My Curious Anarchy

Designers and planners really try an orchestrate the world around them more than they ought to.
When we shout criticism at others we are often whispering it to ourselves.
We cannot control time, chance meetings or intersection of events. They are the canvas on which we draw. They simply are.

This week is incredibly significant for me. 6 months ago almost to the day, I rode a bicycle on Cape Town's streets for the first time. A 6 month personal challenge to change the way I think. The way I design. Today I am presenting the fruit of this adventure at TedXCapeTown. A pitch to talk at the August event. Tonight's 2 minutes are equally important to me as August's potential 18 minutes.

Its all about timing, apparently. 

Here is my pitch.
[Pepper this written word with the bubbly enthusiasm and the full intensity of the intoxicating freedom to be found when you do what it is you are hardwired for..]

I'm Kirsten. I am an urban designer. I always have been.
At my first public participation meeting (gesture:many years ago) I presented a slick, glossy design to a community hall of 300 people on the government housing waiting list.
A 175 unit low income housing pilot project filled to the brim with innovative solutions and supportive jargon. Portfolio grade presentation. 
At the end of the meeting, an elderly lady slowly made her way toward me from the back of the hall. In a softly spoken voice she said to me that she hadnt understood what I had said or the pictures I had drawn. She wanted to know if they meant she would no longer be sleeping in a bathtub at night. Turns out she had been renting out the cramped bathroom of a nearby house. She was looking for hope.

I don't design like that anymore.

The question I asked myself was how can the majority of the inhabitants of this city participate in a system where the language of change is spoken by so few? This unapproachable democracy of city making.
This was the beginning of Open Source Urban Design.

Open Source method briefly is the breaking open of closed systems to reveal the design code. An invitation to collaborate and collectively improve it. Binary Marxism perhaps?
What if we applied this at the scale of the City? Really invited people in? Spoke a shared language?

Briefly, Open Source Urban Design is 3 things:
-Participants become collaborators in this shared language
-Designers move from 'creators' to translators of experience and empathy
-Local authorities move from the strangle hold of red tape and policy making to receivers of words, sentences and paragraphs of this spatial language.

In real terms it looks like this. 6 months ago I got on a bicycle for the first time. I simply could not design spaces for cyclists without understanding their world. I immersed myself in what it meant to commute, to race, to deliver. My incessant 'newbie' questions translated into advocacy..which in turn translated into a collaborative task team after I pitched the idea to City officials that perhaps mobility is not a line but a series of interconnected public spaces which cyclists pass through.
This is my happy space.
This is Open Source Urban Design

Tell me your story and let me help you to decode the city.

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