A spectre has been haunting Europe since US economist Richard Florida predicted that the future belongs to cities in which the “creative class” feels at home. “Cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race,” Florida writes. Many European capitals are competing with one another to be the settlement zone for this “creative class”. In Hamburg’s case, the competition now means that city politics are increasingly subordinated to an “Image City”. The idea is to send out a very specific image of the city into the world: the image of the “pulsating capital”, which offers a “stimulating atmosphere and the best opportunities for creatives of all stripes”. A local marketing company feeds this image to the media as “the brand Hamburg”. It is flooding the republic with brochures that turn Hamburg into a consistent, socially passified fantasialand with Elbe Philharmonic and table dancing, Blankenese and Schanzenviertel, agency life and art scenes, local Harley Days, gay parades in St. Georg, alternative art spectacles in the “HafenCity”, Reeperbahn festivals, fan miles and Cruise Days. Hardly a week goes by without some tourist mega-event carrying out its “brand-strengthening function.”

We say: Ouch, this is painful. Stop this shit. We won’t be taken for fools. Dear location politicians: we refuse to talk about this city in marketing categories. We don’t want to “position” local neighbourhoods as “colourful, brash, eclectic” parts of town, nor will we think of Hamburg in terms of “water, cosmopolitanism, internationality,” or any other “success modules of the brand Hamburg” that you chose to concoct. We are thinking about other things. About the million-plus square metres of empty office space, for example, or the fact that you continue to line the Elbe with premium glass teeth. We hereby state, that in the western city centre it is almost impossible to rent a room in a shared flat for less than 450 Euro per month, or a flat for under 10 Euro per square meter. That the amount of social housing will be slashed by half within ten years. That the poor, elderly and immigrant inhabitants are being driven to the edge of town by Hartz IV (welfare money) and city housing-distribution policies. We think that your “growing city” is actually a segregated city of the 19th century: promenades for the wealthy, tenements for the rabble.

Which is why we want nothing to do with the ad campaign for “brand Hamburg”. Not that you asked us nicely. On the contrary: it has not escaped our attention that cultural funding for artists has been on the decline for years, and is increasingly linked to local political criteria. Look at Wilhelmsburg, Neue Große Bergstraße and Hafencity: artists are expected to follow the funding money and interim-use opportunities like donkeys after carrots – into development areas that need life injecting into them, or investors or new, more solvent residents. You obviously consider it a matter of course that cultural resources should be siphoned “directly into urban development”, “to boost the city’s image”. Culture should be an ornament for turbo-gentrification. St. Pauli and Schanzenviertel are shining examples of what this means: former working class districts become “trendy areas” and, in no time at all, exclusive residential areas with adjoining party and shopping neighbourhoods, where food and clothing chains like H&M milk the amusement-hungry hordes.

Hamburg’s cultural politics has long formed an integral component of your eventification strategy. Thirty million Euro was poured into the militaria museum of some reactionary prince collector. Over forty percent of cultural spending is earmarked for the “Elb philhamonic Hall”. The cultural authorities have been taken hostage by this 500-million Euro grave which, on completion, will at best be a luxury venue for megastars from the international classical and jazz circus. Quite apart from the fact that the symbolic effect of the Elb Philharmonic Hall is socially cynical to the core: the city is building a “lighthouse project”, which offers the moneyed aristocracy a five-star hotel and 47 exclusive freehold apartments, and a draughty viewing platform for the general public. How telling!

And the “growing city” is making it increasingly hard to find halfway affordable studios and rehearsal rooms, or to run clubs and venues, which are not tied to the dictates of turnover. Which is why we say: the last people who should be talking about “pulsating art and music scenes” are city councillors who essentially leave it up to the tax office to decide what should happen on state property. Whenever money is to be made in the inner city, whenever a park can be squeezed, a building slapped onto a patch of green, or a hole filled, the tax office will toss these “prime locations” onto the property market, to the highest bidder with a minimum of conditions. And the result is a history and culture-free investor city of steel and concrete.

We get the picture: We, the music, DJs, art, film and theatre people, the groovy-little-shop owners and anyone who represents a different quality of life, are supposed to function as a counterpoint to the “city of subterranean parking” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). We are meant to take care of the atmosphere, the aura and leisure quality, without which an urban location has little chance in the global competition. We are welcome. In a way. On the one hand. On the other, the blanket development of urban space means that we – the decoys – are moving out in droves, because it is getting increasingly impossible to afford space here.

In the mean time, dear location politicians, you have noticed that this will have a negative impact on your plans. But then, tragically, your proposed solutions never venture one iota beyond the logic of the corporate city. A freshly printed document from the Senate announces its plan to “develop the future potential of the creative economy by strengthening its competitiveness.” It will set up a “creative agency” to function, among other things as “the point of contact for real estate brokerage”. If you can’t afford to pay the rent, you can get yourself ranked as a “young artist” and consult the creative agency about “temporary usage of empty buildings”. You can even get the rent subsidised if you provide proof of “urgent necessity and relevance for Hamburg as a creative location”. There could not be a more unequivocal definition of the role that “creativity” is supposed to play: namely of profit centre for the “growing city”.

And this is where we draw the line. We don’t want any of the quartier developers’ strategically placed “creative real estate” or “creative yards”. We come from squatted housed, stuffy rehearsal rooms, we started clubs in damp cellars and in empty department stores. Our studios were in abandoned administrative buildings and we preferred un-renovated over renovated buildings because the rent was cheaper. In this city, we have always been on the look out for places that had temporarily fallen off the market – because we could be freer there, more autonomous, more independent. And we don’t want to increase their value now. We don’t want to discuss “how we want to live” in urban development workshops. As far as we are concerned, everything we do in this city has to to with open spaces, alternative ideas, utopias, with undermining the logic of exploitation and location.

We say: A city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the “growing city”. We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor.

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The Not in our Name manifesto NION now has several thousand signatories including musicians, writers and painters like Ted Gaier Daniel Richter, Rocko Schamoni and Christoph Twickel.

Adopting the Designers Accord provides access to a community of peers that shares methodologies, resources, and experiences around environmental and social issues in design. Any designer, consultancy, or organization creating consequence at scale should join.

The vision of the Designers Accord is to integrate the principles of sustainable design into all practice and production. Our mission is to catalyze innovation throughout the creative community by collectively building our intelligence around sustainability.

We advocate inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourage sharing best practices so we can innovate more efficiently. We will:

– Provide collective and individual ways for designers to take action.

– Ask all adopters to engage in conversation about social and environmental impact with every client and customer, and integrate sustainable alternatives in their work.

– Create a web platform to enable the conversation about opportunities and challenges associated with creating products and services that make positive social and environmental impact.

Open Source Art is the idea of rethinking to the discarts of human beens as a code produced by a huge community as the population of planet hearth. In this days I’m doing a workshop on re-think the re-cycle with a group of students of the Academy of Fine Art in Lecce.  The results of the workshop will be exhibited into a beautiful “Chiostro” in Lecce during the event Ring2008.

We therefore call for a paradigm shift from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic growth to a concept of “right-sizing” the global and national economies.
1. At the global level, “right-sizing” means reducing the global ecological footprint (including the carbon footprint) to a sustainable level.
2. In countries where the per capita footprint is greater than the sustainable global level, right- sizing implies a reduction to this level within a reasonable timeframe.
3. In countries where severe poverty remains, right-sizing implies increasing consumption by those in poverty as quickly as possible, in a sustainable way, to a level adequate for a decent life, following locally determined poverty-reduction paths rather than externally imposed development policies.
4. This will require increasing economic activity in some cases; but redistribution of income and wealth both within and between countries is a more essential part of this process.

The paradigm shift involves degrowth in wealthy parts of the world.
1. The process by which right-sizing may be achieved in the wealthiest countries, and in the global economy as a whole, is “degrowth”.
2. We define degrowth as a voluntary transition towards a just, participatory, and ecologically sustainable society.
3. The objectives of degrowth are to meet basic human needs and ensure a high quality of life, while reducing the ecological impact of the global economy to a sustainable level, equitably distributed between nations. This will not be achieved by involuntary economic contraction.
4. Degrowth requires a transformation of the global economic system and of the policies promoted and pursued at the national level, to allow the reduction and ultimate eradication of absolute poverty to proceed as the global economy and unsustainable national economies degrow.
5. Once right-sizing has been achieved through the process of degrowth, the aim should be to maintain a “steady state economy” with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating level of consumption.
6. In general, the process of degrowth is characterised by:
• an emphasis on quality of life rather than quantity of consumption;
• the fulfilment of basic human needs for all;
• societal change based on a range of diverse individual and collective actions and policies;
• substantially reduced dependence on economic activity, and an increase in free time, unremunerated activity, conviviality, sense of community, and individual and collective health;
• encouragement of self-reflection, balance, creativity, flexibility, diversity, good citizenship, generosity, and non-materialism;
• observation of the principles of equity, participatory democracy, respect for human rights, and respect for cultural differences.
7. Progress towards degrowth requires immediate steps towards efforts to mainstream the concept of degrowth into parliamentary and public debate and economic institutions; the development of policies and tools for the practical implementation of degrowth; and development of new, non-monetary indicators (including subjective indicators) to identify, measure and compare the benefits and costs of economic activity, in order to assess whether changes in economic activity contribute to or undermine the fulfilment of social and environmental objectives.

From 24 to 26 September 2008, thousands of creative minds from all over the world will come together in Amsterdam for the third PICNIC.

This year, World Water Day coincides with the International Year of Sanitation, challenging us to spur action on a crisis affecting more than one out of three people on the planet.

Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally. That adds up to an unconscionable 1.5 million young lives cut short by a cause we know well how to prevent.

Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll. Those who survive face diminished chances of living a healthy and productive existence. Children, especially girls, are forced to stay out of school, while hygiene-related diseases keep adults from engaging in productive work.

Leaders who adopted the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 envisioned halving the proportion of people living without access to basic sanitation by the year 2015 — but we are nowhere near on pace to achieve that Goal. Experts predict that, by 2015, 2.1 billion people will still lack basic sanitation. At the present rate, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach the target until 2076.

While there have been advances, progress is hampered by population growth, widespread poverty, insufficient investments to address the problem and the biggest culprit: a lack of political will.

With the right resolve, there are many steps that members of the international community can take. World Water Day offers a chance to spotlight these issues, but this year, let us go beyond raising awareness — let us press for action to make a measurable difference in people’s lives.

Nuts picked from Amazon rainforests helped fuel the world’s first commercial airline flight powered by renewable energy.

A Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet flew today from London to Amsterdam with one of its fuel tanks filled with a bio-jet blend including babassu oil and coconut oil.

“Today marks a vital breakthrough for the whole airline industry,” Virgin founder Richard Branson told reporters in a hangar at Heathrow airport prior to the flight’s departure.

The biofuels blend on the Virgin flight contained 20 percent neat biofuel and 80 percent conventional jet fuel. Branson said tests had shown it was possible to fly with a 40 percent blend.

Last year, Virgin started to power some of its trains using a fuel containing 20 percent biodiesel produced mainly using British rapeseed oil blended with U.S. soybean oil and palm oil from the Far East.

via: Reuters

Designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, the figurehead of 20th-century Italian design died on Monday aged 90, the ANSA news agency reported.

His rich longevity and sensitive soul brought him to cross many designs periods. In 1958 Sottsass worked as an industrial designer for ‘Olivetti’. He designed a variety of products such as calculators and typewriters. Some of these products, such as the Logos 27 calculator and the Valentine typewriter were very well known products at the time. His greatest accomplishment whilst at ‘Olivetti’ was the design of the mainframe computer ‘Elea 9003′ for which he given the coveted Compasso d’Oro award. Sottsass’s influential designs helped launch Olivetti into the world of Italian industrial design.

In 1972 Sottsass created a ”House Environment” for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The room consisted of a series of grey fibreglass containers comprising of such things as cookers, sinks, dishwashers, showers, toilets, storage, seating, beds and wardrobes.

Ettore Sottsass was one of the leading members of the Memphis Group founded in 1981 to revive Radical Design. The products created by the Memphis group included limited production creations of unusual objects and functional designs to break down the barriers between high class and low class.

A retrospective of the designer’s work was opened in northeastern Trieste in early December marking his 90th birthday on September 14.

The exhibition, titled “I Want to Know Why,” includes 130 of Sottsass’s creations and runs until March 2.

“I would like the visitors to leave crying — that is, with emotion,” he said at the time of the opening. And he left left us to look at objects with wise words.

This is a result after taking a better look at the Chiquita cardboard boxes found in a nearby supermarket; After collecting at least ten of them, cutting, folding and experimenting a new chandelier appears.

A raft made of plastic Coca Cola crates and bottles.

This is a very simple and inventive way to start double using clean water running into your toilet basin.

No matter if old circuit boards, washer drums, cable or plugs they we craft elegant and high-quality jewelery, furniture and accessories out of it. The products are largely made of recycled parts of used electric and electronic devices. Each piece is handmade and therefore unique.