Design, Citizenship and the City
First came the guerilla gardeners, sowing seeds and planting plants in public places without permission.
Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.
On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.
To some it must seem the very vision of Utopia: an elegant New England-style enclave with neatly clipped lawns, docile residents and a 9pm curfew for social housing tenants aged under 15.
This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.
But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.
According to Westminster Council, the bulging bladders of that city’s denizens are an accident waiting to happen:
Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour.