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Space To Trade As Currency For Innovation

Part 2 Project 2003
Jamie Laffan
Megan White
University of Greenwich | UK
Space to Trade as Currency for Innovation

Polarisation and transnational economics are altering the relationships between location and demographics.
In order to create relevant strategies, private investment must see human capital as active assets. Citizens must have both a role and control of the development of this. Through Intellectual Capital assessment, a trading system is conceived where intangible and increasingly mobile intellectual assets are linked to property capital. This situates public urban space as the currency for innovation, opportunity creation and citizen leverage over community enterprise.
Within global property groups, pressures of shareholder gain and portfolio diversity do not deal adequately with public vision or the social frameworks found in large-scale regeneration proposals. When space is used as a futures market currency, location and a balanced “Knowledge City” is the market proposition. This is my proposal for the 22@ District of Poblenou Barcelona.

Jamie Laffan
Megan White


Jamie has proved himself to be a student of tenacity and courage in tackling the vast challenges of meaningful delivery within PPP and a knowledge driven urban realm. Stepping well beyond the references and preoccupations of his contemporaries which was seen as a risk by most, Jamie’s propositions for valuing and trading public urban space at the point where the global economy hits the ground, empower otherwise disenfranchised citizens and bring a new framework for value and risk within corporate and local decision making. At the same time he has consistently challenged all at the school to re-appraise the possibilities for architecture ACROSS disciplines and practices. In anticipating some of the recent work published by Cabe’s Building Future’s Think Tank, Jamie remains optimistic for architects by developing emergent investigative techniques, forms of notation and tools for emergent delivery across disciplines and stakeholder groups, with a maturity and application that has been consistently rigorous beyond his years. Deploying his ideas always within real situations, Jamie tested himself as strategist, funder, developer, political reactionary, politician, business innovator, poet and designer among others, AS A TOOL in the city situation. With this journey, he uncovered the potential to be an architect of a new currency within an urban opportunity in Barcelona’s 22@ district, setting up commercial vehicles as necessary along the way. Being taken seriously by the city, property developers, international business consultants and local citizens is not easy as a student, especially when you have limited industry practice and are expected by your tutors to be a self starter, but Jamie’s success in demonstrating to all the value of his thesis project, is a mark of both the tangible and timely relevance of his work and of a professional to be watched for the future.

Tutor(s)

2003
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