strategies for temporary use

STRATEGIES FOR TEMPORARY USE

In winter 1979 on the Lower East Side of New York a group of artists broke into an abandoned building to stage an art exhibtion, protesting the city’s real estate policies. It wasn’t the intention in the beginning, but a cultural centre grew up in that building on the back of that initial action, and that centre was called ABC No Rio. They started hosting poetry readings and punk bands, art exhibitions, set up a zine library and built workshops for photography and silk screen printing. A community started to grow up around the centre.

The owner was the city and after a while an agreement was made that ABC No Rio could rent the building at a very low cost on the condition that they left if and when the owner wanted the building back. Throughout this period, which lasted right through the 80s and into the 90s, relations with the city were quite strained. The rental agreement, finally broke down over a dispute about maintenance and the city wanted to evict. In the mid-nineties ABC

Lecture delivered at the conference ‘The Temporary Use of Urban Voids’ held at the Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona (CCCB) on 24 November 2014.

No Rio decided to take things into their own hands, to have the freedom to fix the heating when it broke. A group squatted the upper floors of the building to secure the building and they rallied the community for support. The city relented. And this situation carried on for a few more years, with the city seeking to evict and ABC No Rio fighting to stay.

Things finally came to a head in 1999 after a final eviction attempt and major protests on the part of the cultural centre. The city offered to sell ABC No Rio the building for the sum of $1. There two conditions – the squatters had to leave and the organisation needed to raise the $5 million necessary to refurbish the building properly. That last bit was a struggle, not least because it’s hard to raise money to refurbish a building that you don’t own, but somehow they managed it. Their network helped. One day they even opened a letter and found an anonymous cheque for $1 million. They still don’t know who gave it to them. ABC is now busy constructing their new building on the site of the original one.

In many ways it’s an exceptional story and in many ways ABC No Rio is different from the temporary use projects that we typically see in our cities, but there’s a key way in which it’s not different

ABC No Rio mural. Photo: cmonster

Magic is something that we expect of temporary use projects. And that’s not good enough.

www.killingarchitects.com2

and that’s in the magic of the story – the group of artists, the community they established, the anonymous donation of $1 million, the obstacles they overcame and also the exceptional talent and perseverance and luck of the people who set up and ran the project. And I think that this magic is something that we expect of temporary use projects. And I think that it’s not good enough.

Urban Tactics

I’m an architect and urban designer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. A couple of years ago I got funding from the Dutch Funds for Creative Industries NL to look a little more critically at temporary use projects and at what the factors were for their being successful. I set quite a low bar for success, by successful, I mean that the project actually happened. I didn’t only look at short term projects, but also some longer term ones, ones that started twenty or thirty years ago because I wanted to get a historical perspective. And I looked at these projects internationally, in the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Israel and the US, because I wanted to get a sense of to what extent there were patterns in how they worked.

I looked at a range of projects, from art interventions, to temporary shops and bars, community gardens, artists’ studios, housing cooperatives, shared workspaces.Some of the projects were very short term, like a weekend, others had rolling contracts that the landlord could terminate with a couple of weeks notice, some had fixed contracts for 2-3 years, some had begun as squats and had gradually become regularised, some finally became permanent tenants, or even the owners of their site or building.

What I found was that in all cases there were three main criteria for success:

Firstly, these projects often don’t conform to the standard way of doing things. For example, standard building permits place really onerous demands on an installation that might only last a month. That means that these projects tend to need high level political support to help them navigate regulations and procedures and find an appropriate level of regulation for them.

The second thing is that they often need support from an intermediary, which might be an organisation which specialises in matching landlords with empty buidings with people looking for space, or might be an arts or community organisation which can help connect the project with the right people and help build the necessary trust.

The last thing these projects is need is funding and they often struggle to find it. It was the most common cause of failure I found.

Funding temporary use

Funding is a difficult issue. The non-commercial projects that I looked at, the cultural and community projects, had an issue in common with many arts projects – that people think that artists

don’t need to be paid and that they do what they do out of love. And maybe those artists are also quite bad at finding ways to get paid. But there’s something bigger than that which affects both the commercial and the non-commercial projects and it’s investment, and the way that we think about models for investment in temporary use.

Something that isn’t always fully recognised is that property owners are making a huge investment by offering the use of their building or land. There can be very real advantages for them in doing this, but still, their contribution needs to be fully recognised. What also needs to be recognised however, is that further significant investment is often required in order to allow the property to be used. A lot of people don’t realise that the time and money necessary to set up a temporary project is comparable to what you need for a longer term one – the investment needed is often out of proportion to the temporary project itself. You need to have the building long enough to be able to make a return on the money and time that you’ve put into a project and into making the space usable, even if that mainly means that your investment has time to depreciate fully. You need to get to use the building long enough that the money and time you invested in it is worth it.

The Business of Temporary Use

I again got funding from the Creative Industries Fund NL and this time specifically to look at funding models for temporary use projects. The idea was to look at how these projects could be supported at two key points – start up, when they need to put a lot of time and money in to make the project happen, and also in the longer term since many of these projects do last for several years. This is of obvious interest to the people who run these projects and are looking at ways to make them work, but I wanted to reach beyond them too – I wanted to reach the municipalities and developers and urban designers who want to have temporary use projects in their empty buildings and who want to include them in their development strategies, to help them do a better job of commissioning.

Finding out how these projects work

I did two main things when I was looking at this. The first was to go and talk to some key stakeholders - to people in charge of regeneration at municipalities, to project developers and housing associations who had worked with temporary use projects to find out what they thought the advantages and disadvantages were and how they might be done better and I ended up with quite a list. The second thing that I did was to go and talk to the people actually running temporary use projects and ask them to tell me their story. But I also got them to give me their accounts.

At first that might sound boring, but it’s not. So many of these temporary use projects have superficially similar stories, many of which go something like this: ‘you have a great group of people with an amazing idea, they have a period of struggle to find and secure a space and get the project funded. There’s a lot of obstacles in the way, but they finally overcome them and the project is a great success.’ I wanted to look a bit more closely at that story at what was going on behind the scenes and why and

The last thing these projects is need is funding and they often struggle to find it.


looking at the accounts lets you do that. In the accounts you see the human story behind every failure, challenge and triumph.

If we can understand how these projects are really working, we can find better ways to support them. I took the accounts and turned them into visual infographics that showed things like how much time people spent on a project at different stages, how much money needed to be spent and when and how this compared to when the project got money in, or how much was in their bank account. By showing this graphically I could help people to quickly understand what was going on. By pairing graphics of the accounts with the story of how a particular project unfolded, I could get a more complete view of what was happening and why, what the risks were and how they could be mitigated and perhaps also spot a few new opportunities too.

An ideal funding situation

I would like to show you a couple more projects now and what I found out from their accounts about how temporary use projects often work, but first I would like to show you is what the graphs

of an ‘ideal’ situation looks like and I want to show that in terms of two things – the amount of work that needs to be done at each stage and the money that is going in and out.

Before you begin any project or business there’s a period of research. There’s no money at this point, but quite a lot of time needs to be put in to develop the idea, find a space, persuade the owner to allow you to rent it and organise ta contract, find funding if you need it, but also reaching out to local communities to get people involved and to find out what they want.

Then there’s a start up phase and here you have a lot of work and you also need to invest a relatively large amount of money. That big spike is all of the investment a project needs as it is really starting. It could be anything from painting the walls inside the building you’re using, to putting in a new electrical system and internet, furnishing the space. It’s also things like setting up a website, printing leaflets and posters, getting stock for you shop or bar. You may also be starting to pay people at this point, so your expenditure increases because of that. And the time that the project needs spikes too, because its a lot of work to get all of

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In the accounts you see the human story behind

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that done.

The last bit is where you’re running the project and things get a lot more stable. Your overheads are the same every month, the amount of work you’re doing is predictable.

With that ideal situation in mind I’d now like to tell you about another project that I looked at, the Canning Town Caravanserai in East London.

Canning Town Caravanserai

In 2011 Newham, the borough of London that the Caravanserai is now in, held a competition called Meanwhile London. They had four large sites that were part of the former docklands in London and were vacant, awaiting development and they were looking for groups who could use them temporarily and do something interesting. Competition entrants were asked to put together a short proposal for one of the sites and the winning proposal for each site would be given the land for a period of between 2 and 5 years.

Canning Town Caravanserai won one of the sites. The team behind it was a fairly large group, made up of artists, architects, designers and landscape architects. Their proposal was to have a mix of different small scale activities: there would be a community garden and playground there would be a lot of small workspaces for local people, that would double as shops where the same

goods could be sold. The shops would pay a small rent and would eventually generate a small revenue for the project that could help to pay for further things, but that wasn’t the main funding strategy. The whole thing was to be subsidised by turning an empty block of flats which sat in the middle of the site, into a hotel.

It was around this funding strategy that things started to go wrong. The block of flats was demolished just before the site was handed over to the Caravanserai team and the gas, water and electricity were disconnected. They were also asked to pay £2000 in fees, so that they could apply for planning permission and get the formal permits to build all of the small structures that they had proposed. At this point the project stalled and the team disbanded, unable to carry out the project under these circumstances.

A firm of architects who had been involved from the beginning, Ash Sakula, decided to take the project on. They redesigned the site, rethought the business model for the project and paid the fee for the planning application. Slowly the project started to come to life.

The Caravanserai site is quite large, about 2 hectares in total and it wasn’t possible to develop everything at once – the funding simply wasn’t there. The site was developed through a series of mini-projects that were added one by one and with this growing amount of facilities more and more things were able to happen at the Caravanserai. The first thing to be built was a tiny theatre project that was constructed by students from the University

Model of Canning Town Caravanserai. Ash Sakula Architects


of East London. Over the course of the next couple of years the Caravanserai team added a community garden, a stage for concerts, toilets, a cafe, a series of the workspaces and shops they’d originally envisaged for the site, a giant outdoor table and a community centre made from recycled materials.

This is what it looks like today. The team has done an amazing job and the site is full of people and activities and all of these colourful

structures. Now I’d like to show you their accounts.

The Caravanserai’s accounts

This is the simplified, ideal situation again, just to remind you of what that looks like, with the small spike for the initial research, a fairly large spike when the project is set up and then the graph levels out as the team gets into running the project. This is the same set of graphs for the Caravanserai.

So what’s going on? Just to be clear about what’s being shown here, these graphs cover the period from when Ash Sakula took over the project, so after the competition had been won and the

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original team had disbanded and they go up until mid 2013. There was quite a long initial research and development preriod in which they did the redesign, applied for planning permission, tried to make links with the local community and applied for funding.

And then after that quite long stable development phase, you have the part where they actually start to work on the site and really run the project. The series of spikes is where the theatre and cafe and toilets and things are being built. Each one is a different construction project, where you’re spending money to buy materials for example and obviously, as you’re building, you’re also working a lot of hours. These small jumps in the graph are the points at which the Caravanserai got grants in.

Ash Sakula gave a lot throughout the process, to keep the project going; Cany Ash in particular put in a lot of time and they also took on part time staff to manage the project. They did that because they believed in the Caravanserai as an experiment into a new kind of public space and they saw it as a research project for the office.

It’s clear from the graph that this wasn’t a smooth, easy process. There was a sort of catch-22 situation where the Caravanseria needed to have a certain amount of buildings built before they could start to generate their onw money – they needed the cafe, toilets, workshops, theatre – but it was difficult to find enough funding to get those built, which they needed to do in order to get all of the activities on site going. That meant that you would have bursts of building activity on site and then it would slow down and the team would begin to work on how to make the next small building project happen – finding the funding and the people who would need to be involved in building and running it. Then there would be a bit more funding and construction could start again and that again slow down.

All this while, there were a series of activities happening on site and that’s a credit to the amazing talent and energy of the Caravanserai team. Looking at this graph though, you can see how difficult it was and how hard they had to work and perhaps they shouldn’t have had to work as hard as they did, if the project had been better supported from the outset. It also feels like the project was getting just enough money to survive and even to grow very slowly, but not enough to thrive. I think that to a large extent it was because the right things weren’t in place to support that. There wasn’t enough clarity about the agreement on the site at the beginning, which made it very difficult to plan the project well and find the funding that they needed.

The Caravanserai team were eventually successful but its hard not to feel that their experience was made much more difficult than it had to be. It’s relied on exceptional talent and perseverance and commitment to making that happen. How feasible are temporary use projects if this is what we often ask of them? How sustainable are they? And perhaps more importantly, who does this exclude?

I’d like to take you back to the graphs of what an ideal situation might look like and I’d like to look at how we might help more projects towards it. This is some of the best practice that I’ve found.

How to move towards the ideal situation

The research phase, pre-start-up is really important for planning the project and getting everything in place. There are two ways that I’ve seen it done: by the project initiators, but also in some cases, by an intermediary organisation who is trying to find temporary

tenants for a number of sites or buildings.

One of the best examples I saw of this was a community library in the west of Rotterdam called the Leeszaal, which means ‘reading room’ in Dutch. It was set up by two community activists and social science researchers called Maurice Specht and Joke van der Zwaard. They had a lot of experience of setting up this kind of project and they had a really strong local network.

Over the summer before they opened the library they held a series of workshops with local groups that they knew, asking people whether the library was something that they wanted, and secondly, and crucially what they were prepared to do to help make it happen, because they knew that they would need a lot of people to really set this up and run it.

Start up - finding capital

Start up. The two key things here are about finding the initial capital and then making an agreement around the building. There’s a number of ways that I’ve seen people manage to fund this start up phase. Some people invest their own funds, particularly if they’re starting a business. Sometimes that’s also the case with non commercial projects.

The Leeszaal got a grant. They got E80,000 from a foundation called Stichting DOEN which was partly to pay for the rent of their space and their utility bills for a year and partly went to giving Maurice and Joke a salary so that they could afford to spend a lot of time working on the project. They estimated that they each worked around 20 hours a week to make the Leeszaal happen.

For the Schieblock, a shared workspace in Rotterdam the developer asked the tenants to pay their rent up front and that allowed them to refurbish the building.

For the Pop-down Square project in Wembley in London a competition was held to find a tenant for the space and the local council, who was also the client, gave a grant of £25,000 to help the winner start out, after which their project should be self-sustaining.

In several projects people were able to get loans to help them get started. This was always with commercial projects, but even then the interesting thing is that the loans tended to come from the municipality. There are a few reasons for this. Over the past few years there have been problems getting loans from banks, which has also affected developers who normally wouldn’t have this issue. Municipalities have also loaned money where the project initiators didn’t have enough assets to provide security for a loan and so the municipality stepped in.

Start up - contracts

The second thing at this stage is the contract for use of the building or site. The most important thing about these agreements are clarity about what is being offered, on what terms and for how long and that that isn’t changed part way through. That stability is necessary in order to plan effectively. But knowing how long you can have the space for and on what terms is also essential to being able to invest at a sensible level in the building and the project and for that investment to depreciate.

It sounds very obvious that you need clear, stable agreements, but again, it’s not. A lot of building and sites are vacant because the economy is uncertain. The owners of these vacant properties


want to let them out at commerical rates, or they want to redevelop the site, but they don’t know if or when they’ll be able to and so a rolling contract where they can give the temporary tenants two weeks notice to leave is attractive. The problem with this level of uncertainty is that it rules out a lot of projects from taking place, mainly the sort where you might have to invest in making the building or site usable.

Urban Resort is a developer in Amsterdam that sets up affordable workspaces for people in the creative sector. When they moved into the Volkskrant building, they had to invest around half a million euros to make it usable – the building had been poorly maintained and all of the gas, water and electricity had to be replaced. Tenants also wanted certain facilities, like sound proof music studios, which had to be constructed.

If you’re having to refurbish the building to a basic standard, a good rule of thumb is that you need the building for five years to make that money and effort worth it.When Urban Resort took over the Volkskrant building they made an agreement that in principle they would have the building for five years, but if the owner needed it back sooner, they would have to pay Urban Resort back a proportion of the amount that they had invested in the building,

which helped to solve the problem of uncertainty for everyone.

When do anti-squat arrangements work?

That does leave the question of when an open rolling contract is appropriate, the kind where the owner can ask for their property back at short notice, say two weeks. It does work well for a lot of people, but there’s a few conditions which need to be met for it to be a good proposition:There needs to be a relatively low amount of investment needed to make the space fit for purpose; it works well if you only need the space for a short time anyway, or if you’re able to move easily when the owner wants the property back, because you didn’t have an enormous amount of stuff in the first place and there’s affordable alternatives that you can move to if necessary.

Funding in the longer term

The longer term is often where things get trickier and it’s where the commercial and non-commercial projects really diverge.

The commercial projects, shared workspaces for example, tend to be much more straightforward because they have a clear source of income, even if its a relatively small one at the start. They have the standard issues of being in business, of finding and winning

Leeszaal West, Rotterdam. Photo: Arjan Scheer


works and clients etc.

It’s worth talking about the non-commercial ones though – the social and cultural projects, because they’re seen as offering so much to our cities and yet they’re quite challenging at this stage. I’d like to show you some of the strategies that they use to fund themselves, a few things that are often put forward as potential soultions and then talk about some of the trade offs in that. Most projects will need to use a mixture of different strategies.

The first strategy is selling tickets for events that you put on, which is a pretty straightforward process. It should cover the cost of the events, plus a bit more. This is something that ABC No Rio do, with their punk nights. If you don’t have a full programme of events, you probably can’t support the entire project and organisation in this way.

You can get grants. They tend to be focused on supporting particular activities though and it can bedifficult to find that sort of support to help you cover your overheads.

Another, similar one is to rent out part of your space for other groups to hold meetings, or events., which is something that the Leeszaal does. There’s a limit to how often they can do this and not have it interfere with the use of the space as a community

library.

Another thing that the Leeszaal does is to sell tea and coffee and a lot of places will run a cafe or bar to generate income. They have thought about allowing someone in to run a cafe within the space, who would then pay rent to the Leeszaal. The danger there is with the volunteers who staff the library and keep it running on a day to day basis. They like to serve the tea and coffee as part of their role in running the library for the day and welcoming people to the Leeszaal. A commercial cafe moving in would be likely to alienate the volunteers.

Crowdfunding is often put forward as a solution, often by people who’ve never tried it. An important point is that it can often just multiply the challenges of fund raising. Every time you have someone who gives you funding you have a relationship that you have to maintain – one funder can be a lot of work in terms of keeping them up to date with progress and reporting what you did with the money etc. When you have 500 funders, you have 500 of those relationshiips that you need to maintain, which is incredibly onerous. And that’s if you can find those 500 people, because it’s actually also incredibly difficult to move beyond your immediate

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circle of family and friends.

Cross subsidy of more and less profitable activities can be a useful strategy. Urban Resort who runs the shared workspaces in Amsterdam has a system of charging different amounts of rent to different tenants depending on their income, which they check, so that the tenants cross subsidise each other. You need a fairly large, complex project for that to work.

The last is perhaps the most overlooked and it’s the subsidy that the building owner is often providing when they let their building at a lower rent. And although there are other benefits to the owner of having a temporary project in their space, why really should one individual property owner be asked to subsidise arts and community facilities. Funding those things has traditionally been part of what government does.

Inputs and outputs in termporary use projects

One of the early things that I did in this research was to try and sketch out who puts what in to a temporary use project and who gets what out, because I wanted to understand what that balance was. I looked at that across a range of stakeholders and

I looked at it in terms of money and assets and time that they were putting in, but also at less tangible things. For example, for building owners, the fact that a temporary use can help prove that a site is viable can help attract a commercial tenant, or for the people who live in the same street, having a more attractive, lively street with greater access to shops and services. The people who aren’t directly involved, but who live in the area often can benefit a lot from the fact that the temporary uses are there. One of the main mechanisms by which they might help to support these local facilities is through paying taxes which the municipality could then use to support these social and cultural projects. There are important political solutions to this.

Temporary use projects need stability

I’d like to end by showing you ABC No Rio’s current accounts. They’re very definitely in the stage where they’re just running their project. They have three main funding streams, which are ticket sales, public grant funding and funding from private foundations; they have a regular programme of activities and they have stable team of volunteers. And you see that stability in these graphs. Their accounts are really boring, which is exactly how you want your financial situation to be. It provides a stable basis for being able to do more interesting and valuable things.

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This project was funded by the Creative Industries Fund NL

Killing Architects

This case study is part of a research project looking at financial and business models for projects which make use of temporarily vacant sites and buildings. The impetus for the project came from a preliminary study which showed that one of the main reasons fro the failure of these projects was lack of adequate funding. The aim of this research is to help municipalities, property owners and urban designers and architects to commission better temporary use projects and develop better temporary use strategies. It should also be of use to those trying to develop these sorts of projects, to help get them off the ground and to become self-sustaining in the case of the longer-term ones.

See more at:http://www.killingarchitects.com/urban-tactics-2-the-business-of-temporary-use/

About this research The full e-book on the Business of Temporary Use is available for download at www.killingarchitects.com

strategies for temporary use

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