Design Ideas from the BellLaneCreek.net project in the CYCLISED CITIES at the New London Architecture Building Centre

Cyclised Cities, New London Architecture, 26 Store Street, London WC1E7BT
16 Dec 08 - 30 Jan 09

The Cycle to Cannes charity and London Cycling Campaign have teamed up to ask architects, planners and designers to submit ideas for improving public space in London made possible by a greater emphasis on cycling. These concepts were displayed in the Transport for hospitality suite on The Mall at the Freewheel bike ride on September 21st when they showed to Mayor Johnson and other decision makers and opinion formers. The display moved to the London New London Architecture where it will form the focus of a continuing debate on improving the quality of London's streets.

The quality of our streets today is destroyed by the total dominance of motor vehicles - a shift towards walking and cycling will create a more amenable city. What will a cycling, walking and less car-dependent London look like? The aim is to collect ideas that people are currently working on as well as to encourage them to come up with new solutions as to how specific areas can be improved by design, landscaping and planning.

MArch Urban Design 2008 Show at the Bartlett

BellLaneCreek . net
Information and Telecommunication Technologies have become an integral part of our life and have affected deeply our working and entertainment habits, our whole lifestyle and the way we experience the city.
In what way is information and communication technology changing our lives and how is the city affected by this change?
Is this new kind of lifestyle, which is characterized by "flexibility" and "multiplicity" going to transform the physical image of the city as we know it so far? How is the urban environment going to be affected by the rapidly change of the digital world?
BellLaneCreek.net is a research project, studying ICT’s impact on the image of the city, an experiment that is taking place during the planning, the design, the construction and the inhabitation of a part of London, in order to eventually create
a High-Tech Metropolis with a Humane urban Culture.

BellLaneCreek.net - Phase C: 2010-1011

physical elements -BLC Resaurch Centre for Technology. - More flexit-type buildings and flexible open spaces.
digital elements -More business enter the BLC network, which is connected with the social, educational and industry London network

BellLaneCreek.net - Phase B: 2009-2010

physical elements
- BLC Pedestrian Bridge, which connects Northbank and Southbank.
- BLC Park as a liner green roude including activities and interactions, connecting the existing King George's Park with Hurligham Park.
- BLC Pedestrianised High-Streets, connecting the new BLC London Overgound Station and the existing Wandsworth Town Railway Station with the
new BLC Pedestrian Bridge.
- FlexiCutlure Hall
- More flexi-type buildings

digital elements
-Intelligent street and building lights that can be accessed through the Internet, changing colour and intensity depending on the time of day or on the demands or on the possible artistic interest. Digital street furniture elements, such as coffee tables, bus stops or signs, can display information about menu content, the location of a bus line or the available parking spaces.
-facades that incorporate digital display screen, programmable glass screens for public and private multiuse, programmable awnings that can provide shade and modify spaces along the edge of a building, interactive floors, responsive “water walls” and flexible glass Cubes, bookable on-line for any use.

BellLaneCreek.net - Phase A: 2008-2009

physical elements - London Overground line extension to South West London -The new BLC London Overgound Station. - The Putney Bridge Road extension to the existing River Quarter Square, creating a linear connection between the new BLC Station, the FlexiLife Building and the River Thames Boat Station. This roude is also a gateway of the inner part of the city to Thames. -The Saturday farmer’s market along the above roude. - The BLC Pedestrianised High-Streets, connecting the new BLC London Overgound Station and the existing Wandsworth Town Railway Station with the new BLC Pedestrian Bridge. - Southbank and Northbank continuous roude along Thames. - The FlexiLife Building, the first new kind of flexible buildings to accommodate the new lifestyle of people that use ICT. - The Flexilife Square which is situated between the new BLC Overground station and the new FlexiLife building.
digital elements -Free high-speed Wireless Internet connection all through BLC and the BLC -Community webpage, an online database of every kind of information about BLC; business and services catalogue, online booking spaces, information of what is going on in the place, information about the blc.net project, community blogs etc. -Flexible Life: a 3-D virtual world based on the BLC real place. -Programmable glass screens all over Flexilife Square and roude to Thames.

From a new kind of place that accommodates the ICT's Lifestyle to a High-Tech Metropolis with a humane Urban Culture

The BellLaneCreen.net experiment

Bell Lane Creek, in Wandsworth Borough, was selected to become the pilot site to test ICT’s impact on the future image of the city, in order to create a High-tech Metropolis with a Humane Urban Culture.

Internet and the City

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields.[1] Tim Berners-Lee was the man leading the development of the World Wide Web (with help of course), the defining of HTML (hypertext markup language) used to create web pages, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators). All of those developments took place between 1989 and 1991.[2] "The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location."[3]

Instant communication through email and access to most kind of information are the basic benefits of the internet. The Internet gives us the opportunity to get up to date information through multimedia. Almost everybody can get access to information by browsing, by participating in blogs, or even by subscribing to a portal or an e-magazine or even by receiving news from RSS feeds directly to our email. TV channels and radio stations also emit their programs through the Internet. “You need specialized information? Post a question to the right group and you will get what you want and a dozen more related references. Also, sometimes information ...just comes to you.”[4] Maybe the most interesting part of the internet's development is the free wireless access, provided in a lot of cities of the world, included London.[5]

In our days, the internet provide us the opportunity to cover most of our needs. We are able to work from home, meet our friends through virtual conferences, watch movies and listen to music from our laptop, order food and even “make love”. Are we citizens in the City of Bits?[6] If today, people that have access to the internet are citizens in this type of city, can we give it an image? Can we imagine the City of Bits? Can we then imagine that, if everybody would have access to information technology, this would have been the future image of the city?

In the City of Bits people spent their lives in a very small, smart space that they call it “home”. “Home” is a place where people sleep, get entertained and work. Whereas the industrial revolution forced the separation of home and workplace, the digital revolution is bringing them back together.[7] People telecommute, and do not leave “home” because they do not have to do it. All their needs can be covered there. Information and people “go” there, and goods necessary for survival are being delivered. Place and traveling around has no meaning, every “home” is a centre of the world, a centre of bit's concentration; virtual reality has overlapped and distinguished reality; people live in a Second Life[8] urban environment.

But is this the image we want for our future? People enclosed in their “homes”? Lonely people living in their own virtual reality? What about personal touch? What about face-to-face meetings and human relationships? If we do not meet people and have real contact then there will not be any future cities, because people are not going to exist anymore. And what about people's need to have access to material objects? Human beings will always want to have recourse to materiality.., the more immaterial our lives become the more greater is our corresponding desire for a material world.[9]

Studying UK residents' travel behavior, between 1986-2006, we see an almost constant percentage of business' travellers the last years. We also take under consideration the fact that during the same period, more and more businesses worldwide used IT and the Internet.( t. 6 ) We can assume then, that Information Technology and the communication functions provided by the Internet, have a negative impact on travelling and face-to-face meetings.

On the other hand, several studies taken place in the Netherlands, searching e-shopping versus store-shopping, came to the conclusion that the higher the perceived attractiveness of the city, both in terms of range and convenience of shopping and accessibility, the less Internet users are incline to shop online and to replace the city centre shopping with e-shopping,[10] and that it appears that for most individuals e-shopping is just another way of shopping, complementary to their in-store shopping.[11] BT Futurologists also predict that between 2011 and 2015, people will return to the high-street for personal service.[12]

The City of Bits is a city in the city that we live. It is an invisible, immaterialized network city, that exists in the physical materialized form city, as we so far know and experience it. They both cooperate and coexist, to provide services and goods to their citizens, and make their lives easier and better. Electronic commerce, for example, should not be considered as the replacement of bricks and mortar by servers and telecommunications, but the sophisticated integration of digital network with physical supply chains.[13] We can then imagine several types of new urban networks that information technology, e-commerce, gives us the chance to create:

1. Small business and enterprises can become part of an urban network that provides services and goods as a large business village. For example, all services and shops situated in the same area could create an urban shopping mall[14] many doctors together could create an urban hospital network.

2. Small business, enterprises, and upcoming companies situated in several places all over the city, can provide services to each other, share expenses, technical facilities, common meeting rooms, and all together work as a larger company.

3. If we connect the above network with universities networks, libraries, labs, hotels and restaurants we can then create a new type of urban business park, not as a part of the city but the city itself.

The internet and several computer networks as they decentralize functions can help us think the city itself as a network of networks. That would help small and starting up companies to secure their existence in a global environment and people coming to or living in the city can get informed of what is going on in the area. We could anytime,anywhere get informed from our mobile phone or notebook where is the closest hotel to stay, or where we can find a cheap pair of jeans to buy, a public shower to wash ourselves or a nice event to attend.

The Internet can actually help people to express their opinion and cover their needs. Public participation becomes much more efficient in a society that everybody uses IT. When a local master plan takes place, professionals instead of sending thousands of letters to the residents of the area, could inform them by sending an email. Some people will very easy reply to an e-questioner rather to return a letter. Professionals will then get a better feedback in less time. It could be argued that people with no access to IT will never get inform of what is going on in their area. In this case email could be complementary to the traditional mail. A study on using the Internet for public participation in urban planning process centering around the Case of Yamato City, in Japan, was attempted in 1995.[15] The results shoed that when the master plan was presented on the Internet, the number of participants increased surprisingly, and that the opinion reflection rate was higher than that for the roundtable conference. We must consider the fact that there was an informational gap between citizens who had access to the Internet and those who did not, but since the study took place more than ten years ago, we could say that the gap today would had been less. More master plan projects promote public participation through the Internet, like the "Redevelopment Plan for Creshend City"[16] and the "California coastal sediment management project".[17]

Local councils can create a webpage to inform residents of what is going on in the area and create a blog where people can post their thoughts, opinions, make comments or complaints. Professionals will take these under consideration during the planning and design process. Even communities can create their own virtual network and contact between them. Not that we believe that actions like that promote real socializing, but they bring people together. If people are “connected” they can discuss and decide for issues they are mutually concerned. Of course they can decide to organize a public party in the main street, but they can also realize that what they need is not a new park, but some benches in the square and a projector to show movies during summer time.

A recent technological development on urban planning is the web-based GIS application. A similar application tested on a development plan in Malaysia, concludes that GIS data which was made accessible on the Internet by web-based GIS technology, has offered an effective medium for public participation and collaborative planning.[18] The same study suggests that Web-based GIS technology plays an effective role on the presentation and analyzing of planning information. Users do not need to have specific training or software to be able to interact. Its ability in enabling easy and simplified access and without limitation, in terms of time and location, should be able to increase the number of GIS users and involvement in the planning and development activities. Web-based GIS is expected to revolutionise public participation and consensus building in planning, by allowing anyone to access and use web GIS for capturing and manipulating spatial information with interactive sources and high customization.

2.3.2. Internet and Sustainability

Assuming that with the free wireless internet provided in cities and IT equipment prices, in the future years, the Internet will be accessible by most people in the world. The Internet partly reduces the costs of traveling and helps collaboration between companies internationally. Digital information and digital processes in a company reduces costs in paper, ink and labor. That is why the use of the Internet encourages small and upcoming companies to operate and young open-minded people to express and make true their ideas. In large companies new ideas from young people are usually being discouraged, either by upper level close-minded people or because of complicated and slow moving management processes. In contrast, small and medium companies can be very productive and useful for a society[19] and help to create of what we call “urban business park”, a network of small companies, connected with the research and educational networks of the city. On the contrast, some local businesses -like fast food and hairdressers- look safe from e-commerce competition; but local book, video and music shops and convenience stores are under direct threat.[20]

The Internet connects people. Communities can create their own webpage and portal in the Internet where they can discuss and take decisions for their area and then public participation will be more efficient. Furthermore, people can organize events and then the electronic network will become a real network, based on face-to-face relationships. Communities can also get connected by creating virtual networks. For example, they can create catalogues with map finders using GIS, where local businesses, culture, education and entertainment is situated, and then locals and foreigners can get the information they what and cover their need. Networks like this enable people to spend more time in the city and be more social sustainable. They can walk, get entertainment and enjoy public space, by choosing between a diversity of options.

What about all that energy that the Internet needs to operate? Last November Google announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal.[21] An Australian web company has launched a search engine that is the same as Google, but better for the environment. Its names is Blackle (www.blackle.com) and has the exact same functions as the white version, but on lower energy consuming black background. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year.[22] That give us the hope that future IT would be more friendly to the environment.

Laptop and the City

Mobile computer technology is a today's fact, an invention that has affected our daily lives in many ways. In 1965, Paul Smith, published a guide to educate managers how to use computers in businesses.[1] Since then, computer's networks is a basic infrastructure for most working places; computers decreased working force and increase productivity.

Probably the first portable computer was used by NASA, in the early 1980's, on the space shuttle program. It had a die-cast magnesium case and folding electroluminescent graphics display screen. But, the computer considered by most historians to be the first true portable computer was the Osborne 1. Adam Osborne, an ex-book publisher founded Osborne Computer and produced the Osborne 1 in 1981, a portable computer that weighed 24 pounds and cost $1795. The Osborne 1 came with a five-inch screen, modem port, two 5 1/4 floppy drives, a large collection of bundled software programs, and a battery pack.[1] In 2007, laptops' sales in American beat desktops'. According to Los Angeles times,[2] sixteen of the twenty bestselling PCs on Amazon.com of Christmas 2007 season were laptops. Of the 4,000 Dell. Inc. computers it bought this year, 60% were laptops, so that rail inspectors could file reports from their trucks and other employees could work from home. U.S. corporations are expected to make laptops the majority of their computer purchases in 2008. BNSF Railway Co. already has. Parents and kids consult laptops for quick facts at the dinner table as they once did with encyclopedia. Falling prices and technological improvements are the other two factors driving laptop sales. The recent "One Laptop per Child" project, of Nicolas Negroponte gives opportunities for even more reduction on laptops prices. The project aims to sell $100 Linux operated laptops for education,[3] and versions with Windows will cost $20 more.

Same as the cell phone, the laptop has affected our perception of place and space. When we refer to our working place we do not mean our office but our laptop. The dematerialization of the office space is being hurried also by the shift from paper files to electronic storage.[1] Our working place has not an address where people can reach us but an email address and we can contact with people everywhere, anytime as long as we are connected on line, and we can work anywhere, in any place. Telework, a form of work in which work is performed in a location remote from central office or production facilities, thus separating the worker from personal contact with coworkers there and new technology enables this separation by facilitating communication,[2] is growing among workers.

by using a simple mathematical operation; 5 workers telecommuting once a week, one each day of the week, equals 4 workers working at the office every day, equals 80% less working space, less rent. However, it is not clear yet that teleworking will lead to the shrinking of office spaces or to decentralization, the expansion of office buildings outside the city centre. According to the London Office Policy Review of 2007, in 2006 there was an increasing demand of office space in most of the central London area, but mainly in the Central Activities Zone.[1] It neither clear yet that teleworking increases productivity, since based on recent studies, people taking work to home tend to work more hours. This happens due to the fact that some people prefer take overwork to home instead of staying at the office until late evening.[2]

What is interesting about teleworking is the fact that most teleworkers have their home as their base but they actually work in different other places.^{( t. 3 )} A research by Microsoft Windows Mobile, suggests that mobile workers are taking their work to the beach, onto sailing dinghies and into tree houses and that nine out of ten employees prefer to work outdoors. [3] A scenario like this gives us the opportunity to start thinking of new perfectives of the urban environments. People working in the open space is a completely different lifestyle of working people.

We could of the city as a public environment that provides people the infrastructure they need to work. We have to consider all these people that do not like to work in huge offices buildings or from their home, and they find themselves working with their laptop in cafes. We must think of a new kind of public working places, from a more social and humane aspect. We can imagine of a cozy public place with all the required office infrastructure, where people can work individually or have business meetings with their colleagues or with their clients, discuss and socialize with people from the same or completely different working domain. A contemporary kind of a social club where people can work and have fun.

If we assume that we are spending more time in the urban environment and less in our home, we can we start thinking our home as a place that we only sleep in, and all other needs are being covered by the city? Does this mean that there are going to be more restaurants to eat or more cafes and pubs? We can then imagine a new kind of public space where we can meet our friends and socializing would make us fell just like home. A “public living room” where we can make our

own drink, order delivery food, sit on comfortable coaches and watch TV or the movie we desire, or gossip with friends while listening to our favorite music. These places could be called “live spaces” and could be indoor or outdoor, divided in small more private “living rooms” that we will rent per hour. Supplies for drinks and snacks will be provided in each room and also house electronic equipment as a TV screen, a dvd player, a sound system and wireless internet connection. We can also think of new functions in the city, like public places where we can have a shower after work before we meet friends for dinner, public sleeping places to get a nap during lounch break or just to have some rest before going out for beers, also lockers situated all over the city where we can storage our shopping, or stuff we do not want to carry while moving in the city. During "Metropolis and urban life", a workshop healed in Tokyo in 2005, Yasmine Abbas, a French architect, presented a study about neo-nomads.[1] The author neo-nomand herself, explains a new kind of urban lifestyle. The city is their house and they share it with all other people. The minimum they carry is a USB stick. They use shared laptops and wireless internet, they live in a shared room without kitchen and bathroom. They eat outside and they use public sport centres' facilities for baths. Urban living rooms could accommodate not only teleworkers and neo-nomads but also tourists visiting the city for a few days or a few hours.

Laptop and Sustainability

Even if some people claim that the technological revolution supports the growing division between people that have access to IT and the knowledge economy and those that do not have,[2],[3] we will argue of the opposite. Projects like the "One Laptop per Child" and the free Google Pack Software[4],[5], make us think of an easy to access IT future development. Computer's industry will just have to follow the trends if it want to exist in the future.

Teleworking is not clear yet if it will affect centralizing or urban sprawl. However, it is likely to has an impact on the urban form in terms of functions in the urban environment. Working places, housing, and entertainment and open spaces will become more flexible and mixed together. Therefore diversity and multiplicity will provide to the citizens multiple options of lifestyle. We could then think the future city as a context of diversity of forms and functions. Free formed multifunction buildings everywhere that change uses and images. An interactive architecture all over the city, an interactive city where nothing is stable. The street can become a cinema, and the cinema can be a business meeting place. Our garden is a working place and office buildings can transformed to houses, exterior walls can change shapes, creating spaces from private to public and cafes can become living rooms.

What about the environment? Thinking of all that energy that a laptop consumes to operate, we would think that laptops, and computers in general, have a negative environmental impact. But, if we think that all these technologies consume renewable energy, then the general impact on sustainability may be positive. Gadgets like the "Voltaic's new Generator solar bag",[6] that can charge the laptop, is not a solution for the problem since it is not affordable yet. A future solution will be the self sufficient energy city, that provides people renewable energy, in an affordable price.