IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

94 Chapter 4
An Icelandic designer, Halldor Gislason, has also looked into the ways
designers can help rejuvenate localities devastated by the loss of fishing
but where assets remain: harbors, keys, boats, fish factories, etc. In one
town in the north of Iceland, where the trawlers have all been sold off,
Gislason developed a new kind of cultural tourism that features whale
watching and an exhibition space dealing with timber boats and Viking
sailing technology.
These experiences have taught me that among the success factors in
design-for-locality projects, the most important are a real-world context; a
service orientation; a requirement to connect actors in new combinations
and exploit network effects; and above all, an insistence that the incoming
project team work with local people and ensure, where feasible, that expertise
is left behind after the project ends. This kind of bottom-up design
is not easily reconciled with security-driven control of networks.
The beauty of projects like Spark! is that they help citizens perceive their
own locality through fresh eyes. The most valuable service designers and
artists can provide a locality may therefore be to help it develop a shared
cultural vision of the future, but not to design that future for it.
Design-Free Zones
As with networks and infrastructure, so too with localities: Too much of
our world is just too designed. Too much control over networks is detrimental
to the social innovation upon which our future fortunes depend. It
is welcome to note, therefore, that several European cities are contemplating
the protection of design-free situations, or free zones, in which planning
and other top-down, outside-in improvements will be kept at bay to
make space for the kinds of experimentation that can emerge, unplanned
and unexpected, from wild, design-free ground.
It’s tough for planners to embrace a phenomenon that flourishes because
it is not planned, and free-zone promoters face tough opposition from both
security and health and safety officials, who hate the idea of places outside
their control. (Tickets for the Burning Man Festival in Arizona include the
disclaimer that the buyer may suffer injury or death.)
We can learn a lot from the free-form approaches to urban design that
flourished in situations in which the state was collapsing. A project called
Wild City: Urban Genetics involved a group of designers called Stealth in