Binary minded


- The end of the line

If we only consider things from the polarised view of entrenched thinking, we can only see in two dimensions. Binary thinking cannot help resolve the misdirected situation we have got ourselves into.

If, for example, we only try to address poverty through wealth creation, this is really providing more market fodder; just feeding the machine.

New perspectives around quality of life, self-sustenance and genuine sustainability are needed. But we know that already; it is little more than wheeling out tired platitudes.

How can we re-configure, to use aspects of current practices to achieve positive synergy rather than spiralling downwards with depleting finite resources?

After thousands of years of civilisation is money worship, leisure shopping and celebrity reverence really the best that we can do?





 



Loos' and Colomina's



- On mediated consumption
It is important to consider that we are increasingly watching the world from a mediated perspective, rather than the actual. How often are we somewhere special, take a photo, then look at the shot on the camera screen, rather than the actual thing or place still in front of us?

This dictates that the mediated experience means we not only miss much of the detail around us, but more importantly the overall experience, which would include sounds, smells, context, and even the experience of how we arrived at such a place, so we lose out on the arbitrary possible occurrences that we had not planned for, which can lead to alternative experiences, events and even life paths.

Experience has the built in notion of chance. If it is true that we can only really control half to three quarters of our outcomes, the other part is relevant. But we usually assume its influence will be bad. Perhaps that smaller part is sometimes actually the most interesting and more important bit that provides path splits and tangents as we meander through life. 

In our heads we direct our lives very closely, but that is not really the case. It is our socially conditioned outlook that will not acknowledge the reality, and so our mind edits it out. This in turn accumulates and resists the 'random', which we perceive as ‘other’ and so our base senses harden against it.

The Winchmore Hill shoot:








Helix Street

- Ode to the flâneur

click image to enlarge
Just passing through
With pressure of seemingly ever increasing population numbers in urban areas and the resultant expansion, the distances required to travel are pushing moving around to levels where they are too dominant a proportion of time spent. (Although global population growth could be stabilising - see Pearce F, Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash, 2010, Bantam)

We are experiencing many cases of ‘urban sprawl’ type expansion of cities which brings issues of lack of access to basic facilities, as they are often not ‘officially’ recognised areas, as well as the travel issues. Sometimes these areas can function quite well from a socio-economic despite poor physical conditions, so should not be written off as areas just for clearance and re-development; whatever they are, they are people’s homes.

Enforced commuting of large numbers of people over large distances is unsustainable, both in terms of people’s quality of life and in level of transport required to support that volume of daily movement. So there is a need to find ways to reduce the amount of enforced travel; to allow a higher proportion of travel by choice (within a reduced overall level) and for it to once again become part of a pleasurable pastime or experience, be it by car, bus, train, bicycle or on foot. [For the ‘on foot’ consideration - in many ways the most important - see additional reference texts for flâneur and psychogeography, below.]

Whilst wandering and promenading are laudable and worthwhile pursuits, here we do not seek directly the notion of the flâneur, but that of being more conscious of experiencing a shared sense of place along the street as a richly layered active space, rather then merely being a route; the traditional difference between a ‘street’ and a ‘road’.
 
Out and about
We increasingly no longer relate to the street as a space in itself, but more just as a means to get to a specific function, which actually diffracts our notion of a 'street'. Therefore, the starting point for the design of the helical street is to explore how to re-link the disparate elements, aspects and activities that constitute the street as a dynamic place - integrated yet layered; the mandate being to re-establish the core aspects of the street, which will cultivate better awareness of others around us and address notions of isolation. This sense of isolation leads to a reduced sense of connection with places we use and the people that constitute them, that itself leads to a reduced sense of community.

Even though how we live is shifting, and the traditional idea of community is perhaps less common - where most people in an area work and live there - it is still important that the evolving notion of community is cultivated. We increasingly have a much wider movement ‘net’ with nodes further apart, in that we live, work and socialise in many different areas, so there is a rich nexus of overlaid social ‘nets’ that constitute places. Merely because people in a place have not come from just that locale, does not invalidate it as a cohesive arena of activity, it just means we need to acknowledge that evolved sensed of community.

If we are more aware of those around us and we operate from a sense of awareness and respect, we can embrace a new sense of camaraderie without necessarily needing to know, or even recognise personally, most of the people around us. This issue relates to the current reduced sense of the ‘civic’, in parallel with the above mentioned isolation, but also from the perspective of reduced governmental investment in civic infrastructure, as some regions, particularly the UK and already to a greater extent the US, become more commercially operated. Where solely in response to unsustainable urban growth, wider nets should be countered; where out of choice or genuinely diverse neighbourhoods, it is more acceptable as a general trend of how society is evolving.


Spineless
The traditional high street serves as the ‘spine’ of a neighbourhood and, ideally, is ‘mixed-use’, with residential flats over a commercial workshop, studio or office, with retail at ground floor. Although many high streets have much empty space above the ground floor, this is more often to do with concerns such as access and loss of retail width - which is easily resolvable - rather than accumulated commercial reasons. (Many high street situations would not see a reduction in commercial value for a slightly reduced retail width to allow residential access from the front, rather than the often unpalatable service area at the rear.) It is the holistic re-establishment of how a street functions that the design seeks.

Each ‘neighbourhood’ of the helical street has a good mix of functions to ensure they can evolve sustainably. Furthermore, different areas can be more focussed to provide a greater diversity of places overall: quiet, busy; cultural, retail; working, residential, which gives a richness and variety of encountering different people and neighbourhoods as when walking through our best cities.

That sections can be chosen as certain distinct types of area with more direct access means overall the helical street tower can support a longer high street equivalent than would be the case at ground level, and still be within walking distance (including use of lifts).

Whilst a key difference is that whilst it is not a through route per se, this is mitigated by the more focussed mix of amenities. Although it could in one sense reduce the breadth of range of people types for chance encounters in any particular place - as people will tend to choose their preferred section and not pass along the whole of the street - this does not reduce the experience of encountering people generally; this will be the same or better, with the more vibrant neighbourhoods encouraging promenading. This is further helped by there being no vehicular traffic (deliveries with the lifts), although cars are not necessarily a problem and can be a benefit in a normal street situation, but are often managed badly. Overall, the three dimensional movement makes for a more cohesive destination.


On the street
The ‘vertical street’ is formed by taking the pavement of a typical street and its adjacent buildings and spiralling them up and around to form a (partially open-sided) tower with the pavement as a helical ramp - the building fabric forming the outer shell of the tower - where pedestrians can walk at their leisure. A central atrium space with lifts (shown as three pairs of circular lift shafts on the model) allows direct access to different ‘neighbourhoods’, analogous to bus stops along a high street.

The vertical street allows visual connection across the central atrium space and along the curve of the street, which creates a sense of place as it ‘contains’ a rolling space as people progress around. This counters the effect of overly straight streets that allow the eye to wander to infinity and thus people to become more psychologically removed. At intermittent intervals up the ‘street’, there are central platforms forming areas of respite within the central space, akin to parks and squares stumbled upon, adding the prospect of surprise to our meanderings.

Inevitably there will some comparisons between the helical street and the ‘streets-in-the-air’, which were part of many housing estate projects built, often in outlying areas, during the 1960s and into the 1970s, particularly in the UK. This isolated people as it was based on divorcing different types of routes so lost ‘critical mass’ and lacked the density of numbers of people, but the helical street has all movement still together and the concentration of functions achieves a higher intensity of use.

Another related phenomenon is shopping malls. The helical street takes some of the better aspects of shopping malls - in principle an active destination - but without the unsustainable weaknesses, such as being internalised and mostly only retail; at best not linking out to the broader community, and at worse, actually taking life away from the main high street (whether adjacent or not). Although, there are street based examples of the ‘out-of-town’ shopping malls in city centres: Liverpool One, which stitches together the main centre with the waterfront, although the highway in between was inexplicably left out of the scheme. Out-of-town ‘works’ (for itself – not surrounding neighbourhood) only until the next one is built nearby which is ‘shinier’. Therefore even developers building malls that are more street based with a broader mix of uses would see a better overall return from this more sustainable version, as long as they retain a longer term interest (which they should) rather than just sell off post-construction.

The modular nature of the helical street could support some ‘chain’ type shops (‘nationals’/ ‘multiples’) in multi-width units, but the small unit layout and step would tend to act as a natural limiter. A few chain type shops can act as a draw, but this needs to be balanced with independent shops and mixed together. So the modular unit being well suited to smaller, typically more independent, shops and activities will be the natural tendency, as well as being part of the management criteria.


Babel
Towers, in principle, could be an appropriate typology to help address some current issues, such as urban sprawl. However, ‘skyscrapers’ have not really evolved as a typology since their inception; essentially accommodation in the tower just ‘fills up’ a structure primarily conceived to be tall. They may have developed almost unrecognisably, but this is really little more than a multiplication: being taller with faster lifts, rather than evolving as such.

One of the key problems with most towers is that of relating to human- and street scale at the base: a lobby in scale with the tower is often out of scale with the human, which then often presents a harsh and unwelcoming environment; the notion of an imposing entrance being impressive having been, thankfully, superceded with a general move towards human centred development, although such anachronisms do persist in too many places. (see Out-of-Scale: Rapid Development in China, Urban Design Journal, issue 99, Summer 2006, Nuffield Press, London)

The second aspect is that of scale and integration of massing. Typically, good high streets would be constituted by four to six storey buildings as a general principle, so a tower touching directly down at ground level would again present an inappropriate scale. Towers emerging from a more human scale podium base of four to six storeys gives a much smoother transition, so integrates better to the adjacent street.

The proposed design may initially appear like a conventional tower. However, as discussed above, it has a fundamentally different access due to the helical ramp, and lifts, which means the way it is used and experienced sets it apart from conventional towers. This is further augmented because the structure is a relatively closely spaced vertical frame between each stack of accommodation spaces, so allows some sections or individual elements to be removed, vertically or horizontally, to form spaces for parks, terraces, light and views out. This configuration can achieve a series of cascading spaces either for an internal space, be it a flat, studio or shop, or as an outside space, such as a park or square. (Ken Yeang has been developing such ideas since the last quarter of the previous century.)

The structure ensures that the whole can evolve sustainably at a variety of scales over time: the whole tower could be replaced in phases, or over a longer period of time in smaller stages. Also individual units can be removed, at construction or later; spaces can be plugged; floors can be joined up or knocked through - horizontally or vertically. Such flexibility and array of spaces can be explored to develop an experience of the tower itself, rather than being merely a function of its height.

Light, air and orientation will be important and are integrated, partially through the openings already mentioned, although these are more for spatial and functional reasons, but primarily through three vertical slots: one double unit width to the North, and two single unit width slots to the South East and South West, all being adjacent to lift lobby platforms so providing views out and clear orientation for people (an issue with circular constructions, particularly when use as navigating landmarks around the city). Detailed light and wind studies will suggest further refinements towards a good overall environment. Lifts are placed at thirds of a revolution around the street, with a full circumference of 150 metres, providing vertical access every 50 metres, in line with good urban design principles for rhythm of cross streets along any conventional high street.

The actual configuration of the street proportion is based on a three storey high building (10 metres) and a 9.5 metre wide street, giving a roughly 1:1 proportion of space, (in section through the street). The street itself will feel wider due to the open inner side, so psychologically push more towards a 1:1.5 wide proportion, both of which are considered decent proportions for high streets. The geometry derives from a series of interconnected variables that need to be finely balanced so that steepness of slope, distance around the circumference, view across the central atrium and height of buildings, achieve a good overall equilibrium.

It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic; of all things physical and metaphysical;  of all things human and all things super-human; of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul; that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function.
– Louis Sullivan, 1865 – 1924


Related references
(drawn from Wiki)

Flâneur 
The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun ‘flâneur’ - which has the basic meanings of ‘stroller’, ‘lounger’, ‘saunterer’, or ‘loafer’. Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of ‘flâneur’ (originally from the verb flâner - ‘to stroll’) - that of ‘a person who walks the city in order to experience it.’

While Baudelaire characterised the flâneur as a ‘gentleman stroller of city streets’, he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. The idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.

David Harvey asserts that ‘Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of the dandy and flâneur, a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other’. (Paris: Capital of Modernity 14).

[The dandy aspect of flâneur achieves new relevance with shopping emerging as a leisure activity and increasing celebrity reverence as an aspiration, which twin pursuits continue to supplant both faith and ritual. These two notions being a ‘hard-wired’ part of our social cohesion, but have been so dominated by religion we treat them as synonymous with it. But as religion wanes, a vacuum is left, which shopping and celebrity reverence rush into to fulfil these notions of faith (hope) and ritual (celebration) - Ingenu]

The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur's active participation in and fascination with street life, while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed and anonymity of modern life in the city.

The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel, began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel theorises that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a ‘blasé attitude’, and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being.

- ‘There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savouring the multiple flavours of his city.’ - Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York

- ‘The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world “picturesque”’ - Susan Sontag, 1977 essay, On Photography

Psychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’ Another definition is ‘a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.’

In 1956, the Lettrists joined the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus to set a proper definition for the idea announced by Gil J. Wolman, Unitary Urbanism – ‘the synthesis of art and technology that we call for must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated.’ It demanded the rejection of both functional, Euclidean values in architecture, as well as the separation between art and its surroundings. The execution of unitary urbanism corrupts one's ability to identify where ‘function’ ends and ‘play’ (the ‘ludic’) begins, resulting in what the Lettrist International and Situationist International believed to be a utopia where one was constantly exploring, free of determining factors.  

The art of nesting

- Art from the back of a lorry 
Prologue
Bringing art to the masses;
Art
sets you free?

Freedom is the absence of coercion:
x - coercion = freedom
- Friedrich A. Hayek

Back in the country
The ‘rural’ area is not really rural, at least in an homogeneous sense – See Id of the Ingenu, June 2010: Galería FAR, How to invigorate struggling rural economies; para 10, City to countryside - transects

This article is a complement to the above piece, which outlines the broader context. This article offers a practical possibility – solutions for a shrinking planet.

Small and medium sized villages sit within rural landscape, but are themselves often quite compact – urban - albeit in a small concentration. These are served by main villages, which are usually quite close by. As such, the issue of transport becomes more salient, but usually because there is less of it than larger fully urban areas, which have continuity  of built up areas between centres, unlike rural places. This discrepancy therefore masks a number of issues, most significantly that that rural areas are often considered to be completely different - the opposite - to the urban.

We take transport in cities for similar reasons to people in rural areas – to get from one area to another which provides something that the area where we live does not have, be it shopping, friends, employment or leisure activities. So despite very different appearances and experiences of moving around, there may be much more in common between urban and rural areas than is often credited. Two areas where there is very little in common, however, seem to be general attention and inward investment to rural areas, be it economic or infrastructure (social and physical).

Rural areas can have a tendency to only provide a more subsistence type of services and facilities. This would tend to include some leisure, such as eating, drinking, sport, but typically not much culturally related. Whilst we must remain aware of the dangers of the notion of foisting art on the masses to ‘improve them’, there is the broader implication that merely having ‘art’ as a presence will offer an additional strand of influence, so opening up new possibilities and opportunities for people living away from metropolitan centres. This only really represents an ‘evening up’ of the exposure between those living cities and those in rural areas. Why would people in rural areas be any less likely to enjoy and benefit from cultural activities than people living in larger urban areas. Rural area dwellers can also be urbane.

A lorry load of art
The shipping container offers a standardised way to transport goods, even if those goods are pieces of art. And if used as a gallery ‘ready made’, ie with the pieces already mounted on the inside of a container fitted out as a display space, it provides an almost immediately available gallery. Because the container is standardised and common, it offers a much easier and cheaper way to transport and display pieces of artwork, and therefore be able to more regularly change the display at any given location. It does though require other services to form a complete array of gallery services.

The containerised galleries simply plug into (back-up to) the core facility building, which permanently holds administration, other galleries, lecture facilities, shop, toilets, etc. This offers complementary spaces and services to the, admittedly narrow, container galleries.

A container could also just be in car parks, but the idea is that people come across these facilities, particularly at the village level, in the same places that they would be when going about their regularly daily business, not a special destination per se. The people that already go to cultural destinations will already tend to go to existing cultural places, so serving them does not achieve an expansion of exposure of cultural works, although perhaps more easily visited if it were available in smaller towns.

Although the larger scale two facilities need to be incorporated into the urban fabric, they could be part of an out of town retail park or shopping mall. Also, these places being frequented by many people, means the car park would offer a viable location for just a lone container, albeit staffed.

The art facility falls into three types, each to serve a different catchment area, but to develop regularity and links of usage between each other both up and down the scales, to tie in with how people use the various urban centres available to them over different time periods: daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, annually.

The three facility types sit hierarchically – nested - in that each is assumed to provide the services, facilities and amenities of that of the scale below. Outlined here are centre profiles which each of the three types will serve:

Main village
Serves as hub for smaller (residential only) villages nearby: has banks, cafes, bars, restaurants, food shops, some comparison retail, clinic and post office;
Employment only serving facilities provided;
Local town hall;
Bus service to at least nearest market town;
Population circa 2000
- trips daily/ weekly. Less than half an hour away



Market town
Serves as main centre for that district, including weekly market, significant comparison retail, leisure and library;
Employment serving facilities provided, as well as some general businesses, but only limited to those serving that district area;
Employment training and enterprise development;
District town hall;
Train station;
Population circa 20,000
- trips weekly/ monthly. Less than one hour away

 

Regional centre
Serves as capital of metropolitan region;
Includes services and amenities up to theatres, galleries, symphony hall;
Regional Government offices/ administration of political region;
Employment up to companies operating at a national level;
Colleges to degree/ masters level;
National rail station and airport;
Population circa 200,000
- trips monthly/ seasonally. Less than two hours away
 
(Schools are not included in the three centre profiles because they are provided to 18 years of age at the smallest: the main village scale, so are common to all three)

As outlined above is only the typical scenario. It is, for example, possible for an international company to be established in a medium sized village – a company not primarily serving the area in which it is situated, but merely taking advantage of the area for the services and amenity that area affords its staff . This provides the opportunity for some employment over and above that serving the local area.

By developing connections through the presence of all three key scales of centre, people can use the most local outlet to find out about other events at the larger facilities, and a small part of an exhibition can be displayed around villages on quite a rapid turnaround, almost as a taster of the full exhibition which it can plug back into back at the main facility.

They would also form hubs for readings, performances, internet access, information about related events, employment opportunities in the creative sector, and grants for enterprise around cultural businesses.




The edge of unknown



(As a species) we believe we understand much more than we actually do;

Take, for example, a scientist involved in research in human biology that makes a discovery that could possibly lead to a way to treat a disease or condition. If, when considering how such a treatment might be applied, the underlying assumption is that we believe we understand, say, ninety percent of how the human body works, we would reasonably propose a relatively risky and invasive procedure, as what we do not know of the body is relatively little, so the possible consequences of unknown factors is low. But what if we only understand, say, fifty percent of how the body works? Suddenly, the risks are hugely amplified.

As such, we often stride too confidently deep into unknown territory, whether it be science, politics or economics, with the often woeful consequences that go with that intransigent conceit.

We lead ourselves to believe we are in familiar territory, but it is a mirage; a simulacratic notion of something similar to a place that we believe know, when we do not.
   

On a dark winters night, as we approach an isolated house in the distance, the dim glow from the window of a warm, fire-lit room is an enticing image.

We remain far from home.

Galería F&R - Out in the country

- How to invigorate struggling rural economies

Back and forth
Existing and long term rural dwellers notwithstanding, there is a seemingly unassailable inertia for people to move to the ‘big city’. There are a vast range of reasons why this might be, but that is not the focus here. We are witnessing the impact of this exodus, from the impoverishment of quality of life, such as people living in shanty towns, to the increase in natural disasters as the climate shifts in reaction to both accumulative resource depletion and increasingly unsustainable behaviour at a global scale, at least partially caused by this migration. This perceived reduction on quality of life from the rural to urban shift is to some extent premised on the false notion that ‘life in the country’ is all ‘sweetness and delight’.

In contrast to this, there is an emerging aside around understanding why there is an increasing number of people going the other way, from large conurbations to semi-rural environments: Why live in ‘rurality’; because of an idealised notion of ‘lifestyle’, or because it is simply not the ‘city’? What is there that is of itself to live there for? Is it escapism; a romantic return to Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, memories of a simpler life akin to childhood, as if the ‘city’ life is merely typified by pace, superficiality, materialism, or perhaps just a reaction to an accumulative lack of proximity to nature.

Our interest here is to explore some aspects of the nature of the semi-rural living environment and in what ways the economic diversity could be improved towards making them more sustainable places, and therefore a more viable place to live, other than those who already live there or move just to retire (and skew local resources by typically being older and thus, for example, being a bigger draw on local healthcare). In this way, we address, albeit in a small way, the one way movement outlined above, but also how to begin to re-invigorate the seemingly forgotten rural living environments.

There is a specific location used as a case study, which will be referred to descriptively, but the identity of which is not revealed, partially because it is meant representatively of the myriad of similar situations around the world, and partially because, hypocritically, it is a place I frequent often and I like it the way it is. Although, I acknowledge the narrowness and fragility of the local economy, and thus we have the reason for this article.

[For further reading on sustainable small towns, see also the excellent: Knox, Paul L & Heike Mayer, Small Town Sustainability: Economic, Social and Environmental Innovation, Basel, Birkhauser, 2009]

In the city
In many ways, we are emerging from narrower and more idealistic planning approaches of the twentieth century for the development of our towns and cities, into more integrated modes that consider both the surrounding context and how people actually live, and increasingly take the given situation as a starting point.

This equates to a much better understanding of how cities work, and by extension, what we need to do to improve them. As such, it becomes more to do with political will as to whether, and to what extent, we engage with, and improve, our neighbourhoods and cities. What this also highlights is the need for regeneration professionals and urban designers to focus on semi-rural environments as well, so that we have a more balanced outlook on how and where people live.

There will of course inevitably be a ‘tail’ behind the leading edge of achieving sustainable regeneration, and indeed this could be quite long, in that it will take a few generations to work through, but as long as lessons learnt can be taken on board, there is good reason to hope we may go in the right direction, although there is by no means any guarantee of this, and inevitably it will vary hugely from area to area around the world, particularly with increasing pressure of commercialisation and the mostly negative implications that go with that.

This should not however lead to the notion that all that has gone before was of no worth; what is crucial is that we take the relevant and best of what has come before, and integrate it with current and emerging practices, when they are deemed, consensually, to be of worth. It was the ‘clean sweep’ approach of successive planning epochs through the twentieth century that gave such a polarised series of places that form many of the areas currently struggling.

City to countryside
It is now the consensus that we have passed the point where over half of the world’s population live in an urban environment. However, this still leaves around three billion people in a predominantly rural situation. Also, to what extent does the suburban (non-urban, non-rural) situation come to bear? There are many gradations from dense urban to fully rural, but in reality it is rarely as cleanly defined as the transects diagrams. [The notion of ‘suburbs’ is clearly related here but outside of the scope of this article, albeit to say that the semi-rural situation under discussion here is quite distinct from a suburban, or ‘semi-urban’, situation, although they are both non-urban.]

 
The reality is not really reflected in the transect diagram: rural areas, and indeed others too to a lesser extent, are quite mixed, with some villages being quite compact, but sat in a wholly rural context. If we are to consider an area holistically, it is not only about acknowledging this mix, but also, for example, how each of these function and how they interact together, as well as considering the non-physical, from transport and access to education, employment, leisure and culture: the socio-economic. All together, we have the main three strands of what might be termed holistic sustainability: economic, environmental and social.

By increasing the focus on the neglected lives of those beyond the edges of our large urban areas, we can begin to explore the rural situation, which may form a different kind of conurbation: a collection of small market towns and villages acting in concert, but connected by rurality rather than urban sprawl. This would allow us to see more clearly how these small ‘pockets’ of urban areas connect with their rural areas, and what the nature of the inter-connection between each pocket is, and how each functions, as well as revealing whether the role of each complements the others, rather than compete, to form a cohesive whole across the valley. This in turn could lead to ways to better connect large town and city dwellers with the rural hinterland that supports their city - water, food, waste, transport. Essentially moving towards this notion of a more holistic sustainability.

Employment diversity
The area under consideration is a collection of around seventeen villages set in a valley, with the three larger ones lying on the main valley road through, and the rest located deeper into the mountains off the main road. The three main villages tend to have most of the shops, restaurants and civic functions, such as town hall, doctors, banks and post office. Being in one valley, they all very much feel as one place, with a sense of camaraderie.

The area is predominantly mountainous and wooded on the lower slopes, but close to the coast, and has cheese and cider as two of the main local products, there being a lot of goat farming in the area, and good climate for apples. The area attracts a good degree of tourism for the mountains, providing a good range of activities from walking and mountain climbing to caving and canoeing.

As might be expected, the area is busy through the Summer, with hotels being mostly full. However, whilst it is by no means a solely tourist area that closes down in the winter, there are far fewer tourists out of season and many hotels, bars and restaurants struggle through this period.

Which brings us to the nub of the problem: there is an oversupply of mediocre bedspaces, not commensurate with the high quality of the landscape the area enjoys. This situation was exacerbated by the stoking of the building industry with well intentioned rural development grants from the European Union, leading to the (substantially true) stereotype whereby women work in hospitality, and men work in construction.

This situation has been self-fuelling with a cycle of: cheap bedspaces – oversupply – lack of job options – too much construction – cheap bedspaces. Although one half of this equation has recently changed significantly with a large and rapid drop in the level of construction as part of a broader situation countrywide.

This situation was at least partially created by the aforementioned European Union grants in the latter quarter of the twentieth century for rural households to convert buildings into hospitality accommodation. (The reasons for this are discussed below in Demographic context.) Crucially, they were grants rather than loans, so unsurprisingly, popular. This led to an explosion of bedspaces, which, as discussed above, may be mostly full in peak high season, but most of the time are not, and led to the situation where even a decent hotel room can be had for under fifty Euros per night. This has lead people to become reliant on un-sustainable business models, and not focusing on other possible methods of making a living. Any future economic development would need to give detailed consideration to the level and range of types of accommodation.

Bedtime
The bedspaces would need to distil down over time, but would be fine initially while new strands of employment are seeded and until they gain traction. The worst of the bedspaces should be the ones to disappear, so the quality rises and becomes more commensurate with the nature of the place and builds the perception of the area in general. This in turn will drive the need for better support services and facilities such as restaurants bars, shops, tour companies, leisure services, etc. There are excellent views from many places in the area, but much accommodation relies on merely being in the area of beautiful landscape without directly taking advantage of it per se.

An increase in the diversity of employment options would address the issue as well as the exodus of the local young, and help attract others to the area. Whilst the nature of the locality (landscape) may be a direct attraction for many visitors and businesses, it can also be a secondary reason for others: a media business, for example, that only needs a decent broadband connection, who may wish to have a beautiful place to locate to without that being directly beneficial to the business itself. Although, quality of life and location for employees is a major factor when companies consider re-location, or better still, businesses that develop from local talent.

[Note: The base case that it is the mountainous nature of the area that is of inherent value is acknowledged by the local government, and is protected.]

Demographic context
In the second half of the twentieth century, the industry that this area was well known for went into substantial decline. This led to an exodus to other parts of Europe of a large part of the workforce, many of whom have now returned in retirement.

The current situation is further exacerbated in that there was in effect not just a lost generation, but a line drawn stopping future generations in the area for certain families: The people that went to work in countries such as France, Belgium and Germany around the 1970’s for a significant part of their working lives, and have returned in retirement, tend to have children who have stayed in their parent’s working country, and in most cases are unlikely to move to back. Many of the returnees lament this situation, questioning why their children do not want to return, but seemingly not realising, or at least acknowledging, that their children were born and raised elsewhere, so consider that to be home. This represents a situation worse than the common exodus of the young due to lack of, or perception of lack of, employment opportunities, but a partial stem in the future population from people native to the area. This also increases a sense of isolation in the retired generation who find difficulty in comprehending that their adult children do not want to 'return', when in reality they have never really had a connection with the area, other than through their parents as an idealised vicarious notion.

The tenuous connection represented by the property owned by the parental generation that will pass to their children - tenuous because it is probably unwanted in the most part - could possibly represent an opportunity. If the area can be invigorated economically, and these properties can be brought forward through planning policy and political will to be viable properties, occasional holiday visits could be an opportunity to encourage some people to settle in the area. There is much to offer, but the leap from nice place for a holiday is a long way from good place to live. If this could be broadened further to attract others whose families are not originally from the area who wish to settle in there, this would add a better pool of experience which itself would help diversify employment and enrich life in the valley.

Rural art foundation
The role of creatives in regeneration is already well documented, so the benefits and issues around that can be left aside here, although it should not be over estimated, but rather properly considered with evidence based analysis of the whats and hows. What is offered here is an example of a small art foundation that hopes be part of diversifying the local economy by attracting a different type of person so widening the scope of the attraction of the area and raising its profile, but in a way not directly related to the landscape, which is its primary draw.

The art foundation would initially provide an artist’s residence with a short, say, four month residency, at the end of which there would be an exhibition, which would run for the duration of the following tenure, once the second – exhibition – building was completed. Before that, the exhibition could be held in the studio, between tenures, or at a local space in one of the small towns nearby, which itself would help to develop its presence and create stronger links.

By providing both a studio and residence, as well as a situation that is relatively isolated and devoid of distractions, apart from stunning scenery and great cuisine, artists could focus on developing the work. This would be offered to artists, with little restriction on media, who have a clear idea or body of work to explore, so probably would not be recent students who would need tutoring.

As it became more established, it could reach out to the local community in more direct ways, even with some things as simple as access to broadband internet connection, which would help prevent such an enterprise existing in isolation from the local economy, as well as exposing people to a broader range of experiences and possible opportunities. Also, visitors to exhibitions would be using local hotels and restaurants.

Network
Artists in residence will come from their own networks, well developed in some cases, albeit perhaps informal, and therefore would provide access to them, as well as bringing attention to the area from those networks. These networks act as support and knowledge sharing for artists, and do not need to be wholly physical. This could be further developed into an open studios network, with an annual 'festival', providing public interaction and artist exposure.

Therefore, there would be a need for a ‘hub’ to act as centre and coordinate activities, which this foundation could fulfil. Initially it would have a base of a few existing artists and creatives, and build up the network and attract funding, which would raise the profile and achieve a ‘critical mass’, which in turn would bring more people to the area.

It would be important to integrate into the area in a number of ways, the nature of which need to be established, and build capacity for new jobs to emerge, further capacity and opportunity for which would hopefully emerge as the enterprise gathered momentum.

It is anticipated that artists would be drawn from both national and international arenas. This would not only draw attention from an international perspective, but allow a reciprocal focus on developing a higher profile abroad. These would act symbiotically to attract both attention and funding.

Summer school
Once the foundation was well established and financially sustainable, with regular exhibitions appealing to a ‘loyal’ following and other gallery contacts, it would be able to consider a broader range of programme.

One of the four annual tenures could be now taken for a Summer school, the media of which could vary each year: art, theatre, design, film. The contacts developed through the art foundation could be used to bring in required tutors, who would live in the studio house if not local, while the gallery building becomes the group studio, (with around twelve students living downstairs). Students who would perhaps not get such an opportunity otherwise would form the bulk of the group, perhaps from establishing contacts with a colleges and NGOs around the world – assuming that is possible in an un-patronising manner. This would provide groups of different cultural backgrounds, and it would be this that would be taken as the leitmotif, and its counterpoints, to be explored and used to evolve fresh work. For this to have a foil, some local students would be included in the group. This would set up the possibility of exchange programmes, where a small group of local students visit the places of the national and international students.

In the end
The art foundation is not intended as a full solution to making the local economy healthy, but as a change in the dynamic and a salient marker that other things are possible, signalling the way forward for others to acknowledge and release their own entrepreneurial tendencies.