Denburn Dérive #00 PROLOGUE

Up and down Ferryhill pushing the clock to make the appointment with my collaborator. London train rumbling overhead - noisy through the alarming crack in the viaduct arch, the strain gauges the filth. Rainshowers patrol the horizons, darkening out to sea and orbiting our basin-bound town. Will we get wet today? But for now, sun breaks through and provokes a little sheen of sweat - sunglasses on I'm in too much of a hurry to be lingering and photographing all these edges, but I can't help myself. The weather is on the same edge as the transformed and re-transforming littoral of these flatlands between re-routed river and the harbour, this mudflat where once the Denburn and Backburn of Ferryhill mingled their braided way to the mightier estuary beyond and the sea.

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Palmerston who bought his way into Parliament, and who opposed any extension of the franchise to the urban working class, posthumously awarded his own One Way Street with Rotten Dyke

John Aberdein

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Hydroponic supplies and consumables for the cultivators of certain giggly crops snuggle cocking a snook under the slime-filthy arches of Palmerston Road at the site of stalled comprehensive redevelopment on the Denburn estuary flatlands.
Once hailed by the local authority as an exciting, emerging, dynamic new business district south of the city centre, development work here is stalled. Freedom House has been built and occupied, Pilgrim House remains a vacant lot of rubble and estuarine sand. Ready for occupation Summer 2009. The economic crisis made a liar of the developer's billboard - just as on the TV news every weekday we see and hear (and feel) the cognitive dissonant stress of special economic correspondents as they struggle to find a way to tell the tea-time massed prolity: the dawning realisation that a return to growth may not actually be feasible.

Half demolished fish smokehouses remain in a stand-off with the abandoned demolition-man's bulldozer. The anodized aluminium clad high-tech HQ of the local development corporation is gullshit streaked, neighbouring as it does the fish-packers' brick sheds with their robust business model stubborn - no spreadsheet-misdirected finance capital required. No lease-out real-estate capital leverage buy-back vehicle. Just boxed fish from the harbour; finance capital for real-estate bets might have dried up, but we all must still eat. Fishy industry half-here half-away; pencilneck suited and booted spreadsheet wranglers half-arrived. An electric tension discharges in the arc between the now and the then, and between the then and the future. That rapidly receding future juxtaposed with a past that isn't compatible with the new aspiration.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/welcome-to-boomtown-britains-new-capital-of-bling-891291.html

It is morning in Rubislaw Den, Aberdeen's most prosperous neighbourhood. The sumptuous, granite-faced villas erected by the Victorian shipbuilders and mill barons who made this corner of Scotland rich more than a century ago, rise up and down the tree-lined streets. In the surrounding parkland, deer graze and kingfishers swoop. All is quiet, apart from the occasional crunch of tyres on gravel as Bentleys and Lamborghinis bearing personalised number plates slip out of double-gated driveways to convey their owners to work, or ferry spouses to another day of retail therapy in the city centre.

It might stick in the craw of those living elsewhere in the UK to see wealth being so conspicuously flaunted in Aberdeen's West End – battling as they are to cope with a 35 per cent hike in gas bills or the cost of filling a fuel tank – but here, in the backyard of Europe's high-powered oil and gas executives, the latest round of soaring world energy prices are helping the industry reap rewards unseen since the boom days of the 1970s.

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Aberdeen - widely thought to be the town the credit crunch forgot - but the now-stalled development tells us otherwise. High oil prices have kept the debt-wolf from the door for a while, but Aberdeen is the dead man walking - and those walking the concourses of its amerimall shopping centres are its zombies.

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Fred Magdoff and Michael D Yates

The ABCs of the Economic Crisis

A working person toiling away on an automobile assembly line or in a restaurant kitchen must have found it difficult to understand how the bankers and brokers who have brought the economy to its knees made so much money simply by selling pieces of paper. When workers make cars, houses or meals, and when farmers produce food, they are producing something that people need and can use. But those who sell complex financial instruments don't produce anything tangible at all. Something doesn't seem right about making money without producing a useful good or service. And indeed, no society can survive if the only economic activity - or even the dominant activity - is lending and borrowing money. The same can be said for buying already-made things at one price and selling them at a higher price. If the only economic activity is merchant trade, everyone will soon die because nothing is being produced.

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I've arranged to meet my collaborator in Union Square. Thinking that perhaps it would be ironic for us to start our collaberation there, at the sight of consumer capitalism's highest form - on the northern edge of its imperial reach - Aberdeen's newest shopping and leisure destination is, maybe, too big a bite to chew in one.

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Unfinished short story

One of the many things which troubled him was the standard of product which was available from many of the retail outlets in The New Centre. It was a kind of inside out transaction, he thought. The appearance of sumptuous luxury and opulent prestige telegraphed by the surroundings was belied by the lack of choice and just-about-OK quality of the goods on offer. He sighed. He knew that this was the way of things; that the act of retail - the consumerist consummation, was now almost entirely about the experience of shopping itself. Products, once purchased, became almost irrelevant as the unsatisfiable shimmering simmering need to buy more grasped the shopper and promptly propelled him or her through the doors of the next shop along. Inside out. Like the centre itself; concrete multi-level carpark and aluminium clad shed from most exterior views but the interior veneered with brass and oak, marble and crystal glass. He understood the need for the constant renewal of businesses - the creative destruction at the heart of capitalism - "all that is solid melts into air". He appreciated the reasons for consumers' constant craving for novelty. At the heart of the human condition was the need to seek out new delights; that was hard-wired into the brains of the nomadic hunter-gatherers which we had been until only ten millenia earlier - a mere eyeblink in the full sweeping arc of human evolution. Biologically and psychologically we remained hunter-gatherers, and that heritage was best and fully both expressed in and exploited by The New Centre.

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Past the road-freight loading bay of the new shopping mall which is in the same space as once occupied by a railhead freight terminal which operated fully integrated with the sea-port beyond, I arrive inside the surveillance footprint of the mall's security zone. The cycle racks once trumpeted as evidence of the mall management's committtment to sustainability now exclusively occupied by large-engine-capacity motorbikes. An automatic door and I'm inside the conditioned environment, the mediated experience of the mall. In sharp contrast to the deserted and desolated streets outside, the mall's marble veneered ersatz street is crammed with people. Their contemporary fashion uniforms instantly let me know what sort of people they are - or, more accurately, what their favorite TV programmes are.

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She teamed the stripy socks and black gymshoes with the flowery dress because one of the fat girls on that American high-school singalong show did the same - so it's OK to be bigger these days - it must be, or those girls wouldn't be on the TV. It's all about messages, you know. Her whole life is one of messages, her branded possessions are laden with messages. Her car is marque "x" which says "y" about her. She reckons it says "y" about her, 'cos the advert and the carsalesman (her great annual friend - he's so flirty!) implied heavily that it would. It also lets everyone know what her paygrade is. That's very important. By the badges of their cars they keep their scores in the hierarchies.


All these things are signifiers of 'her', but, although she exercised the final and one true freedom of consumer choice, she did not truly choose them - rather they were chosen for her; they chose her. Unheedingly she spins the hamsterwheel on the neverending upgrade cycle. Surely the next upgrade iteration of her chosen phone and car or gamesconsole and kitchen appliance or laptop and holiday package or tv broadcasting standard; whatever will be the one which will make her life complete! She doesn't care that the upgrade cycle has effectively rendered the ownership of her possessions merely short term leases towards planned obsolescence - that's OK! The subscription model embraces and guides her towards a future on the upgrade path, the roadmap to forever, the added functionality, the software/hardware nexus. Mobile phone teleco business models lead the way to the free provision of hardware in return for a monthly subscription fee. The more she pays, the quicker she gets upgraded to newer more functional flashier hardware which she displays visibly to the chagrin of her inferiors in the lounge bar restaurant leisure and retail destination.


Does it trouble her that, seen from the other end of the telescope, she is in fact the product which has been manufactured conditioned moulded and finalised by her own agency; compliant vacuous consumption of advertising media (the adverts are sometimes better than the programmes!). The living room was the factory - the product being manufactured was she. She has been told what to want, told when to want it, but never told why. A pre-indebted fully conditioned compliant producer-consumer, her contract is negotiable. She is the 'installed base' to which the providers must continually 'upsell'. Her eyes are the eyes delivered to the advertisers by her media provider. Her subscription is the unarguably certain future revenue upon which the media providers base their corporate profitability forecasts as they strategise and organise: the world and its minds being theirs to homogenise.


So does it trouble her? Sometimes she wonders - is this all there is? Sometimes the shadow of the beginning of knowledge flits darkening across her consciousness, but usually, she's too distracted, too put upon, too tired to entertain these thoughts. Does it trouble her? No, she's too busy at work: crushed by the unhuman commute, enriching far-off faceless shareholders by her toils. That is when she's not going through the motions with displacement activity and clock-watching till 5 o'clock and the tea-time glass of wine (or two or three) which she's convinced herself that she deserves; digging ever deeper into the easy-credit overdraft of ersatz happiness and good cheer from the bank of Boozy Britain. Then an exhausted evening slumped in front of the plasma, ready-meal in one hand, balloon goblet of pinot grigio in the other; conditioned by advertising-funded broadcasting to be a good consumer - a commercial commodity, bought, sold and delivered gift-wrapped to the corporations; endentured, bonded, enslaved by the upgrade cycle. Then the same again tomorrow.


Ah, but retail therapy on a Saturday morning! "This is the highlight of my week" she can be heard saying to her companions, only just a little too loudly.

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Outside the mall I saw the rump of a fishing-industry food sector, clinging on against the tide of valueless vague papershuffling make-work, so inside the mall I'm momentarily disgusted and disorientated by by the food-chain inversion implied by the foot-skin nibbling-fish stall in the centre of the concourse. I look away retching, my consciousness is diverted elsewhere and I percieve a psychogeograpical fault-line. Who else has allowed themselves to notice that two security guards - one of them very short, but with a hollow-eyed "don't fuck with me" look in his hard-life face and a tight-wound flick-knife potential to his bearing - have four or five boys lined up against the hoarding of an unoccupied shop unit? Apart from one, who is clearly much older, the boys look like brothers - they've all got the same haircut and are graded in height. All are wearing similarly hand-down cheap unbranded sportswear and trainers. They know what's next - the best they can hope for is summary ejection from the mall. They just don't fit here, you see.

And now across the crowd, I can see my collaborator - psychogeographer Lewis Dryburgh - man with détournement on his mind. We've arranged to meet today for a dérive up the valley of the Denburn from its outfall into the Upper Dock of the harbour. He's leaning against a pillar and putting his phone back in his pocket. I wave at him as my own phone thrums and toots - a text from Lewis. I'm late - but only by 5 minutes. We greet each other and make a start...

So, in search of an ancient watercourse, we head off towards the Upper Dock, through the new bus and coach terminal which is aesthetically very similar to (but planographically opposite from) the roadfreight loading bay at the other end of the shopping mall. "Welcome to Aberdeen!" But which is the true freight of this mall? In which direction does this building cause value to flow?

The Roe Buck

http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/mgConvert2PDF.aspx?ID=12314 
Page 469
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The type and extent of deer control measures will vary from site to site. As at Tullos Hill, the action required to reduce the amount of deer damage to acceptably low levels will necessarily include the appropriate intensity of culling on an on-going basis until trees can reach full establishment – ie beyond the height at which roe deer can cause major damage. This would cost in the region of £9000 and can be covered within the existing funding for phase 1. Erection of deer fencing is another option which may be required in some areas where on-going deer control is either impractical or otherwise unlikely to reduce grazing pressure to acceptable levels.

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He’d just been congratulating himself - it was quite early in the season to feel as fit as he did. During the appalling winter, his saddle-fitness had declined, but since the spring had come early and bright he’d managed to improve on that. Climbing the steepest hill he knew in the town; he’d managed it that day with less distress, in a higher gear, quicker and with better form than he’d done so far that year. Half way up he’d even felt good enough to kick, to dig down into reserves of strength he didn’t know he had - to spin the pedals faster and actually accelerate up the hill. That hill at the very edge of the parish boundary of his town - quite rural really - up a forestry trail to a summit with an Ordnance Survey concrete pillar trig-point on top and such a view! The hill that gathers the rain that feeds the springs that become the burn that gave his town its name and gave the town the green estuarine littoral to found itself upon all those centuries ago.

Cresting the summit and now on a plateau the cyclist knuckle-flicks the paddle to slip up a gear and relaxes, pleased with himself. Now traveling at about walking pace on the loose gravel path, heading slightly down and dead straight, increasing speed; faster now jogging pace, faster now running speed faster again faster than a runner - gravel chips pinging poing boing from beneath chunky nobbly tyres. To think: the loose-ish glacially deposited aggregate sand and gravel of this kame hill were water-bourn carried by that burn water; speck by speck, stone by stone down the valley and formed that estuary, now reclaimed beneath shopping mall and car park and railway station and road: a perfect flatland for development alongside the harbour - that harbour itself once the shifting sand estuary of a much mightier-yet watercourse, now granite pier and concrete pile contained, dredger-tamed.

Now speeding about as fast as he'd like to go for comfort and safety on the unmetalled surface - any more and his suspension-forks wouldn’t plushly absorb the bumps of the gravel and sand yet boulder-studded surface - he realises in the quiet of his outreaching thoughts that he’s not alone - something impinges on his consciousness, matching speed and direction - a flicker in the trees: the path now a fully enclosed avenue high contrast light and shadow strobe pulsing through the tree fronds hiding the sky above. Shafts of coppergold light here briefly blinding him through the slatted louvres of the pines - there illuminating the quiet dust of the still forest, suspended in the air, a moment holding its breath. That flicker in the trees, it’s real, it's alive, its a deer! On a parallel route, he can see small antlers - a buck! Matching movement through the forest. But the cyclist is a noisy fuss on a forestry road and the roe buck is effortless amongst moss and fern and boulder and trees, jinking and sidewinding - maintaining smooth forward momentum, muzzle high on this slender neck and with this jet black moist eye regarding and shadowing the cyclist’s progress, the roe buck stays with him - steady.

And then, the path gradient turns positive again, robbing both of speed, but still they shadow one another slowing to the crest, slowing, slowing together, stopping - stopped. Unclipping one foot from a pedal, the mountain biker stands as still and quiet as he can on the upward-sloping path, and the roe stops too as if somehow robbed of the impetus which earlier made him run. A living-room’s width away, the deer is just inside the margin of the trees; this body parallel to the path, this head turning to the man. A moment of complete silence. A moment of complete stillness. This moment - not enough for the man to see too deeply into these deep moist reflective big black eyes. Not enough to make a true mutual connection, not enough. But enough to for him to see that in these black moist eyes here is no human emotion - no way to ever connect. And suddenly silently these eyes are away! Turning at right angles, the parallel shadowing over, finished - the buck springs with no noise and these slenderest of neat legs over a stone dyke into a grassy field and away swift and down towards the broad valley of the ancient burn. The two part, their paths brought together by coincidence, by providence, now their routes bifurcated and branching away from each other forever.

Standing now alone, the cyclist felt a little ashamed that he should have thought himself fit, that his meaty-thigh-powered steel and aluminium contrivance should have filled him with self-congratulatory regard. For all he prided himself on being an outdoor type; of connecting with the good earth, of living the life of the world - rather than just inhabiting it; now the man realised that, compared to the roe buck, he was just a conceited dilettante, with all this weird equipment and preparations and clothes and planning. A fussy amateur, only playing at being real - only pretending to be outside. By contrast the deer was the very essence of a self-contained life without superfluity. Lean, slender, light, swift, efficient. Fit and fitting. Truly free.

For, now freed from his brief alien contact with the man, centred wholly and still within his body’s own movement, the buck’s desire line down into the valley is primordial. He is moving without moving, as water flows within itself; the buck cannot be anything other than what he is; he is integral. Just as without the water there is no watercourse, the deer is self-contained in his looping graceful curved route down across open fields following a path of least resistance with no artifice, no construction, no meaning, no implication. Nothing is wasted and nothing is superfluous. He has neither capacity for understanding any distinction between himself and the landscape through which he moves, nor way of understanding the passing of one moment to the next. For by his existence that understanding would be redundant: he is that landscape; he is that movement; he is that moment - there can be no distinction for all are one. Flashing across the field and vaulting... up, hey! Over another dyke at speed the buck somehow remains that silently moving pool of stillness, motionless in his body; moving without moving - completely fit for his surroundings and fitting them seamlessly and essentially. Providence he is, and he is subject to providence. Here is no human emotion. Here is only motionless motion.

The cyclist stood watching as the buck receded to a speck, proceeding into the depths of the valley and from this high vantage the man’s eyes flickered to the prominences which he noticed stood, seeming sentinels, either side of the valley as it descended meandering eastwards towards the town’s urban centre. On a hill to the north of the valley, a civic water supply reservoir. Looking for all the world like a truncated pyramid built by an ancient civilisation, the reservoir’s sepulchral forms devised an appropriate reflection to the modernist-style city crematorium which occupied the mirror-slope hill to the south. To the north, life-giving cool water - to the south, death and disposal in flames.

As he regarded the buildings on these slopes, and as these thoughts wandered across his mind, the cyclist realised that he’d lost sight of the buck. Try as he might, he couldn’t pick him out any more amongst the fields and dykes, hedges and copses as they spread out below him in the valley. He couldn’t see whether the roe buck would travel on the north or the south side. He couldn’t see what choice providence had made for the bifurcating future. On one branch, nurture and a plan for the future - on the other, consuming searing erasure; an end to a future.

He re-clipped his foot into the pedal, sighed deeply and pedaled on.

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A version of this piece first appeared in the Aberdeen Voice citizen journalism online news and information source on 3rd June, 2011.

I Walk, I Cycle, I Look, I Think. I am the Bad Man of Rubislaw Hill.

I've just been Krakened!

After yesterday's upbeat feeling when we reported that maybe the tide was turning for the creative and progressive sections of Aberdonian society, we've been brought back to earth with a thump provided by the agency of our burgeoning police state and its ad-hoc amateur army of self-appointed busybody petit-police informants who have been empowered by the urgings of Operation Kraken - which we've complained about specifically before.

Denburn flows beneath Seafield House
'underground' carpark at Hill of Rubislaw

A little while ago, on the 10th of April, I was up on the Hill of Rubislaw. There are many, many interesting aspects to the geography, industrial archaeology and current use of this part of our town and the human interaction with that geography. We've got quite a lot to say about it, and will do so over the coming weeks and months as part of several interestingly intersecting projects. So there I was, on a mountain bike that day, photographing the Denburn as it disappears underneath the carpark of Seafield House. There are no signs which prohibit access, there are no notifications that the space is private; footpaths and roads criss-cross the site providing access from all sides and various routes across the campus.

Seafield House is a huge office building, once occupied by UK state oil corporation Britoil, latterly occupied by multinational plc oilco Shell, now split into suites with various occupants, some empty. Shell are still in some of those suites, I think. I took a handful of photos and had conversations with a couple of private security guard petit-police who (obvously having espied me on their CCTV panopticon monopticon screens) emerged from their airless cabin and took an indignant interest in what I was doing, they asserted (incorrectly) that I required permission to take photographs. I told them I was working on a writing / geography project, and they seemed to accept that. They didn't bother asking to see the photos I'd taken. They did ask my name. I declined to provide it. In hindsight the way they 'dealt' with me is quite fascinating and enlightening. One of these private-security guards was a blond-dreadlocked white-rasta multi-pierced crusty-type. When I explained the parallels between the non-underground underground carpark of Seafield House at Hill of Rubislaw - the way it fills the valley of the Denburn at that point - and how it parallels and provides a precident for the notorious proposal to fill in another part of the Denburn Valley further downstream, he agreed with my aims in wishing to point out this parallel. I can now see that this was one of the ways that these people have been trained to 'contain' non-conforming behaviour - I thought I'd made an ally for progressive urbanism - I thought I'd made him think, but all the time he was making me reveal my hand, reveal details about myself, and once I'd gone he got on the phone to the police. Stupid me.

Denburn re-emerges from beneath carpark
and Seafield House

So today, the police come to the door of our studios in the upscale heart of downtown Pituxton, demanding to be let in to interview me about this "incident" at Seafield House. ("Incident"?) As far as I was aware, I had a conversation with a couple of over-officious security guards who appeared to accept my explanation as to what I was doing - it's stretching a point to label this an "incident", surely? As I hadn't provided the petit-police with my name, I was surprised that the real police had managed to connect me with the "incident" at Hill of Rubislaw. It is of great concern to us, and a source of anguish and worry that police resources and capital have been expended in reviewing, cross-referencing and collating CCTV footage in order to arrive at an identification of me.  The footage was circulated within the police, presumably via some sort of internal notification communication system, and seen by a significant proportion of their officers, until one could identify me (no doubt from my 'footprint' left by the famous 'incident' at Union Square.) We cannot say how many police man-hours have been expended in making that cross-reference identification. Maybe they have AI expert systems based on fuzzy logic which help them make these connections. But perhaps we're getting just as paranoid as they are if we start to think like that - robot overlords, the singularity is close, etc...

Sign says "Underground car park"
But it isn't "underground" at all...
It's build into the natural contours of the Denburn Valley

In any case, with so much time and manpower being spent on mopping up the fallout from our perfectly legal activities which impinge on no-one else's rights, it seems clear that we've become quite a pest to the authorities (or businesses, or something) - what with all that walking and cycling around and noticing stuff and thinking about it and writing about it. How dare they accuse me of any wrongdoing or assume that I am intent on causing harm? Our intentions are quite the reverse. Yet there they were, in our studio, two Grampian Police officers excusing themselves that they had to investigate the "incident" because of the "terrorist threat". Really. The female officer said that she understood that what I had been doing at Hill of Rubislaw was harmless, but that nevertheless she was duty-bound to follow up, just as the petit-police were duty-bound to report me to the police. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, it all sounded a  bit "we're just following orders" to me.

During the interview with the police, which was conducted in the working studio of our business, surrounded by the tools of our trade and by artwork in progress strewn around the place in various stages of completion, I was insultingly asked by the interviewing officer: "Do you work, at all?" It was firstly incredible to us that she didn't notice that she was actually within a place of work, but secondly, and probably more pertinently, what difference should it make whether I work or not? Is it as if the unemployed are all evil with malfeasance on their minds, more likely to be involved with terrorism?

"Ground" level. Parking in the Denburn valley beneath.

I expressed my incredulity to the police officers as they stood in my studio, implying stuff. I expressed my incredulity that the petit-police at Seafield House, while appearing to accept my explanation on the day had actually taken the puffed-up indignant and self-important time to take the 'matter' further. "Oh, but they've got to report 'incidents' like these, d'you see" the female police officer patronisingly assured me.
"Incident?" I asked, eyebrows raised.
"Oh yes, there's a heightened level of threat at the moment," the policewoman told me. "Just look what happened in Morocco."

Yes. That's what she said. Words almost fail us. We find it offensive in the extreme that my taking photographs of buildings and burns in the West End of Aberdeen should be compared to the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents in a faraway foreign country characterised by unstable social, political and religious conditions. It is sick and sickening. The minds which make these connections are sick, it sickens discourse (this being an example) and it is part of the ongoing pathology of the society which we had hoped to help to remedy. It makes us nervous about our whole lives - nervous of finding things interesting - structures, textures, imprints, buildings - nervous and afraid to share the delight we find in the things we find interesting. Nervous to even write this. I steel myself and write on...

It sickens us to our stomachs that we're being made to feel bad about our way of life, our interests and the way we explore our city in order to reach an understanding of its past, present and future. In this way; in our own small way we hope to help influence societal development here, to try to make our future in our town better, livable, human. We care about our lives in our town, we care about this passionately - which is why we look so closely. And then for this we have to explain ourselves at length, to authority figures (and petit-police para-authority figures) who think it's just weird to look at a river and wonder where it goes. We submit that it is we who are normal and they who are weird, using as they do their authority to nosey in about and ask us impertinent questions, to compare us to terrorist murderers and to keep and refer to records on us at the behest of private security part-time self-empowered petit-police squinting suspiciously at their CCTV screens, hating, fearing, paranoid. We have done nothing wrong. We should have nothing to fear - yet we feel the yolk and shackles of suspicion beginning to chafe. As they have managed to identify me, and come to my door simply from pictures of my likeness, we wonder just how deeply their investigations into the background of my private life have gone. It's a creepy feeling.

It is becoming clear that by looking at, thinking about and writing of our surroundings in the way we do, we stand out to a degree which is increasingly regarded as unacceptable in our society. There is a Japanese saying "The nail-head that stands out will be hammered flush". Our interest in urbanism has prompted a three-week police investigation and has brought officers to our door: We just felt the hammer.

We'd like to say to the interests which wield that hammer:

Stop guessing! Go out and catch some effing criminals; go out and gather some intelligence on those who perhaps do wish to cause harm to people, property, society - these people emphatically are not us and you know it. Stop trying to stifle the creative people in Aberdeen, for one day you'll find there are none of us left. Our patience is wearing thin.

Of course, by writing all this, we are putting ourselves further in view as outliers. We are nail-heads that stand all the further out. By oppressing us and attempting to suppress our perfectly innocuous actions - by attempting to hammer flush the nail-heads - the authorities and para-authorities provoke our further criticism.

And so on...


Edit:

A friend points out that I'm probably not right to believe that I've been tracked by my likeness on CCTV:

...the way I'd do it would be look at the cellphone info to see whose phones were in the cell, get their numbers, id the owners. Fairly straightforward if you are in a position of power. Not that I do, but just saying. Going to CCTV mode is so inefficient.

Indeed, and thanks for that.

After having had a few days to reflect, we think that the most interesting aspect of the story is that the police went to the bother of tracking me. It strikes me that the Oilco's here in Aberdeen may be behaving a little like those A+ list celebrities (Tom Cruise and the like) who ban eye-contact with their underlings. Shell are saying "don't you dare look at me!"

We think that there are three possibilities for the police having followed up on the security guards' reporting of my presence in this semi-private semi-public place.

1. Oilco paranoia - police willing to act as oilco agents and deliver me a fingerwagging rebuke for daring to notice that there are oil company premises in Aberdeen. Police owned by business. We're doomed.
2. Genuine fear of terrorist attack by slightly chubby middle aged man making no attempt to hide his actions and happy to discuss what he's up to with the security guards. In which case the three weeks they took to getting round to intercepting me simply demonstrates their incompetence. We have no hope of these officers protecting us from genuine malfesance. We're doomed.
3. Mechanical box-ticking follow-up by-the-book. 

Of these, we reckon that the third is the most likely. It's the book that's wrong. It still makes the security-guards and police guilty of 'just following orders' by the agency of 'by the book' and incapable of autonomous action which would allow an independent response to unique circumstances. We're doomed.

Woonerf for The Denburn Valley. Philosophy, Background and Site Visits.

On the day of the launch of a private-sector led design competition to re-shape the public realm space of central Aberdeen via a scheme which has as part of its parameters the destruction of Aberdeen's Union Terrace Gardens, we're delighted to be able to offer this alternative conceptual report into a vision which would retain Aberdonian's beloved city centre garden, and make the best possible use of the existing assets on the other side of the Denburn Valley - "Belmont Street Gardens", if you will...

Belmont Street Gardens

A couple of weeks ago, we laid out the beginnings of our vision for an alternative to the existing monolithic all-or-nothing take-it-or-leave it proposal for the redevelopment of Union Terrace Gardens and the east slope of the Denburn Valley opposite. That monolithic proposal was once know as the "City Square Project". Following public outcry at the very idea of destroying Union Terrace Gardens, the promotors of that project now wish it to be known as the "City Gardens Project". You can see what the PR gods have done there. The project is being promoted on behalf of local tycoon oil-man billionaire Sir Ian Wood by local development quango 'ACSEF' (Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future).

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Union Terrace Gardens is NOT the problem.

Denburn Dual Carriageway
Plus somewhere to put the bins.

Existing covered section - alienating.

TOP-DOWN

We are concerned that ACSEF's 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. We prefer a more iterative, yet paradoxically much bolder approach, and have so proposed that that the underused Denburn Dual Carriageway (which so blights the valley) be abandoned, ploughed up and turned into a single carriageway 'woonerf' with streetscape initiative build-outs, planting, street furniture, kiosks; all the usual stuff you might see in the centre of any similar-sized town elsewhere in continental Europe.

Human scale - places of refuge and community
St. Nicolas Street - outside M&S

A woonerf is a shared space urban landscape - it's a policy pioneered in the Netherlands in the 1970's. Woonerf is a term increasingly used in the English-speaking world to mean an area where motorists have priority equal to or lesser than other road-users, thus increasing the livability of the city at the human scale, even as residential and commercial-use density increases. Based upon principals of filtered permeability and shared space for transport corridors and thoroughfares these woonerf areas were pioneered in Groningen and other towns in the Netherlands, Flanders and Germany to encourage walking and cycling by giving them a more attractive environment free from traffic and a time and convenience advantage over car driving.

RE-EXAMINED

So, with our woonerf proposal in mind we re-examined the material on the City Gardens Project website. Once or twice in the past we've raised specific concerns about some of the aspects implicit or explicit in the material on the site, but over the last few days, we had the chance to examine in detail the presentation material on their website, specifically the input of Charles Landry (author of The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators). You can download this material here:

• Powerpoint Presentation (*.ppt file download)
• Audio Recording (*.mp3 download)

We also refer to Scottish Government policy statement documents:

• Designing Places (pdf) Interesting to note that the foreword is by Aberdeen Central MSP Lewis Macdonald)
• Designing Streets (pdf)
• Civilising the Streets (pdf direct download)

We also undertook site visits to Union Terrace Gardens and the footway (such as it is) which runs on the east side only of the Denburn Dual Carriageway. We also visited Aberdeen's existing woonerf exemplars at Belmont Street, St Nicholas Street and The Green.

URBAN DUAL CARRIAGEWAYS - A SOLIPSISTIC SOLUTION ONLY TO THEMSELVES

Where is everybody? No pavements, no cyclelanes.
Em. No cars, either.

As we already pointed out, the Denburn Road urban dual carriageway represents a problematical conundrum to Aberdeen. Barely used, it sits dog in a manger at the heart of the city centre's prime real estate, the footway used for the storage of refuse recycling bins. Lovely. So rarely is it used by motor traffic that what vehicles do use it invariably do so at excessive speed, the granite-canyon walls of the carriageways reflecting and reverberating their engine roar. We are given to understand (and this is hearsay, so take it as such) that the Denburn Dual Carriageway had been planned and drawn up many years before it became a reality, and was finally given the go-ahead as a goodwill gesture to the designer who was due to retire around that time. This ill-conceived piece of urban motorism actually has not one but two plaques commemorating its creation. How embarrassing.

Not one...

Now, as we begin to chew on the meat of the 21st century, this 20th century solution to urban transport looks more and more old-fashioned and shaming. Two schemes are currently officially proposed which will tackle this blight. Both appear to be aimed at providing the Denburn Dual Carriageway with more traffic. Firstly, we have the Berryden Corridor Urban Dual Carriageway project, which will link with the Denburn Dual Carriageway. Secondly we have the City Gardens Project, which has as one of its parameters the requirement to 'cover over' the Denburn Dual Carriageway - thus turning it into an urban motorway tunnel. Indeed the conceptual report (big pdf) into the (then) City Square Project shows some 500 parking spaces on two underdeck levels occupying the volume currently 'airspace' above Union Terrace Gardens. That would certainly put lots of traffic onto the Denburn Dual Carriageway.

but two...

We find that both of these officially proposed solutions are solipsistic - seeing motor-traffic transportation as being the desired outcome of providing infrastructure for motor-traffic transportation. This motorcentric philosophy with its reliance on and pandering to car-dependent obesogenic lifestyles is out of date and out of time.



MOTORCENTRIC "OLD THINKING"

Charles Landry said that "old thinking" is exemplified by attitudes and policies where the "car is king" whereas "new thinking" is partially characterised by urban planning policies where "the car is the guest". This, of course, is an explicit re-statement of the philosophy behind the Woonerf concept which we propose. In his presentation, Landry says that this "new thinking" based on "shared space" where the person - the pedestrian - re-captures the city from the car, helps create the acme of a city which can compete on 21st century global terms - a "humane city" with "distinctiveness" where people have a sense of ownership, where delight and enjoyment, participation and familiarity are encountered within human scale, liveable environments; "great places". It strikes us that what Landry said in his presentation stands in stark contrast to the irreversible monolithic single building (for that is what it would be) which the City Garden Project proposes.

Belmont Street - the car is a "guest". Can you see it?

Rather than "tear up the rulebook" as Landry exhorts planners to do, the advocates of the City Garden Project are flicking through that long-discredited rulebook of comprehensive re-development and urban dual carriageway schemes and coming up with the type of capital-intensive mega-building projects which have long been consigned to history elsewhere where more enlightened planning policy predominates. The perceived need to spend huge amounts of capital on this sort of regeneration is a fallacy. Indeed, as Landry said, shared-space schemes are a means of recapturing spaces in a very cheap way. One of the things which Landry says is a most important consideration relating to our urban experience is "what does it feel like?". How does it make us feel?

THE HAPPINESS AGENDA

Please excuse us while we quote the current Prime Minister, David Cameron:

Too often in politics today, we behave as if the only thing that matters is the insider stuff that we politicians love to argue about - economic growth, budget deficits and GDP.

GDP. Gross domestic product. Yes it's vital. It measures the wealth of our society. But it hardly tells the whole story. Wealth is about so much more than pounds, or euros or dollars can ever measure. It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being. Well-being can't be measured by money or traded in markets. It can't be required by law or delivered by government. It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture, and above all the strength of our relationships.

Improving our society's sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times. 

An existing garden off Denburn Road

Right, sorry about that (feel a bit dirty now), but we completely agree with everything he said there. In his book "Cities for People" Jan Gehl, leader of Copenhagen's transformation into a walkable city, examines the necessity to encourage urban design from the perspective of the five senses (we would say six), taken at walking speed. This eye-level approach does much to address the needs -and happiness - of the individual and it is central to our critical approach to current proposals. There's no doubt that we have much to learn from continental Europe, but we also have something to learn from the developing world. In particular, we are aware of the Urban Happiness movement in Bogota, Columbia, and the spectacular advances they have made in creating happiness through livability and inclusive participation in Bogota for all the people, no matter their wealth or social status. Often it is pointed out that Aberdeen is the most socially stratified of Scotland's cities, so we should listen to what this movement has to say. The movement is spearheaded by former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa. “There are a few things we can agree on about happiness,” he says. “You need to fulfill your potential as a human being. You need to walk. You need to be with other people. Most of all, you need to not feel inferior.” A key to equality is providing dignified, functional transportation, which Bogota has done with a powerful version of bus rapid transit as well as extensive bike and pedestrian networks. “When you talk about these things, designing a city can be a very powerful means to generate happiness,” Peñalosa says. By linking urban design to the economics of happiness, Bogotans have become happier. The murder rate fell by an astounding 40% during Peñalosa’s term and continues to decrease, along with the number of traffic deaths. Traffic moves three times faster now during rush hour. And the changes transformed how people feel.

SCOTTISH INITIATIVES

An existing garden off Denburn Road

As mentioned, there is much we can learn from our neighbours in continental Europe, and indeed a great deal of work has been done by policy makers at Scottish Government and quango level to provide frameworks for our planners to follow. The most recent of these documents "Civilising the Streets" (pdf direct download) specifically matches the needs and requirements of specific Scottish Cities (including Aberdeen) with the grass-roots liveability and urban environment initiatives undertaken in analagous cities in continental Europe. This sophisticated document provides specific conclusions and recommendations for the implementation of human-scale active travel and transportation policies in Scottish towns and cities. Read in conjunction with the policy documents "Designing Places" (pdf) and "Designing Streets" (pdf), we can conclude that our Woonerf proposal for Denburn Road would meet with political approval.

From "Designing Places":

The most successful places, the ones that flourish socially and economically, tend to have certain qualities in common. First, they have a distinct identity. Second, their spaces are safe and pleasant. Third, they are easy to move around, especially on foot. Fourth, visitors feel a sense of welcome. Places that have been successful for a long time, or that are likely to continue to be successful, may well have another quality, which may not be immediately apparent – they adapt easily to changing circumstances. Finally, places that are successful in the long term, and which contribute to the wider quality of life, will prove to make good use of scarce resources. They are sustainable.

Sustainability – the measure of the likely impact of development on the social, economic and environmental conditions of people in the future and in other places – must run as a common thread through all our thinking about design. Thinking about sustainability focuses in particular on promoting greener lifestyles, energy efficiency, mixed uses, biodiversity, transport and water quality.

A cantilevered cafe over Denburn Road,
looking across to Union Terrace Gardens.
We will integrate this.

We believe that the back lots of Belmont Street - the front lots of Denburn Road, have huge potential to fulfill these six qualities and that the only barrier to them doing so immediately is the fact that they face onto an urban dual carriageway. The fact that that urban dual carriageway is so sparsely populated with traffic is our opportunity to boldly seize the initiative and remove it once and for all, thus also removing its inhuman blight from our townscape. Once achieved, this reversion to a more human-scale streetscape will, as Landry promotes, provide a familiar and convenient space at a human scale in stark contrast with the inhuman alienation of an environment which is at present designed exclusively for use by machines. From being a dead space which specifically and intentionally excludes human activity, we will transform it into a "great street".

From "Designing Streets":

The process of street design offers an opportunity to deliver far more to our society than simply transport corridors. Well-designed streets can be a vital resource in social, economic and cultural terms; they can be the main component of our public realm and a core element of local and national identity. Well-designed streets can also be crucial components in Scotland’s drive towards sustainable development and responding to climate change. Attractive and well-connected street networks encourage more people to walk and cycle to local destinations, improving their health while reducing motor traffic, energy use and pollution.

Discovery, delight, access

We believe that the placing of the redevelopment of the Denburn Valley on our civic agenda in Aberdeen provides us with a once-in a lifetime opportunity to create a "great space" at human scale and minimal cost. Already many streetscape enhancing enterprises back onto Denburn Road. Bars, cafés, hotels, photographic studios, restaurants, high-end engineering consultancies and even a cinema (notwithstanding it's current difficulties) already have street-level access to Denburn Road - given the right streetscape these enterprises will thrive in the human-scale environment which a woonef has been proven time and again all over the world to provide. We should have that here.

ABERDONIAN EXEMPLARS

Bustle in heritage.

Too often, Aberdeen is characterised as exemplifying an insular "not invented here" attitude. That need not bother us in this case, for we already have successful examples of woonerf operating in the commercial heart of the town. In Belmont Street and St Nicholas Street, people walk the centre of the road untroubled by motor traffic - yet in Belmont Street motor traffic is not specifically banned - it has "guest" status. St Nicholas Street links well with the Belmont Street area through the St Nicholas churchyard, which is a green haven in the town centre. Most recently, an urban streetscape initiative has been implemented in "The Green" a historic part of our town.

Serenity and refuge

With our proposals for the Denburn Road area, we can link all these pedestrian-friendly areas together, and, moreover we can increase connectivity with other transport modes. Our proposals would have the east side of The Green terminate at the railway platform which currently serves the suburban service to Dyce. There are plans to greatly improve the suburban and exurban rail service to and from Aberdeen, and our proposals would integrate with that. At present the east end of The Green terminates in the Denburn Dual Carrageway, beyond which is a loading bay for the Trinity Centre shopping mall above, in turn, beyond that is the railway platform Our proposal to close the Denburn Dual Carriageway would re-develop the loading-bay space as Railway Station space and would fulfill the 150-year-old dream of providing direct access to Union Street from that Railway Station Platform via existing lift-shafts and stairwells at the Trinity Centre shopping mall. This scheme would also provide pleasant and direct access to the Union Square shopping centre and its huge car-park, obviating the need to bring any elevated levels of motor transport any farther into the town centre than that which we suffer already.

The east-end of The Green as it is today. It just stops.
Dual Carriageway, then loading bay. Then Railway Station.
But no access. We will fix that.

SUMMATION

Nooks and corners add interest and intrigue.

This is an imaginative and simple scheme; a low impact but high effect plan which radically alters the emphasis of our town centre away from motorcars, and provides space in a pleasant environment for commercial, retail and residential development. And all at very little up-front cost to existing businesses and residents. A little while ago we wrote about the return of a mixed economy to the towns and cities of the USA; a grass-roots sustainable movement of entrepreneurs providing goods and services in the new-economic realities of the 21st century. Our proposals for the Denburn Valley support this new vision of capital. Our proposal to turn an underused urban asset in the form of the Denburn Dual Carriageway into a "great space" which could be linked to Union Terrace Gardens by footbridges allows a modern and radical human-scale vision for Aberdeen's town centre. This is an achievable vision which allows for organic growth in business sectors making the best use of our splendid and iconic existing buildings.

Development opportunity.

Our imaginative proposals would put our town at the forefront of the new urbanism and would allow creativity to flourish at a human scale in a familiar and welcoming environment. This environment provides choices, promotes connectivity and provokes delight while retaining what is best about the built environment of our town. What is more, this proposal is a minimum intervention and allows enterprise to flourish sustainably from the grass roots, not by top-down once-only fingers-crossed-and-see-what-happens decree. In effect our proposals would turn the whole breathtaking scenographic vista of the entirety of the Denburn Valley transected by Rosemount Viaduct into an enormous (nearly) natural-topography entrance porch - a cultural crucible - for our town for those arriving by rail. This "sense of arrival" (per Landry) would make this town famous, and for better reasons than it is famous today. Maybe even the Denburn itself could run in the open once more, the living water flowing in the heart of our town, it certainly makes a picturesque scene further up its valley at the Grammar School.

In the grounds of the Grammar School

There are many options along the way: Our new plan to turn the existing dual carrageway into a new contemporary garden, the Denburn Valley Gardens (if you will) would encompass both east and west slopes of the valley, so some part of the gardens would always be in direct sunlight. The existing Victorian gardens would be fully retained at practically no cost, and when the sunlight moves off them, garden users can cross over to new, modern gardens on the east bank, terracing down from Belmont Street, accessed by footbridges over the railway line which itself would be retained lending scenographic drama to our showpiece city centre and displaying the latest railway technology. There need be no hurry to proscriptively pedestrianise Union Street, as by the agency of our scheme, private motorised transport in the town centre will simply wither away.

Indeed, once our scheme is up and running, seamlessly connecting the Green with the Railway Station; with Union Square and St Nicholas Street; with St Nicholas Churchyard and Belmont Street with Union Terrace Gardens - all at pedestrian scale with charm and delight around every corner - who would ever want to take their car all the way into the town centre ever again?

Just needs a bit of care.

ALREADY part of this beautiful vista seen from Union Terrace Gardens.

CODA

As part of our researches, we found that there's another woonerf already in existence in the Denburn Valley which could serve as a precident for our proposals. It's at Rubislaw Den South, very near the home of Sir Ian Wood, oil-man tycoon and backer of the City Gardens Project. It's lovely.

Existing Denburn Valley woonerf. 

Woonerf for the Denburn Valley Development.

Word comes from the European Commission that, for the sake of the future, for the sake of sustainability and for the sake of liveability, it is their aspiration that petrol and diesel vehicles be banned from urban centres by 2050.

As radical pedestrians and utility cyclists, naturally, this is exactly the sort of thing we want to hear. This weekend, the taste of exhaust pollution in the centre of Aberdeen was quite disgusting, the noise-stress was unbearable and the vast majority of people (pedestrians) were, as usual, crammed into their tiny pavement allocation by the car drivers who use the space allocated to them on our town centre's roads to the exclusion of all other potential utility that might be gained from that precious urban space.

Future carpark.

In the light of this new anti-motor transport policy development in Europe, it seems all the more perverse that Aberdeen's political and business interests are intent on pushing ahead with urban dual carriageway projects which will deliver large numbers of high-speed drivers into the town centre at a higher rate than ever before. This, of course, will necessitate the creation of more car parking space, which will in turn induce more journeys by car into the city centre. It's like the 1960's version of urban planning. Quite embarrassing, really. One of the places earmarked for a big new car park (sometimes euphamistically termed or "traffic hub") appears to be the city's historic Union Terrace Gardens. This is deplorable.

A radical daydream creeps into our consciousness, a vision of a pleasant city centre which is proud to display both its heritage and its faith in the future. One of the major arguments put forward by those who want to redevelop Union Terrace Gardens is the fact that they are 'poorly utilised'. Well, we're not sure that a city park loses utility when unoccupied by people - it continues to provide ecological services; oxygen generation, urban wildlife habitat, sound baffling and the like - but, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and it has been pointed out elsewhere that the Denburn urban dual carriageway is, likewise, 'poorly utilised'.

A woefully underused urban asset.
No pavements. WTF?

Another argument for decking over the Denburn valley is to conceal the unsightly urban motorway. But, wait a minute - why conceal something which is barely used? Why not just do away with it? Keeping such a big road seems a bit, em, short sighted when private petrol vehicles are to be banned from town centres in less than 40 years time. We say dig it up and lay turf. We say plough it up and plant trees. A small service road on the woonerf model could be retained for emergency vehicles and utility services, but, most of the time it would be used by pedestrians for pleasant sunlit walks in the serene and valley. Maybe the Denburn itself could run in the open once more.

Aberdeen Woonerf!

A "woonerf" is a shared space urban landscape - it's a policy pioneered in the Netherlands in the 1970's. "Woonerf" is a term increasingly used in the English-speaking world to mean an area where motorists have priority equal to or lesser than other road-users, thus increasing the livability of the city at the human scale, even as residential density increases. Based upon principals of filtered permeability and shared space for transport corridors and thoroughfares these woonerf areas were pioneered in Groningen and other towns in the Netherlands, Flanders and Germany to encourage walking and cycling by giving them a more attractive environment free from traffic and a time and convenience advantage over car driving. Why can't we have that?

A further argument put forward for decking over the Denburn valley is that the current gardens are often shaded - and this is true in the evenings. With our new plan to turn the existing dual carrageway into a new contemporary garden, the Denburn Valley Gardens (if you will) would encompass both east and west slopes of the valley, so some part of the gardens would always be in direct sunlight. The existing Victorian gardens would be fully retained at practically no cost, and when the sunlight moves off them, garden users can cross over to new, modern gardens on the east bank, terracing down from Belmont Street, accessed by footbridges over the railway line which itself would be retained lending scenographic drama to our showpiece city centre and displaying the latest tilting train TGV technology.

One of the intentions of the European Commission's policy is to move half of journeys under 200 miles onto rail. Retaining sight of the railway (and, perhaps, new platforms for passenger embarkation) would display the fact that rail travel is at the heart of our city's vision of the future - not the dead-end car-dependent motorcentric vision which today predominates to the detriment of our environment.

And so our radical daydream turns into achievable vision. We're not joking. This is now our stated vision for Union Terrace Gardens and the Denburn Valley, including Upper Denburn (you'll be hearing a lot more about Upper Denburn over the next few years - you heard it here first!).

It would look a little bit like this original human-scale vision for the valley, with greensward and gardens on both sides, a tiny Denburn Road woonerf full of dawdling pedestrians and the latest high-tech railway on display:

We'll be examining this radical new proposal in a bit more detail over the coming weeks with site-visits and the like. We'll do this in comparison with similar projects which have been delivered elsewhere, such as Cheonggyecheon Park in Seoul:

This is more-or-less exactly what we have in mind.

 The "High Line" in Manhattan:

The "High Line" regenerated a disused railway viaduct.
At Denburn, we will turn a disused dual carriageway into a park.

We will also look at our new woonerf proposal in the context of the City Gardens Project "Turning Vision Into Reality" presentation material (particularly that provided by Charles Landry), which we believe supports our vision for high-liveability, human scale, mixed use, walkable places of refuge and tranquility, where creativity can flourish.

Here are some of Charles Landry's slides, as presented to ACSEF and as available to download from the City Gardens Project website:

High-liveability - Mixed use - Places of refuge

Human scale - Walkability

Comforting to read this.