This is the second installent of a series of projects to come out of our Power of 8 research trip to ‘Acres Green: The Way Life Should Be’.

…the hypnotic dance patterns of small, glowing insects against the warm colours of the dark sky left us in awe, and we wanted to know more. We stopped two people dressed in large netted clothing walking down the street. They introduced themselves as ‘hivers’ and told us the story behind these mysterious creatures:

These glowing creatures were the Beamer Bees or Beamer Signum Apis Melifera, formulated by a community of biologists and hired bio-hackers to service under-pollinated trees, plants and vegetables due to the disappearance of honey bees.

The Beamer Bees are guided by radiowaves and electromagnetic landscapes to crops requiring pollination. They are produced in a limited number each year, and their interactions with the bumble bees and other creatures are tightly monitored. It seems that the Acres Green residents can buy licenses to call the bees. License holders use the bugles or other personal mobile devices which transmits radiowaves that the bees can detect. The bees follow the waves to their source.

We realised how the Beamer Bees had became central to the Acres Green ecosystem and people seemed to be able to live in harmony with them. We see a glimpse of one family’s everyday interactions with the new creatures. Practical, yet stylish netted fashion ensured comfort on the way to a party, Gardeners who missed out on licenses opportunistically used wifi routers to attract bees to their plants.

Discovering unexpected cross-pollinated flowers became a new hobby, their daughter was allowed to keep a glowing bee as a bedside pet.

The Beamer honey syrup and royal jelly, with its unique medicinal qualities is prescribed by GPs for allergies. 

The first installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 1: the electric aurora.

In the preface to his 1957 bestiary ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ Jorge Luis Borges describes a child’s first visit to the zoo. With wonder and joy the child marvels at the strangeness and mysteries of the unfamiliar creatures that they have never before seen. This encounter with a zoo of the real sits within the catalogue of a zoo of mythology, inhabited by ‘necessary monsters’ which are imbued with the dreams and fears of those who conjured them.

Today our idealistic views of the natural world are becoming outmoded. We are beginning to encounter a new form of nature that seems born of the scientists of myth and allegory. The augmented body, genetic modification and neo biological invention is now confronting us with the
utterly novel reality of engineered ‘monsters’. This project engages with this call to redefine the very nature of nature by exploring the potential of monstrous myths and fictions as critical tools with which to engage with emerging environmental conditions and the evolving perception of nature in contemporary culture.

These questions are developed through “Specimens of Unnatural History”, a contemporary recasting of the bestiaries of the past As a zoological voyeur it explores the savannas of body modification, anime, taxidermy and biotechnology to gaze out across the near future population of this augmented wilderness.

This first instalment is an electric aurora. Thousands of these creatures swarm like locusts through the night sky, glowing within illuminated clouds.

These monsters form critical instruments through which to view the potential of a transformed nature, perverted by the hybridization of culture and technology.

Darting to the safety of the shadows a biotech ferret munches on its prey…

The fourth installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 4: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret.Carefully we watch our step as annoying bioluminescent billboards scamper about the pavement looking to catch someones attention…

The liquid twitter of nesting birds rings, parched leaves crackle and young trees trudge achingly feeling for the right weather. The warming sun trickles through the canopy of this migrating forest as it chases climate change across the globe in the morning light of a day yet to come.

See ‘The Electric Aurora’ in the previous Post for a further description of the concepts behind the project.

Urban heat islands? Sink estates? Windswept alleys? The Mobile Mountain solves all your urban problems… for a limited season only! Read on to explore TTT’s latest riff on microclimate infrastructures…

I. The Problem of Public Space
While electronic and social networking technologies threaten to totally dematerialize our experience of the ‘public’, the notion of physical public space remains a constant human requirement as more and more people live in closer proximities within cities.

Increased privatisation and demographic fragmentation more often than not render the city’s public spaces as locii of dysfunction as opposed to offering the liberties of urbanity.

II. The Problem of Climate Change
Personal choices in the city often hinge on local weather conditions. Will I go out today? What will I wear? Can I sit outdoors? Ways of manipulating microclimates will in the future be deployed to create a regime of public infrastructure responsive to climate at a local level. Mitigating changing climate patterns at a personal level will make individual choice more predictable whilst at the same time allowing public gatherings to form where they may have been excluded previously due to urban heat islands, wind downdrafts or microlocal weather shifts.

autumn

III. Mobile Mountain
MBL.MTN is a project for a small artificial mountain that regulates the temperature of its interior and thus provides a year-round indoor/outdoor venue for public gatherings.

The MBL.MTN is portable, able to be towed from location to location. It can be deployed for a variety of uses and locations including: a hub for local interest groups, a stage for community events, a growing platform for seasonal edibles, and a marketplace to sell them! It becomes an attractive place in the city making otherwise uncomfortable or unsafe areas habitable again. It provides relief to a summer urban heat island; a warm hearth at an evening outdoor festival; or shelter in the rainy season.

Not being tied to any one location, it is free of the associations that might have built up over a period of time that render some some spaces dysfunctional and unsafe. Whilst at the same time it is innately adaptable in its appearance and character.

We propose that a whole series of structures based on the MBL.MTN template would together create an infrastructure of mobile public spaces - nothing short of a wholesale reinvigoration of the way we use outdoor spaces in the city!

summer

IV. Building Community
MBL.MTN exploits the emerging technology of phase-change materials (PCMs) as a way of effectively storing heat within less dense construction materials. A modular system of blocks filled with wax-based PCMs allows the structure to store solar heat efficiently without the means of any active energy input. The MBL.MTN stays cool during summer and warm in winter.

A modular approach allows assembly with low specialist constructional knowledge. This has the benefit of allowing local communities to participate in building together MBL.MTN incrementally over a period of days, months or years, and to whatever shape is appropriate for the local culture.

winter

A full house at TINAG’s Festival of Urbanism witnessed a healthy debate over whether dystopia offers us a productive way of looking at the future. Chaired by Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today’s Darryl Chen, a strong cast of emerging and seasoned urbanists responded to the topic with an incredibly broad range of projects. Click the vid for an introduction to the theme. Full documentation will be included in a forthcoming Critical Cities volume. But for now, here are some (out of context) highlights from the discussion:

Amin Taha: The visions we had of our project were initially horrific visions. Someone described it as Bond villain chic… some mad person’s utopia.

Finn Williams: Both utopias and dystopias rely on a cynicism about the present.

Austin Williams: There is nothing cynical about me. I am critical. I am skeptical, but not cynical.

Tomas Klassnik: I challenge the idea that Ikea was a second rate version of the Bauhaus, whereas maybe it was the perfect realization of what they set out to achieve.

Darryl Chen: Our project was an exercise in design and an exercise in the opposite of design, because we imagined how our designs might have a life beyond the designer’s remit - how they might be subverted by other forces that we’d be happy to accept beyond questions of good and bad.

Austin Williams: Design may alter the face of the earth, but ultimately design doesn’t change the world.

Liam Young: Pure fantasy is indulgent. The speculative project is only worthwhile if it’s based on some kind of rigour, analysis, or some kind of critical problem to start with.

Alex Warnock-Smith: None of the projects we’ve shown tonight was successful. They’ve all failed since we weren’t able to implement them.

Liam Young: Perhaps they have a life apart from their implementation, that they can find traction and generate a set of ideas around them that’s divorced from whether or not they are built.

Elena Pascolo: Design is not an end product. The power of design is as a tool for thinking.

This project witnesses the result of the London Borough of Sutton’s desire to form England’s first “sustainable suburb” in the outer reaches of Greater London. What was first a twinkle in a councillor’s eye led to Sutton’s local government to write a policy document safeguarding Hackbridge as a showcase of carbon-positive living at the scale of the urban district. Sped by compulsory purchases and decanting of a small handful of resistant residents, the process gained more and more momentum until the milestone formation of the Green Grass Management Trust. First functioning as a para-governmental management arm of the fledgling district, the Green Grass MT gained in stature to be a renegade local government in its own right. As more and more people signed up to live within the confines of the newly established urban Ring, the Green Grass MT became less reliant on government subsidies and eventually became untouchable as a political entity, much to the quiet chagrin of local planners and councillors. Officially a special policy area under the umbrella authority of the borough, the Ring is now in actuality independent and self-sufficient in all respects.

Statistics gathered by the Ring’s inhouse carbon-counting bureaucracy show that the overwhelming response by Londoners to sign up started to drop off after reaching the 3000 mark, indicating that enthusiasm for a genuine carbon-positive commitment was finite. Nevertheless, the vibrancy and almost obsessive nature of life within the Ring is testament not only to a fervent commitment to carbon reduction, but to a socially-reformed way of life.

The Ring’s carbon-counting bureaucrats also reveal the extent to which the Ring acts as a carbon sink for the rest of the borough. Able to offset 19,000 tonnes of CO2 and produce 68,800 MWh/year surplus heat and electricity, this productive powerhouse effectively represents 22% of the borough’s residential energy requirement, whilst also recycling and methane-harvesting the borough’s waste. Clearly the potentials of this urban configuration to replicate itself across London’s suburbs are apparent. And not surprisingly some of the greatest supporters of the Ring are the biggest polluting residents of the adjoining districts who (as it has been well documented in local press) are more than happy to give them a “reason to be there” [1]. To date there has been no civil unrest between these two extreme poles of the demographic spectrum, indeed the Ring’s border is so ingeniously constructed that little contact need be made to the outside world at all. The few concessions – the Propaganda and Visitor Centre and Recycling Dating and Recruitment Centre among them – are promotional exercises that serve the interests of the Ring itself.

With years yet before any adequate assessment can be made, debate rages as to whether the Ring belongs in the category of Visionary Pioneer or the long lineage of failed Utopian Experiments. For the time, we can only say we have been offered a glimpse of Salvation by Urbanism.

[1] Sutton Guardian, 28 May 2008.

“Where The Grass Is Greener” documents a radical alternative in contemporary living, an urban infrastructure, a social experiment, a political statement…. Three thousand residents and counting. In London’s outer suburbs, a community has gathered walling themselves off from the rest of society. These postcards bear testament to their vision.

During the course of the 07/08 academic year a new school of architecture was formed in London. It was not celebrated in the university guides, it was not visible as a player in the end of year exhibition circuit but it was there lurking below the surface.  In this year Liam Young from Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today taught a design studio in 4 separate universities, choosing each studio so that together they covered every year of architectural education from first year to final year.

Although wildly unqualified for such an administrative position Liam had in effect become the head or dean of a school, albeit a new school parasitically embedded in an array of host institutions.  The school has been titled ‘The Menagerie’.  Pictured is its own end of year catalogue made from the stitched together unit pages printed from the host universities own publications. It is planned to celebrate the end of the year with a graduation roller disco.

Perhaps this is a new model for the institution, one that is exploded into fragments, camouflaged within the fabric of the city, co ordinated through blogs, txt messages and the 140 character haikus of twitter.