to Newcastle you will see a building that is now some sort of Slug and Lettuce type bar or something that literally the wealth of Europe was traded through that building, the coal was traded through that building. So there is a sort of difference in, just as we’re standing here in Gateshead and the Newcastle buildings, solid Victorian money making buildings.
The buildings here say a different thing, they say to the people of Gateshead, ‘Be aspirational’. It started with the Gateshead International Athletics Stadium. Many years ago that word International, that huge aspiration, the Angel of the North, which I suspect most of you have either driven past or seen on the train or seen anyway, and then these two fantastic brand spanking buildings here in Gateshead. Let’s not get into the revenue implications though, this is about ambitious buildings. These buildings are expensive to run and actually where I work in Northumberland we have nothing. Well, actually we do have something on this scale because we have the Alnwick Garden. But I think really it has to start with people and then the buildings have to be appropriate to the people. Today I heard a fantastic programme on the radio, you wouldn’t have heard it because you were here, about men’s sheds, the men’s shed movement in Australia to try and stop Australian men killing themselves so that they can go and talk to other men in sheds. They make things in their sheds, furniture, toys, that they can then sell so that the men’s sheds are revenue neutral. Now I think that’s what I want to do from now on, I want to just build sheds. (laughter)
John Thackara
I want one of them and there’s a couple of men in this room, I’ve noticed there are a few men in this design industry who might also want a shed.
Belinda, you’re in the media business. TV producer specialising in large-scale cross-platform – that’s a kind of London word. Tell us what kind of programmes you make.
Belinda Williams
Well, I’m from Media 19, we’re based in Gateshead just over the river in a shiny new sustainable building, supposedly. We’re a production company that started off about 15 years ago being based in Sunderland in the North East, predominantly produced documentaries that reflected the lives and experiences of people living in and around Sunderland and the River Weir. Then kind of expanded dramatically from that, realising when documentary became something that television showed and embraced and people were watching day to day, into looking at what are the new ways that we can engage people in telling their own stories about who they are in their own lives.
We created a project called Self Portrait UK which was about getting people to produce an image or a statement about themselves, not purely for television but also for distribution on a number of different platforms. We did this in partnership with Channel 4, with the Arts Council England based up here in the North East and with a range of different producers and communities across the country. I think at that point which was sort of 2003 there were just beginning to be websites up and around where people were just beginning to put stuff on and think, well, this is a new idea, a new way to do. Since then I think the idea of people creating their own content has completely snowballed. So that is what we do, we create large-scale cross-platform projects, also small projects, but they’re all about finding new ways to engage people in new ways of thinking and of actually getting their ideas seen and heard by other people.
John Thackara
And so one of the things we can talk about this afternoon is, for most of the people here the discussions I’ve heard today, the notion of putting citizen’s at the centre of co-creation or innovation processes. It’s very easy to say it but there are all sorts of practical obstacles to actually giving people genuine authority to tell their stories.
Belinda Williams
Yes I think that’s the biggest challenge when you do anything that’s supposedly about a true voice or people’s own ideas. I think it can be very tokenistic and I think that’s the challenge. We’re always presented with and we’re always kind of asking ourselves that question. But I think the work that we do is about providing the portal for that, providing the format for that to happen. So that’s about us as producers kind of trying to engender and pass on our own skills to people but also about giving people the opportunity to sort of have a platform for sending in their own ideas and submitting their own ideas, giving people permission really to say what they think.
John Thackara
And then Lionel Hehir, Executive Director of Groundwork South Tyneside with a background in years gone by in landscape and architecture but you’re basically a specialist in sustainability and the building industry and also associated subjects. Tell us about Groundwork because Groundwork is one of those things that I’ve been outside the UK for 15 years and I’ve never come across. It’s been one of the cornerstones of several Dott projects, a completely wide variety of grass roots organisations with a very sophisticated agenda and incredible high levels of community participation. So how did all that happen?
Lionel Hehir
Yes well, as you say, I was a landscape architect and before that a town planner. I fell into this sustainability career, if you like, because I was running this organisation call Ground Work in South Tyneside which actually tries to deliver exactly, Belinda, what you’re talking about which is empowering people to make the decisions that will affect their lives and improve their quality of life. It proved to be quite difficult to do that because the economics of running a charity are very difficult. I fell into the sustainability element because we needed to create a means of generating income. Jane, you talked about the money coming in, vitally important. Sustainability isn’t just about the environment and energy and transport, it’s about the social aspects absolutely but it’s about the economic aspect as well. So in fact we built a sizeable building in Hebburn that is essentially built of second-hand materials and generates all its own power, in fact it generates three times the power that the building needs. So we’re, I suppose, carbon negative, Andy will tell me if I’m right, it is carbon negative not carbon positive. So we’ve been through that exercise about working with people in the community to make their own decisions about how life will be in the future. We fund that through a building that is carbon negative so we hit, I hope, the social, economic and environmental elements of sustainability. We are actually helping the planet and that’s the way forward.
John Thackara
This is one of the things I wanted to start on as a panel, so to speak, this notion that there are of course people still fighting battles to raise awareness about the subject of climate change and all these other problem issues, but most people in this region, in my experience, are busily engaged in very practical aspects. So, for example, the energy network around the different sources of expertise on different technologies and approaches to generation. Is this region special about that Andy in terms of… The development agency talks a lot about reinventing the carbon age, lots of parts of the world do that, what’s special about here?
Andy Mace
I think there is a lot of work going on in renewables particularly and not just at the building design stag for the renewables to fit into but all down to the sort of real grass roots of designing new systems, wind turbines. There’s a fantastic bio-mass group that meets and connects the growers of the bio-mass to the consultants and potential clients. So I think there is a real sort of ground swell and it’s really coming together. I think what we need is more demand from clients and buildings and others, we need more projects. But I think there really is a real interest, there is an engineering ability and there are firms both doing the design and delivery of these.
John Thackara
What I’ve struggled with, because when I first got here I was taken to see this fantastic bio-mass plant here, tidal here, micro, hydro… At that moment, two years ago, still very much kind of separated into silos of experts promoting themselves as one answer. What I’ve learned from talking to you and colleagues is that it’s most sustainable solutions are likely to be combinations of different kinds of new technology, not one alone in one place. So it’s like when Stevenson invented a locomotive, several people invented locomotives, it’s only when they invented a railway system that the kind of transport age took off. It’s possible to make the same comparison with energy, that multiple components need to be put together.
Andy Mace
Yes I would agree with that and I, we’re going to get into political…
John Thackara
Do please quickly do that.
Andy Mace
What I’m nervous about is we’ve just had the new code for sustainable homes issued which from a technical point of view I think is excellent.
John Thackara
Does everybody know what that is because I don’t, what is a code for…?
Andy Mace
It’s basically a specification that covers a range of things from energy, water, material use to ecology to do with new housing and there is a proposal for this new code to be ratcheted up over the next few years such that by 2016 all new homes from that time will need to be carbon neutral and to hit other minimum standards in terms of water use.
Belinda Williams
And is that for the developer or for the person who is buying the house?
Andy Mace
For the developer to actually construct.
Belinda Williams
Right, so it’s not the house buyer who has to follow the code?
Andy Mace
No, it’s the designer and the builder and the developer. So, for example, average water use per person is around 150 litres per person and maybe more in some instances. But the highest levels of the code, for example, you have to get that down to 80 litres per person for possible water per day. So that immediately means the use of either grey water recycling or use of rain water. So there’s a whole public health issue and a mindset we’ve got to get over in terms of people being happy to flush their toilets with rain water which it’s starting to happen but it’s still not the norm for the UK.
John Thackara
But this is one of the fascinating things, we have to change the cultural understanding of hygiene as well as, so to speak, making closed water systems. So when people feel less obsessed by extreme measures of hygiene only then will we be able to have these slightly kind of more advanced systems, is that a fair point?
Andy Mace
I think so because I think there’s a disconnect between policy which, I don’t disagree with that work and the code for example. As designers we’re designing buildings to that standard now. In terms of the products, whether it’s tripe glazed windows because there’s only one firm I know in the UK that we can get them from to hit that standard, or whether it’s rain water recycling systems and toilets that flush that people are happy with. The product stuff and the actual people issues are yet to be really explored. And the liveability of these houses.
John Thackara
Somebody told me, not here but at another meeting, that cow bowers in Sweden have higher environmental standards than houses in Britain, is this possible true?
Male Speaker
Yes.
Female Speaker
Yes.
John Thackara
So part of the discussion here is do designers just implement plans and, for example, follow standards set by other people or should we be creating much more dramatic shifts and envisioning more different futures than just following incrementally what code makers tell us?
Lionel Hehir
We have systems in place at present which people accept and if we take Andy’s point on flushing toilets I think it’s about seven or nine litres to flush a toilet at the moment. In the eco centre I think that would probably flush the toilet in the eco centre, but there’s a whole philosophical change in doing that. When tenants moved into our place we actually had to have instructions on the back of the toilet doors as to how people use toilets. So the technology is there, the design process of making them easier we need to go through, but people have got to accept that there is a change. For my building it took a long time because people felt that there were hygiene issues and it was different.
Andy Mace
My view is that a lot of that is down to lack of information and if you give people information on which to make decisions then generally they will make pretty good decisions.
Lionel Hehir
But we did it with cartoons on the back of the toilet doors. That was a designed element that just hadn’t crossed my mind.
John Thackara
We had a very interesting discussion in the mobility project about the, this is not about toilets this is about sharing car seats, and it transpired that one of the biggest obstacles to sharing rides is the fear of being in a car with a psychopath who will chop you into bits.
Jane Blackburn
Yes, because that’s what your cultural education teaches you, not to pick up strangers, not to talk to strangers. I can quite understand that, some of the remote areas of Northumberland if you were driving nearly 40 minutes or an hour without seeing another human being, which is perfectly possible where I used to live, you would think twice about opening the door and letting people in. But that scheme actually moved beyond that.
John Thackara
So you had a scheme which was, so to speak, bottom up in the sense that only people in the ride scheme would be recommended to each other. It started with a school or a community so I think that, and that’s a model for a social glue to make a service which sounds ecological and so on, but it’s a very simple social experiment called ‘I trust you’ where you take my child to school.
Jane Blackburn
Exactly, it is the ‘I trust you’ model and in our society at the moment 2007 doesn’t seem to be moving towards an ‘I trust you’ sort of model. But what I’m interested in is my cultural gang works very closely with the environment gang here in the North East and they, in my view, have been incredibly successful nationally at getting young people, the holy grail apparently, to completely buy into the environmental argument. I think they’ve been tremendously successful but what the environmentalists are saying to us cultural people is we’ve made a bit of a mistake here because we’ve gone too far too fast. What we’ve said basically is you out there you’re all going to die. That’s the environmental message. It’s too stark and it’s not achievable by real people. Real people don’t understand you’re all going to die because they go, bugger it we’ll just carry on doing what we were doing anyway then. So what the environmental people in the North East are saying to us is how can you help us, you cultural people translate these messages into normal human patterns of behaviour that then gradually make a cultural change, whether it’s about you don’t actually need to wash your clothes every day, you don’t need to flush your loo in the same way. You trust people because there’s a scheme that is happening in Northumberland, why don’t you have a look at it. So that’s, I think, how we have to come together. But it’s all about people isn’t it?
John Thackara
It is, but one of the things is what everybody says, the Chief Executive of every company on the planet will say, it’s all about people, we are a people business, but then their actions don’t necessarily correspond to that. So to me I think the debate with this conference is travelling from, designers will answer all these questions and design things that other people will use to the word user-centred, co-creation, co-design. But it’s to do with how we establish what’s real about co-design rather than just saying it as being polite about it. Belinda, maybe to bring you in here…
Belinda Williams
I think what was interesting about one of the Dott projects that we were involved in which was called Welcome, you might have seen some of the material downstairs, was that we actually had to work with communities on Teesside about looking at their daily lives and the aspects of their lives that were welcoming or not and whether that be through people’s actions or places that they visit and go to. I think you can draw a sort of parallel because what we sort of were working with people and asking them to do was to kind of map their day and to look at everything within their day that they found welcoming or not and to ask themselves why wasn’t it and then what their ideas might be to change that? But also to find ways to get people to do it in a way that was actually about documenting that or creating their own kind of diary or archive from that so they felt a sense of involvement within the project rather than it being, something is welcoming if I like it or something isn’t, but really getting them to look at things down to where a doorknob was placed or whether it was the dog that welcomed them home or whether it was the big industrial landscape that they found welcoming or not. So the same could apply to looking at their own day about how much water they use or whether they’re being environmentally careful or not. Then getting them to think about it and actually create their own story around that.
John Thackara
What is the power relationship between you and a group of citizens? Are you studying them? Are you giving them tools to tell their story and do you not have any impact on it at all or is it somewhere between the two?
Belinda Williams
I think there’s always an element of us going there and saying we have some tools that maybe you can use to create these images or words or pictures. For example, on Welcome if we look at one community we worked with in Newtown in Stockton. We would send people within that community out with a photographer or with a film maker or with a writer to give them an example of how to record their day, how to record their journeys. But in some instances people were very well equipped to do that for themselves, they didn’t need us. So it’s as much about setting ideas in people’s minds as it is about telling them how to do something. We’re not telling them how to do something but we might be transferring some of the skills we do have in order to get them to understand how they might be able to relay their ideas and thoughts and concerns to the wider public, whether that be to designers or to exhibitions or if it’s about health to health specialists or whatever. So I think our kind of position within that is as facilitators or enablers and also as recorders I think. And also as a body that would bring that material together and get it presented across a number of different platforms, so whether that be on television through to at the Dott festival. So our position is, I think, very different to if you’re a programme maker and you’re going out to make your own documentary and you’re very much the auteur within that. Our position is very much one of facilitating.
John Thackara
I have a suspicion that there a quite a lot of auteurs still in this room, maybe we could com onto that in a moment. But, Jane, you do kind of citizen consultations where you’re doing regeneration and tourism projects.
Jane Blackburn
Yes of course we do and some of it is successful and some of it isn’t. Actually, I think this is where I go back to some of the things we were just talking about before that, I think we’re just trying out best in our current generation of people who are in these positions trying to make the best fist of it that we possibly can to just get some stuff done and it not be too terrible. I don’t want to make over claim for the scale of ambition or delivery that we have at the moment. We have some great projects, we have some fairly mediocre ones as well, but at the heart of the best ones are those ones where actually there’s a really good combination between excellence and scale and ambition and the fact that the people really like it. We have fantastic buildings that the people didn’t want and they’re not very full and we have fantastic buildings that the people were sort of drawn in but not necessarily because they were consulted on every single nut and bolt. It could be that they just feel that it suits them, that they’re proud of it. Then of course we come this issue about sustainable tourism and tourism because some of the buildings that I’m talking about in Northumberland are absolutely chocca but they’re chocca with tourists. And the people in the town actually think it’s incredibly inconvenient because they can no longer park outside the dry-cleaners. And I know because I’m somebody who likes to park outside the dry-cleaners as well but –
John Thackara
You will have to just clean your clothes Jane, that’s a very simple thing.
Jane Blackburn
I am doing that actually you’ll be pleased to know, under these hot light maybe you might not be. I think that you’ve got to be the best you can possible be, you’ve got to be, these developments, these buildings have to be really fantastic and they do have to reflect some element of the community in which they’re being placed. But you can take people along with ambition and pride actually because if you do ask questions of communities, do you want this, if you ask a stupid question you always get a stupid answer. Do you want the Angel of the North? No, I want dog mess to be cleared up and I want window boxes and I want my primary schools to be better funded.
No, that wasn’t a very sensible question to ask which is why Gateshead Council didn’t ask those sorts of questions. Now the sense of pride for those people who aren’t necessarily from the North East but we feel we’re coming home when you pass the Angel and that’s done something for all of us. We’ve got some really iconic and wonderful developments in this region, and in Northumberland where I work particularly, that are very attractive to tourists but as I say the local people don’t necessarily, they’re sort of secretly proud of them but no matter how much community consultation you do sometimes you’ve got to just sort of go for it.
John Thackara
Andy, you’re doing new cities, what are you doing? A new city North of Moscow and a new town? I’ve always wanted to ask somebody, how can you understand the cultural kind of space of a place 100km north of Moscow and kind of a plonk a new city there? How do you do it?
Andy Mace
For the work we’ve done in China, before I go onto the Moscow stuff, we have experts who, you’re right it’s a very difficult issue because we’re designers and working in this very spatial sort of environment and talking about concrete and brick and steel buildings and roads and infrastructure. Putting that into a local cultural context is very difficult, particularly when we take our Western ideas and go to China where priorities are just turned on their head. So we rely massively on local colleagues and other sort of cultural experts to actually sort of steer the cultural elements of the design and to make sure that public space and other cultural issues are integrated within the master plan.
Jane Blackburn
But who wanted you to go and build them a new, somebody must have asked you to go and do it?
Andy Mace
Yes it was quite a long process. There’s a private, or as private as clients can be in China, who were gifted this particular part of this island just off Shanghai and they had had a number of master plans developed by internationally renowned architects. But they were gifted the land on the basis, from the national Government, that it would be an eco-city and nobody up to that point in all of those master plans they had done could actually sort of define what an eco-city was and actually give them the confidence that they could deliver it. These were going from Welwyn Garden City kind of ideas through to high-tech what have you. So, it was only when we were, from our perspective, we tried to come at it from a much more holistic point of view, not just architecturally led, but overlaid social issues, the culture, the environment, a business plan and the whole thing. And the governance because new ways of running these cities need new ways governing them and it’s only by doing it all together and we’re more able to do that because we have the range of experts –
John Thackara
But is it easy to design an eco-city in the governance context of China that it would be here? So in the North East of England –
Andy Mace
It is in a way yes because my personal view from purely an environmental point of view and the need to reduce our use of resources is that we almost need more politics not less because there needs to be more restrictions on use of water, energy, travel and everything else if we’re to actually live within our fair share.
John Thackara
I had a discussion with a person from Newcastle who is cross that we’ve put in our book the fact that the noise of the traffic in the centre of Newcastle has been measured as the noisiest place in Britain and this person said you’re doing down our great city, noise represents economic activity, noise is a sign of vigour and live with it basically. Do you think there are ways of re‑imagining these industrial cities like Newcastle, could they become, in your mind is Newcastle totally different from Dongtan eco-city or can you imagine them teaching each other in some way?
Andy Mace
Dongtan, as difficult as it was for us, was easy because it’s a brownfield site and there is no complicated matrix or roads or energy cables or buildings and all the other stuff that we have in cities. I think what examples like Dongtan help us with is that we learn the lessons of how things actually need to run and be designed and work and then sort of work backwards to try and put analysis between where we are with cities like Newcastle and ideally where we need to be. Then try and work out the processes to get there. But what stops us most of the time is the politicing I have to say and the planning system and all sorts of other things to do with the bureaucracy not actually the practical engineering things that need to be done.
John Thackara
It’s tough though because this part of the world had a history of when politics worked in a kind of direct and dramatic way and all sorts of unfortunate things happened in the 60s?
Jane Blackburn
Yes I was just thinking about that as I was driving along one of the unfortunate things that happened in the 60s, but actually I want to just state something that I heard one of our well-known Newcastle architects Cyril Winskell say at a recent debate that we were having about this very issue. Making a plea that actually we talk about servant planning rather than master planning and I think I know exactly what he means by that and I think that’s something about putting the people back into the discussion. I think what you’ve just said is just terrifying the idea, I mean it’s quite easy your job to just go in and design in a completely brownfield site with a huge political dictator just saying build me an eco-city. A bit harder to come and do that in Newcastle I suspect?
Andy Mace
I agree but you have to sort of go and stand in Shanghai and understand the pressure on the city to appreciate that because what’s happening is the commercial district of Shanghai, Pudong, will be connected to this island by new rail and tunnel link and then that infrastructure will be extended through the island and then will eventually will join the North and the South side of the Yangtze River. As soon as that infrastructure goes in, the pressure on development all along that road will be absolutely intense and so it will happen whether it’s Arup in there designing it or whatever, people will just move out of Shanghai because of the frenetic nature of that city and the pressure and the small spaces everybody will be crammed into and they will just go and live there in shanties and it will become an ecological disaster. So by doing it in a controlled way is hopefully going to make it better than it otherwise would have been.
Lionel Hehir
But you had a fantastic design brief, Andy, because you were commissioned to design an eco-city so it’s your concept of the eco-city which is being implemented and that’s covering, if I know Arup and you, that’s covering absolutely everything. You aren’t just talking about the energy and the transport element in the design process?
Andy Mace
That is very arrogantly saying that we’ve got the solution and I think we’ve pushed things on a long way but there are huge issues still outstanding to do with things like food production and all sorts of things that need massive areas and they’re just not solved yet.
Jane Blackburn
You’ve got the answer haven’t you?
John Thackara
Middlesbrough. Shanghai and Middlesbrough, we’re going to twin them and Toronto, yeah.
Jane Blackburn
Urban farming.
Lionel Hehir
Building the communities, Jane’s point is community is the key. You’re starting with a blank sheet of paper there and building the community –
John Thackara
Brownfield is a rather, were there any people on this brownfield site or is there now?
Andy Mace
No there are some migrant agricultural workers, but not permanent residents.
John Thackara
It’s the same with Thames Gateway, the Olympics is all empty, it’s all empty they say and there’s actually people there and wildlife and all sorts of eco-systems but to a developer it’s empty because it’s not filled with velodromes and Holiday Inns.
Andy Mace
I go back to the point I made earlier, it will happen. Once that road is there people will just go and move there and it will be horrendous.
Lionel Hehir
Because people are the key and you can’t control it, that’s the difficult bit.
Andy Mace
You have to start somewhere designing these things and because it’s a massively complex matrix of interaction between transport and food and people and when you’re trying to design these things you have to start somewhere. So by trying to tease out some of the key linkages between the type of land use and how far people need to travel backwards and forwards to work and get work and their houses close together, really simple stuff, you can start to get those key linkages and those are the things that massively impact on people’s use of resources.
John Thackara
It’s simple stuff but do we have the skills to follow the agenda of this conference, you talk about the relationship between food and transport, for example. There’s numbers of people being trained to design vehicles but not so many people being trained or expert at the relationship between food and transportation and mobility? Do we have the right skills to tackle these problems as quickly as we need to? Lionel, you’ve actually done a lot of education and we had this discussion about eco-schools…
Lionel Hehir
Yes, that’s such a difficult question, I really don’t know how to answer that, do we have the skills? What gives me heart is that young people, school kids now, understand the issues that are facing the planet far more than we do. They are really inventive. We are in a programme just last week with a school in Newcastle and their ideas about how the world will be in 2050 were incredible, they are really up to date with climate change concerns, they’re that worried that the planet is dying… [Tannoy announcement] ... There are huge opportunities to embrace the enthusiasm and the aspirations that young children have. I don’t think they are aware of issues like food miles, for example, but they are aware of the global picture. The issue that we have is getting them to understand that what they do in their personal lives and what their parents do actually can affect that change. That’s quite hard.
John Thackara
This lot are wilting, I can see the weary faces out there. Right. That was ten minutes five minutes ago anyway, but it’s fine. You want me to end don’t you? I heard somebody else get one question. Nico wants to ask one but I know what he’s going to ask. Somebody at the back, yes?
Audience member
Basically what it’s about is getting the message out to the masses. Instead of maybe looking in little pocket areas like Northumbria or East Yorkshire, wherever it might be, or Dorset, how do you feel about message being brought across using soaps? Things people interact with on a passive level each and every day, probably some of you guys as well. So you go there and it’s a learning, maybe you go out there and do documentaries and stuff, but people participating, it breaks up the normal rhythm of the way they lead their lives. But the soap operas are intractable, they talk about all day, they’ll get involved with the storylines. So do you think maybe there’s an onus on screenwriters, art directors, production designers, to work alongside people in the real world looking at these issues and embedding them into the stories, maybe that’s another way of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters evolving together and learning?
Belinda Williams
We don’t all watch soaps, that’s part of the problem with that probably. I think certainly the issue of young people telling their parents to do things is a strong one, my daughter says to me stop running that tap when you clean your teeth, so that’s a powerful one I think coming from people. I think in terms of some kind of campaign, I think you’re right, you could create a campaign which perhaps in the same way that we did with our Welcome one, what makes you feel welcome. So it’s about thinking of something of a way of actually engaging people in looking at their everyday lives and what it is they do that actually can effect the future and their children’s future. So yeah if we could think one up between us then you could have a large-scale national campaign around that idea. What does water mean to you? I don’t know, but something, but literally I think you’re absolutely right, until people really understand that every time you flush a chain that’s what you’re doing you’re not going to change anything. My son is 17 and says I’m going to have the largest carbon footprint on the earth, he really isn’t interested in it, and so how will you get him interested?
John Thackara
Nothing personal, they’re waving at me from the front here. Can I just say we’re going to stop and there’s a thing afterwards, over to Jeremy. Can I thank you very much for coming along.