ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands – Rotterdam/ Amsterdam- based urban planning firm, Stipo B.V., just released their new book ‘The City at Eye Level: Lessons for Street Plinths’ and will be available for free download or hard-­‐copy via website on 11 January 2013. The book, a collaborative effort of five editors and 43 professional contributors from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Demark, USA, UK and Germany, (including Samar Héchaimé of factors) delves deeply into the concepts, philosophy, and strategies behind planning the ground floors (“plinths”) of urban environments. Interviews, case studies, and first-­‐hand stories highlight important examples of best practices from cities in the Netherlands (in particular, Rotterdam) as well as Copenhagen, Antwerp, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

This books shows that good plinths require a smart strategy supported by many players including the city, the owners, the renters and the users, and introduces a host of new vocabularly to help define this innovative planning strategy. A great city at eye level requires a strategy based on three domains: software (use, the experience, the functions), hardware (design of plinths, buildings, streetscapes, hybrid zones and principles of sustainability) and orgware (organisation of functions and portfolio maintenance). The 215-­ page book offers ideas, solutions and examples of the best ground floors and ground-­‐level planning from cities across the world. The concluding chapter proposes 75 specific lessons for good plinths.

On 11 January, 2013, Stipo launched the book to the world in the city where it all started: Rotterdam. About 230 guests, including urban planners, entrepreneurs, housing associations, local civil servants, neighbours, and interested parties, all came together to celebrate. Hosted by several partners (EDBR, AIR, Deltametropool, Gemeente Rotterdam) the launch was open to the public and included a Plinth Safari for all guests-­‐-­‐parallel visits examining the best plinth planning practices in Rotterdam-­‐-­‐as well as a chance to meet a few of the book’s co-­‐authors who were also present for the evening. John Worthington, co-­‐ founder of DEGW and Director of The Academy of Urbanism in London, gave the keynote speech. He focused on how the book is relevant in an international context, in international cities.

The book is available through the publishing house Eburon and will be on bookshelves and Amazon.com in the coming weeks. It is also available for download at www.thecityateyelevel.com.

Food has long been an expression of our cultures and our way of life. That even prompts archaeologists to analyse the contents of tombs to understand how a civilisation lived and survived. The way we have shifted our search for food has fundamentally shifted our societies and the whole experience with food continues to define us till today.

When we travel we always want to experience the local food as a way of getting literally getting a taste of where we are. We call that experiencing the authenticity. The more adventurous of us want to go off the beaten track and try out the restaurants were the locals hang out. By doing so we get to savour a regional flair that tell us stories beyond what we read in the sponsored tourist books. It is even better when we get invited to someone’s home to taste the cooking served at that a particular family table. This not only gives us a taste of the culture of the country in general but also the flavours specific to that small microcosm that is more intimate and personal.

We have seen a lot of shows on the television that highlight that experience of  hidden culinary treasures while travelling to new countries. Take an example Anthony Bourdain’s no reservations. It makes you want to go savouring your way around the planet, exploring unexplored territories and share lives through food.

In most cultures there is a reflection of your acceptance into its midst and home when you are invited to share a meal.

When we first move out of our parent’s homes and go off to live the adventure filled life of a student, it is food whose cost we cut the most. Yet we learn the art of cheap eats and cheap levels. We live by an austerity that somewhat joyous and glorious.  We share our dime concoctions with our friends in these feast like events that were equivalent in our minds to Roman feasts, where boxed wine and laughter were abundant and discussions and plans grandiose. After all it is all a part of what is going to lead us to change the world…

Nevertheless austerity is not only something we enjoy as a glorious and romantic part of getting to adulthood. Austerity and hunger is experience massively around the world by people that can’t find enough to feed themselves and their families. This is not a problem suffered only by faceless sub-Saharan populations with whom we have no connection nor relation. This problem is felt by people around us, in the inner cities and in the suburbs of our big first world cities. Many a child and their parents goes hungry and cold to bed, whether it is in war torn countries or in major world cities.

In our aspirations we always think of the first sign of wealth is when we have plenty and more, when we can throw away. We aspire to become a throw away culture.  We consume without retention and the first sign of our ability to consume is the abundance of food.

The other day I was at the Imperial War Museum in London and there is section in  the museum about the austerity measure with food and rations during WWII. It is not anything that is unusual, nor was it an exceptional measure that the British government followed. Of course what is always amazing is the sense of inventiveness that immerges during these times to keep a sense of culture and taste alive. With the little rations of food supplies how can you change the recipe of pudding to still feed the whole family and try not to sacrifice on the taste. How can  you become entrepreneurial and barter with your neighbour with what they have that you need and vice versa. How can you save by growing your own food. It was a way of thinking and a way of life that was adopted by everyone and survived even a few years after the war.

Today we have lost touch with that sense of urgency that had emerged during the war. We have also lost touch with where our food comes from. Our children have no connection with the earth as a source if their food and thus have no qualms on throwing away without understanding the repercussion of every thrown morsel and discarded scrap. In our sense of getting over the austerity we wanted our children to never feel the want and did not teach them the value of that abundance.

There has been a rise to green movements with varied degrees of involvement, from the policy driven to the militant who live what they preach.

Nevertheless sustainable thinking and way of life only works with an interconnection and an understanding of the cycle from the source to the end, and how it related to us, to our lives. We can’t get active about something that doesn’t touch us directly.

Mobilisation and austerity measures in WWII worked because the causes and effects were felt by every person in the United Kingdom. I am not romanticising the effects and saying everyone became diligent and did not try to profit of the situation. Profiteering is something you will see in every situation unfortunately.

In order for us to see a change in tide in relation to sustainable living and sustainable development we need to have to feel a threat to our ways of life and especially to our food. We also need to feel a direct cause and effect for us to perform changes to our life and make them sustainable. Of course the best ways to perform changes in society are to go through the children. We have seen its adverse effects on how political movements have been able to really take hold when they targeted the children and the young. We also have seen its positive effects when children were mobilised to help bring in a greener way of life into the home in places like Curitiba in Brazil.

For example having markets all over the city, closer to where we live rather than destinations to the urban initiated organic militants, is a way to help children and young people connect with food and its source. The food experience is an interconnected sensory and sensual experience. It takes us over and immerses us. If it is seen as just sustenance might as well just distribute protein pills to everyone. But our taste buds would protest. They would have us have craving and would water just at the thought of something that we know tastes good.  These markets would spread the smell of raw foods and would connect it with the smell of the earth. As a child my favourite smell is that of the earth after the first rain of autumn. You could smell how alive earth is. You could feel it breathe. You could see it crawl with little animals. You see their trail lace over the brown fresh earth. And you could gather these little animals so that you could help your grandmother transform them into dinner. For me those snails are still probably some of the tastiest meals I have had. Same held true to every salad and every cake make out of the fruits and vegetables grown in my grandmother’s garden. She gave me my first lessons in cooking and showed me how it is about flair even in time of austerity.

Understanding that cycle what we need to understand how to help our planet not only survive but flourish in the future. Having our children experience and engage in it is a legacy we give them to the future. It should be the battle that mobilises all of us in a way that is intrinsic to our daily lives. It should not be something so hard for us to do that we just don’t do it. But in order to do it is should matter. It should make us do it. It should engage us like our grandmother and great grandmothers were engaged and mobilized without thinking of themselves as militants. This is what they HAD to do for US.

Food should be part of the education and the culture. There used to be home economics in schools which has now been removed. Home economics would teach us the basic logic of the economics of the home and how to make it sustainable. It allowed us to understand the connections with the food and the sustenance. It allowed us to bring in the creative solutions to solve the problems we might encounter in the home. I not only believe we should bring back home economics into the schools but I also believe cooking classes should be brought into the schools. It allows our children to understand the connectivity of raw food, its sources and the food that we have at the dinner table. But it also allows them to understand chemistry, physics and math in the most practical manner same as they are doing in the charter schools with the forensic experiments.

What if all those manicured lawns are also transformed into urban agriculture land. What if you could actually smell food growing closer to where you lived rather than having to have a trip to the countryside to connect with nature. What if the facilities and options to grow small plants were integrated into our flats and homes and onto the roofs of our buildings. What if we really created all these suspended gardens that made the fame of Babylon. Not only will we be more connected to the food we eat but literally we will be closer to the oxygen we breathe.

What if the austerity measures that the government was enforcing due to the economical downturn actually leads us to a richer life of health and abundance since it will teach us to be reconnected with the sources of our food and sustenance….

Museums also have a big role to play in all of this. Take the example of the exhibit on the mobilisation and the austerity of WWII. This could accompanied by interactive experiments and courses that teach us how our grandmothers and their mothers used their imagination and got through the though time while trying not to sacrifice on health. It could teach us how to prepare food. It could teach us about our tastes and culture through food. How it has been preserved or dissipated through the ages. It could teach us the meaning of truly being a community since cooking with someone and eating with them is not something you do with just anyone. You will not invite a stranger to your table to your kitchen, and if you do that person will not be a stranger for long.

Museums. They are in our cities. They are gateways to our culture, to our past, to our future, to our history, to our ingenuity, to our sorrows, to our triumphs, to everything that has made us human or has connected us to the nature and the universe we live in.

Museums are the soft power to our cities and to our countries. They have the power to shape perceptions and ideas. To influence and leave a mark. They are an immersive and engulfing experience that works passively at educating and forming points of views. Museums have the power to engage our emotions like very few places can, and the more they enthral us the more lasting their mark is going to be on us.

As cities go London is very well positioned with a wide-ranging arsenal of such soft power, from the public to the privately run. London holds a treasure in its midst that makes other cities envious. Nevertheless the perception and reaction to these treasures is as mixed and diverse as there are people giving their opinion. To some Londoners these museums are part of their past, their school day memories, and they have not been there since the field trips they have been dragged into by the educational institution they belong to. To other Londoners museums are where you go when you have visitors and otherwise they are places you avoid. Then there are those who have children and are grateful to having the museums that have free general admission as they provide easy and cheap grounds to entertain their toddlers, which in a way is commendable as these toddlers will hopefully grow up with an appreciation of culture, science etc and of shared heritages. To a few it is a constant inspiring destination that allows us to remember the power of dreams, with the unequivocal enchantment that we have such wealth under our fingertips (of course there might be a debate on who has the right to these treasures but this is a different discussion). To the visitors these museums are part of the checklist of things to do in London, and their experiences vary from the ticking of a check next to a list entry to the loss of oneself in a world and subject they are passionate about.

Regardless of what we think of the museums we have to admit that at least in London there is a democratisation to the access to such culture and such wealth, which is definitely something unusual globally.

Yet we are confined to interact with these jewels in only three different touch points. The first touch point is the physical location, the museum itself. The edifice that holds within its walls whatever wonders it has been bestowed upon it to collect, preserve, study and highlight. The second touch point is a virtual one, usually a website, sometimes some twitter accounts maybe a blog and similar web presences. The third touch point is usually an educational presence, a team that collaborates with the local educational institutions to take the museum into schools and bring the schools into the museums.
In my experience with museums and visiting a multitude of them, there are none as engaging and exciting as the museums that are targeting children such as the ‘Science Museum’ in London, the ‘Museum of Science and Industry’ in Chicago, ‘le Palais de la découverte’ in Paris and a slew of similar organizations and institutions. These museums are immersive, and fun. They teach you without lecturing. They put you in the middle of a situation and depending on the choices you make you might get different outcomes, which are clarified, for ease of understanding. You are part of the exhibit, and it does not sit detached and at a distance from you. These institutions are so beloved by their visitors that they take care of them while they are interacting with them. It is not because they are sturdy, because in some of these museums you have exhibits showcasing things as fragile live butterflies. It is because that engagement warrants a sense of respect even from the most rowdy of visitors. The curators and directors of these institutions have understood the power of fuelling the imagination and how that is done through an emotional attachment and a physical engagement. And mostly through fun.

The other day I was on the tube and there was a group of young girls, they were a troupe of brownies, in the same car as me. Their sense of excitement was so palpable. They had their backpacks and knapsacks and they were ready for an adventure. They were counting the stops and negotiating what their plans for the night are going to be. They were so captivating that they enticed the whole car into a conversation, something very rare in the tube in London or any public transport around the world for that matter. It turns out that these girls were heading to a night of camping at the Science Museum. How exhilarating! It is not a novel idea. I know many museums that have such an endeavours and they are always so exciting for the participants.
By the time the troupe had alighted you could feel a sense of common envy. I am sure we were all thinking that we wished we were part of that troupe.
What is interested about that incident is that these girls have offered unintentionally the fourth touch point to the museum, one that the museums have not harnessed its power properly yet. That touch point is the city and its inhabitants. It had infiltrated the living space of the urbanites and had absorbed them into its world even for a brief moment. Many museums as I mentioned do have such events, but mostly the parents drive their children to the museum or they go on a private bus to the museum especially when coming from a suburban area. The fact that these visitors were on the tube made the journey and the engagement with the other people along the way part of the adventure, and it brought the adventure to others who were not even planning on experiencing it. They also inadvertently became the ambassadors making us all want to go and experience the museum one more time.

The museums and the planes of the cities they inhabit should engage more with each other. Of course museums advertise their upcoming events. Some bring out a piece onto the streetscape outside the museum to lure people in. In some instances like in Paris metro stations ‘Louvre’ and ‘Arts et Metiers’, among others, the museum is brought into the public transport to create and interconnection between the museum, the ground plane, the street level, the underground level and those zapping through it on the metro. These work as momentary attention grabbers that don’t leave too much impact.

The conversation that was triggered on that tube car is what museums should strive to achieve it they would like to have a more lasting impact on the fourth plane of engagement. This fuelling of the imagination will would remain with us longer and make us dream much more readily. That conversation should be followed then through inside the walls of the museum to engage us and immerse us like it does with the children, allowing us to understand how what is being exhibited affects and forms our world and how we can use it to instigate positive change within our world. It should grab us so intensely that we live through that immersive experience and come out of it wanting and yearning for more, or maybe the opposite, which is being so turned off by something that we are willing to make the effort to change it.