OtherAberdeen

Under

2012-02-13T17:08:00.000Z

Growing up in Aberdeen, the young mind can't help but be fascinated by the under-ground (or rather, under-road) aspects of the town. Beneath large parts of Union Street, Bridge Street, The Castlegate, Market Street, Holburn Street, Bon-Accord Street and, of course, Rosemount Viaduct exist vaulted caverns which shoulder the carriageway above. The vaults beneath the Holburn and Bon Accord viaducts provide coal-cellars for the tenements which flank the structures; coal-chute covers sometimes still visible embedded in granite flagstones, anomalous amongst the concrete pavingstones. And I can especially remember being in a store-room/workshop beneath Union Street at some point during the mid-1970's. I can't remember for sure why I was there, something to do with a TV repair, but I do specifically remember the shop proprietor making great play of the fact that we were under the road. The shop premises was an electrical retailer (a local enterprise called "Alexanders") in the unit now occupied by that Anne Summers low-rent lingerie outlet. On Bridge Street, there was a sports goods shop (I can't remember the name) which had premises on both sides of the road, linked through the vault under the road. I remember a very narrow steep boxy staircase. One-at-a-time please.

A while ago, we touched on the subject a little:

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/08/up-stairs-to-understanding-of.html

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Viaducts like these exist all over Europe in formerly hilly town centres with which the Victorians had their vainglorious way. Notably Edinburgh has its many viaducts and bridges with vaulted caverns below, and those vaults are put to work as entertainment venues, pop-up pubs, knocking shops, ghost-tour backdrops, etc. Similarly, London's Oxford street is, in part, raised above the former natural topography. In parts, entire pre-Victorian streetscapes are preserved below vaults, notably the Georgian shopping street which has been preserved almost in its entirety below the Selfridges department store. We understand that this living psychogeographical fossil (for what else can we call it?) has been from time to time used as a film-set. Back home, we have heard claims of secret access, of strange artifacts and of old cottages and the like existing below the vaulted stonework of Aberdeen's viaducts, but we treat these claims with scepticism. We know that, notwithstanding the odd restaurant and nightclub, the vaults of Aberdeen are most commonly used as underground carparks, and commercial storage. However, we would love to learn of more exotic uses, of secrets forgotten, of stories waiting to be told. We would so love be proven wrong.

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I was passing the door to the vaults beneath Market Street one day last week. By being on foot and keeping eyes open, you can increase your chances of being in the right place at the right time. A new air extraction system was being installed in the vaults, I chatted a bit to the HVAC guys, and they let me in...

Dog in Manger Throws Toys out of Pram

2012-02-10T19:10:00.003Z

Do you remember this one?

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/08/dog-in-manger.html

Updated today with this:

And, all the more extraordinarily, with this:

News also reaches us via The Herald of a letter which Donald Trump has written to Alex Salmond MSP, Scotland's First Minister.

Trump Declares War on Scotland

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/trump-declares-war-on-salmond.16718168

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In a withering letter, he tells Mr Salmond that by encouraging the construction of offshore wind farms, "you will single-handedly have done more damage to Scotland than any event in Scottish history"

Later, in a radio interview, he said that included wars.

Mr Trump has been fighting against 11 off-shore turbines which he claims would spoil the views from his new championship golf course at Balmedie. He has already declared no more work will be done on his planned hotel, 950 holiday homes and 500 houses until the fate of the wind farm is decided. He has also demanded a public inquiry, and a decision is expected within four months.

However, in his letter to the First Minister, Mr Trump paints a wider canvas: "You seem hell bent on destroying Scotland's coastline and, therefore, Scotland itself". He says he could never support this "insanity".

"As a matter of fact I have just authorised a member of my staff to allocate a substantial amount of money to launch an international campaign to fight your plan to surround Scotland's coast with many thousands of wind turbines – it will be like looking through the bars of a prison and the Scottish citizens will be the prisoners," the letter adds.

Mr Trump says tourists would not suffer because there would not be any coming to Scotland because of the wind farm policy.

He questions the economic wisdom of Scottish ministers laying such store in wind energy: "For the record, taxing your citizens to subsidise wind projects owned by foreign energy companies will destroy your country and its economy. Jobs will not be created in Scotland because these ugly monstrosities known as turbines are manufactured in other countries such as China. These countries, who so benefit from your billions of pounds in payments, are laughing at you."

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You'll see that the article points out that Donald Trump promises to finance an "international campaign" against windfarm developments all over Scotland. Extraordinary.

Being residents of Aberdeen, Scottish, interested in energy policy, interested in planning issues, etc as we are, these outbursts seem almost comical in their hyperbole to us. But then we realise that we, perhaps, are not the intended audience of Donald Trump's polemics. Nor, perhaps, are the political figures to whom he has nominally addressed these paroxysms. No, the intended audience of Donald Trump's outpourings might be exclusively made up of his existing stakeholders. Last summer, blaming the global downturn, Donald Trump pulled back from his originally promised development of a "high class" [sic] golf resort with five star hotel, condominiums, luxury villas and the like. Now Donald Trump finds himself with a development which some have suggested that he cannot finance, and from which it has been said that he cannot profit.

The BBC sought a response from the Scottish Government, and got this choice quote:

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Scottish waters are estimated to have as much as a quarter of Europe's potential offshore wind energy. A recent study suggests that harnessing just a third of the practical resource off our coast by 2050 would enable us to generate enough electricity to power Scotland seven times over.

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Adding to this, Niall Stewart, who is Chief Executive of Scottish Renewables said:

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Who is Donald Trump to tell Scotland what is good for our economy and our environment? Offshore wind is already attracting billions of pounds of investment and supporting hundreds of jobs across Scotland.

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That Donald Trump has chosen to try to stand in the way of this juggernaut - picking a fight which (surely even he knows well) he cannot win, might be seen on the face of it to be ill-judged and foolhardy. Particularly perplexing is that Donald Trump chooses to pick an unnecessary fight, for, as Niall Stuart also points out - there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why these developments cannot exist side by side.

When these facts are appreciated, some people might conclude the following: that Donald Trump's outbursts over the last few days are not intended to influence Scottish Government energy policy; the statements are not intended to win hearts and minds in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire; they are not aimed at "saving Scotland" as Donald Trump asserts; and nor are they intended to promote his golf course. Those same sceptics might believe that these polemics are, rather, aimed at saving face. Sceptics as they are, they might be tempted to think that, confronted with what could be seen as the prospect of failure at Menie - instead of accepting responsibility for what might be seen as an ill-judged investment and own up to what could be understood as management failures; rather than draw attention to his financial situation or just admit that, as some might say, he appears to be beaten - Donald Trump must find an external reason outwith his control; something to blame. Those same sceptics might be tempted to say that he needs a scapegoat by which to deflect the attention of his investors, backers, fans, boosters and other key stakeholders away from what might be interpreted as his burgeoning personal and corporate failure in Aberdeenshire.

But we would never say such things about a man and organisation we respect as much as we do. We daren't.

The necessity for Scotland to have future prosperity based upon an energy supply which does not jeopardise the atmosphere appears, the sceptic might conclude, to offer Donald Trump just that way out.

So, if the sceptics are proven right, who are we to stand in the way of what could be understood to be Donald Trump's face-saving exit strategy? But if and when he does go, we will miss such entertaining spectacle as he has provided for the last five years!

Haste ye back!

That's Entertainment!

2012-02-10T15:28:00.001Z

Attitudes to Surveillance in Public Places

2012-01-25T08:57:00.000Z

Followers of Road Rage News will not be unfamiliar with this classic which has gone viral in the last few days, having first been picked up by the magnificent Bristol Traffic blog, then mainstream media outlets the Guardian and Telegraph. A business motorist was caught on camera verbally abusing a man who filmed her car blocking a busy road. She threatens to tell the police that he assaulted her.

The YouTube user, intrigued by a truly frightful example of arrogant motoring started filming on his vidphone. The motorist jumps out of her car, and starts pursuing the pedestrian down the street.

"You've been filming me. Gimme that phone - now! You've been filming me - it's illegal! It's illegal! Who the fuck do you think you are, filming me? I'm trying to get to my place of work - how dare you fat little lump?

[...later...]

I want to know who you are, I want to know where you live or where you work."

She also threatens him with a fraudulent vexatious allegation (of assault) and a man (thought to be the motorist's husband) harangues and intimidatingly menaces the YouTube user.

Leaving to one side the appallingly ignorant and arrogant driving style of the business motorist who is the subject of the video and also leaving aside the harassment and intimidation she and her husband visited upon the pedestrian, what intrigues all the more is the attitude to surveillance in public places.

If Bath is anything like Aberdeen, everyone is almost always and everywhere in the town centre subject to video (and, increasingly, audio - oh, and tracking) surveillance. This surveillance is operated by civil authorities and, again - increasingly, by private security firms. As the driver of a high-ish end Audi, the business motorist who is the subject of the viral movie will doubtless be fully loaded with sat-nav and an anti-theft tracking device. All the information streams from these surveillance data gathering systems are transmitted to people (or AI expert-system statistical analysis and pattern recognition algorithms) in remote locations with unknowable proclivities and uncertain future outcomes. All of this our society has become accustomed to; if it bothers us at all, it does so only marginally. Yet, when the business motorist in the video spots that she is being filmed by a member of the public who is in plain view, who's face she can see and whom she can engage in conversation - she goes APESHIT. Why is that?

The Energy Trap, The Bubble Market, The Capital Trap

2012-01-24T14:19:00.003Z

Nearly a year ago, at the premier of filmmaker Fraser Denholm's documentary feature "Run Down Aberdeen", an open floor discussion with the audience followed the screening. During that discussion, local list Labour MSP Lewis Macdonald was heard to say that "high oil prices are good for Aberdeen". As, since the mid 1970's, the Aberdeen economy has become increasingly dependent upon the extraction of fossil fuels from the petroleum fields beneath the raging swells of the central and northern North Sea, for an MSP to make such a statement would seem to be - well - just common sense. Wouldn't it?

But, whenever we're confronted with something which appears to be common sense, as psychogeographers, we're apt to try to have a good look around the back. We're on the same page as grand old man of letters W. Somerset Maugham on this one:

"Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers."

So, what of this common sense claim that high oil prices are good for our town? As an opener, we'd draw attention to our old blog-post "D is for Dutch Disease", in which we examined the inimical effect on our local economy of this over-reliance on the one business sector with particular reference to the resource-extractive aspect of that sector:

OtherAberdeen

The A to Z of Aberdeen, D is for The Dutch Disease

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2010/07/a-to-z-of-aberdeen-d.html

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The Dutch Disease is a concept in economics which explains how the development of a natural resource extraction business sector (like oil and gas) and its associated economic boom can over-balance an economy, causing decline in non-extractive value-adding sectors - particularly the manufacturing sector, but also in agriculture. The pathology of the Dutch Disease is accompanied by moral decline in the personal sphere (affluenza) and turpitude in the public sector (government) as it becomes entangled with big-money business interests. Hmm... sounds familiar?

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Since we wrote that, there have been an number of developments. And other than the bland "good for Aberdeen" assertion, we collectively must ask what high oil prices mean: what is the cause; and what is the effect going forward (as they say)?

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THE ENERGY TRAP

Recognition of evidence that global oil production is reaching (or has already reached) the "undulating plateau" at it's historic peak is now no longer the domain of the tin-foil hatters. Today this recognition comes, not from the usual-suspect voice-in-the-wilderness Peak Oiler blogosphere (The Oil Drum, The Energy Bulletin, The Post Carbon Institute and such), but from the likes of the US military, Shell Oil, and the White House.

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United States Joint Forces Command

Joint Operating Environment

http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf

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...by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 [million barrels per day].

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Shell Oil

"Signals and Signposts"

http://www.shell.com/home/content/media/news_and_media_releases/2011/scenarios_signals_signposts_14022011.html

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We believe that the world is entering an era of volatile transitions and intensified economic cycles.

[…]

Supply will struggle to keep pace with demand. By the end of the coming decade, growth in the production of easily accessible oil and gas will not match the projected rate of demand growth.

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Le Monde

Washington considers a decline of world oil production as of 2011

http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline-of-world-oil-production-as-of-2011/

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The Obama administration of Energy supports the … hypothesis of an "undulating plateau". Lauren Mayne, responsible for liquid fuel prospects at the DoE, explains : "Once maximum world oil production is reached, that level will be approximately maintained for several years thereafter, creating an undulating plateau. After this plateau period, production will experience a decline."

Concern about the future availability of energy dense fuel sources, which will be required to create a transitional and then a sustainable energy infrastructure are beginning to be expressed in academic circles.

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Do The Math

The Energy Trap

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap

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Our reaction to a diminishing flow of fossil fuel energy in the short-term will determine whether we transition to a sustainable but technological existence or allow ourselves to collapse. One stumbling block in particular has me worried. I call it The Energy Trap.

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability—first in petroleum—our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but…energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term—effectively steepening the decline—for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

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THE BUBBLE MARKET

New Scientist

Carbon bubble could threaten markets… maybe

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21031-carbon-bubble-could-threaten-markets-maybe.html

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After the dot-com bubble and the property bubble, prepare for the carbon bubble. Entrepreneurs meeting in the Maldives last week warned that shaky assumptions about future fossil-fuel use are buoying financial markets and that the collapse of this "carbon bubble" could trigger another crash one day.
"There is this suicidal river of capital flowing into fossil fuels," says Jeremy Leggett, a green entrepreneur ... based in London. "Let's get the risk acknowledged."
[…]
According to some studies, in order to have a chance of limiting global warming to 2 °C, humans cannot pump more than another 570 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere before 2050. Yet a report by energy-industry initiative Carbon Tracker, commissioned by Leggett and others, found that the proven fossil-fuel reserves of companies and countries would add up to 2800 Gt if burned for their energy.
That means up to 80 per cent of known reserves may have to be left in the ground if governments decide to limit total future emissions to 570 Gt.
[…]
Leggett's point, though, is that the carbon bubble is a risk that investors are overlooking. Pension funds, for instance, continue to put their money into gas, oil and coal companies without taking account of it.

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It's not our intention here to examine the alarming geopolitical implications of this onrushing environmental degradation and energy supply bottleneck, chewy and crunchy though that will be. And, let us be clear, global oil production figures have never been higher. However, North Sea oil production is well past its peak, and is falling rapidly.

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THE CAPITAL TRAP

While the oil price per barrel in US dollars peaked at near $150 during 2008 and then fell sharply, the price of North Sea oil has 'recovered' (as they say) and is today trading at $110. And in the intervening period, fluctuations in currency exchange rates have meant that, when expressed in Pounds Sterling or Euros, oil has never ever traded at a higher price. The combination of this all-time record high price along with both record global demand and falling UK output is an unfortunate triple-confluence of global trends for our provincial town. The implications of this co-incidence for the sustainability of high levels of economic activity and employment in our town are troubling, for - as oil reserves diminish - the grinding certainties of geological happenstance and the imperatives of the profit motive insist that it is the more difficult, more expensive to reach reserves which are tapped last - and the cheaper-to-exploit resources are those which are extracted first. The high oil price, for this 'province' (as they say) hastens the day when those easier reserves are gone, and all that remains is the difficult stuff - the reserves which require a high market price for oil before the return on investment realises the cost of exploitation. (Monetary costs only, that is. There are, of course, many externalities.) But worse even than that, the current excessively high return on investment acts like black hole for capital - sucking in investment which, as the necessity to stabilise and reduce carbon-dependency in our energy supply begins to bite, would be better reallocated towards putting our energy supply on a sustainable, renewable, decarbonised foundation.

Recently, news reports have pointed towards investment growth in support of a burgeoning renewable energy sector; Inverness, Perth, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Orkney all beneficiaries. Alas, little of that investment is directed towards Aberdeen, distracted as our local capital and skill base is towards the glittering prizes of riches wrung from the high-value fossil fuels lying in the convoluted strata kilometres beneath the seabed.

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The Courier

Enterprise area status a boost for Dundee's renewable energy hopes

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Business/article/20374/enterprise-area-status-a-boost-for-dundee-s-renewable-energy-hopes.html

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Dundee's fledgling renewables sector has been given a major boost by being declared as one of Scotland's new enterprise areas.
[…]
It is hoped the dock's new status will encourage companies such as utilities giant SSE to progress plans to make Dundee a key focus of their North Sea renewables plans. The Perth-based company signed a memorandum of understanding with Dundee City Council, Forth Ports and Scottish Enterprise to explore options for a new manufacturing plant to be established at Dundee Port to service the offshore wind sector.
Any such development would create hundreds of jobs directly and in the associated supply chain.

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But here in Aberdeen the energy trap is compounded by the fossil-fuel-powered capital trap as investment disappears over the event-horizon of record oil prices into the black hole of non-renewable hydrocarbon extraction. And on the streets of our town, excessive pay rates in that extractive sector are visibly disappearing down the sink-sector drain of conspicuous consumption and a grotesquely distended housing bubble. Aspiration (as commonly understood) is all to often demonstrably mistaken for acquisition, and affluence is mistaken for wealth as late-stage consumerism mounts its final stand in the shopping malls of our inconsequential northern provincial town.

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The Scotsman

Scots can cash in on £375bn oil bonanza

http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/scotland/scots_can_cash_in_on_375bn_oil_bonanza_1_1943934

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SCOTLAND’S North Sea oil and gas industry can deliver a £376 billion bonanza over the next 40 years and secure Aberdeen as “one of the global energy capitals” of the future, according to a report published today
The PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study said the oil boom was there for the taking if government and industry leaders can “grasp the many opportunities”.

Mark Higginson, senior partner at PwC in Aberdeen, said: “We have a remarkable – and potentially unrepeatable – opportunity to position the city as an international energy centre of excellence… However, this isn’t simply going to fall to Aberdeen by right. We need to shape our own destiny and the journey must start now, with everyone focused on a single, definitive strategy that embraces core objectives of maximising oil reserves, exploiting the new frontier areas west of Shetland and the Arctic, becoming a talent magnet and more effectively serving the needs of industry...”

The study, titled Northern Lights: a strategic vision of Aberdeen as a world-class energy capital, advised stakeholders to collaborate more to build on the city’s long track record in oil and gas, without which there was a risk that the opportunities within reach may slip away.

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Aberdeen City Council

Alternative Energy Strategy for Council Owned Public Buildings

http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/mgConvert2PDF.aspx?ID=13864&txtonly=1

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Whilst each project to develop alternative energy technologies will require detailed analysis and evaluation before being progressed, this strategy will provide the overall context in which future projects will be developed.

[...]

May 2011 Version 4Appendix 2: Overview of Available TechnologiesThis strategy will consider a number of alternative energy technologies some of which are outlined below. It should be noted that for Council owned public buildings planning permission for alternative energy technologies is not required unless the equipment is valued over £100,000.

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[our emphasis]

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Time and again we are frustrated when we see clean, sustainable energy sources, which are available to exploit in abundance all over and around Scotland, referred to by Aberdeen's people and businesses as "alternative energy". The use of that phrase "alternative energy" is telling. It tells you everything you might want to know about the people and businesses that use it. Rather than use words like "sustainable" or "renewable" or "clean" when discussing non-polluting energy sources they instead label these sources of energy as "alternative". In the UK, the use of that word has pejorative connotations, usually to do with "alternative" lifestyles like strict veganism, communal living, far-left political beliefs or religious cults or other hippy-dippy stuff which is to be mistrusted, feared, scorned and therefore belittled whenever possible. By using this kind of language the people and businesses of Aberdeen show that their default position associates clean energy sources with questionable fringe actives and beliefs which are to be scorned. This sets the context in which they frame their discourse and actions, for language is never neutral.

And thus we despair that it's becoming increasingly unlikely that significant capital will be reallocated away from the atmosphere-threatening hydrocarbon industry to build a sustainable local economy based upon clean energy sources here in time to secure the vaunted title "Global Energy Capital" [sic] which local business development companies claim for our town. For the one-way-bet certainty afforded by an oil-price which, despite globally defective demand; despite recession or depression, remains proudly above the psychologically significant $100 per barrel mark is a huge distraction to capital, which (as we have all seen since 2008) always discounts the future.

Flashing like the urgent "HOLD NOW" buttons of a slot machine stuck on a jackpot payout, this ton-high oil price militates against any thought of significant reallocation of capital crossing the minds of the oil companies and their executives here. The certain play of continued and renewed investment in the oil-bearing strata beneath the seas of the UK's continental shelf satisfies the needs of capital oh so much more than adequately. Why would capital (the need to increase itself being its primary reason for existing - integral to its true definition) redeploy away from so certain a one-way bet into something a just little more risky?

The tickers tick up on global heat budget, CO2 concentration, social inequality, species extinction, deforestation, ocean acidification, resource depletion and political instability and conflict. But the ticker also ticks up - ever up - on the free-market price of a barrel of oil. That same ticker begins to look like a countdown to the deadline for establishing a sustainable economic future for Aberdeen. The high oil price an obstruction, a distraction. It's in the way of the future.

Local labour politician Lewis Macdonald stated at the screening of 'Run Down Aberdeen' that "high oil prices are good for Aberdeen". Politicians, it seems, also discount the future.

Unfortunately, we have to live there.

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Unacceptably Intrusive Covert Surveillance

2012-01-22T17:16:00.001Z

In the UK, it's a regrettable fact that we're used to being visually surveilled by closed circuit TV at all times and everywhere in public town-centre spaces - either by civic authorities when in public realm space, or by private security contractors when in commercially-operated space. Very often that commercially-operated urban space gives every appearance of being public realm space; a good example being the plaza on the top deck of Aberdeen's St Nicholas shopping centre, which connects pedestrian access between St Nicholas Street, the historic St Nicholas churchyard and Schoolhill/Upperkirkgate. It looks very much like public space, it provides a vital pedestrian access thoroughfare in the heart of the town and it just feels like a public realm space. But it isn't; it belongs to and is operated by Land Securities plc (LandSec, as they are known to insiders, is the UK's largest commercial property developer). Similarly, the border between public realm space and commercially-operated space is often ill-defined and it's difficult for the casual pedestrian to discern at what point his or her rights of way and freedom of assembly have been extinguished in favour of commercial exigencies. One of the most striking examples of this phenomenon in Aberdeen is the interface between the Rail Station and the Union Square shopping centre. The developers of the site have designed the commercial 'offering' (as they say) around pre-existing desire lines so that it's not easy for someone arriving by train in Aberdeen to find his or her way into public realm space without first passing through space which is part of the Union Square commercial venture and as so is operated by a private company.

Anyone who doubts that we have a good reason to be concerned about this; anyone who's prepared to trot out the old "if you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear" excuse for kowtowing to those who would surveil us at every possible opportunity should read this, and this, and this, and this. Oh, and this and this.

While we have serious concerns about the normalisation of blanket surveillance in urban space (at the risk of sounding starry-eyed naive) we at least preserve a hope that civil authorities do what they do in service of the greater good, on behalf of us all and answerable to our elected representatives. By contrast, surveillance undertaken by private security firms on behalf of the commercial operators of privately-owned urban space do so only in the service of profit, enhanced shareholder value (as they say). Still, though, at least we get warning of such surveillance - CCTV operators are obliged by law to display signs letting us all know that an area is covered by surveillance. These signs are indeed visible (adding ever more to streetfurniture clutter) in both town centre public and private realm spaces.

But now news reaches us via The Scotsman newspaper of an insidious new form of surveillance being 'rolled out' (as they say) across the shopping centres of Aberdeen.

Movements of shoppers tracked by 1984 phone technology

http://www.scotsman.com/business/technology/movements_of_shoppers_tracked_by_1984_phone_technology_1_2043604

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...unsuspecting shoppers who enter a shopping centre are now often tracked on a screen by retail staff – using their mobile phone signals to locate their path through the shops.

Many Scottish centres are using the technology – which has been adopted by property giant Land Securities, which owns a large number of major shopping centres and has installed the tracking devices in ten of them – as well as rival Hammerson, which operates the technology at the Silverburn shopping centre in Glasgow and plans to install at its Union Square development in Aberdeen this year.

The Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow, the Bon Accord and St Nicholas shopping centres in Aberdeen and Livingston’s The Centre are also among those north of the Border using FootPath, created by Path Intelligence, which is behind a range of technology to help shopping centre bosses plan their layouts.

Path Intelligence chief executive Sharon Biggar refused to admit whether the technology was even in use in Scotland for “data protection” reasons – although she did acknowledge that it was utilised in centres in the UK and six other countries around the world.“We are not allowed to reveal the names of any of our clients because of data protection laws,” she told The Scotsman. However, while the company fiercely protects its paying clients, it does not give shoppers the same privacy.

The refusal to list where this technology is in use means that shoppers are unaware that they are being tracked – unless they spot the small signs alerting them to the practice. However, even if they do see the signs, there is no option for them to opt out of the scheme without turning off their mobile phones.

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To which we'd add that the great majority of today's mobile phone handsets cannot be fully powered down without removing the battery, and so your phone will respond to a tracking ping even if you might think you've turned it off.

This same Ms Biggar, of Path Intellegence, manufacturers of the intrusive surveillance technology, is also quoted in the Aberdeen Citizen freesheet ("BEST [sic] free newspaper in Scotland"):

"We are very open with the public. We ask our clients to have signage up where the system is operating. The signs are exactly the same as the ones for CCTV"

Yet, when we pass through Bon Accord and St Nicholas shopping centres, while we can see the signs which warn us of CCTV surveillance, we see no signs whatsoever warning us that we are to be subjected to this new form of distasteful electronic-tracking intrusion. The only indication of this novel and intimidating privacy-busting technology you get is if you manage to spot the sensors themselves. Here's one, it's about the size of a hardback book:

See if you can spot them next time you visit the Bon Accord and St Nicholas shopping centres!

FootPath Technology

http://www.pathintelligence.com/en/products/footpath/footpath-technology

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The Path Intelligence FootPath system consists of a small number of discreet monitoring units installed throughout the centre. These units calculate the movement of consumers without requiring the shopper to wear or carry any special equipment. The units measure signals from the consumers' mobile phones using unique technology that can locate a consumer's position to within a few metres. These units feed this data (24 hours a day 7 days a week) to a processing centre, where the data is audited and sophisticated statistical analysis is applied to create continuously updated information on the flow of shoppers throughout the centre. At any time the shopping centre management can access the data via PI's secure web-based reporting system.

The FootPath technology is the only system available on the market today that can gather information on shopper paths continuously and accurately. FootPath can be installed in one centre or across a portfolio, providing you with quantifiable information to help you monitor your centre and assess the impact of your business decisions.

[our emphasis]

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Interesting to note that the system is not closed; that is to say that it is not an discreet network within only the building it serves. Rather, the data that the system gathers is transmitted to a Path Intelligence central processing facility. (Who knows where? Most probably this function is itself outsourced to an offshore number crunching data centre.) The data, once analysed, is then distributed via the internet back to the subscriber. We cannot know whether this is local Bon Accord or St Nicholas centre management, or some central management facility of Land Securities plc. In any case, it's not just the shopping centre security contractor, nor the shopping centre management or owners who have access to information about your movements, the providers of the tracking technology also gather that data. We have to ask ourselves how we feel about this. Did you like the bit where they said that shoppers are "not required to wear or carry special equipment"? We suppose we should, at least, be thankful for that!

It is telling that, even as the operators of our shopping centres fail to notify us of the fact that this intrusive surveillance is taking place, the providers of the tracking technology make capital of the fact that the monitoring units are discreet. Why, unless they fear a backlash of public disgust and outrage, would the unobtrusive physical footprint of the tracking units be regarded as one of the benefits - the unique selling points (as they say) of this highly intrusive development in our cities? It's as if they're trying to keep their data-gathering activities as covert as possible.

Someone should tell them - if they've nothing to hide, then they've nothing to fear.

Union Terrace Gardens or City Gardens Project - A Final Thought or Two Before You Decide

2012-01-20T16:08:00.002Z

OK, there's so much in the media about the ongoing controversy surrounding oil-tycoon Sir Ian Wood's vision of comprehensively redeveloping Union Terrace Gardens and imposing a new building on precious, protected green space in the heart of Aberdeen that there's not much for us to add other than to tie up a few loose ends.

If you live in Aberdeen, you'll know well that you're about to be asked to take part in a postal referendum which will determine the future of our only town-centre park. The choice will be to retain the park - Union Terrace Gardens - or endorse carbon-mogul Sir Ian Wood's City Garden Project (the real-estate boosters of the project used to call it the "City Square Project", but that name didn't play too well in focus groups). If the people of Aberdeen choose destruction of the existing park, the park will be comprehensively redeveloped, and the valley it currently occupies (much like a small-scale version of Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens) filled with a new building which has become known as "The Granite Web". This new building appears to be a catwalk-bedecked semi-outdoor concert venue and shopping mall. We used to say "shopping centre". Do you remember when we used to say "shopping scheme"?

Existing - Union Terrace Gardens

Proposed - The Granite Web

Anyway, there's little we can add to the overwhelming dissent, disgust and indignation which characterises the discourse about the comprehensive redevelopment proposals in new media outlets and social media forums, so we present some samples here:

///

STV Local

http://local.stv.tv/aberdeen/news/25833-youth-council-chairman-steps-down-over-union-terrace-gardens-stance/

>>>>>>>>>>

[Aberdeen] Youth Council’s official view [is] that the City Gardens Project is an environmental, social and financial gamble.

<<<<<<<<<<<

Blouin Artinfo

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/756740/diller-scofidio-renfro-tapped-to-build-a-high-line-for-scotland

>>>>>>>>>>

It’s a fabled and oft-pursued “Bilbao Effect,” or in this case, High Line effect, that we strongly caution against. Recent failures to create this coveted tourist-draw include Oscar Niemeyer’s shuttered cultural center in Spain, and Rafael Viñoly’s critically pummeled “Golden Banana” in Colchester, England.

<<<<<<<<<<<

Lena the Hyena

http://lenathehyena.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/a-tangled-granite-web-weaves-around-union-terrace-gardens/

>>>>>>>>>>

Aberdeen did have a park in its centre. It does have a park; Victorian gardens. And it is reasonable to see why someone with disposable income measured in millions might want to influence improvements to the centre of his home town (although that in itself calls into question the morality of influencing policy just because you have more money than most) but the motives behind the proposal have shifted since it was first envisaged. [...] Suffice to say that by creating a piazza (and that was the term in use at the beginning of this whole UTG episode) the city would attract business is specious. I don’t for a moment imagine that Mr Wood ever moved his business into anywhere because of the look of the place, whether or not it had a piazza, but because of the economic returns his company hoped to bank.

<<<<<<<<<<<

Moved to Comment

http://rxpell.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/and-the-winner-is/

>>>>>>>>>>

Sterile, stale and uninspiring are just three of the words that have been used to describe the scheme – a cross between Tellytubby land and a ’70s skatepark with myriad opportunities for graffiti artists and multiple jumping off points for the suicidal. Contempt for heritage is shown by the fact that the historical features of the gardens are wiped away with the distinctive (and listed) granite balustrades going the same way as the mature trees.

<<<<<<<<<<<

We would also recommend the incisive commentary, spread out over many many posts, on the wonderful Blerr de Blerr Blerr blog from videographer of Aberdeen, Fraser Denholm.

And we too have covered some aspects of our own objections to the proposed comprehensive development:

///

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/03/biting-hand.html

>>>>>>>>>>

... our personal greatest vexation with this proposed redevelopment was the way than an opportunity to anchor a progressive arts and creative sector in Aberdeen was so thoughtlessly as to appear maliciously squandered. The City Square proposals caused the collapse of the Peacock Visual Arts Northern Light initiative which would have created a new contemporary arts centre for Aberdeen and the north of Scotland.

<<<<<<<<<<<

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/04/woonerf-for-denburn-valley-proposal.html

>>>>>>>>>>

We are concerned that ACSEF's [local business-interest quango/lobbying group, boosters of the project] top-down agenda to impose one single expensive solution to what they perceive to be Aberdeen's town centre problems runs the risk of putting all our civic eggs in one heavily-indebted basket.

<<<<<<<<<<<

///

To all of which, let us add the reminder that this proposed comprehensive redevelopment and building project is on common-good land (pdf) - sometimes referred to as "burgh commons" - as established by land rights campaigner Andy Wightman in his 2011 paper Union Terrace Gardens - Historic and Legal Status (pdf). This is land which is owned exclusively by no-one and generally by everyone, and which is held by the town authorities in trust for the people of Aberdeen. The Wikipedia entry for "burgh commons" states: "By the early 19th century, most burgh commons had been appropriated by the wealthy landowners who dominated burgh councils, and very few have survived." At the risk of appearing churlish, should we applaud the fact that the affluent capitalists of Aberdeen are at last making this effort to catch up?

"BON ACCORD CENTRE
Permission granted for entry
No public right of way constituted"

In all seriousness, though, this proposed development is of course an attempt by business interests to privatise public-realm space for profit. Or "adding shareholder value" as they tend to say - why use one straightforward word when you can use three obfuscations? Should the development go ahead, we will be able to visit these "gardens" only by the grace of the private sector owners and/or operators of the new building. Experience confirms that those private-sector operators will impose arbitrary restrictions on behaviour and appearance, and will undertake intrusive surveillance on all passing through. Indeed, our town has form in allowing the private sector to extinguish public rights. Where once a public right-of-way south from George Street continued all the way south to join with Market Street via St Nicholas Street, today a huge real-estate company called "Land Securities plc" grant permission for pedestrian access through their Bon Accord and St Nicholas Centre shopping malls only under the condition that no public right of way is (re)established. Where once we had a right of free access and passage, association and discourse, now all we have is consumer choice, that choice itself from a diminishing handful of shargar shoppies.

When old-media outlets, such as our local press, provide a forum for the boosters of this project which would build commercial and retail premises on the site of of our only town-centre park, they inevitably invoke a loathsome and cringing insecurity, a needy aspiration to "attract" businesses and businesspeople to the town and a perceived necessity to make the town an "attractive prospect for future mobile investment". Over the last two years, ever since emission-monger Sir Ian Wood first caused the collapse of the proposed Northern Lights arts centre, which would have created a home for local creative forum Peacock Visual Arts in Union Terrace Gardens, we have had many misgivings about what comprehensive redevelopment of the gardens would mean - we have always had the feeling that the wool was being pulled over our eyes, and not in the obvious way. But it is only today, only now that the people of Aberdeen (despite already once having said "no" to carbon-magnate Sir Ian's vision) approach the final zero-hour decision time that we can put our finger on one source of these misgivings. The City Garden Project, as proposed by CO2 baron Sir Ian Wood, is not for the people of Aberdeen. It's for the much more important people who aren't here yet. It's not for the likes of you and us - we don't count, we only live here already. We are the pre-existingly inconvenient legacy community.

We therefore urge you, if you have a vote, to reject the proposed destruction of the town centre garden in favour of business profits (sorry - enhanced shareholder value). The moneymen of this town, with emission-monger Sir Ian Wood at their head, have made the mistake of believing that a town is nothing more than the sum total of all the business activity which takes place within its borders, and so they then go on to compound their error by thinking that the town should be run like a business. We at OtherAberdeen know that the truth is much much broader than that pencilneck narrow vision promoted by pollution-king Sir Ian, ACSEF and our town council. Towns and cities are communities - places for people, places for association and interchange of all kinds, not just commerce. Show them that you know this too. Vote to Retain Union Terrace Gardens.

Explosive Lows, Sting Jets, Blocking Events and Resilience

2012-01-06T19:43:00.001Z

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Two weeks ago today, on Scotland's extra New Year bank holiday, you might remember a nasty winter storm caused extensive damage to property and infrastructure all over the country. In other parts of the UK there were a couple of deaths caused in one instance by a falling tree and in the other by adverse conditions at sea. While these human tragedies happened in the southernmost part of Britain, the greatest rage of the storm was visited upon the central belt of Scotland, where, due to the extra New Year's bank holiday, most folk were enjoying a day off work at home and so thankfully there were few injuries and no fatalities. The central belt is the most populous part of Scotland; an area of relatively low-lying land situated between the Highland massif and the southern uplands, it comprises the valleys of the River Forth and River Clyde with Scotland's two major cities - Edinburgh and Glasgow - at either coast along with all the concomitant housing, transport facilities, businesses, infrastructure and population density associated with them. The central belt is the cinch for Scotland's waist, giving the physical geography of the country that distinctive and familiar hourglass figure.

When the storm came, its greatest intensity was funnelled by this topography into the central belt. This being the area of maximum human habitation and activity, the storm had greatest possible impact upon the human geography of Scotland. This is the second such notably intense storm to hit Scotland this season, the first being ~~European Windstorm Friedhelm~~ Hurricane Bawbag which famously caused a social-media sensation when unilaterally re-named by internet gobshites on Twitter.

Notwistanding the fact that it was more the location of maximum intensity rather than the intensity itself which was newsworthy (conditions like those two weeks ago - had they happened, say, in the Cairngorms or on Shetland would not have attracted much reportage) there were a couple of terms used by TV weatherfolk which drew the attention. Firstly, before the storm hit, forecasters scrambled suddenly to intensify their weather warnings, as the incoming low-pressure weather system became subject to a sudden deepening to become what they called an "explosive low". After the storm had passed, meteorologists noted that the storm had been characterised by a "sting jet", a phenomenon first identified after the Great Storm of 1987 which affected the south of England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_jet

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A sting jet is a meteorological phenomenon which is believed to be the cause of the most damaging winds in European windstorms.
Following reanalysis of the Great Storm of 1987, led by Professor Keith Browning at the University of Reading, researchers identified a mesoscale flow where the most damaging winds were shown to be emanating from the evaporating tip of the hooked cloud head on the southern flank of the cyclone. This cloud, hooked like a scorpion's tail, gives the wind region its name the "Sting Jet".
It is thought that a zone of strong winds, originating from within the mid-tropospheric cloud head of an explosively deepening depression, are enhanced further as the "jet" descends, drying out and evaporating a clear path through snow and ice particles. The evaporative cooling leading to the air within the jet becoming denser, leading to an acceleration of the downward flow towards the tip of the cloud head when it begins to hook around the cyclone centre. Windspeeds in excess of 80 kn (150 km/h) can be associated with the Sting jet.

The Sting Jet

The preceding three winters here have also been characterised by unusual conditions. In the winter of 2008/9 and then again but even moreso in 2009/10 a rare and persistent omega-shaped kink in the high-altitude jet stream (a high-speed river of air which girds the earth and flows west-to-east) caused high-pressure anti-cyclonic weather systems to become "stuck" over Britain - blocked from continuing their more usual west-to-east progress. The attendant clear skies associated with high-pressure weather systems allowed heat to escape directly into the stratosphere and so the country those winters was characterised by rime frost and morning fogs, starry nights and windless calm. For the sharp-eyed and patient, rare atmospheric phenomena like moonbows and sun dogs and parhelic arcs became commonplace daily sights. In 2010/11 a similar jet stream "blocking event" occurred, but that season's high pressure system got stuck over the central North Atlantic with the effect that weather systems marched in formation one after the other down from the high arctic, causing record snowfall and record low temperatures all over Britain. Nasty. These blocking events are becoming more common, and can be dangerous. Summer blocking events over Russia are responsible for thousands of heat-related deaths and the destruction of land, real estate and habitat by wildfire.

No blocking event over Britain this season (so far at least) and the winter, while rough and windy, has been unusually mild. So, selfishly, in Scotland we might feel thankful for the mild temperatures. But that gratitude comes with a sense of unease, for how many seasons in a row can we experience unusual weather and continue to label it "unusual"?

A BBC Scotland weather-news special - Storm-Force Scotland - was broadcast last weekend, and as I watched, I felt that there was a bit of a "Keep Calm and Carry On" air about it. Archive footage was shown to demonstrate that, yes, from time to time damaging winds can occur in Scotland and the participants appeared to be under special orders not to use the terms "Global Warming" or "Dangerous Climate Change".

But Alex Reid, the Scottish Government's special meteorological advisor let the mask slip…

We should not be surprised that these unusual weather patterns continue to surprise the authorities, for the disruption they bring takes a different form each time. And as this pattern-with-no-pattern continues we hear much from Government spokespeople talking of the need for "resilience". When, two years ago, freezing conditions and a shortage of grit/salt made Scottish roads unusable, a Transport Secretary lost his government position and steps were taken to ensure future superabundance of grit/salt. This year, those stockpiles lie unused. And then when floods swept low-lying areas of Moray and Perthshire tens of millions of pounds were spend on flood defence measures. Bunds and dykes and gates now lie unneeded, silent witnesses to wind-felled chimneystacks, and roads and railways closed by fallen trees. It seems that when the state and big business talk of "resilience" they mean "hardening" - a futile enterprise, for all human effort is ever dwarfed by the magisterial power of nature.

On the Isle of Bute, in that first week of 2012, the storm had cut the electricity supply from the mainland. The chainstores and supermarkets, reliant as they are on Kanban and PLU systems were unable to operate. They closed their doors to customers. Despite the fact that there might still have been stock on the shelves, the employees felt so disempowered by being un-powered that they could not take their customers ready-money - for the tills were not working. Without electricity, the threads of big-business commerce unravelled. But by contrast, the sole trader and small-scale local enterprises (which that island community remains blessed to retain) - the butcher and baker, ironmonger and inn - remained trading perfectly well. Marking their accounts by pencil in notebooks, locking cash taken in a strongbox in a cupboard. But what about people with no cash until the banks are back online? Well, they had no worries - the community-based enterprises were the local heroes who knew their customers by name. A little note; an IOU on a post-it pad written by candlelight - and trust - was their currency.

Resilience is not to be found, cannot be found, in engineering projects which jut their chin at nature, hoping to stand fast against the storm, or the cold, or the desertification, or the flood, or the heat, or the landslide, or the drought or the tide, or whatever combination surprises us next. Hubristically strengthening our civil-engineering defences merely increases the severity of the impact when those defences will be finally, inevitably breached. "Look upon my works ye mighty and despair". No - resilience is, rather, to be found in those activities - those systems - which fail-safe, which are unaffected by cascade failure, which are discreet nodes unconnected to artificial dependency networks. This true resilience stands founded in the strength of our communities and operates within the envelope described by the sustainability of our activities. We should take note of the sole traders of Bute and how they reacted during the time that the island was off the grid at the start of 2012. We should study carefully how they sustained their community for a whole week without electricity - without missing a beat, for there is a real lesson of true resilience for our future contained within their sustainable activities and self-reliant attitudes.

That's Entertainment!

2012-01-06T19:42:00.001Z

Silent New Year

2012-01-01T11:36:00.001Z

And now this is the first day of another year in Aberdeen. Happy New Year everyone.

At the sounding of the midnight bells and the ringing-in of the new year with a toast to loved ones, down in time every year from when I was a young boy in Aberdeen, one of the things I first remember about Hogmanay in this town was my dad taking me out into the back garden and us listening together to the boats in the harbour sounding their horns. For fifteen minutes or half an hour they blared their airhorn hoots in paradoxically mournful salutation of the celebration. The droning tone of these horns blown for joy fitted the duality of the Hogmanay festival, which marks the funeral of one year and the birth of a new one. All the streets in the double-estuary-amphitheatre of our maritime town resonated to the different tones, and the people of the town listened in wonder - cocking an ear to this freighter and that anchor-tug, this supply-ship and that tanker. Which tone went with which sort of ship? Which was louder, and which shriller?

And every Hogmanay since, the ships' horns sounding out in the harbour at midnight at the turning of the year has been one of the things that has marked the season for me. An annual punctuation, something to expect, a tradition; personal and civic. And a few years ago, the tech embodied in the horns evolved - and the Hogmanay sound across town changed from being that saraband of pneumatically driven hoot to a more upbeat polka sequence of digitally-generated beeps and tones, not an unwelcome change. Rather than the mysterious mourn in slow-time darkness, the soundscape of our town on Hogmanay came to resemble more the climactic sequence of tone-communication depicted in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fascinating and other-worldly; a sensory impression reinforced by the recent fashion to use firework displays to help mark the turning of the new year.

But suddenly, oddly, this year, no boats in the harbour or ships in the bay horned their toots or beebed their blare for Hogmanay. No sound came from the basin to accompany our celebrations as 2011 turned into 2012. The harbinger of this new year was silent - foreshadowing shame? Boding infamy? Presaging an ill-starred fate? We don't know why this traditional aspect of Hogmanay was absent from our town this year. Maybe there's a good reason, maybe just a trivial one. Maybe it's trivial of us to complain. But one thing is for sure, it's another one of the little erosions which bit by bit leave us with fewer and fewer reasons for remaining here. It signifies one of the many many Zeno corrosions which little by little threaten to burn away this town's soul. What other little denudations have passed us all unnoticed?

Have a Very Alcohol-mediated, Consumerist, Motorcentric, Advertising-driven and Illiterate, Xmas in Aberdeen!

2011-12-22T15:50:00.000Z

I went to the barber. We like barbers, and we like the fact that there's a resurgence in their numbers on the streets of Aberdeen. Used to be, before the long boom, that there were lots of barbershops. Bastions of exclusive masculinity they were, where stoic-faced men and boys would sit or stand queuing around the edge of a smallish room, waiting in companionable silence or low-tone discussion for their turn on the barber's chair - impressively sturdy yet mildly frightening-looking in its functionality, sharing as it does a common ancestor with the dentist's chair. Ranged round the room - stonily staring either into the middle distance or at the chequerboard linoleum floor we would be; men together at one with the laminarity of our own smooth thoughts in that masculine mindscape which may flourish in quiet, understated and conducive spaces like the barbershop. Places like that are where best the masculine mindscape can range wide and smooth - idea upon idea distilling and concentrating, concatenating and ramifying; creative patterns merge and blossom - for it requires just that sort of continuous unity of environment and encounter for its best experience and function. The only sounds in the barbershop the whispered, measured tones of sober discussion, the hum of the electric clippers and the snick-snip of the finishing scissors, then a whispered "...and something for the weekend? Sir?" and the man currently being groomed was brushed down. He'd stand up, pay - and then it'd be your turn for the buzz-cut. No crap, no smalltalk, no faffing about, no feminisingly fragrant and functionally extraneous trichological 'product' - just an effing haircut, done expertly, quickly and cheaply by a grown man who you could trust had done exactly that same thing a million times before. You could have faith that in ten minutes flat he'd have you'd stepping out of the chair with your hair looking exactly like that of the NASA test-pilot you expected it to. What could possibly go wrong with such a simple activity, so quiet and uncomplicated a space, so straightforward a commercial relationship?

When the long boom came, the barbershops one by one began to disappear - we thought it was natural wastage - the old barbers retired and their premises became unisex salons. Full of 'lifestyle' magazines, conditioner/gel/mousse/whatever 'product' (to be sold on commission), pop music videos, and late-teenage girls who would charge a small fortune for taking up to an hour to make a frankly bad job of cutting your hair. Sometimes these places would have aquaria. But, worst of all - oh by far worst of all - the smalltalk; the juddering discontinuity of arbitrary inconsequential crapchat, destroying the unity of the masculine mindscape.

Now that the long boom is at an end, and the politicians and commentariat begin to think about ways to try and tell the electorate that a return to economic growth may not actually be feasible, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good and barbershops are returning to the urban scene in Aberdeen - we daresay it's the same story all over the country.

So, more or less on a whim, I walked into one of Holburn Street's growing number (seven at the most recent count) of barbershops which have recently begun to typify parts of the town-centre. All appeared as it should have been: chequerboard linoleum flooring; fuss-free interior; traditional-looking barber's chairs; no branded hair 'product'; a small queue of men with reassuringly blank looks. All correct. I expected that I shared a common frame of reference with barber and clientele alike. But I was wrong.

Regular readers will know that we at Other,Aberdeen believe that - rather than the ticket-price or up-to-datedness of gewgaw possessions; rather than the external veneer of mere ostentation; and rather than an overdraft of ersatz happiness from the bank of Boozy Britain, the key to well-being is to be sought in the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture, the strength of our relationships and the sustainability of our activities. So I was disappointed to to be subjected to the smalltalk of the barber who first asked me what sort of car I drive. (Living in the town centre, it's not necessary for me to own a car, so I do not.) That smalltalk opening gambit having failed, the barber then asked whether I would be out drinking that night. (I do not drink.)

"What! Not even at Christmas?"

< No. >

"Are you not even going to take a drink on Christmas Day?"

< No. I don't use it. >

Eyebrows raised, and head shaking, the barber blew a breath out from between pursed lips: "Pffft".

Next I was asked what I expected to "get" for Christmas (I was not asked what I would be giving). And then, once my hair was cut and I had paid, I was handed a little seasonal promotional 'gift'; a barbershop-branded beer-bottle opener: "In case you change your mind and decide to have a wee cheeky beer or two over the festive season". The fact that I do not use alcohol simply could not, would not, fit into the barber's world view, especially at Christmas!

Walking back home, I reflected on how misunderstood the straightforward desire for simplicity can be. At this time of year especially, and with the western world's economies undergoing the convulsions of phase change to a low- or no-growth future - we hope that simple, unmediated pleasures, unfreighted with commercial content and free from reliance upon fragile critical dependency networks become valued once again. I quickened my step, eager for the simple pleasures of hearth and home on that winter day. The day's consignment of Christmas cards awaited me in the vestibule. Among them, this gem:

Where to start with this copyright busting, advertising-subsumed, commercially complicit piece of seasonal "cheer", parasitising as it does upon the mass-culture iconography which has developed around the secondary arbitrage market for car insurance? Perhaps it is enough to simply point out that the producers of this Christmas card have mis-spelled "meerkat".

With Season's Greetings to all our readers!

Key Stakeholder

Other, Aberdeen

Cacophonous Rosemount

2011-12-16T15:54:00.004Z

As the oppressive noise level generated by motor traffic in Aberdeen increases in direct correspondence with the oil price, trying to undertake psychogeographical studies of the town and its socio-geographical relationships becomes more and more frustrating and our field reports run the risk of becoming increasingly one-dimensional. More than once, these pages have featured our bitter complaints about the growing cacophonous overburden of discordance on our town's streets and the impact of this noisy intrusion upon our quality of life. And when we visit an area of study, by chance dérive or purposeful expedition, it takes an engaged effort of the will to try to screen out the harsh racket which destroys the unity of the urban experience - that which our psychogeography seeks.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, we walked up and down Rosemount Place - host to a subsidiary commercial district of Aberdeen, about a kilometre from the town centre, and so fitting nicely the the multi-node-model of urbanisation. The Rosemount area is full of artefacts and arrangements of great psychogeographical interest. From ancient boundary stones to boutique cheese-vendors; from mid-century Viennese-style art deco apartment blocks to Georgian manor houses hidden behind Victorian tenements, accessible up long dark pends; from independent cosmopolitan cafés to cipher-embazoned granite pediments and gables - Rosemount is fascinating. Tree-lined avenues and traditional green-lane rights-of-way criss-cross the area. Rosemount would be a nice place to linger, to dawdle, to stroll and maybe even do some grocery shopping; to stop in a cafe and read a newspaper, to live life at a human scale and pace. But unfortunately, through-traffic roars up and down Rosemount Place, rat-running at maximum possible speed between the northwest of the town and the central business district. The noise generated by the continual high-speed flow of traffic makes Rosemount Place an unpleasant and oppressive zone. Not at all a nice place to linger.

We had intended to stay, to look at stuff, to think and reflect, to discuss what we were experiencing. But it was impossible. We couldn't dally, because we had to shout to each other in order to be heard. It just was not possible to stand on the pavement or stroll and maintain a conversation. Once again we were subjected to that most British of outcomes - the confusion that exists between streets and roads. In pre-mid 20th century urbanism, roads connected locations and streets connected people. A road's main function was transportation, while streets enabled public interaction. Today, in Aberdeen, even the streets are roads, and public interaction is marginalised in favour of noisy high-speed motor-traffic 'flow'.

According to the World Health Organisation document "Burden of disease from environmental noise" (pdf):

The health impacts of environmental noise are a growing concern. At least one million healthy life years are lost every year from traffic-related noise in the western part of Europe.
[...]
Traffic noise alone is harming the health of almost every third person in the WHO European Region. One in five Europeans is regularly exposed to sound levels at night that could significantly damage health.
[...]
Excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people’s daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects, reduce performance and provoke annoyance responses and changes in social behaviour.

So, what is to be done? We're pleased to note that the Scottish Government is obliged by European Union legislation to address environmental noise via Noise Action Plans covering Noise Management Areas (pdf). Unfortunately, we're less pleased to note that local greenwash boilerplate issuing quango NESTRANS (North East Scotland Transport) is the local body responsible for dealing with transport noise in Aberdeen.

The NESTRANS "Health and Transport Action Plan" (HTAP) document is difficult to find, particularly as NESTRANS appear not to have updated the document index on their website since 2008, but a bit of knowledge of how to conduct advanced Google searches delivers up the goods.

Google-generated HTML version here.
MS Word .doc format download here.

It's disappointing to note that the "Noise Control" section of the report is practically identical to that published in the NESTRANS HTAP last year, the only change in the form of words being those necessary to report that no action has yet been taken, not even to identify problem areas. We'll save them the time and effort: the whole of Aberdeen is now a problem area for traffic noise.

Google viewer version of 2010 HTAP here.

It was a fairly pleasant surprise to see that our local advertising free-sheet "The Aberdeen Citizen" (BEST free newspaper in Scotland) covered this story with a front-page splash last week: "EU COULD TELL ABERDEEN TO CUT DOWN THE NOISE" - they thundered. We were delighted. But then we read the article. The reporter who wrote it asked a local haulage magnate to comment. The transport tycoon in question responded by calling for road resurfacing:

"Drive past noise varies on the road surface ... it can be loud and intimidating. The only way to lower that is to improve the road surface."

(Our emphasis)

The reporter also sought a quote from a NESTRANS spokeswoman who said:

"As technological advances reduce noise levels from vehicles, it is possible that improvements will occur anyway."

Astonishing. This spokeswoman believes that "technological advances" will come to the rescue; presumably those advances being in the form of electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles which will emit negligible engine-noise. But, engine noise is already only detectable in today's motor cars at speeds lower than 20mph. Above that speed, it is the rolling tyre rumble and aerodynamic effects which produce the noise which so blights our urban environment and is of such great concern to the World Health Organisation. So the NESTRANS spokeswoman is happy to tell us that she is just crossing her fingers and hoping that the problem will go away, and the haulage magnate wants road surface 'improvements'. Neither of these quoted sources countenance measures (such as modal-shift away from use of private motor vehicles towards sustainable, active and/or public transport modes) which could reduce traffic volumes or speeds. They have not considered this obvious, low-cost and minimum intervention solution, because so entrenched has their motor-centric world-view become that they cannot see the bleedingly obvious fact that motor-traffic is the source of motor-traffic noise. To paraphrase the splendid "At War With The Motorist" blog:

The cause of traffic noise is traffic. Too much of if, driving too fast. We like to pretend that it’s bad engineering, because we can always fix engineering by replacing it with some different engineering. And we like to pretend that it’s not the volume and speed of traffic and the behaviour of drivers, because acknowledging this would mean giving up hope that one day the traffic noise will magically be solved. But that’s the way it is: too many cars, driven too fast.

Edgewatch

2011-12-16T11:28:00.000Z

OtherAberdeen's first hardcore psychogeographic photoblog project "Edgewatch" came to an end the other day. Check it out: http://edgewatch.blogspot.com/

365 days of Aberdeen

If you're in the know, you'll already know about the successor to Edgewatch: "Northern Liminalia"

Driech Mizzle Cacophony

2011-11-30T12:44:00.001Z

-------oo§oo-------

<<<<A volcanic eruption halts ALL air traffic into and out of the UK, for the first time ever. Eerie silence at the top of the hill, where only last week I was buzzed by a helecopter-full of roughnecks. The airport roar of jet engines silenced by Icelandic ash, the only thing I can hear today at the prominence summit is the gentle wind, whispering serene abstractions in my ears.>>>>

.................

I was taken aback to find from an entry made in an old notebook just over eighteen months ago that a silence, eerie or serene or of whatever character, could be found anywhere in this town, at any time. The note was made at the top of Brimmond Hill in April 2010. I was taken aback to read it because these days, just a short six seasons later, there's no silence to be found here - not anywhere round here at all. How quickly we forget; how easily plasticised our human existence. The condition of constant outdoor noise is so readily regarded as normal to our situation.

So I crave the peace and space that we all used to enjoy. Actually, no - we didn't enjoy it, we took it for granted. Like on a Sunday, for example. I remember long, aimless teenage Sunday afternoon walks - with friends or in solitary thoughtfulness - through our town's plentiful beech- and birch-lined boulevards and avenues. The peace affording me the mental space, the unity of direct passive experience, to appreciate the granite and slate symmetries, framed by hedge and tree, lawn and border. Bay and turret, gable and pitch. Suffusing my human spirit with unique ambience of place and time. But today, to walk those same boulevards and avenues - fewer, ever fewer their lawns and hedges and trees - is to find that unity of experience disrupted by the continual noise of motor traffic. The relaxed nature of walking for transportation or even for its own sake has been critically disrupted as, over recent years, even our streets have become roads.

To recapture that serenity - that unity - we set out with hope, with intention of passivity, on Sunday morning to walk the Sustrans footpath on the Old Deeside Way; Abergeldie to the Den of Cults, then down to the Shakkin' Briggie at the old waterworks. We hope, o we so hope for quiet. Surely, walking that route, away from roads and the streets that have become roads, we'll find what we want, and find our minds there too on that driech morning.

The morning immediately mizzles near-dimensionless nanosphere-points of water onto everything we're wearing - like dew on a spiderweb. But shortly we're properly soused as, surface tension breached, those points gather more and more water. Discharging water vapour from the smirr-saturated but mild and windless air they expand, ballooning, and burst into just wetness. But we're dressed and shod for these normal autumn conditions. Weather doesn't frighten us.

There is beauty in the soft-edges of this fall weather - the dun damp of autumn, the fungal must of the deliquescing leaf-litter by the sides of the footpath, next year's top layer of topsoil. By the side of the footpath an apple tree gnarls back at the glowering sky. Its underbrush is the focus for a squabble of birdlife. We see that somehow little beaks have split the windfall apples. The discarded semi-skins which the birds do not prefer lie around discarded, voided like pastry cases after a children's party. As we approach a double-dozen blackbirds and robins and starlings kerfuffle and flap and vector off a safe distance, to return to the tree and its underbrush once we're past. Their little songs, their tweeting entreaties, beeping out first the warning then whistling the all-clear to their feathered cadres, and cheering our souls as we set out on our morning route.

We walk along through Airyhall and Garthdee. There are few other people about. And none of those are just walking. There are a handful of joggers. Insulated, every one of them, from our world by ear-connected bicep-strapped iPod. The trademark white earbuds and wires along with the velcro armstrap appurtenance somewhat reminiscent of medical paraphrenalia - a stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff hybrid. Brows knitted and gurning, these loping obsessives: we nod hello to them as they pass. They do not see us, they focus to the horizon of the middle-distance.

And here is a dog-walker. Indignant, clearly: seems the obligation to provide his pet with exercise and relief is not what he'd prefer to be doing this Sunday morning. His face angled sternly down he mutters desultory into the phone in his right-hand fist, the remote electronically mediated interlocutor elsewhere taking precedence over the flesh and bone and fur animal present. A little knotted translucent polybag of still dog-arse warm dogshit dangles obscenely from the man's left-hand fingers on knotted loop. He twirls it absentmindedly like a dandy might a cane. We smile our community to him as we pass. He does not meet our eyes, actually turning his head away. But the dog - she is a collie - trots across and makes eye-contact with us, one after the other, politely. She gently snuffles briefly our outstretched hands and looks farewell to us over her shoulder as we walk on. She will know us now and forever.

At Pitfodels, and it's mid-morning. The mist-damp air is an efficient transmitter of sound waves, so - although we can't see it - we can hear the motor traffic on the North Deeside Road, 100 metres to the right, parallel to our walking route. What are they doing - so many of them, driving about the place, on a Sunday morning? And then we're past the old train station at The Den of Cults. An odd name, and tautological; "Cults" being a diminutive derived from the Gaelic "cuil" for "nook". So "Cults" is a little secluded place. The "den", which is the steep gorge of a stream, making it doubly-so. Despite its name, so intriguing to modern ears, no sinister sects are hiding in this steep V-shaped valley, just an everso-nice Victorian municipal suburb built for the waterworks where the Cults burn confluxes with the River Dee. That suburb now, of course, metastasised by the late 20th century's large-plan bungalows and cul-de-sacs all the way up the south-facing hill to the watershed.

Down in the den, the rushing burn streaming and bubbling over rocks and little bouldery waterfalls by our side, we feel perhaps the first inkling of the cheerful feelings - the unity of sensation - which we'd sought when we set out. We can pick out the obsolete waterworks infrastructure: An engine house now a des-res; valves, spigots and the like as garden ornaments; enigmatic equipment artefacts embedded in walls and footways. Oh, and the big newish kidney-shaped reservoir on the flood-plain, like a man-made oxbow lake on the broad flat inch (a flat sandy bank or river island). Out in the centre of the flat, still water the handrails of a just-submerged catwalk structure are parallel platforms where a gauntlet of waterbirds - mostly ducks, some gulls, a handful of swans and one single cormorant with its wings spread wide - stand guard.

Across the river, yan to the yin on the same flood-plain inch squats the "Aspire Golf Centre". Surely one of the most up-to-date and exciting golfing opportunities available to the hard-pressed golfers of the north-east of Scotland, for acknowledging the busyness of the busy folk of business in Aberdeen "City and Shire" the Aspire Golf Centre offers a short-form of golf. Only nine holes, and every one a par 3. Flood-lit, for high-speed late-night golfing, after those long hours a-wrangling at the spreadsheets in your cubicle. And a target range; very popular, because it has what are called "Powertees", an "automated teeing solution", which means that aspiring golfers don't ever have to bend over. Less hassle, see?

And passing the golf centre, the South Deeside Road, a secondary road, a narrow winding B-road which follows the contours of the steep gradient southern wall of the glacial valley. Again and again, the crest and roar of gearbox and turbo reverberate booming off that valley wall. Reflected over the river to us on our muddy path to Inchgarth: the cacophony of the motor-men taking their high-speed gear-change engine-breaking thrills on the leaf-fall slick adverse cambers. Heel-and-toe fast and furious they fly, and we see their Subarus and Golfs or whatever flicker through the trees across the water. Not 100 metres away, their choice of Sunday-morning leisure destroys ours; we cannot even sustain a conversation between us. A flight of swans angles quite low overhead, but today we are denied the privilege of hearing their in-flight murmuring intrigues. We might as well have tried to find peace at an airport, or a Grand Prix circuit.

-------oo§oo-------

March Stones 58 to 60 ABD - Froghall.

2011-11-23T17:14:00.001Z

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Celtic Place-Names in Aberdeenshire
John Milne, 1912
>>>>>
FROGHALL: Cheerful place. Frogail, merry, cheerful.

The branch line from Kittybrewster to our harbour’s massive rail terminal, one of many “Waterloos”, lies in near-desuetude, the almost-gleam of the rails betraying the only occasional robust creeping of freight wagons slipping in the dark of the clanking night towards the Berryden loop and access to main-line rail and away. Cargos to or from who-knows-where, who knows for what? Rare, seldom seen. Hardly considered.

Negotiate the dust and roar and hurry of the motor traffic at the Powis Terrace/Bedford Road junction and traverse either of two pedestrian footbridges over the railway cutting and onto Elmbank Terrace, there to get away into another world. Always and everywhere, it seems, to be on the wrong side of the rails is a condemnation. But here, walking with care to find the town’s ancient boundary stones - the “March Stones” (see note below) - to be on the wrong side of these tracks offers a kind of relief. The area, called Sunnyside to the north, Froghall to the south seems becalmed in a doldrum which is somehow away from the rest of Aberdeen; separate - a forgotten triangle of neglect. Benign neglect. This town is busy, too busy - so to walk down a quiet residential but non-suburban street, which has become like a woonerf-by-accident is a rare pleasure here. So easy to forget that walking and talking with your pedestrian companions is one of life’s simple riches, free wealth - for over the last small handful of years, since the oil-price first surpassed one hundred U.S. Dollars per barrel, this town-that-likes-to-think-it’s-a-city has gone into resource-extractive overdrive. Drill baby drill. This involves lots of people driving around the place as fast as they possibly can.
The boastful and offensive Aberdonian saw: “Recession? What recession?” - which revels in the high oil prices which cause such misery elsewhere - is played out on the less and less stately avenues and boulevards of our town as the cherished-plated out-of-scale machine-people machine the streets into crumbling gravel, milled to dust and reaming the pot-holes of their muck. So finding any pleasant outdoor spot in Aberdeen which is not intrusively besmirched by the constant traffic swish and foom has become a practical impossibility. It is always with us. As the autumn progresses and the trees now have shuddered away near the last of their leaves, not even our town’s parks offer a refuge from the continual susurration-roar of the busy people busying about being busy in the service of business.

58 ABD

Walking through becalmed Sunnyside/Froghall is relief. This unremembered triangle has, for whatever happy confluence of reasons, been rendered non-permeable to motor-traffic flows. Strolling calmly and slowly, each other’s words are listened to and considered in the unhurried luxury; the stroll of ideas as one step goes in front of another. In this way, and along these ways, progress is made as we make progress through the locality. The landscape of the built environment and its elements is assimilated in its relationship to us, in those elements’ relationships to each other. We insinuate ourselves and our thoughts into that landscape, we can be still in the resonances of the insights we gain, which in turn centre and still us farther yet. Still, centred, moving. An expansive unity of experience moving on and through the inner urban landscape.

59 ABD

The once-impressive villas, merchant-manors of nineteenth-century traders or capitalists, overlook the near-redundant branch line in the cutting below Elmbank Terrace - the street where boundary stones 58 ABD and 59 ABD are found. Were the original proprietors of these impressive properties overlooking an interest in the cargoes traversing or capital embodied in the short-lived Aberdeenshire canal which - almost immediately obsolescent upon its foundation - in turn established the foundation of the railway now occupying the cutting? Behind the villas, an industrial area fallen on hard times. Aberdeen’s still-born jute industry died with the canal, monumental masonry exhausted with the granite quarries. Traces of those industrial waves remain; in the street names - Canal Road and Jute Street (where we find boundary stone 60 ABD); and the industrial heritage evident in the built environment - the workers tenements clustering round the industrial area, the traces of rail sidings and platforms, the hand-cranes and unworked slabs in abandoned mason’s yards. And now, second (or third?) wave light industry, transient, almost gone too. Motor-trade, builders’ merchants, carpenters, telephone engineering depot, all in various stages of decrepitude. We smile to each other in the acknowledgment that there is beauty here. There is allure in the craquelure of peeling paint. There is dusty beauty in the modernism of a redundant telephone exchange used as a stationery store, forms no longer following function. There is delight to find a pedestrian permeability up a snicket behind bollards and there is a thrilling unity to the right-angled granite canyons that are the never-identical ramifications of the Aberdeen Victorian tenement template.

The edges form as industry constantly revolutionises itself and all that is solid melts into air. The edge is the difference between something and nothing. Residential development encroaches, people come and go, and come again. Will the Dutch disease event-horizon, the overriding exigency of oil-industry urgency suck all the capital of our town down-hole, to die dissipated and exhausted in (or exported from) a peripheral industrial estate? Or will something new, some novel enterprise yet to be conceived, re-occupy the dormant heart of Froghall - the "cheerful place"?

60 ABD

Development Opportunities

Tenements - Old.

Flats - Newer

Apartments - Newest

Tagging not new - 'JJ 1879'

Test Department

wood berd

Goods Pioneer

Every day is like Sunday.

Note: The “March Stones”

The extent of this "gift" of land from Bruce (which required an annual rent to be paid to the crown - heh, some gift!) can be seen around Aberdeen today. Often mistaken for milestones, the engraved numbered stelae which lie hidden in plain view around Aberdeen mark the boundary between the gifted estate and the hinterland beyond - Kincardine to the south, Mar to the west and Buchan to the North. Bruce had occupied Aberdeen in 1307 and 1308 while he laid waste to a large part of that hinterland.

The Harrying of Buchan was a devastating event for this area, characterised by its (surprisingly modern) ruthlessly systematic nature. This was a policy, managed and executed with businesslike efficiency; entire towns like Ellon were completely eradicated, livestock and crops were burned in the fields, infrastructure was dismantled and dissipated. Some historians say that so complete was the destruction that the innate and potential wealth of Buchan was damaged for centuries after. A terrible and exceptional act of vengeful spite, unparalleled in these islands before or since.

Small wonder the Aberdonians cowered and offered Bruce whatever he wanted. The fearful and pusillanimous capitulation of Aberdeen's burghers (who had been loyal to the English crown until the pogrom in the hinterland) no doubt, in time, pricked Bruces' conscience and lead to his eventual largesse towards our town. According to the Aberdeen City and Shire website, the ordinary people of Aberdeen also "furnished" Bruce with "large supplies" of cash, food and other goods. Under what levels of terror and sword-edge compulsion was this "furnishing" obliged? In this context, the "gift" of the Freedom Lands more than a decade later might be seen as a form of belated conscience-stricken compensation from Bruce to Aberdeen's craven burghers.

The numbered stelae boundary markers which show the edges of that “gift”, the Freedom Lands are known as March Stones ("march" being the Old Scots word for "boundary”).

Why a Third Crossing is Wrong - We Try to Explain Electricity to a Cat

2011-11-22T12:55:00.001Z

-------oo0oo-------

Our attention has been drawn to the "Why a Third Crossing is Wrong" blog at thirddoncrossing.wordpress.com, in which a community activist in Tillydrone logically sets out the reasons why Aberdeen City Council and their business-community sponsors are wrong to push ever onward with their antiquated proposals for a damaging new bridge (the "Third [sic - see below] Don Crossing") over the River Don at Tillydrone. This new motor-vehicle bridge, if built, would form part of the much larger grand project to build a new (but paradoxically, as we have explained, very old-fashioned) radial expressway in Aberdeen, pointing directly at the heart of the town centre. We've touched on some of the aspects of this new radial expressway once or twice before.

We admire the systematic and thoroughgoing approach demonstrated by the author of Why A Third Crossing is Wrong (let's call it "WTCW") - but of course, the damoclean situation which the Tillydrone (and wider Aberdeen) community finds itself in demands nothing other than all the rigour that can possibly be mobilised in opposition to this road and bridge project which will slice the community in two. The case against the building of this new road and bridge is set out logically and assiduously on the pages of WTCW and the perspicacity and professionalism of the content pages (which are in the form of submissions to the forthcoming public enquiry into the compulsory purchase orders associated with the scheme) does credit to the Tillydrone community. We congratulate the author of the WTCW blog and we recommend it to our readers: go and have a look.

Being familiar with some of the issues surrounding the proposed Third Don Crossing, and after reading the WTCW blog, we were reminded of a recent piece on Copenhagenize in which motorists using a street through a community in Ferrara, Italy are referred to as parasites:

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2011/11/parasites-and-living-lungs.html

<<<<<<<

What a great word. The host organism is, of course, the city off which they feed. The streets outside my flat as I write this are relatively free of parasites. The ones that plague Copenhagen aren't your traditional parasites. They aren't noctural. They desert their host organism on migratory patterns, scurrying back to their formicaries in the afternoons, only to return to feed upon their host in the morning. To continue their infestation and causing all manner of illnesses that the host organism is unable to defend itself against.

Traffic pollution with its toxic emissions and noise pollution, a lower perception of safety for pedestrians and cyclists, traffic accidents that kill and maim, reduced property prices and so on.

Parasites. It's a brilliant way to describe the motorists who roll down these streets, contributing nothing to the liveableness of my neighbourhood and others, hardly making a dent in the economic well-being of the shops, paying their taxes in other municipalities. Rumbling past, spouting the residue of their combusted fossil fuels behind them to the funky tunes on their radio while they text away on their telephones.

>>>>>>>>>

WTDC says:

http://thirddoncrossing.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/34/

<<<<<<<

The academic consensus is that growth in car transport and road haulage mileage should be discouraged as it is not sustainable socially, environmentally and economically and that there should be a ‘modal shift’ to other sustainable forms. i.e. there should be a decoupling of road transport from economic growth.

I am not alone in interpreting that the root of the problem of congestion is the over dependence of the North East on car transport and this is evident by the fact that congestion in and around Aberdeen is not only confined to the Haudagain and Bridge Don ‘pinch points’. I consider that the development will perpetuate this condition by encouraging car usage resulting in more congestion and continuing the progressive marginalisation of sustainable transport alternatives.

Reading through the documentation so far is leading me to the conclusion that there is a bias in the interpretation of the studies leaning towards the conclusion for the need of a road traffic bridge. There appears to be over emphasis on the benefits, understatement of the consequences and the ignoring of alternatives.

>>>>>>>>>

OtherAberdeen's regular readers will of course know that our position is uncompromisingly against the use of motor-vehicles as a personal transport mode in the centre of Aberdeen (or any town centre). Policies which discourage cars in urban centres and reallocate roadspace away from motor traffic are mainstream throughout continental Europe and are being adopted even in the USA to the great benefit of local economic prospects and urban social profiles, but when we publish blog-posts demanding that similar policies be adopted here, we generally get a whole lot of quite nasty abuse.

So… it's a tough nut to crack… Going hard at the technical aspects of specific projects, as WTCW does, and as RoadSense (for instance) are doing with regard to the forthcoming orbital motorway project (the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route, or AWPR), is vital - for without these efforts and others like them, 'facts on the ground' would change rapidly and irreversibly, as road-building proposals are presented as plans, and plans are presented as faits accomplis. But it's troubling that efforts like these have to be made at all, for they are fighting a rearguard action against a democratic deficit. And as we have pointed out before, the current road-building obsession in Aberdeen is an atavistic desire for the realisation of plans which were first drawn up in the centre of the car-crazy twentieth century, before the externalities of motor-centric policies were understood. Car-dependency (or is it car-addiction? - so hard to tell the difference) as pointed out by WTCW is endemic in this part of the world.

We believe that the underlying problem lies in the mind-set of the polity here (just offering an opinion like that expressed in the previous sentence can provoke reams of abuse). It's a problem of framing, of context. We said, in the conclusion to our "Woonerf for the Denburn Valley" piece:

"…once our scheme is up and running … who would ever want to take their car all the way into the town centre ever again?"

And among the responses we got was one from someone who said:

"Yeah, exactly. That's the serious danger of schemes like these which remove road capacity".

The point being that, here, in this town, in this area, more cars on more roads is ipso facto regarded as being the desirable outcome. This is the context - the frame - in which we try to make the case for sustainable and active transport. You might as well try to explain electricity to a cat. The framing, the prevailing mindset, makes the case for any alternative to motor-transport practically impossible to promulgate. For example, take the forthcoming "Berryden Corridor Improvements" [sic] project, which forms part of the same radial expressway as the Third Don Crossing. The use of that word 'improvements' is telling, for it is the consequence of an a priori assumption on behalf of planners that more cars on more roads in the city is a good thing. So the use of that word 'improvements' can be seen as a political deployment of language; for who could credibly oppose something which is an 'improvement'? The questions that exercise us at OtherAberdeen are, firstly: Why is car-dependency endemic here? And secondly: What is to be done? What can be done to break the frame, change the context?

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Why is car-dependency endemic here?

Historically and broadly-speaking, economic progress and improvements in living standards have been accompanied by an increase in car ownership and use. This is understandable. The affluent society, status displays, the growth of suburban living and commuting, the upgrade cycle, etc. All other things being equal (and in the absence of civic policies to discourage motoring) economic growth provokes more motoring; cause and effect. It appears that our policy-makers have got this back-ass forwards; mistaking cause for effect they now believe that more motoring on more roads is a primary cause of economic growth. This is a cargo cult.

OtherAberdeen has explored the impulse for hierarchical status-display through motoring and, while that's an effect that's evident everywhere in the UK, we feel that the extreme affluence of the upper percentiles of the Aberdeen population has a disproportionate psychological 'pull' effect on those 'below' them in the hierarchy, many of who mistake affluence for wealth and so cannot understand that aspiration is not the same thing as acquisition. "Aberdeen is Tycoon-town, / If you're not a tycoon yet, you will be soon." So, aping the transport choices of the hyper-affluent, the people of Aberdeen and its hinterland are delighted to put more cars on more roads, because to them it demonstrates that Aberdeen is a town on the up-and-up, a town that's going somewhere (even if that's only to the shops for a pint of milk).

Related to that upper-percentile affluence is, of course, the fact that the predominant industry round here is concerned with oil extraction. An acquaintance, defending his excessive motor-mileage said he was "supporting the local economy" by using so much petrol. He wasn't joking. But there's a bit more to it than that: Aside from the impacts upon urban liveability, aside from the detrimental personal and social effects of sedentary lifestyles, and aside from the impact on the perception of safety and desirability of switching to other transport modes, excessive motoring also contributes to climate change (motor transport causes about a quarter of UK carbon emissions). As motor transport and the oil extraction industry are critically co-dependent, so it is psychologically impossible for a motorist in Aberdeen to integrate the fact that motoring is harmful into his or her world view, for that is the same thing as acknowledging that our town's success (such as it is) is based upon that same globally harmful thing. If you want to get Aberdeen people to admit that motoring is harmful, you are asking them to admit that the North Sea oil industry is harmful, and that, by extension, Aberdeen itself is harmful. As Upton Sinclair (author of "Oil!" filmed as "There Will be Blood") said:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it!"

---§---

What is to be done?

We've mentioned that asking people in Aberdeen to switch to a mode of transport which is less amenable to hierarchical status displays is hard going.

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/10/carshare-no-dont-think-so.html

<<<<<<<

Having spent a lifetime on the upgrade cycle gathering those letters and numbers on the boot-lip of their car - those glyphs and cartouches which so shorthandedly signify their importance - to then tell them that it was all for nothing and that they must abandon these status-displays is to so undermine the foundations of their world-view that they cannot integrate it into reasonable discourse. You might as well tell them that everything they believe in and hold dear is demonstrably wrong, and that everything they think they have achieved and hope to go on to attain is just an illusion. It's like telling a toddler that Santa doesn't exist, and taking away their lollipop at the same time. The reaction you get is not good.

>>>>>>>>

In an ideal world, the fact that there is no 3rd Don Crossing would be seen as an opportunity. For instance, in both Oxford and Cambridge, high levels of active and sustainable transport are the norm. In Oxford's case, this was policy-driven. There it was decided in the 1970's that the urban environment in the town centre was simply too precious to expose to the detrimental effects of motor-traffic. Park-and-ride was pioneered in Oxford, but - crucially - it was accompanied by a moratorium on the creation of new parking spaces in the town centre. No new public car-parks, and - even more importantly - no employee carparks for businesses. While we have excellent P&R facilities for Aberdeen, they are fatally undermined by policies which continue to attract large numbers of motor journeys into the heart of the town. Cambridge benefitted from a different dynamic; though, paradoxically, it was a lack of dynamism which has lead to today's happy outcome. In that town, civic neglect meant that they missed out on the late 20th century enthusiasm for inner-city ring-roads and radial expressways and the like. What turned out to be benign neglect meant none of that sort of motor-pandering infrastructure was installed, and - the ancient town centre being largely unsuitable for motor-traffic - the people of Cambridge took to bikes (or, rather, never got off them). Today, Cambridge has the highest modal share for cycling in the UK. It's worth emphasising that this is not the result of a specific pro-active-transport policy, but rather is the outcome of doing very little to encourage motoring.

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But where does that leave the likes of us active-transport advocates in Aberdeen? In Aberdeen, it leaves us out on the edge; that's where. Sniping from the fringe, marginalised, a hated out-group, seen as dogs-in-mangers; anti-progress, anti-business, anti-Aberdeen. But, of course, we are none of those things.

Additionally, we are highly skeptical of the compromises offered by groups such as Get-About, and Aberdeen Cycle Forum - because what they ask is that sustainable and active transport be considered, be included in strategic plans which are largely about putting more cars on more roads. And they get exactly what they ask for - tokenistic half measures, afterthoughts and unsuitable infrastructure tacked onto major road-building projects. Where these groups fail is in their acceptance that active and sustainable travel is 'in addition to' business as usual, whereas, if campaigns for active and sustainable travel were successful, there would be significantly less pressure on existing road capacity, and calls for more roads would simply evaporate. For active and sustainable transport is not 'in addition to' business as usual - rather, it is 'instead of' business as usual. The policies of GetAbout and the like have failure built in, for they first acquiesce unquestionably to the a priori calls for more roads, and then seek to piggyback on that.

We note that Aberdeen City Council's plans for the Third Don Crossing bridge and its feeder roads include some tokenistic cycle paths, some of which are labeled as being 'segregated'. You'd think we'd be pleased, yes? Well we're not, because this labelling demonstrates that road-planners in this town have completely misunderstood what segregation of facilities for cycling should actually encompass. We couldn't put it any better than the Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club, so we'll leave it to them and their discussion of what "Going Dutch" would mean for UK cycling infrastructure:

http://lofidelitybicycleclub.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/misinterpreting-interpretations/

<<<<<<<<

The fact is that ‘Going Dutch’ does mean having segregation everywhere! But there’s one fundamental caveat; The British assume segregation to mean ‘segregating cyclists from the road to ’improve traffic flow’ for motorised traffic’ whereas the Dutch mean ‘segregate motorised vehicles from people to improve movement for everyone’.

Through the years, the British have created a lot of bypasses, relief roads, motorways, urban expressways and the like. The Dutch did the same but ensured that it became an utter pain in the buttocks to get across the town being bypassed in a car, in effect forcing motorised traffic to use the new infrastructure built. The British didn’t and are still paying the price with heavily congested town and city centres. In fact we keep using it as some perverse justification to build more bypasses, relief roads, motorways, urban expressways and the like.

>>>>>>>>

Here

Quite. Here, in Aberdeen, we have both plans for a new orbital motorway bypass and a new radial expressway (as well as other radial access 'improvements' for motor transport). Additionally, so great is the fear that the orbital motorway bypass road will reduce traffic flows into and through the town centre, that NESTRANS (the North East of Scotland Transport Partnership - a political/business quango) document "Optimising the Benefits of the AWPR" (pdf) includes specific provision for measures to 'improve' radial flows of motor traffic towards and through the town centre. This is the direct polar opposite of the more modern transport planning we see in continental Europe (in particular Netherlands and Denmark) where, as the Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club point out, yes indeed they have bypasses and motorways and the like, but it is this infrastructure itself which forms the major plank of the segregation policy.

Elsewhere

For these roads fulfil the policy of segregating cars from people, keeping motor-traffic flows away from where people want and need to be. And so, in this way, urban centres - centres for entertainment, residences, commerce and community - are allowed to fulfil their correct urban function as human-scale places for people, rather than machine-scale places for cars. Were our forthcoming orbital motorway bypass project to be accompanied by policies which would prevent radial flows of motor traffic into and through the centre of our town, there would be no greater advocates of it than we. But it is not, so we are not.

Here

Incontrovertible evidence has been mounting for some time now, demonstrating beyond doubt that motor-centric policies to encourage ever-increasing numbers of motorcar journeys into the centres of towns are wrong. Wrong for the environment, wrong for personal health, wrong for the community and wrong for business sustainability. Indeed, we were delighted to notice that a raft of recent studies encompassing places as diverse as The Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, Swizerland and the United States shows policies which cater for bicycle transport are better for local business than those which cater for motor transport.

http://thisbigcity.net/local-economic-implications-of-urban-bicycle-networks/

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...a study from the Dutch city of Utrecht which found that whilst bicycle-based consumers spend less per transaction, they make more visits and spend the most collectively. This isn’t the only connection – a German study found similar results, calling cyclists ‘better customers’ due to them making eleven trips per month compared to seven for motorists. And the Swiss are in on it too, where research into parking space profitability found that each square metre of bicycle parking generated €7500 compared to €6625 for cars.

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Elsewhere.

When will Aberdeen get the message? In the past, when they didn't know what else to do, physicians used to allow fevers to run high - kill or cure. Perhaps the motor-centric policies of Aberdeen - with our forthcoming orbital motorway, accompanied as it is by this new bridge and other access projects at Haudagain, 3rd Don Crossing, Bridge of Dee replacement, Berryden 'Improvements', and a great big new carpark where Union Terrace Gardens used to be are an attempt to provoke just such a crisis - for once these projects are complete, large volumes of high speed traffic will power unimpeded into the heart of our town, causing atrocious levels of noise and chemical pollution, heavy congestion and destroying liveability for the communities the expressways bisect. Once this crisis is upon us, policy will - must - inevitably shift, for there will be nowhere left for new roads to be built.

Or will there?

Tunnels Vision for Aberdeen Transport
(a must-read)

If we tolerate current plans, the risible nonsense of grandiloquent proposals for tunnels and monorails and god-knows-what-all will surely follow. For that reason, as well as everything else above, we wish the Tillydrone community and the author of Why a Third Crossing is Wrong every success in their resistance.

But finally, there is another reason why a "Third" Don Crossing is "wrong". For, having successfully framed the discourse - the promoters of this scheme have managed to get us all to use the name "Third Don crossing" when referring to it. But it is not - if this scheme goes ahead - this will be the sixth bridge over the Don in Aberdeen. Count them.

-------oo0oo-------

The Spectacle of the Symphony

2011-11-18T15:49:00.001Z

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1.
THE WHOLE LIFE of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

2.

IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.

The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967)
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994)

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To Aberdeen’s down-at-heel Georgian/Victorian concert-hall - The Music Hall - last night for a performance of Sibelius’ 5th Symphony, the concert forming part of the “Naked Classics” series from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra

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http://www.rsno.org.uk/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=80&extmode=view&extid=272&date=2011-10-11

The RSNO's successful Naked Classics is coming to Aberdeen for the very first time!
Presenter Paul Rissmann uses an innovative mixture of projections, lighting, on stage demonstrations and interviews with players [sic] to reveal the stories behind musical masterworks and the composers who wrote them. Then, after the interval, sit back and enjoy the work being performed in all its glory by the RSNO.
A distant horn-call, a flight of swans, and copious quantities of vodka – Jean Sibelius got his inspiration from some unlikely places. But when it all came together in his Fifth Symphony, the result was one of the most stirring masterpieces in modern music (and a tune so good that it's been covered by everyone from the Beach Boys to Sinitta). Paul Rissmann and conductor Christian Kluxen take it to pieces and show you how it all works.

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The RSNO’s “Naked Classics” format forgoes the traditional programme of an orchestral concert. The first half of the concert - in which the orchestra usually will play an short overture (opening) piece followed by a concerto (a longer piece, featuring a soloist) is dispensed with in favour of a 45-minute lecture with a sort of son-et-lumière and power-point presentation which tries to explain both the composer and the symphonic work in an informal and entertaining way, the intended aim being to improve the accessibility of symphonic music.

We had serious reservations about this format from the moment we learned that we were to be subjected to it. Firstly, we felt we were being short-changed - we knew we would feel keenly the absence of the overture and concerto. Particularly felt was the lack of a soloist, for often (yes, even here in Aberdeen) we are delighted to be treated to a virtuoso performance from a world-class musician at the very top of their world-renowned talent. But not yesterday. Instead we got a quite boring talk with slides not enlivened even slightly by all the possible bells and whistles of special PowerPoint page-turn and cloud-puff transition effects and the like.

Now, a symphony can be programmatic - which is how the piece is described when it attempts to render an extra-musical narrative or explores a particular thematic subject in linear progression. But more usually the symphonic form exemplifies absolute music which is intended to be appreciated without any specific reference to the outside world. The unity of the symphonic form and its effect upon the listener is enabled by that self-same continuous unmediated single experience which is the symphonic form itself. Other than competent musicians, their instruments, a hall to play in and the score, no other thing is required. It is not textual, it is not pictorial, it is not verbal; it is pure music, it is symphony - the artistic pinnacle of rendered human emotion. So, once the lecture was underway, we were disquieted by the risibly literal interpretations and pat explanations mapped directly one-to-one onto the musical forms and intentions of Sibelius and his work. We were issued a Baedeker, a guide for tourists. We were spoon-fed an insultingly childish sequence of comfortingly primary-colourful pictorial and textual symbols to use as a meaning-eliding gazetteer with which to summarise and contain, categorise and control the abstract and terrifyingly vast depths of unfathomable emotion which are the true content of the monolithic work of genius which is Sibelius' 5th Symphony. The first movement is a bit like a flower opening, apparently. The second is a stream or river - who knew? And the third is exactly like some swans, seemingly. There. Now you know.

So the interval came, and we thought, with relief - good; that’s that then, we can try to forget all about that crap, disconnect from the imposed context, and engage exclusively with the symphony in the second half. But no, the symphony itself was accompanied by powerpoint slides throughout, projected onto a big screen above the audience; the visually intrusive imagery and text referring back to the words and pictures expounded during the lecture in the first half of the evening, reinforcing their asinine associations. It will take all our kung-fu skills and a passive effort of accepting resistance to expunge those hyperrealistic, over-simplistic and literal images and text from their imposed association with this masterpiece symphony. An association where none should exist - uncomplicated words for a complex non-verbal form, unchallenging images for an elaborate non-pictorial artwork - keeping us from a true appreciation of the artwork, quarantining us from the emotional freight which is the true content of the symphony. Not only all that, but the high-intensity digital projector, from which the powerpoint slides were projected, also issued an intrusively insistent and incessant susurration from its position suspended up on high, at the very acoustic focal point of the concert hall. Thus, the unity of the symphonic experience was polluted and rendered into a juddering discontinuity of distraction and false images, caroming over the mutilated surface of a disjointed experience.

So, this “Naked Classics” is a patronising and didactic cheapening of high culture that fails even on its own terms. Rather than bring the audience closer to the music, as is its intention, this “Naked Classics” format does not succeed, for it imposes a cognitive burden of additional and spurious sensory content - redundant barriers which keep the audience at a distance removed from a direct appreciation of the music. The symphony, the highest form of musical composition, should not be presented as a multi-media ‘event’ - it is a single-media artwork. It is not an object to be contemplated from the outside, by external means - for it requires no explanation other than that which is contained within it itself. It requires no representation other than that which it itself offers, directly and personally encountered by the listener’s abstracted perception, a direct intercourse (mediated only by instruments and musical virtousity) between the mind of the composer and the emotional topography of the listener’s consciousness, directly lived in real time. Any further exposition is redundant, a pointless distraction, a misdirection.

We go to symphonic concerts to avoid the Spectacle. We had thought in our idealistic naivety that orchestral music would remain a safe refuge from the common stream. But last night the RSNO - an organisation which should know better; an organisation with a royal warrant to serve as guardians of high culture - took symphony away from us and instead we were spoon fed with the Spectacle of the Symphony.

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>>>>>>>>>>>>>

1.
THE WHOLE LIFE of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

2.

IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.

The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967)
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994)

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An Energetic Approach to Lingo Bingo and Greenwash

2011-11-17T13:07:00.001Z

Last year, we wrote an indignant piece about local development quango ACSEF (Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future) and their flagship cargo-cult real-estate project, "Energetica", which had then just benefitted from a relaunch.

The Energetica "leaflet" distributed at the time was, we said: "[a] self-satirising work of pompous cut-and-paste managementspeak buzzword grandiloquence [which] is both a plea by vested interests for development land to be released to construction companies and a sales brochure which sickeningly flatters potential buyers."

A Newburgh
Energetica Tenement

But we've been reading the peerless Auchterness blog, where we learned a much-needed thing or two about planning, so now we take it all back, all that nasty stuff we said about Energetica. For it seems that last year's relaunch of Energetica went so well that they've decided to have another relaunch this year, with a refresh of the offering and rebranding with new brochures to download from a smashing new website with a dot-uk-dot-com domain and everything.

And so we congratulate ACSEF on this re-launch, not least because it shows a praiseworthy evolutionary approach to the use of language in support of the promotion of real-estate ventures. Whereas the previous iteration of Energetica transparently telegraphed the oil-industry legacy of the ACSEF board members (last year we were instructed that the project would "stimulate synergies" and were invited to consider the "private sector vision" of "dynamic organisations"), today, things have moved on, oh yes, and an altogether more modern and forward looking and thrillingly emotional offering is published, ready for you to download in modern, exciting, PDF form here.

For on the Energetica website and in the lovely new brochure we were very thrilled to see a use of words which is designed to push the reader's psychological buttons - evocative words, expressive phrases laden with an abstracted emotional freight - words which connote a softer kind of power than that of the oil-service companies who are largely responsible for promoting this real-estate scheme. Here's the sort of stuff they're saying now:

"Here, now, and on the horizon" - "Inspired through a deeper understanding" - "If it can be imagined, it can be realised" - "Passion and opportunity should be shared" - "We should take responsibility for our world"

Yes, it's clear that - through their stewardship of the International Design Competition for the destruction of Union Terrace Gardens - ACSEF have learned a thing or to about peppering their publications with the very latest kind of Starchitect-style boilerplate. See - the Union Terrace Gardens debacle wasn't for nothing after all!

But above all, one of the most admirable aspects of the Energetica project is its greenwashing credentials - the use of the word "sustainable", for instance is a big favourite of our local oil company tycoons here in Aberdeen, and is highly evident on the Energetica website and brochure. There are, on the exciting, innovative, forward-looking Energetica interactive maps, little glyphs which denote the locations where a handful of wind-turbines might go in-between Aberdeen and Fraserburgh one day. Sustainability, see? And we all know that golf is a "green" activity (geddit?!), so it's heartening to see a preponderance golf courses decorating the map of Energetica - many indeed are the the chances afforded by these exclusive mostly-male bastions for high-ranking executives to discuss important matters in a low-pressure unminuted environment, away from the attentions of the busybody stickybeaks who just wouldn't understand the finer points of high-end real-estate dealings anyway. And as saviour of the future Mr Dr Donald Trump himself has said:

...if I added the deals I make on my course to my portfolio then it would be a much bigger part of my business. If I didn't play golf at my course in Westchester County (N.Y.) then I wouldn't have four major buildings there. Owning a great golf course gives you great power.

We offer a word of caution, however, to ACSEF. We know how difficult it is for them to shrug off their existing high-carbon motorcentric and frequent-flyer world-view, but if they are to truly achieve world-class breakthrough greenwash, they should leave out (or at least de-emphasise) all their talk of the Aberdeen Airport Expansion project, which is mentioned in the brochure and on web-pages here and here and here. Moreover, they might consider leaving out (or at least not trumpeting quite so loudly) all their needy-pleading promotion of Aberdeen's mooted orbital motorway project (the AWPR - Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route) and the accompanying intended increase of capacity on the A90 trunk road to Ellon which are mentioned on the Energetica brochure and on the web pages here and here and here and here and here and here.

And a final word of advice. In attempting to issue a greenwashing press-release, when ACSEF speak on behalf of oil service companies who have leased a shed at the Energetica industrial estate, if they are to have us believe that these companies are truly the sort of enterprises which are committed to plotting an entrepreneurial course for Aberdeen "City and Shire" into a future beyond the exploitation of oil and gas reserves, its probably best if they stop referring to sustainable and renewable sources of energy as being "alternative energy". When executives with a background in oil and gas use language like that, it just gives the game away, see?

But, to sum it up, we congratulate ACSEF once again on their re-launch of Energetica. We think it's gone so well that they should have another re-launch, really soon.

More about Golf Greens than Green Energy

Unbearably Hideous and Detestable

2011-11-15T14:09:00.001Z

UP AT the top we say: "something is very wrong with this town - psychogeography might or might not help…". And indeed today we are at a loss, for nothing we can say or show could possibly help mitigate the growing horror which creeps across the consciousness as the most recent implications of the budget apocalypse at Aberdeen City Council become ever clearer. No amount of urban exploration or ludic walking could eliminate the hollow feeling of distaste felt when the implications of of the cuts crystallise into words in a policy document which will, in a short time, become facts on the ground.

A summary of the forthcoming budget cuts, how they have been prioritised and what that means for public services can be read here (PDF). It's tough going - the opaque language of the document is as dry as the bones which may be all that remains of our town's civic sphere once the budget reductions have been implemented.

If you can stomach it, the reading of this most recent document will demonstrate to you what our local political representatives, their publicly-paid bureaucrats and their unaccountable businessmen puppet-masters have decided is the prioritised hierarchy of cuts for the coming 5-year period. It's a sort of civic triage, aimed at the delivery of £35.7m of budget savings. The document summarises how these savings are to be achieved, and breaks the savings down by how they are spread across council directorates: Social Care & Wellbeing; Education, Culture & Sport; Housing & Environment and so forth. It is an object lesson in doublethink that these directorates are flagged up along with their corresponding contributions. Contributions which consist of things taken away, that is.

Local readers will probably be aware that the cuts detailed in this document are in addition to the existing tranche of cuts made over the last two years which achieved a contribution of around £15m. Those cuts fell largely upon provision of services for physically and mentally disabled people, and the terminally ill, including children.

So, additional to that, among the new measures explored and prioritised are:

Increasing primary schools class sizes by up to 78% (recommended maximum number of pupils in p3 to be increased from 18 to 33)
Sacking pupil support assistants
Shutting five primary and two secondary schools
Reducing services for the homeless
Stopping day care for mentally ill people
Closing recycling centres
Closure of parks and gardens throughout the city, selling the land.
Reduction then cessation of school crossing patrols

We note that there is, in this document, no de-prioritising of our council's continuing push forward with the old-fashioned multi-million pound urban dual-carriageway and radial expressway projects which were dreamt up in the centre of the car-crazy 20th century. Rather than consider a suspension of these motorcentric policies and instead explore the cheaper and more modern transport options common in continental Europe and even the USA, by contrast our local government has, in this budget document, demonstrated its commitment to continuing the enablement and authorisation of car-dependent lifestyles by ruling out the introduction of a congestion charge for Aberdeen. Moreover, the document shows our local authority's foot-dragging resistance to the implementation of the higher penalty charges for illegal parking which the Scottish Government has requested that local authorities introduce.

No to congestion charge, no to higher parking charges. Yes to more urban dual-carriageways. Yes to bigger class sizes, yes to the sacking of lollipop ladies. The council signals that the right to drive unimpeded at ever greater speed around Aberdeen and park where you will is more important than children's education and safety, more important than services for the disabled and disadvantaged, more important than public parks.

Measures also considered but listed further down the list of axe-ready priorities are the closure of all 16 of our community libraries and the shut-down of all museums and art galleries for one year. It's no surprise that this philistine town should consider the suspension of cultural services, but its a source of spine-chilling horror that, for want of a total shortfall of £70m over ten years, such grave damage is being done to the civic sphere of our town. That these cuts should largely fall on the blameless, the vulnerable, the marginalised, the disenfranchised, the poor, the ill and the disabled - while parallel council activity is intent on borrowing a similar sum in order to realise the vanity project of a highly affluent and locally influential billionaire oil tycoon in his grandiloquent plans for the privatisation of public space in the town centre is beyond distasteful.

That our local government should seriously consider the closure and sale of many public parks, while doing all they can to toady to the got-lucky businessman - effectively mortgaging the commonly-held land in the centre of our town to discharge the plutocratic aspirations of one citizen and his cadres - while thousands upon thousands other citizens face serious detriment to or cessation of the local authority services which maintain their quality of life - is beyond offensive. Though it is instructive, for it demonstrates the contempt in which ordinary people are held by the politicians, bureaucrats and capitalists who run Aberdeen.

There are other policies both explicit and implicit in the budget-cut document, which we might decide are worth exploring later on. For instance, the document implicitly shows that there's a bit of jiggery-pokery being considered with regard to our Common Good fund. And there is an explicit demonstration that our local authority is reluctant to implement government policy which would see the reduction of council tax reliefs on second homes, but is quite content to implement policies which will remove vital help from homeless people. Something is, indeed, very wrong with this town. In the words of Private Eye's 'Piloti',

What exactly does one have to do to stop a fine city like Aberdeen self-harming, not to say committing suicide?

Spectacular November

2011-11-07T10:55:00.001Z

Last night I dreamt I went to Stockethill again.

2011-10-31T14:26:00.000Z

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Last night I dreamt I went to Stockethill again. It seemed to me I stood by the granite steps leading to the path, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The path wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done. But as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it. The development spectacle had come into its pomp by some sudden empowerment and by brutal turn and JCB track had destroyed the gentle footpath with concreted ballast fenceposts for commercial hoardings, ripping to a shred the poor thread that had late been public right of way and its little steps and rustic benches. And finally, there was elm and beech; mature, tall and stately; secretive and silent. Surely even commerce could not mar the perfect beauty of those twenty-five metre trunks? The development spectacle can play odd tricks upon the fancy, and suddenly, looking at the aspirational promotional hoarding depicting mocked-up aspirational couples laughing in perfection outside their perfect new aspirational houses, it seemed to me that all might be as it had been, not one month before. And then a cloud came upon the sun and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it. I looked upon the desolate tree-stumps, with no whisper of the past about their forever-gone canopies. We can never go back to Stockethill again.

March Stones 56 & 57 ABD. K is for Kittybrewster.

2011-10-28T17:27:00.004+01:00

In a wide-ranging exploration of just what psychogeography means in Britain today, Tina Richardson - Psychogeographer of Leeds - wrote in her blog-post "The Psychogeographical Franchise" about a strain of 'radical nostalgia' (per Bonnet - pdf) within British psychogeography. This approach whereby "loss and redemption are explored and negotiated" is said to be typified by author Iain Sinclair.

And yes, sometimes when we read the online psychogeographical output of others, we find ourselves reading what in fact turns out to be but a whimsical commentary referencing lost buildings or now-obscured geographical features. A sort of mildly-indignant melancholic short-range travelogue - very often beautifully-written - with a loose historical context. Histobunk. For our part, we psychogeographers of OtherAberdeen are aware that nostalgia has the potential to be a pitfall and have guarded a handful of times against the ease of falling into its attractive trap. But that's not to say we don't do it too - sometimes it simply can't be avoided. Often we find in Aberdeen so egregious are the harms done to once thriving neighbourhoods by planning blight and spectacularly ill-conceived development decisions that the"radical nostalgic" theory and praxis is the best searchlight to turn upon the situation.

And so, while tracing the ancient boundaries of Aberdeen - the "March Stones" we came upon the once-thriving former suburb of Kittybrewster. Here, two of our semi-regular strands ("March Stones" and "The A to Z of Aberdeen") coincide. "K for Kittybrewster": location of march stones 56 and 57 ABD.

Celtic Place-Names in Aberdeenshire
John Milne, 1912
>>>>
KlTTYBREWSTER, KlTTYBROUSTER WELL, KlTTYTHIRST WELL. In these names the first part represents Cuitan Briste, broken fold. Cuitan, dim. of cuit, fold; briste, broken. Usually, folds for cattle had water near them. Kittybrewster was in the den now called Berryden, which means watery den. Kittybrouster was on the boundary between St Nicholas and Spital parishes, on the west side of Monthooly. It is mentioned in a charter defining the bounds of the Spital lands, in the possession of the Town Council. Kittythirst is in Keig, and in this name, from association with a well, briste had become thirst. Broken- fold in Forglen is a translation of Cuitan Briste. These folds had been made by planting trunks of trees upright in the ground. When these decayed the folds had become ruinous.

Speaking to my old mum and dad, they tell of a mid-20th century heyday for Kittybrewster:

The Great Northern Road. Town meets county. A railway junction and locomotive engineering works with 20-track turntable and engine shed. A split-the-wind fork in the road, a luxury hotel, a livestock market. A huge - huge! - rail-head freight terminal at the former ancient borough boundary which follows the watercourse route of the Powis Burn. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of cattle-trucks in the acres upon acres of marshalling yards - as far as the eye can see. Tweed-clad flat-bunneted livestock owners and wranglers smoking pipes and cheroots and 'ticklers'. Impenetrable dialects. The cattle-pens all the way to Berryden. The smell! The auctioneer's cant, his clipboard, his gavel, his white coat. Agricultural machinery vendors and motor-sales garages. Open outcry roups of second-hand harvesters and motorcars on the cinder football pitches in the suburb's Central Park. Vertically integrated agricultural business, horizontally diverse service enterprises. Cafes, pubs, restaurants. Barbers, florists, grocers. Bakers, stationers, newsagents. A diverse confluence of transport, commerce and industry at the edgeland. Integrated transport - road, tram, rail freight, passenger rail - diversified businesses. A coming together at the crossroads, money and goods changing hands, people changing trains. Aberdeen's largest ever granite built cinema, velour and polished-brass luxury next door to the deco achievement of the Northern Hotel.
A grand day, a good price - silver service, malt and cotton sheets at the best hotel in town, then first class carriage home in the morning. Prices not so good? A dormitory bunk at the Temperance Hotel and third class home to Formartine. Cattle driven from market the short downhill drove to the captured bolts and razor-sharp long knives of the slaughter men at George Street with their "Butcher's Arms".

Pre WW2 - Astoria Cinema, Central Park and Livestock Mart
with tenements behind on Great Northern Road.

There's not much to see at Kittybrewster today, other than derelict and vacant industrial and retail premises and, amid the devastation, the great-survivor that is the grade-A listed Northern Hotel. But, of course, the past is the past, and Kittybrewster is neither transport hub nor commercial nexus today. No-one could credibly suggest that the area (which is no longer suburban, rather it is very much inner-city) would be a suitable area for cattle-trading and meat-packing, nor indeed for a rail-freight terminal. No, indeed, in Aberdeen, no-one should be surprised to learn that the sites formerly occupied by rail marshalling yards, by cattle-pens and by agricultural machinery showrooms are to be swept away in favour of a radial urban expressway which is designed to deliver high volumes of high-speed motor traffic into the town centre in ever larger numbers. This radial expressway scheme is known to our urban planners as the "Berryden Corridor Improvement" [sic]. When it is opened, the destruction of Kittybrewster will be complete, and far from being the literally crucial destination that it once was, Kittybrewster will be separated even from itself by the new motor-highway.

March Stone 56 ABD.
Just to the north of the site formerly occupied by the Astoria Cinema

So the formerly economically vital business, trade and transport and community hub that was centred in the community of Kittybrewster was a diverse nexus pinning Aberdeenshire to the edge of our town like a brooch but is today a disquietingly quiet place. The already devastated area appears to be holding its breath and steeling itself for the greater devastation to come, planning blight. Kittybrewster - the "broken cattle-fold". Nominative Determinism?

March Stone 57 ABD. Close to the railway bridge at the
southern end of Great Northern Road. By the bins.

Having walked through and thought about Kittybrewster, we return now to the analysis of nostalgia itself, and its use in and affect upon psychogeographical theory and praxis. For during our dérive through Kittybrewster an alternative analysis concerning the real effect of nostalgia upon urban liveability came to mind. Rather than sit here in our atelier, typing up this report, luxuriating in the indignant bemoaning of Kittybrewster's current situation: "oooh, it's not like the old days" and willingly revelling in wistful nostalgia, we can see that Kittybrewster is, in fact the real victim of a very different kind of nostalgia. In those urban-expressway plans which are on the cusp of being implemented we discern the realisation of a strain of nostalgia which, rather than being the harmless plaything of us dilettante psychogeographers, is actually a genuinely harmful influence on the actual situation of the forthcoming urban environment. For in their grandiloquent road transport plans we can detect in our local urban planners a longing for the kind of retro-future, the sort of spectacular 'motopia', which was first dreamt up in the centre of the car-crazy 20th century. That now, as we approach the main run of the 21st century, the planners of Aberdeen begin to implement these embarrassingly old-fashioned motorcentric plans is nothing other than the lazy indulging of a nostalgia for a stillborn future which never arrived, and which we today know very well will make for urban places and spaces which are unpleasant in the extreme.

Development corridor

Fill it with motors!

An Open Goal, An Uncontested Scrum

2011-10-26T17:42:00.004+01:00

If you're familiar with local planning issues in Aberdeen, skim this first couple of paragraphs. If you're not, then you might be surprised to learn that in Aberdeen we have a sunken town-centre park called Union Terrace Gardens (very much like a pocket-sized version of Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens) which is under threat of redevelopment for the sake of business profits. The vision of one man (oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood), this proposed redevelopment has been branded as the "City Gardens Project" and is being 'driven' forward by local business development quango ACSEF (Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future) along with some other local tycoons. Visit the website if you want.

Other than a scrubby swatch in the centre of a large roundabout on the Inner City Ring-Road, Union Terrace Gardens is the only open green space in the centre of our town. We've covered some aspects of this proposed redevelopment before, and we've even proposed our alternative 'vision' for what could be done to improve and safeguard (rather than destroy or jeopardise) this open green space in the town centre. Against stiff opposition, the business-orientated boosters of this commercial annexation of public space have pushed forward, ever onward - and last week opened an exhibition of the competing submissions to the international design competition which they had taken it upon themselves to organise with public funds.Members of the public are invited to view the proposals for the destruction of the gardens and are asked to vote for which of the six on offer they prefer. No minimum intervention option to restore the park to its originally-intended amenity is offered. Radical change is presented as a fait accompli.

Concept #1.

For visual interest, we've sprinkled this post with images from the submissions to the design competition, which we got from STV local. You can download big PDFs of the full submissions and read all the usual starchitect boilerplate for yourself from design competition gatekeeper Malcolm Reading Consultants' website here.

Interviewed on local TV channel STV, ACSEF-styled "heritage expert" Malcolm Reading himself, interviewed at the VIP-only opening of the exhibition which showcases the six competing designs, said:

>>transcript
It's a testament to Aberdeen haha really, in a sense of er it is a world city and these are world class design teams who're interested in building in this city. I, eh I think its a - its a - really it is, it is, a testament to an interest in design quality about what cities are going to be like in the twenty-first century [sic]

Concept #2

OK. Notwithstanding what's written specifically below, we're not going to examine the various proposals. To do so would be redundant, for friend of OtherAberdeen Fraser Denholm has already examined the six proposals and has written a blistering critique in his trademark style, which we endorse. Go and read it here.

Right, did you read it? Good. So we continue...

1. STARCHITECTS & THE BILBAO EFFECT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchitect

With urban generation from the turn of the twentieth century picking up, economists forecast that globalization and the powers of multi-national corporations would shift the balance of power away from nation states towards individual cities, which would then compete with neighbouring cities and cities elsewhere for the most lucrative modern industries, and which increasingly in major Western Europe and US cities did not include manufacturing. Thus cities set about 'reinventing themselves', giving precedence to the value given by culture. Municipalities and non-profit organizations hope the use of a Starchitect will drive traffic and tourist income to their new facilities. With the popular and critical success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry, in which a rundown area of a city in economic decline brought in huge financial growth and prestige, the media started to talk about the so-called "Bilbao factor"; a star architect designing a blue-chip, prestige building was thought to make all the difference in producing a landmark for the city.

Concept #3

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/11/starchitecture-a-modest-proposal.html
NEWSWEEK

The trend [named] “the Bilbao Effect” after the huge success of Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain—is just about over.

The phenomenon of using iconic architecture to promote a city, an institution, or a real-estate development was a product of the economic boom that began in the late 1990s and ended with the recession in 2008.As Western economies begin to recover, extravagant, eye-popping architecture is giving way to a subtler new aesthetic. In the U.S. and Europe, architectural values are shifting from can-you-top-this designs toward more efficient, functional building. Innovation and experimentation are increasingly directed at sustainability and new technology. For a younger generation of architects in particular, “the spectacle building is kind of a dinosaur,” says Rosalie Genevro, director of the Architectural League in New York.

Two years ago, the Boston Globe article 'Marking the End of the Bilbao Decade' said: "…times dictate a shift away from vanity projects" and asked: "have we reached the climax and termination of a whole era in architecture?…" And now, Maria Misra writing in last month's Prospect magazine says: "We can expect the monstrous regiment of 'starchitects' who have strewn crass monuments to their [and their clients'] own narcissism across our cities to embrace a more sober, elegant and functional style…"

Concept #4

Alas, here in Aberdeen we must suffer the detritus left after the retreat of the waves at the high-water mark. In our tycoons we have a reservoir of not only the single minded monomania but also the narcissism necessary to power the last of the starchitects forward on one final vanity project, one last triumph of the will. And just as fast-fashion garments are remaindered unsold stepwise through the logistical chain all the way north through the towns and cities of the UK until at last they wash up last-gasp last-chance-to-sell in the shops of Aberdeen (next stop Africa!), so we see the last gasp of this will to "wow factor architecture" expire in our town centre.

2. THE OPEN GOAL

Whatever your feelings about the quality (or otherwise) of the conceptual proposals for the destruction of Union Terrace Gardens, it's important to realise that it's the choice of site that's the problem. We must be careful not to confuse context with content. Imagine, for instance, that these proposals instead were for a building/gardens project to be sited at:

Mounthooly Roundabout / West Nth st. (Brownfield/transport land-use at present)
Timmer Market/Hannover St car park (Brownfield/transport)
Denburn Health Ctr (Brownfield)
Holburn Valley North Slope at Justice Mill Lane (Recently redeveloped brownfield - now commercial)
Site of Union Square (Recently redeveloped brownfield - now retail)

We imagine that, on any of these other sites, the starchitect proposals would have been "grasped with open arms" [sic, per ACSEF] by the people of Aberdeen.

Concept #5

But, of course, the great big open goal which the tycoons and their bagmen have missed is the site of the now empty and soon to be derelict St Nicholas House, former headquarters building of Aberdeen City Council. Leaving our own feelings aside, the building is (rightly or wrongly) generally regarded as a much-loathed buck-tooth turned rotten, an eyesore in the heart of our town. Were the tycoons to have proposed a city garden or civic square on that site, they would have been pushing at an open door and been assured of the wholehearted support of the vast majority of Aberdonians. They would have reaped the benefit of citizens' goodwill for years to come (along with all the consent thereby manufactured for their atmosphere-jeopardising hydrocarbon production activities - but that's another story). How could they miss so obvious a wide open goal? What's wrong with them? We thought they were supposed to be clever.

3. AN ILL-DEFINED CONTEXT LEADS TO A FALSE PREMISE

As mentioned, this project is being forced onward by local enterprise quango ACSEF (Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future) on behalf of the oil-tycoons for who's interests they provide the necessary administrative fig leaves. But the name ACSEF itself points to the problem these people have in defining the necessary content for our local community and wider society as they and we collectively face an uncertain future, for they have a demonstrable problem in defining the context in which they work. The name ACSEF - Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future - is a misnomer, for these people concentrate their efforts on maximising benefits for local business (which is the concern of discrete private individuals, and is limited in its time horizon by reporting seasons and tax-return basis periods) rather than the local economy. The local economy, which is by definition the entirety of the local area, its land, its people, its society, its natural and human resources, its knowledge, its potential and its limitations - in addition to its businesses - is not delimited by time horizons either in the past or the future, and is much larger in scope than can be encompassed by mere business concerns. Thus, by viewing everything through the myopic lens of business, ACSEF blithely have alienated significant sectors of local discourse, which they simply cannot see.

So, having established that, we examine sceptically ACSEF's assertions that this redevelopment project is a "fundamental plank" necessary for "businesses and investment to secure jobs for our children and grand-children" and is required to "transform the economy". All this, somehow, from a small city centre park. It's clear that the problems facing the economy are several orders of magnitude more grave than any which might be solved by a real estate deal involving a town centre park. Again, from Prospect Magazine, from back in 2008 - close to the start of the current economic difficulties:

Gelrald Holtham writes:

The freeing of capital movements in the 1980s combined with the collapse of communism, releasing billions of new workers into the world economy, has recreated a global reserve army of labour. That in turn has contributed to a rise in the share of world GDP accounted for by profits and an accompanying decline in the share accounted for by wages. Such a development easily leads either to over-investment by businesses or a shortfall of aggregate demand. When wages lag, spending can keep up with output only by an expansion of consumer debt.
[...]
Since Keynes was unfashionable and Marx unmentionable, no-one asked what this would mean for the level and pattern of demand.
[...]
Yet here was the central problem with the globalised system. If profits and output rise persistently faster than wages, who will buy the output? A lack of effective demand, in Keynesian terms is averted for a time [by the expansion credit], but ultimately shows up in a problem of "the realisation of capital".

So we in the developed world find ourselves here: globally defective demand caused by an imbalance between wage and profit rates, made worse by a collapse in the availability of the very consumer credit which had masked the problem for a decade or more, and severely aggravated by the necessity to pay down that debt at both national and personal levels.

But here, in our small corner, those who have taken it upon themselves to secure an 'economic future' for Aberdeen believe (or, rather, would try to have us believe) that a real-estate deal involving a small public park and benefitting a handful of local construction companies and property developers will fix it. It will not, of course. The imbalance between wages and profit took decades to reach this crisis point and so it will take comprehensive attitudinal shifts in society; a change in the local, national and international conversation, and a widespread paradigm shift to remedy this imbalance. It's tasteless in the extreme that a local business development quango should use the global crisis as a smokescreen for what is, in fact, a project to privatise - for the benefit of a tiny handful of already-affluent local business-people - a relatively small (but high-value) patch of what has been community-owned land since the middle-ages.

Concept #6

4. THE STING, AN UNCONTESTED SCRUM. "CHOICE ARCHITECTURE"

Above, when we pointed out the 'open goal' we mocked the boosters of the City Gardens Project for their choice of site. But maybe, just maybe they are cleverer than we give them credit for. We are particularly worried about the Concept #6 proposal, with it's bizarre monolith. Go and look at it again (pdf). Maybe we're just paranoid, but we worry nonetheless. Throughout this entire controversial debacle, we've had the feeling that we're being scammed in some way - and not the obvious one - that this whole thing is some sort of shell game. Large real estate deals have always and everywhere been characterised by the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't misdirection of bad-things-made-to-look-good and good-things-made-to-look-bad conjuring. Our concern is that this Concept #6 has been chosen for us, pre-selected. On internet chat forums, blogs and social networking sites, we're all too busy having a damned good laugh at its egregious MONOLITH to notice that this is, indeed, the only proposal which 1. nearly fits the tycoon Sir Ian Woods' parameters and 2. is said to have a 'feasible payback strategy'. We're all too busy being misdirected by the big flashing red herring MONOLITH to notice the 13000 sq metre three-storey public car-park which sits beneath the MONOLITH, and the unspecified area of private car-park which occupies the airspace above the Denburn Road dual carriageway to service the parking needs of the workers in the the 7000 sq metre commercial offices which straddle the valley and 'add to the urban grain' along the eastern slope of the Denburn valley.

For this design, rather than take the approach of all the other designs which are, in fact singular, genuinely monolithic buildings filling the valley. Concept #6 is actually modular, consisting of several discrete buildings which can be pick-mixed to suit. And, indeed (MONOLITH aside) to the vast majority of the public, proposal #6 looks OK. The gardens -particularly the natural [sic] amphitheatre - are shown to be left more-or-less untouched. With a push and a rush, we might envisage this proposal being adopted as Aberdeen City Council favourite, with the proviso that the horrid monolith part is left out (thus making it 'even' cheaper). Of course, the ever-promised arts centre was intended for location in the monolith - but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs! So, in the end what we get is Concept #6 sans monolith (sans arts centre) but including its large development of commercial offices straddling the Denburn at Union Bridge and several new blocks of offices along the eastern slope of the Denburn valley. These commercial developments along with the large new carparks occupying the current 'dark' area of the gardens and over the Denburn Road dual carriageway. These commercial enterprises, carparks and offices, forming the 'payback strategy'. Brilliant!

We have heard members of the public mentioning that the #6 concept has nice things included in it - for instance the extension of the gardens to encompass the William Wallace statue and the inclusion of a spur which appears to extend greenery a hundred metres north as far as Woolmanhill. It has also been pointed out that the Concept #6 plans include the re-greening of Golden Square. But the 'nice' things about this proposal are merely the (very cheap) quid pro quo for developing the currently green backlands of Belmont St for commercial offices and turning fully one third of Union Terrace Gardens into a multi-story carpark.

Surely we need hardly point out that the extension of the park to Woolmanhill and Wallace, and the greening of Golden Square do not require the polity of Aberdeen to give consent to a real estate deal which will see the rest of the Denburn Valley at Union Terrace and Belmont Street fall prey to overdevelopment. Yet, having been presented with a fait accompli, we fear that people will feel compelled to choose the 'least worst' option. The 'least worst' option - we have heard and read a number of our townsfolk opine - is option #6.

And so the moneyed interests which would benefit from this privatisation of common land are offered an uncontested scrum. Amazing. We have heard a great deal from the promoters of this project about "World Class Architects". We have no particular comment on their competence as architects in the usual sense of building design. But we must offer our complements on the developers' heresthetical skills in the design of the "Choice Architecture" which is being presented to the people of our town. World Class.

Submission #6 - Multi-storey carpark on common ground

Submission #6 - Overdevelopment of Belmont backlands

High-Water Mark

2011-10-12T14:37:00.000+01:00

>>>>

Cast iron parapet riveted.
Rolled steel structural skeleton.
Baked clay ceramic blue-green brick.
Dressed stone rusticate masonry.
Damp lime mortar stalactites.

Lilac, turquoise, cobalt, umber,
Citrine, cadmium orange and slimy
Intersticial ion exchange,
Anodic and cathodic they drip.

The tangy products of corrosion
Slither smeary snot slick, thick,
Serous and silvery electric.
Slatherous and lathering - chemical biology
Minerally feeds bacterial bloom.
Over ferrous, igneous metamorphic
And ceramic substrate:
Fungus, lichen and blistering moss
And leaf litter
And litter
And guano
And frass.

Then just dust.

From pustulating mustard and viridian blisters
Mushroom dank dribbling papules
And the ocherous crevice; a dark citrine fracture
Is a disquietingly cold fissuring breach

crack
delaminating
disintegrating
aromatic wet-dry rupture

A fragrant technicolour symbiosis born of organic metallic bacillus mineral ejecta. Animal, vegetable, mineral - it's a meaningless distinction.
For now, it is alive - that's all.
It's beautiful - that's enough.

II.

"It's beautiful"

Under my breath,
Just to myself.
But overheard by
The one passerby
Who replied:

III.

"Aye. I bet they couldn't make it like that these days".

I was standing still, and had been for a while. The passerby was walking smartly through, underneath the railway arch. So we lacked a common frame of reference - that's why it took a while to understand that the beauty he appreciated was in the structure of the arch, its construction and its span rather than the entropic interplay of the arch's intricately dynamic atrophy; that which so fascinated me. Instead, he thought I was lauding the beauty of this stone, brick, rubble, iron and steel arch of the mile's stretch gently-graded railway viaduct. It's a testament to single-minded capital. A river diverted, the estuary drained. Ecological devastation brought and so many lives and fortunes lost to bring it here, now so very very long ago.

Here where the natives once came to gawp and cheer maharajas and tsars changing trains - highland-bound they were to go and placate with fawning tribute the heavily-armed and continually victorious megalomaniac widow in her mountain-fastness purdah. Her, and her vast armies.

And here now the London-bound, soon to be superannuated, high-speed diesel loco coughs and farts its humming flywheels into whirring angular momentum. Blue-grey particulate smoke issues in fitting discharges from stubby rearward-raked exhaust pipes which penetrate the striated locomotive roof. Then, carriage linkages finally flexed, smooth acceleration. Deserted first class carriages, an oily yellow glow diffusing from their chi-chi little table lamps into the autumning gloom. As the driver throttles-up the 25-year old engines front and rear with their Record-Breaker's potential on the Flying Scotsman run, I think of how far we came. And why we stopped.

That same viaduct, travelling all the way down time from 1867. That same rail-line brought the commissar Tony Benn from Westminster to oil-boom Aberdeen in 1976. Gravid with rational civilisation's last message to the joint-stock seven sister daughters of Standard Oil; he was to tell Mobil and Exxon and Chevron and Amoco and the others that no, they couldn't just take it all. Our British National Oil Corporation would have 51%, for all the people of the UK.

Those same locomotives and carriages, travelling all the way down time from 1976. That same late 20th century high-speed diesel train - as promoted, commissioned and inspired into existence by the insistence of that same rational socialist technocrat. High-tech high-speed rail for all! Now fading glory - yes. But because of that, all the more evocative and heart-wrenching a glimpse into the Concorde- (or TU144-?) era world-we-could-have-all-had.

And all the while, as free-market votaries kicked their heels in the shadows, (sharpening their stilettos and scissors and axes in Chile and elsewhere), our own stakhanovite visionary government technologists and bureaucrats were accidentally betrayed by unwittingly myopic oblimovist organised labour at the high-water mark of civilisation. Oops.

And that betrayal afforded the stilettoed ideologues of irrationality the trigger they were waiting for to make their putsch; to let the credulous market-religion adherents in. And taking the name of "capitalism" in vain - erroneously using it interchangeably with "free market" - they superstitiously worshipped the idol which they openly called "The Invisible Hand".

Mistaking affluence for wealth, the free-market fundamentalists first concentrated then dissipated our common capital and so grievously failed us all. But they also mistook price for value and so, in turn their beloved markets failed. And all that is solid melts into air.

"Aye. I bet they couldn't make it like that these days".

Invasion

2011-10-11T05:30:00.000+01:00

>>>>>>>>>>>
These abhorrently visually-intrusive recent additions to our stock of spacially-intrusive street furniture in Aberdeen are supposed to improve the air quality in our town.

<<<<<<<<<<<<

http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lID=39452&sID=5034

Aberdeen City Council

Air Quality Action Plan 2011

VMS [variable messaging system] is currently used in Aberdeen to provide drivers with general car parking guidance, enabling them to avoid drivingunnecessarily looking for car parking spaces. Further VMS signs have recently been implemented around the City on keycorridor approaches advising of incidents/events that may affect their travel onwards. ACC [Aberdeen City Council] is also to use the VMS to postgeneral air quality messages, particularly on peripheral City routes. These messages should raise awareness of air quality,especially during air pollution episodes [sic].
(our emphasis)

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But the system exists solely for the benefit and convenience of motorists. It marshals and directs them with the maximum possible state-of-the-art technological efficiency towards the surfeit of parking spaces available in the town centre. We cannot remember seeing this variable messaging system ever displaying a total number of fewer than two thousand vacant parking spaces available.

How can this be? This is a contradiction to the aim, we cannot reduce the harm cause by motoring by encouraging more motoring. For this system, which demonstrably has the increase of driver convenience as its entire reason for being, serves as an invitation for irresponsible motorists to bring cars into the very centre of the town. So the system acts as a disincentive to active travel or modal shift. This system normalises the bringing of noisy polluting vehicles into the town centre. It provides both permission and facility. The message sent by this Variable Message System is: "If you are a motorist, you are very welcome in the centre of this town - look; see how much space we have made available for you. Don't worry about climate change, don't worry about air quality. This town doesn't - it will pander to you, don't worry... don't worry..." We very much doubt that the promise to "post general air quality messages" to "raise awareness... during air pollution episodes" will ever suggest that the motorist reading the message is contributing to the problem and should leave the car at home. No - secure in their hot, locked, filth-belching, noisy metal boxes - motorists are comforted and enabled by this system.

This is wrong. Motorists must be made to worry, life must be made difficult for them in town centres. To offer motorists facility and sanction for their harmful and selfish activity is no way to reduce pollution, no way to cut down on dangerous carbon emissions. A better policy which would result in improved air quality in this town and a reduction in its carbon budget would be a policy which sees the removal of this car parking guidance system, accompanied by a complete ban on creating any more parking spaces and the phased closing down of existing parking facilities.

COLLAPSE

2011-10-07T12:46:00.000+01:00

//////////////////////////////////////////////////
CARBON-CAPTURE-PROJECT-LONGANNET-COLLAPSE?NEWSFEED=TRUE
//////////////////////////////////////////////////

///////////http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/06/carbon-capture-project-longannet-collapse?newsfeed=true...

<<<<<<<<
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Flagship UK carbon capture project 'close to collapse'

Scottish Power expected to pull out of government-promoted scheme to build a £1bn prototype CCS plant at Longannet

Terry Macalister and Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 October 2011 15.32 BST

---------------------------------------------------
A £1bn flagship government project for fighting climate change – the construction of a prototype carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at Longannet in Scotland – is on the verge of collapse, it emerged on Thursday.Talks between the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) and Scottish Power have run into deep trouble and the electricity supplier is expected to pull the plug on the government-promoted scheme, which hoped to bury carbon emissions from the coal power station in the North Sea. [...]

Decc had promised £1bn of public money but the developers are understood to be arguing that they cannot proceed without more money to trial the scheme, close to the Firth of Forth.Both sides insist "talks are ongoing" but well-placed industry and political sources say the process is "pretty much over" and a statement to that effect could be expected shortly.Jeff Chapman, the chief executive of theCarbon Capture and Storage Association, said the collapse of the Longannet scheme would be a "severe disappointment" for the wider hopes of the sector."Everybody knows the negotiations have been very difficult, so to that extent it's quite possible [the talks] don't come to a conclusion – although there are other projects coming through the system hopefully." [...]

The Fife scheme was by far the most advanced and spearheaded the drive to develop this new technology in Britain. Ministers have repeatedly stressed the importance of CCS as a way of keeping coal and potentially other fossil-fuel burning power stations in operation without undermining moves to cut CO2.Longannet is the third largest coal-fired power station in Europe at 2,400MW and was once highlighted as Scotland's biggest single polluter.

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Three mega-rich (at least one of them giga-rich) capitalists of Aberdeen. Standing at the head of their multiple boardroom tables in the town which styles itself the 'Energy Capital of Europe' they are watching as this scheme to neutralise the atmosphere-menacing emissions of Europe third's largest coal-burning power-station - Scotland's biggest polluter - collapses. This project to neuter its teratogenic discharges lies close to breakdown for want of an investment shortfall - the sum of which would be less than one tenth of this cadre's aggregate net worth. That is; this project does not want for material, or know-how, or industrial capacity: no, it fails for lack of the trivial fiction of cash-money.

For this novel technology (while scientifically simple) remains commercially unproven; it is a business risk; the financial returns are uncertain. For this pecuniary reason alone - despite its promise of continual gigawatts (but scrubbed, guilt-free, of harmful carbon) from the 50-year-yet certain supply of global coal - no power station anywhere in the world has a full-scale carbon capture and storage system running. No-one yet knows just how much it will cost to clean up electricity which is manufactured from coal. No-one yet knows how much (or how little) profit is to be made.

In this town, we have a large workforce of innovative technologists and engineers with the skills and experience necessary to design, manufacture and operate systems like these. The wrangling of high-pressure gas, fluid and plasma is very much our stock-in-trade. And in our oil tycoons, we have the capital which, if deployed into these low- and no- carbon electricity and motive power sources (of which CCS is just one) would truly, finally change this town's self-styled moniker from "Oil Capital" to "Energy Capital" and so at last give truth to the conceit.

Now, today, we all stand at the crossroads. Will these men mobilise their capital - are they prepared to take the risk? Much is made by the PR agencies they retain of their philanthropic credentials. What could be more humanity-loving than risking a small part of their capital on a chance to safeguard the atmosphere? Or is the one-way-bet certainty afforded by an oil-price which, despite globally defective demand; despite recession or depression, remains proudly above the psychologically significant $100 per barrel mark distracting them?

Flashing in their minds like the urgent "HOLD NOW" buttons of a slot machine stuck on a jackpot payout, this ton-high oil price militates against any thought of reallocation of capital crossing the minds of the tycoons. The certain play of continued and renewed investment in the oil-bearing strata beneath the seas of the UK's continental shelf satisfies the needs of capital oh so much more than adequately. Why would capital (the need to increase itself being its primary reason for existing - integral to its true definition) redeploy away from so certain a one-way bet into something risky?

The tycoons stand at the heads of their boardroom tables, their hands on the levers of capital. The tickers tick up on global heat budget, CO2 concentration, social inequality, species extinction, deforestation, ocean acidification, resource depletion and political instability and conflict. But the ticker also ticks up - ever up - on the free-market price of a barrel of oil. The tycoons have their hands on the control levers of capital. But they have feet of clay.

-------oo0oo-------

/NATURAL RESERVE/

.......>>>>http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/features/Profile-Ian-Suttie-the-tycoon.6846117.jp..

Profile: Ian Suttie, the tycoon with natural reserve

Published Date: 02 October 2011

By Richard Bath

HE IS the stealth bomber of Scottish business, appearing only rarely on to the radar screen of public consciousness before quickly disappearing. And that, by and large, is the way Ian Suttie likes it.But all that changed last week when a major oil find in the Kraken field, 88 miles off Shetland, by Aberdeen-based First Oil put Suttie at the top of Scotland's rich list. With one positive North Sea seismograph, he was catapulted out of the business sections of newspapers and on to the front pages.

For an oil tycoon with 40 directorships whose company's 30 per cent stake in the Kraken field means he is now reputed to be worth more than a billion pounds, remarkably little is known about Suttie. Indeed, Suttie is said to regard the prospect of becoming public property with unalloyed horror. An oilman who worked with him said he's "not exactly reclusive, but he's not far off it - he's very private".

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/ONE OF A KIND/

>>>>>>>>>http://www.agcc.co.uk/april-2011-cover/.........

Jimmy Milne - A journey there and back again

“I was born on Boxing Day and have been fighting for existence ever since,” he says.

Milne [Balmoral Group chairman] celebrated his 70th birthday last year but to suggest that it might be time to ease up risks permanent impairment by the Samurai sword which sits beside his desk.

“I still feel like a 20-year-old most days and I still have a spring in my step and fire in my belly.

“I am driven by throwing back the frontiers of technology and always trying to beat the biggest and the best in the world. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

“I can’t stand anyone saying ‘Jim I can’t do this.’ I say let’s just start again. Let’s get rid of the ‘t’ because there is always a way of doing it. I really believe in positive thinking and positive action and with that you can literally shift mountains. Another thing I can’t stand is people coming to me and saying ‘I tried the best I could.’

“Winston Churchill said that to try your best is not good enough - you have to go out and achieve what has to be achieved and there is a gulf of a difference between these mindsets.

“I don’t take no for an answer and I will never give up – but it is not just Jimmy Milne. I drive it but I have a terrific team of guys, very loyal and hard working who take pride in Balmoral and what we do but we never get complacent.

“My first employee is still with me and we have 54 long term members of staff and more than 1000 man-years of polymer experience - and that’s not just me!”

He has no doubt that the hard work ethic goes back to his childhood on the farm.

>>>>http://www.offshore-europe.co.uk/ExhibitorLibrary/385/Balmoral_Offshore_News_7_2.pdf.....

Demand for oiland gas pullsenergy sectorthrough recession
Although the oil and gas industry has been affected by the globaleconomic slowdown the energy sector tends to work in longer-termcycles. This is particularly true of deepwater operations.The demand for hydrocarbon-based energy is continually increasingand this has pushed the industry into new territories and ever deeperwaters. As a result of continuous exploration and production activitymuch of the offshore supply chain has remained relatively wellprotected from the worst ravages of recession.Despite the economic slowdown Balmoral Offshore Engineering’sinternational business has increased exponentially between 2007 and 2010 We are delighted that the industry is showing its faith in us as apremium provider of high quality, reliable products and have beensuccessful in securing significant contracts for some of the industry’smost prestigious global deepwater provinces.To cope with the increasing demand we are investing heavily in a newmanufacturing plant in Brazil

Jim Milne CBE, Chairman and Managing Director, Balmoral Group

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/NORTHERNMOST TYCOON/

/LOOKS BEYOND OIL/

>>>>http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/profile-in-the-school-of-hard-knox-sir-ian-wood-britains-northernmost-tycoon-looks-beyond-oil-david-bowen-reports-1405720.html .......

In the school of hard Knox: Sir Ian Wood: Britain's northernmost tycoon looks beyond oil.
[...]
Sir Ian is proud of the Granite City. Once it had realised the opportunities of oil, he says, it did the right things. 'It would be wrong to say it would all have happened anyway. The business could have gone to Dundee or elsewhere. The harbour has been rebuilt, and the local civic leaders did what they could to encourage development. That is very much to their credit.'
Now he feels his job is to make sure Aberdeen does not drift back into economic obscurity. 'We're the lucky generation of north-east Scotland,' he says. 'I'd hate the next generation to look back and say,

"Well, what did you leave us?" '

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Culture of Victim Blaming and Pre-punishing

2011-10-02T15:31:00.003+01:00

>>>>

The cyclist travels southbound on Aberdeen’s Ashley Road at a speed somewhere between 15 and 18 mph - a usual cruising speed for level-terrain cycling around town. Ashely Road is the type of inner-urban residential street typical in Scotland, characterised by terraced and semi-detached townhouses, small-trader shops and a large primary school. The speed limit on this road is 20 mph. But it is used as a rat-run.

Passing the school, the impatient roar of motor vehicles can be heard behind the cyclist - and then a taxi thunders past, overtaking at excessive speed. Emboldened by the taxi driver’s audacious manoeuvre, the driver of a flat-bed truck decides that he too should also be in front of the cyclist. So sure is he of his right to precede the cyclist that he takes no account of an oncoming vehicle - another cyclist - who is forced to slow down and pull over into the gutter to avoid a head-on collision with this truck travelling at speed on the wrong side of the road.Both motor-vehicles, in their drivers' arrogant haste to stamp their inconsiderate and dangerous precedence on the roadspace are then pictured waiting at a set of traffic lights as the cyclist immediately catches up with and passes them, seconds later.

A couple of years ago a young boy, a pupil at Ashley Road School, was injured quite badly by a similarly inconsiderate and reckless motorist at exactly this spot, travelling at excessive speed outside the school, rat-running between Pitmuxton and Rubislaw. And as the menacing crunch-time graphs ski-jump up, plotting the upward trajectories of oil price, human population, resource depletion, carbon emissions, deforestation, inequality, species extinctions and global heat budget - what is the proposed solution - here, in this town - to the harm caused by inappropriate motoring in inner-urban residential areas near schools? Unsurprisingly, the response which is regarded as “common sense” in this town is a proliferation of pedestian-restricting railings, behind which our children are taught that the outside world is a dangerous and frightening place. Everything is done to accommodate the convenience of motor-traffic, all the while impinging on the convenience of pedestrians, eroding the utility of other modes of transport and extinguishing the right of children to behave as children.

But worse even than all this, only in Aberdeen could a situation of psychogeographcal false consciousness exist to such a high state that it leads to the invention of the “Walkodile”. Check it out:

Walkodile: It's a kind of rigid tethering system for small children. A sort of sick plastic-spined victim-prepunishing chain gang. Just because motorists can't be trusted to behave themselves around schools.

Astonishing. So, rather than consider motor-traffic management policies along principles of shared space or filtered permeability - restricting the unhindered high-speed movement of motor traffic along residential roads where primary schools and community facilities are situated - we are presented instead with measures and systems which restrict the movement of children. Rather than address the issue of irresponsible and uncivilised motorist behaviour around schools, we have this alienating response based upon rules and restrictions which pre-punish potential victims.This locally invented “Walkodile” is particularly execrable, resembling - actually no: replicating - as it does a chain gang for pre-teens. Locking them together in shackles, wearing high-vis sashes, restricting free movement, reinforcing the message that going outside is a dangerous and special activity, something which requires special planning, special clothing, special equipment and special permission. This teaches children that being outside is not something you can do independently; you are required to be part of a team which is tethered in a rigid and arbitrary hierarchy. Moreover, it conditions these kids that they will, for the rest of their lives, be constrained and chained. Freedom but a dream, they will be forever forced into rigid and arbitrary hierarchies, ordered where to go and when to go there. And this lesson will be forced upon the coming generation of Aberdonians from their pre-school days - by the time they are ready to join the workforce they will be pre-conditioned for unquestioning obedience. Indeed, they will have become dependent upon the constraints and chains which were put upon them from their earliest memory. They will be unquestionably and unquestioningly ready to service capital in the pursuit of endless economic growth. And that's all that really matters in this town, isn't it?

We hope that the business behind the “Walkodile” fails, and we hope that anyone who has invested in it suffers the humiliating loss of their capital. Below is a video of the inventor demonstrating her "product" and attempting to explain herself. If it were up to us she would be prosecuted and jailed. But then, she's already a hopeless prisoner of her own world-view, isn't she?

?????

Edit - update.

Hoho, the inventors of the Walkodile are now promoting the "Walkodile Song" which bears an astonishing similarity to those songs sung in the 'call out and reply' style by chain gangs, cotton-picking slave teams and yolked together galley-slaves. Coincidence?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjyuo_-BnEw

Carshare? No, don't think so.

2011-10-01T14:46:00.000+01:00

>>>>>>>>>>>>
We draw your attention to coverage of the risible failures of both "Car-Free Day" and "In Town Without My Car in Aberdeen", these active transport initiatives being handled in our town by the curious quango "GetAbout", which, according to their website is "a joint project featuring [sic] several organisations".Imagine our surprise when we noticed that they'd bought airtime on STV during Dickinson's Real Deal yesterday to screen an advert which promotes carsharing. In case you missed it:

In the video, you can follow the heartening tale of Cartoon Graeme and Cartoon Pete, both of whom commute from Westhill to Tullos every day. With the help of GetAbout's free service, they get hooked up to share cars and so save "about half" on their fuel costs.Right. So there are a few things wrong with that. Like the fact that just how, exactly, did they expect office workers on the 8.30 to 5.30 treadmill to see a TV ad-spot at quarter to three in the mid-afternoon? (We are happy to provide this "watch again catchup" service, free!)

But more fundamentally than that, the ad implies quite correctly that motoring is expensive (and, indeed, it is - costing about £550 per month for the average person running the average car, according to the RAC's 2010 figures). Counter-intuitively, this is why car-share promotion will fail in Aberdeen.It’s true that, whenever there’s a petrol-tax-hike or price increase because of record-high oil costs, we all see the STV cub reporter sent out to do his easy-peasy hack-work lazy boilerplate on “hard pressed” motorists who are “beleaguered” by record fuel prices. And there they are: motorists-in-solidarity-on-the-forecourt being interviewed; happy to be interviewed venting about paying “more than enough”. They roll their eyes and go through the motions of complaining bitterly, but if you look closely, if you examine the micro-gestures, you’ll see that their eyes are actually smiling – laughing even – with self-regarding relish. Oh yes, the motorists love to complain because in that complaining they get to boast about how much money they spend on running their cars, and how hard they work in extra overtime hours to keep the show on the road (how does car-sharing work when you're doing ad-hoc overtime, anyway?) This demonstrates that they are cash-rich and time-poor: the very badges of high status.Thus the ever-increasing cost of motoring affords the motorist a chance to perform Darwinian status-display dances. From the young contract engineer using his soft-top roadster as a fanny-magnet to the yummy-mummy piloting her oil-tanker-vast Range Rover around the centre of town on the yummy mummy money-go-round – higher motoring costs simply and conveniently serve to enhance status, for in Aberdeen motoring is now a Veblen Good; the more expensive it is, the greater its attraction. Indeed motoring today is the high status distilled essence of aspiration itself. This is why car-sharing in Aberdeen is doomed to fail. You wouldn’t want to look poor, now would you?

You see, car-sharing robs the motorist of his or her most potent status-symbol signpost. And, as our society is hierarchical, a lack of obvious signposts to status troubles the type of people (so common in this town) who have a pathological need to signal their place in the hierarchy to those around them. While the models and levels of spec of their vehicles are distinguished only artificially and superficially, it is enough - for the little cryptic collection of numbers and letters on the boot-lip is the urgent bip-bip-beep telegraph of their pay-grade, their rank, their position on the ladder; their level in the hierarchy. While of course all hierarchies are repulsive, arbitrary, artificial and absurd - they are the compelling organising principal of our society and are evident everywhere. The language of aspiration and the impulse to 'upgrade' is woven into the fabric of every aspect of late-stage consumer capitalism, and this is why the type of people so predominant in our town cling so tightly to their motorcars - for the alternative is a mode of transport which is less amenable to hierarchical status displays. Having spent a life on the upgrade cycle gathering those letters and numbers on the boot-lip of their car - those glyphs and cartouches which so shorthandedly signify their importance - to then tell them that it was all for nothing and that they must abandon these status-displays is to so undermine the foundations of their world-view that they cannot integrate it into reasonable discourse. You might as well tell them that everything they believe in and hold dear is demonstrably wrong, and that everything they think they have achieved and hope to go on to attain is just an illusion. It's like telling a toddler that Santa doesn't exist, and taking away their lollipop at the same time. The reaction you get is not good. For this reason, car-sharing will fail in this town.

But, more fundamentally even than that, we abhor the GetAbout carsharing campaign for it's wheedling compromise. We hate compromise. The premise (now uncontroversial) is that spending an hour a day, every working day, commuting by motorcar is harmful; economically and ecologically unsustainable; unbearably costly both to the individual and to larger society. It is now clear that so egregious are the harms caused by motor commuting and the normalisation of car-dependent motorcentric lifestyles, that the time has arrived for people of good conscience to demand an end to this bizarre fixation with personal motor transport. But, rather than do this, GetAbout prefer only to ask politely that those who perpetrate the harm do so just a little less, cut down a bit, please. Like nicely asking the house-breaker to burgle only houses with odd numbers, GetAbout have missed a chance to promote real beneficial change and instead choose the compromise of hand-wringing cringing negotiation with the wrong-doer. We hate compromise and we execrate negotiation. Both compromise and negotiation are signs of an initially dishonest lack of total commitment to the original premise. We must ask, what is it that GetAbout are afraid of? And why will they not commit fully to active and sustainable transport? Rather than this embarrassing and humiliating call for slightly less motoring, why cannot they just come out and deliver the message that the perceived necessity to build one's life around such an unsustainable commute to work is something which must now be rigorously questioned? GetAbout should be demanding that people make urgent efforts through their work/life choices to create a sustainable context in which to experience that life and work. This requires demanding denser mixed urban developments which allow living nearer to work or working nearer to home. It requires demanding that employers plan for, enable and compel workers to telecommute whenever possible. It requires demanding an immediate moratorium on expensive and unnecessary roadbuilding schemes (like the Aberdeen bypass motorway with its associated radial expressways) and the vast public subsidies consumed by these projects. It requires demanding continental-style commitment to diverse modes of public and active transport and a total ban on the provision of subsidised parking spaces for workers and residents.

What it does not require is the airing of a cheap silly little counterproductive cartoon on afternoon TV to needily beg ever so politely that the wrongdoers (who aren't watching anyway) do just a little bit less wrong all the while continuing to authorise and normalise their damaging levels of undesirable activity. The time for such cringing and cringeworthy compromise is over, because existential questions are now being asked of our civilisation as we enter this age of ecological crises and societal anomie. This long emergency, the slow motion crisis: Are we in it? Has it started yet? How far in are we? Yes, we are in it. Yes, it has started. And how we behave today and tomorrow will determine how far in we go and whether it's possible to reverse the most grievous predictions outlined by the worst-case scenarios. How's your conscience?

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Marischal Frontage Affront Outrage. Reconditioning and Conditioning

2011-09-29T17:55:00.000+01:00

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http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-look-marischal-college.html

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reader comments...

Johanna said...

Have you gone back now, that the building is totally finished and the brickwork is dry???

The reason it looks blotchy was when you took the photos,
it had not long finished raining and the facia [sic] was drying out, hence it being blotchy....

26 September 2011 23:30 

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Firstly, Johanna thanks for your comment, but no; that's not right, it hadn't been raining. And yes; we have returned many times. Most recently on this beautiful dry hot bright Indian Summer afternoon today. Photos were taken - see below. The state of the facade has definitely not improved. If anything, the bright sunlight today threw the awful condition of the frontage into sharper relief than we'd seen before.

But that's old news now. What mostly surprises us about this matter is the denial which our fellow townspeople continue to exhibit when discussing the [botched] reconditioning of the Marischal College frontage and how [bad] it looks. As we said after our second visit:

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/04/marischal-college-second-look.html

From a distance, or if you're passing through Broad Street in a vehicle, it looks OK-ish. Perhaps that's all that matters to whoever wrote the specification or managed the job on site. We prefer to take a slower, measured and more contemplative and up-close approach to our life within the urban realm, and it is this unhurried and ruminative attitude which has allowed us to notice problems at Marischal. We say that the standard of the work at Marischal is a scandal. We all should be outraged. But it seems we are at variance with the times, for when we try to discuss this issue with our fellow townsfolk, very few of them seem to have noticed. Or if they have, they deny that it's an issue.

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While we were there this afternoon, we sat on one of the benches beside the risibly literal new statue of Robert the Bruce, taking the time to look carefully and allow the atrocious state of the frontage to sink into our consciousness; taking the time to think about it and to think about and discuss between us what it means. During this rumination, we couldn't help but overhear some of the comments of the passers-by, comments which struck us with the cognitive dissonance of their stark contrast to what was actually being looked at. "Lovely," said the passers-by... "stunning"... "pristine"... "former glory"; it was as if a press release was being read out loud. We felt like strangers in a strange land where up is down and black is white. Joanna's comment above is not the first contact of its kind we've received on this matter, but it is one of the more polite. The fact that Aberdonians are willing, indeed keen, to disbelieve demonstrable facts and are happy, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, to openly contradict those facts or to make improbable excuses for them says much more about the situation of these Aberdonians than it does about the uncomfortable actualities themselves.

This is epiphenomenal. Which is to say that what we can learn about Aberdeen's people through their willing and wilful self-delusion on this matter tells us more about how Aberdonians fit themselves into the wider societal context than it does about their abilities as architecture critics. It tells us about the perceptual filters which these people are happy to don rather than confront a disappointing or difficult truth. It tells us of a false consciousness and an almost Pavlovian conditioning to which these people have, willingly or unconsciously, submitted or been subjected. This conditioning has rendered the populace compliant, unquestioning, malleable and directable. We can't help but wonder if there are other matters, matters more serious than the mere fucking up of a building reconditioning project, about which the Aberdonian public are willingly misled and are happy to wilfully misunderstand.
And we can't help wondering, thinking of the future, what other obfuscations of inconvenient truths will this emperor's-new-cloths-blind population be happy to swallow whole? And what beliefs, however egregious and incorrect, might be planted in the conditioned-compliant group-consciousness? And, in defence of these beliefs, what actions will those people be happy - eager, even- to take?

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The A to Z of Aberdeen - J is for ...

2011-09-23T14:48:00.001+01:00

World Car Free Day - Aberdeen

2011-09-22T18:15:00.001+01:00

@sustrans
Happy #worldcarfreeday everyone*. Let's continue to help create permanent change to benefit pedestrians and cyclists: bit.ly/15PLL8

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http://www.worldcarfree.net/wcfd/

Every September 22, people from around the world* get together in the streets, intersections, and neighbourhood blocks to remind the world that we don't have to accept our car-dominated society.

(* = except in Aberdeen, Scotland)

On the way to March Stone 55 ABD. The Five Roads and Ashgrove

2011-09-21T14:17:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will know that we’ve been tracing the line of Aberdeen’s ancient boundaries. Skip the first few paragraphs if you’re already familiar with the background...

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Confirmed in his Great Charter of 1319 (an ancient document which founded the real-estate and political power regime which prevails over the polity in Aberdeen to this day), in 1315 Robert the Bruce endowed the Burgesses of Aberdeen with a huge estate of land - known as “The Freedom Lands”. The medieval burgesses were a powerful group of men: police and army and lawmaking body and local authority all rolled into one, With a royal mandate behind them, their monopoly on force enabled them to enforce a monopoly on trade. They were the burgh. How our concept of freedom has changed.

The extent of this "gift" of land from Bruce (which required an annual rent to be paid to the crown - heh, some gift!) can be seen around Aberdeen today. Often mistaken for milestones, the engraved numbered stelae which lie hidden in plain view around Aberdeen mark the boundary between the gifted estate and the hinterland beyond - Kincardine to the south, Mar to the west and Buchan to the North. Bruce had occupied Aberdeen in 1307 and 1308 while he laid waste to a large part of that hinterland.

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http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/01/march-stones-37-to-39-abd.html

The Harrying of Buchan was a devastating event for this area, characterised by its (surprisingly modern) ruthlessly systematic nature. This was a policy, managed and executed with businesslike efficiency; entire towns like Ellon were completely eradicated, livestock and crops were burned in the fields, infrastructure was dismantled and dissipated. Some historians say that so complete was the destruction that the innate and potential wealth of Buchan was damaged for centuries after. A terrible and exceptional act of vengeful spite, unparalleled in these islands before or since.

Small wonder the Aberdonians cowered and offered Bruce whatever he wanted. The fearful and pusillanimous capitulation of Aberdeen's burghers (who had been loyal to the English crown until the pogrom in the hinterland) no doubt, in time, pricked Bruces' conscience and lead to his eventual largesse. According to the Aberdeen City and Shire website, the ordinary people of Aberdeen also "furnished" Bruce with "large supplies" of cash, food and other goods. Under what levels of terror and sword-edge compulsion was this "furnishing" obliged? In this context, the "gift" of the Freedom Lands more than a decade later might be seen as a form of belated conscience-stricken compensation from Bruce to Aberdeen's craven burghers.

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Quarry-spoil heritage
on Rosehill Drive

These numbered stelae boundary markers which show the edges of the Freedom Lands are known as March Stones ("march" being the Old Scots word for "boundary”. Between March Stones 52 and 54 we traversed a psychogeography replete with history and prehistory; redolent of stories known and unknown; stories in the process of being forgotten: strongmen and poets, industrialists and the ordinary-folk workers who made them their fortunes. This time, on our way to March Stone 55 we descend from the prominence of Rosehill, down first Rosehill Drive, then down the curiously-named Back Hilton Road following the one-time line of the Powis Burn with leafy Ashgrove to our right (south) and formidable (some say) Cattofield to our left (north) on its route from the quarry-ridge granite heights to the sand-flat estuarine lands of the seaside links.

The boundary line, from where we last left it at Rosehill’s March Stone 54 all the way to its end with the “Omega Stone” close to the mouth of the River Don, largely marks the route of this ancient watercourse, its tributaries and distributaries. Sloping down along Rosehill Drive and Back Hilton Road, it was long-since tamed into rod-straight ditches. And then, more recently - just outwith living memory - it was subsumed beneath flagstone, then concrete and tarmac. Once an important, prominent and known boundary between the jurisdiction of one burgh and the next, between one thing and something else, where the rights and obligations of one gave way to the rights and obligations of another; in this area, the boundary has long also been a thoroughfare. It’s almost as if the power of those rights and obligations was apt to be discharged latitudinally via the path-of-least resistance desire-lines represented by the boundaries and marked by boundary features; a surface effect - an edge phenomenon; like lightning striking water. This psychogeographical power of edges is remarkable in its longevity - for instance, the medieval western boundary of the Burgh of Aberdeen - the western edge of Bruce’s Freedom Lands; the estates marked by all these “March Stones” - remains the boundary of the modern entity City of Aberdeen to this day. And (if and when it is ever built) the proposed Aberdeen bypass motorway will, between its crossing of the River Dee to its circumnavigation of Kingswells, follow the arbitrary line of this ancient edge.

Telecoms network infrastructure at
the Five Roads

Walking the two long straight segments of the line down from March Stone 54 to March Stone 55 takes us on a dog-leg angled procession first down Rosehill Drive with its mid-20th century bungalow-boulevard suburb townscape; pleasant and mannered sitting in the sun on its south-facing slope, this suburb was suburban not for long before being encircled and obsolesced by the major social housing scheme developments beyond. Then we come upon the “Five Roads” roundabout knuckle, a confusing interchange. Confusing - firstly because the junction accommodates motor traffic flow from six roads, not five. Secondly, because approaching the nexus on foot presents the pedestrian with a Gordian Knot of you-can’t-get-there-from-here choices, as he or she may well be able to see the desired destination but is thwarted by seemingly arbitrary labyrinthine barriers and is inconveniently and frustratingly directed here and there against the desire-line flow: Make the right choice in the first instance or be diverted farther ever farther from where you want to walk to. A handful of shops somehow survives at one of the junction’s apexes, despite the surrounding car-dominated environment which is unpleasant; polluted, noisy, smelly and fraught.

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He’s trying to organise the bags, trying to get the shopping sorted out and into the rucksack that he brought. But the dog’s playing up, barking and growling at strangers, pacing about and getting her chain tangled in her legs and just getting in the effing way. And the kid’s wailing, wanting that bloody toy. He tries and he tries to organise the bags of shopping into some sort of order and he just doesn’t have enough hands. He can’t control the dog cos the traffic’s too loud to make himself heard - to shout down her barks - and he can’t comfort the kid ’cos he’s shouting at the dog. And every time he shouts at the dog the kid gets more upset and the more upset the kid is the more agitated the dog and the more agitated the dog the louder he has to shout and the pavement’s just so narrow here there’s just not the room and the noise ohmygod the noise and he just doesn’t have enough hands.

God! The bloody noise! He sooooo doesn’t like it when the staffie starts playing up - things get a bit, em, unpredictable. Gotta get the dog out of here. Gotta get across the road, and then follow the barriers and another pelican crossing across another road. ’At’s it, now he’s getting somewhere: he’s got the kid on his hip - the toddler’s sticky face - tears and toffee - smirching his tracktop. Nevermind - it’ll go in the machine at the missus’s and, while he waits in his vest, it’ll dripdry quickly - it’ll have to. He’s got the plastic carriers and the dog’s chain and the kid’s toy (a nasty cheap plastic trike on a long handle for pushalong - oh my god how the kid had insisted - grat and peenged and grat until he got his way) he’s got the long bright plastic handle of the toy in his other, his right hand, dragging it behind him like the carcass of some rigoured animal. So, no hand free to push the button for the pedestrian crossing. Fuck. A gap in the traffic, sightlines are poor - risk it? No don’t be daft. Someone else, a middle-aged couple, at the crossing now, one of them pressed the Push Button for Crossing Signal Opposite thank god, he gives a smile and a nod of thanks. "WAIT", says the lit up box. WAIT... WAIT... Beepabeepbeepabeepbeepabeep. Swiftly across in front of the couple. And follow the pavement behind the barriers down a bit more. Good, quieter here - the pavement a bit wider here, good. A yank a damned good hard yank on the staffie’s chain and that - to know that there’s a big boss at the other end of the lead - calms her down a bit. Calms her down a good bit. She immediately flollops herself down, almost comically, ungainly, like a very powerful and muscular sack of tatties, on the pavement and starts licking at her bits. Nice. But it’s OK, though - she’s not going to cause any trouble while she’s at that. Now for the shopping. Squatting on haunches, eye-level talking quietly and soothingly to the kid, one carrier bag goes inside another, both into the rucksack. OK, the words to the kid have worked, and the kid rubs his eyes and sniffs up the snotters, swallowing and, literally looking up - chin out resolute, the upset is forgotten. Now to get the kid and his toy together...

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Diametrically opposite the terminus of Rosehill Drive at the Five Roads roundabout is Ashgrove Court, which we are told was Aberdeen’s first residential tower block or “’scraper”, as local usage would have it. The elision of “skyscraper” to “’scraper” is a telling piece of nominative determinism - nominative pre-determinism, in fact. The very word “’scraper”: something which “scrapes”, with its connotations of harsh friction, erosion, damage, injury, striation, denudation. Or is it the other meaning - the way that, if you were to live there, you might “just scrape by”; manage to live only with difficulty; scrimping and scraping; scraping a meagre living? In either case, our local word for residential tower blocks has determined that none should regard them as desirable places to live. Give a dog a bad name...

Un-underpass. Nonederpass.

Ashgrove Court is, despite the nominative determinism, looking good on its age (which we guess to be perhaps approaching fifty years) standing proud and commanding a view south east to the town centre over first the former farm which was Ashgrove, where mental-asylum inmates toiled their captive days away, herded to the farm for their labours through a now bricked-up underpass beneath Ashgrove Road. Beyond Ashgrove Road, the view from the ’scraper encompasses the grounds of that lunatic asylum to which that underpass connected at Cornhill and then the vista widens to Rosemount and the town centre beyond and below. Those former fields of Ashgrove farm - though today forming a housing estate with mid-century council-house tenements, vacant shop units and the (almost obligatory) recently-closed and boarded-up disused primary school - retain the old farm’s boundary wall which somehow seems to lend the estate an identity of its own, curiously separate from the rest of Aberdeen.

Ashgrove Farmhouse
Occupied until quite recently.

That boundary wall forms the south side of Back Hilton Road which we walk down from the Five Roads roundabout. If you know where it is and what you’re looking for, and if you have sharp eyes, its possible to gaze down the entire length of Back Hilton Road from the roundabout and discern March Stone 55 ABD at the end. It’s just a tiny pixel-speck at that half kilometer distance, but it is visible.

March Stone 55 ABD

And as we approach the stone we hear a scrapey rumbling behind us, across the road - and a gurgling laugh, then a dog-bark - and another. More laughter as the rumbling gets louder. Turning round, we see again the track-suited buzz-cut young man accompanied by his status dog and toddler son. He’s got the toddler - feet splayed out sitting down - on a sort-of plastic tricycle which has a four-foot pole extending from the rear axle ending in a handle which would come to about the young man’s waist height. With his left hand holding the dog’s chain, his right hand is pushing down on the trike-pole so that the trike is wheelie-ing along - its front wheel up 20 centimeters from the ground. And he jogs gently, loping controlled and steady down the concrete pavement slope of Back Hilton Road pushing the plastic trike with his son on board in front of him. The toddler on the trike - being pushed far far faster (but safe, level and steady) than ever such a toy plastic tricycle was supposed to go - has his head thrown back laughing uncontrolled loudly in sheer delight and ecstasy. The pure glee on the pre-school boy's face is as bright as sunshine - looking up and back over his shoulder he can look into his dad's eyes, leaning over and laughing right back with him. WahayYayhay-aha-ahahahaha! And the Staffordshire Bull Terrier on her chain, in the young dad's left hand, appears anthropomorphically on her furry face to have a similar laughing grin, the same as her master's and his son's. Muscularly she trots, matching the man’s loping strides with her own elbow-out sideways-ish lollop, her front legs seeming to manage to travel far far faster than those at the back. Barkbarkbark. For joy. Man, boy, dog - an ancient family unit subset on an outing, getting in a bit of fun while getting in the shopping. Getting a thrill along with the necessary provisions - laying down a bonding substrate of happy time memory. A memory template which is held in common by men and boys and dogs since first men and boys and dogs went out together and came back with food; game for the table, serious play for the hunting unit. And now this family has a memory-bond which ties them not only together in shared experience today but which will also last them all their days together or apart - solid, pure, innocent - a tie which binds. Archaic and primordial, contemporary and eternal. Universal and personal. A timeless moment, that morning on Back Hilton Road, close to March Stone 55 ABD.

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