Things I find interesting, funny, or worth a mention
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Dubber recommends
Things I find interesting, but which don't really fit on my personal blog.
Dubber's food
Photoblogging absolutely everything I eat and drink for a whole year.
Cities: solved
I've been travelling a lot in Europe recently, and I've come to the conclusion that making a great, vibrant, creative city is really, really simple.
What follows is my 5-step plan to better cities. If you get these things right, ALL else will follow.
1) Sort out transport.
Trams all over the inner city district. Subway lines and trains everywhere else. Don't think spokes into a hub. Think spiderweb. People want to go to parts of the city that are not The Mall.
Simplify the pricing. There should be no more than three ticket prices:
a) Anywhere, using any form of public transport anytime in the next hour;
b) Anywhere, using any kind of public transport anytime in the next 24 hours; and
c) Anywhere, using any kind of public transport anytime in the next 7 days.
Also, make sure you add bicycle lanes EVERYWHERE. And I'm not talking about bus lanes that you're allowed to cycle in, bits of the road that cars usually park in, or cycle paths that suddenly stop for no readily apparent reason. Install separate cycle lanes that cyclists can actually use without dying.
And while you're at it, subsidise bikes, reward people for using them - and make them available to rent on every street corner in the city on a coin (not card) pick up & drop off anywhere system.
Banning cars from the city centre would also help.
And replace the Tannoy in the train station. Making it excruciatingly loud doesn't compensate for the fact it sounds awful.
2) Sort out Wi-Fi.
Fast, free and everywhere. It's not difficult and it's not expensive.
Cafes, hotels, train stations, airports, pubs, venues and libraries MUST have free, open access wifi. This is good for business, good for people and good for the city.
3) Sort out public art.
Commission works. Make them interesting. Put them in cool places.
But most importantly - generally speaking, just leave the graffiti where it is. Stop trying to clean it off - it just makes things uglier.
There'll be a period for a couple of years where the graffiti will look untidy - but this is a self-healing system. Good art springs up to replace bad art. Skills improve. Ambitions are raised. The art becomes a tourist attraction.
Erect and allocate graffiti-friendly walls. Commission murals. Invite graffiti crews and other artists to decorate trains and buses, bus shelters and drab exterior walls. Spending money on removing graffiti would be better spent on pretty much anything else. Repairing windows, maybe. Or new commissions.
In other words - supply art FOR the public - but also encourage art BY the public. Sounds like madness? It's not.
4) Get decent signposts.
Where are things? How far away are they? Tell me what sort of thing they are.
"Michaelson Centre" or "Pondhouse" means nothing to a visitor - or to most residents, probably.
Where's all the cool stuff happening? Posters for events, gigs and happenings should be EVERYWHERE.
Sort out your street signs. You should be able to see what street you're on, and what street intersects with it from pretty much anywhere. Road signs at knee level on buildings are utterly useless. Make proper, visible signs, and then put them up on poles where we can see them.
Free maps and easy to follow transport route guides would be really helpful too.
Show us where the entrances to the canals are. How far is it to the train station from here? In which direction?
Surely this isn't rocket science.
5) Abolish bad food.
Seriously. Ban microwaved bread. Train baristas properly. No - I mean REALLY properly. Outlaw instant coffee.
Make the act of using fresh ingredients and baking daily a minimum mandatory requirement in order to gain a licence to serve food. Sandwiches should not come pre-packaged.
And while we're at it, let's instigate a 2-mile exclusion zone for global food and drink chains. If there's a Starbucks in the city centre - the next one's two miles away, minimum. Likewise Costa, Greggs, Nero, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Subway... anything. Subsidise independent cafes.
In fact, you know what? Subsidise good food. It makes your citizens smarter and healthier. You'll save a truckload on health costs, and you'll find the city centre a much more pleasant experience.
Eating out should be the social and cultural lifeblood of the city - not a chore that you have to endure a few times a day.
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And that's it. Dubber's 5-step plan for making any city worth living in. Everything else will follow from there. A vibrant, cultural life with plenty of music, performance, arts and creative works. A healthy business culture with thriving SMEs. Places that people will want to live. Tourism. New business investment. The lot.
Most European cities do some of this well. Some are pretty close to getting all of it right. Birmingham, sadly, is an Epic Fail on all counts. It'll be a brave public official that instigates these five steps - but their name will ring down through the generations as the saviour of the city and a local hero for all time. Yes, it'll be expensive, but it'd pay for itself within the decade, and the rewards will grow exponentially.
Transport. WiFi. Art. Signage. Food.
Solved.
Filed under //
How to fix cities
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Hanging with Fresh Poulp
I spent the last few days in Berlin at the NetAudio Festival. I gave a talk and was on a panel, but I also spent a lot of time with some very cool French and Spanish guys from the netlabel Fresh Poulp. Here's a video snapshot of one night at NetAudio Berlin, featuring the Fresh Poulp guys, but with some other stuff along the way too, to give you a taste of what it was like there.
Comments [4]
How's the book coming along, Dubber?
I'm co-writing a book at the moment. The deadline's Christmas, so I better get a move on with it. The publisher's abstract turned up in my inbox today, so that was a nice little reminder of what I have on my plate. Hopefully the looming deadline will be nicely motivating. And then the blind panic that will inevitably set in as the date approaches should inspire a last-minute sprint.
Understanding the Music Industries is designed for undergraduates and musicians seeking to learn about the changing economic, social, technological and business landscapes of the music industries. Drawing on historical perspectives and contemporary practice, it helps readers to make sense of the rapid pace of change that is characteristic of the field. The term ‘music industries’ encompasses a wide variety of roles, responsibilities and opportunities which this book discusses through chapters devoted to composition, production, distribution, promotion, consumption, copyright, and the recording industry. Each presents overviews of the relevant area together with explorations of key issues and consideration of the impact of the Internet.
Chris Anderton is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Southampton Solent University. He received his MBA from the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool in 2002 and his PhD from Swansea University in 2007. The latter examined the historical, social, political and geographical dimensions of British music festivals. He is currently the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Music Promotion at Southampton Solent University where he teaches a range of popular music and music industry units. His research interests include: the future of the music industries, music piracy and bootlegging, music festivals, the social geographies of music, progressive rock, and electronic music.
Andrew Dubber is an Arts and Humanities Research Council Knowledge Transfer Fellow in Music Industries Innovation, a founder member of the Interactive Cultures Research Unit, and a Senior Lecturer in the Music Industries at the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University. His research includes a project on online fandom within the BBC’s Audio and Music Interactive division; explorations into jazz and other specialist music consumption online; the social impact of iPods; and post-graduate work on digital radio and deregulation. He is the author of New Music Strategies, a co-founder of Music Think Tank, and currently consults for over thirty music and radio businesses in the UK and Europe – from established record labels and retailers to entrepreneurial online music start-ups.
Filed under //
Writing
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Go-Kart disco
Shay and Zac watch Daddy race, then they have a little dance to celebrate his successful driving.
Filed under //
Birmingham
Family
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A walk with Dad to Sarehole Mill
I'd never been to Sarehole Mill before, and it's just down the road. Dad had wanted to go for a walk, and so we strolled along Stratford Road and went and picked up a new door bolt thingy for the bedroom at Wickes. We went a different way back, and decided on the spur of the moment to stick our heads around the door at Sarehole Mill, in case it was open to visitors.
They had a nice little tearoom, and the mill museum was open from noon till 4pm, so we decided to go and have a look through. Amazing that I've lived here this long, that's been in our backyard all this time, and I'd never set foot in it till now.
I'll be taking visitors there in future. It's really lovely.
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