These people thrive on challenges and draw energy from environments that allow them to learn. The early cohorts of digital natives are now graduating from schools where personalised learning has been integrated into the curriculum. They expect to be an active participant, not a passive observer.

The transformation in our schools is being played out in our workplaces. Technology is shifting both the means of work and the relationships that manage it. Knowledge-based processes are increasingly automated or outsourced. Hierarchies are being routed by networks.

According to a 2013 paper by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, two Oxford University researchers, 47% of all jobs are likely to be replaced by a computer – not just factory work, but any process governed by an algorithm of rules where best practices can be identified.

What’s left for us humans is arguably the more interesting stuff that relies on higher-order thinking, collaboration, innovation and relationships. These are the qualities that people bring that robots aren’t so good at – interactivity, emotional intelligence, flexibility, quirkiness.

They’re all qualities found in the growing companies that we most admire.

In Australia, the poster child for such progressive, human-led but technology-enabled companies is software development company Atlassian – a company that is on the verge of an IPO that would see the two 34-year-old co-CEOs valued at over A$1b each. The success of this company is founded on a set of values targeted squarely at the new world of work:

1. Open Company, No Bullshit
2. Build with Heart and Balance
3. Don’t #@!% the Customer
4. Play, as a Team
5. Be the Change you Seek

Both Deloitte’s passionate people and many prospective Atlassian staffers “may struggle with clearly defined roles, organisational silos, and predictability”. Seely Brown and Hagel argue that organisations need to redesign their work environments – both physical and virtual environments – and management systems to attract and retain passionate people.

The changes in the physical workplace are well underway. Andrew Laing’s 2013 paper on the ITC sector in New York sets out a comprehensive survey of the shifts both in demand and supply for workspace. The conventions of the relentlessly efficient single-use office tower, the long commercial lease, the privately owned work point are all crumbling. Many of our clients are already using less space and looking for new ways to share the space they have. Work is leaving the building, and looking for new toeholds across the city – the new hubs and third places, and the old libraries, cafes and public spaces.

The spaces in between will be the real attractor for the Googles, the Atlassians and the Kulgans. Curating these spaces will be the next challenge for precinct planners and city strategists who have long understood the place-making contributions of landscape and art. The next generation of installations will be playful hybrids of virtual and physical worlds – not just for the tech sector, but for every human with a super computer in her or his pocket. Urban gaming will be serious play.

Play offers the freedom to invent, to improvise and experiment. To do things that would look like failure in other contexts. Over the past five years a whole new ecology of games has emerged with the saturation of the smart phone and GPS technologies.

“Gaming is play across media, time, social spaces, and networks of meaning. It requires players to be fluent in a series of connected literacies that are multi-modal, performative, productive, and participatory in nature.” pvi collective

Serious urban games now exist for training for change, for health and for social cohesion. They range from covert individual experiences through to gleeful group quests. Here are four examples of the rapidly growing field.

1. Soulfill

Soulfill is a mobile assisted role-playing game for public transport. It wants you to focus on the people in the environment around you, not on the screen in your hand. The game prompts are minimal. You listen to a narrator who challenges you to move past the awkwardness of initiating eye contact. You score points by initiating and maintaining eye contact with strangers – and you lose points by making eye contact with those already looking at you.

Multi-player games are more carefully programmed in time and space – and this orchestration accounts for the influence of performance arts groups in urban gaming.

2. Deviator

Perth-based pvi collective’s game known as Deviator recently took over the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Deviator is an immersive, outdoor game played in teams with smart phones. Audience members are charged with the mission of temporarily transforming their city into a playground by engaging with a number of not-so-serious challenges.

I’m still not sure how pole dancing in Oxford Street qualified, but the gleeful fun of sack races on cross walks, “kiss chasey” in Taylor Square, and blowing up balloons until they burst resonated – most of them were straight out of the school yard. Other locations asked for more subversive play – (follow someone without their knowledge until they turn into a doorway) – or regenerative (here are some seeds you might want to plant) or declarative (what message would you like to leave on this blackboard). But the need to rack up as many points inside an hour made for an hilarious frenzied night of fun. Watch here.

3. Black market

The group behind deviator has another project in development titled black market. Part game, part social experiment, black market takes place on city streets and locates the players inside a world of economic collapse. Inspired by the core philosophies of the ‘occupy’ movement and the financial bankruptcies in Europe, players need to survive in a world where money and material wealth have collapsed. Bartering and bargaining come to the fore.

4. Massively Multiplayer soba

Massively Multiplayer Soba is a large scale collaborative urban game focused on culture, food and language that culminates in a meal. Points are awarded on the basis of complexity and the depth of interactions, rather than a scavenger hunt. The game is designed to encourage people to mix and interact with residents in meaningful ways that challenge preconceptions of race and language.

Where to next? The next generation of urban gaming might see more pervasive games that leave traces of activity in spaces for future visitors. Or games that create more open-ended stories. Even games that connect people more intensely over time. The one thing we can be sure about is that the growth will be extraordinary, and with the mobile phone at the centre.

“The phone takes the processing power of yesterday’s supercomputers – even the most basic model has access to more number-crunching capacity than NASA had when it put men on the moon in 1969 – and applies it to ordinary human interactions”.

Ordinary human interactions are the stuff of our cities. Watch out for the rise of serious play.

Sue Wittenoom (sue.wittenoom@archtam.com) is a director of ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Australia. She’s presenting at GreenCities 2015 in Melbourne on March 18. Follow her on twitter @swittenoom

More urban gaming links:

https://www.ingress.com/: a mobile, geolocation-based game that calls on players to travel to real-world locations such as landmarks and public art, where they use their phones to open and close portals that can help or hinder an invading alien race

http://www.rottenapple.us/: random hacks of citizenry

http://www.watershed.co.uk/playablecity/conference14/: A Playable City is a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and stories.

References:

The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Hector Rodrigeuz the international journal of computer game research volume 6 issue 1 December 2006

The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014

The Implications of a Networked Urban Landscape for Architectural Programming. Andrew Laing Volume Art & Science of Real Estate Volume 42 2014 #4

Work and workplaces and the digital city, Andrew Laing, Columbia University Centre for Urban Real Estate, 2013

Propositions for Sydney. Andrew Laing and Sue Wittenoom, 2014

The Power of Immersive Media Frank Rose, strategy+business February 9, 2015

The Play Report. Protein Journal Issue 13

Serious Urban Games. From play in the city to play for the city Gabriele Ferri and Patrick Coppock, February 2012

The future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, 2013

Unlocking the passion of the Explorer. Report 1 of the 2013 Shift Index series. Deloitte Center for the Edge

The truly personal computer The Economist February 28^th 2015

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This means new rules, a different game. Internet citizens now understand the enormous power of collective influence to get what they want, when they want and how they want it. Millennials – those born between the late 90s and early 2000s – were the first to embrace the change, and seize the ability to share media content in powerful new ways. Both a cause and product of this new online environment, a typical Millennial is more tolerant, educated and well-connected, and they like to do things their own way. They are less inclined to take orders and more into problem solving through collaborative interaction – live and online.

Alongside this in the workplace, many companies are gradually leaving behind their old-fashioned corporate structures, embracing the effects of these changes. Harnessing the power of networks is falling to management at every level, with a growing impetus to foster an ongoing, open, collaborative culture that facilitates freedom of expression and “entrepreneurial” spirit. Increasingly, companies are tearing down the walls (both physical and metaphorical) between employees, opening up space for dialogue, and allowing them to work together in a way that suits them rather than in a prescribed manner or quantity.

Since I joined ArchTam’s Strategy Plus team in Spain nearly a year ago, I have enjoyed experiencing this “participatory culture”. For example, our i-breaks (innovation breaks) – a weekly 30-minute session where random team members share new trends, e.g. in technology, sustainability, business initiatives. Every member is free to contribute when ready, and what they contribute is always valued. This community of ideas provides a strong incentive for creative expression and active participation, positively affecting the output of our work.

Here’s another example; accompanied by our client, Spanish developer GMP, some ArchTam colleagues from around the world (including me) got together in Madrid for a learning event hosted by the Strategy Plus team. Within a 24-hour timeframe, three teams were challenged to produce three proposals for the future of an iconic building – to turn it into a landmark site. One of these focused on aspirational office space, another on a high-spec technological site, and the third on a top-quality mixed-use space.

Every idea was considered, from each and every team member, for the final delivery of each proposal, enhancing artistic expression and team engagement. The result of sharing knowledge and ideas between the diverse team members was incredibly beneficial in delivering creative solutions, giving a holistic view of the information for faster and better decision making. The event also enabled us to build and strengthen powerful and durable relationships with colleagues around the globe.

It’s time to create a brighter future. I strongly believe that shifting corporate culture towards advanced collaboration plays to the strengths of the incoming workforce, and fosters a more interactive, creative workforce that is engaged and motivated, meaning a project delivery of any size can be handled more efficiently and effectively. A great example of this from amongst our clients would be Sony Music’s Headquarters in Madrid, now an integrated, flexible space for artists and staff to enjoy (pictured above). This new approach has increased the volume of Sony Music’s visitors while fostering closer relationships with their clients and label support teams.

Is your company ready to embrace the change?

Alvaro Ager is part of the Communications team at ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Madrid.

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With devices becoming increasingly portable and fast, we can now access our work almost everywhere, seemingly only dependant on wifi connection. Technology’s greatest impacts in the way in which we work are often cited as the ability for greater precision, consistency and for easy communication – with one click we can connect with people across the globe at any time of day, making it far easier to do business with companies worldwide – but what about the impact on office culture?

The ease of sending emails is overriding the office worker’s impulse to pick up the phone or walk over to someone’s desk – many of our clients complain of “email culture”, with clogged inboxes and endless “reply-all”. This begs the question of whether new technology has influenced our business culture or business culture is influencing how we use new technology.

It seems to me that, because we have access to information instantaneously anytime, we also seek this from people as well as technology. There have probably been times when we can all admit to wondering why someone hasn’t responded to our email immediately!

Whilst it’s useful to stay connected, being able to access five different communication methods – from messaging to face time on our smart phones – also means we have to think harder about our work/life balance. To resist checking emails away from the office, when it’s so quick and easy to do so, is more difficult than it may seem. Has it become the norm for our working hours and own time to become blurred?

This blurring of boundaries can also work the other way, with many of the most popular workplaces bringing elements of home-life into their culture and design. In a recent list published on Glassdoor, based on both a survey of workers’ opinions on the pros and cons of holding a job at their company, as well as ratings on how satisfied they are there, the top three companies (Google, Bain & Co. and Nestle Purina) were all supported by employee comments citing things like “beautiful campus” and “excellent culture”, with employees at Nestle Purina even able to bring pets into the workplace. Employees clearly place high value on being able to bring elements of their home and social life into the workplace, and employers are increasingly finding ways to offer this.

So what does this mean for our clients and our workplace designs? How can we maximise the benefits to the merging of work and home life and what does this mean for the future of offices? For example, an approach of 50:50 workspace and social space could enable us to interact and work in a less formal manner, and as long as deadlines are met and the work is done, why should we not embrace a flexible workday?

Although it has both benefits and limitations, technology can only be what we make of it, and so it is imperative that we understand the best ways to make it work for us and for our clients

Amy Bourne (amy.bourne@archtam.com) is a designer at ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in London. 

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We’re only beginning to see their impact on the healthcare system and facility design.

I began researching these Echo Boomers a few years back while designing a hospital birth center. …”

This is the beginning of a blog post I wrote for Healthcare Design. It will be the first of a series on this topic. Read the rest of the post here and check the right side of the page for subsequent posts as they go up.

 Christine Hester Devens (christine.devens@archtam.com) is a healthcare interior designer with ArchTam.

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The Global Cities Indicators Facility (GCIF) at the University of Toronto has for a long time worked with many cities around the world to collect and share data on city-level information that would be valuable for city management. Their global conference held this past May in Toronto brought together several hundred representatives of city governments, architects, planners and academics to explore what is being discovered. As a senior fellow of the Global Cities Institute I was invited to speak at the conference.

Created in 2008, the GCIF provides a set of city indicators prioritized by cities, with a globally standardized methodology that allows for comparability of city performance and knowledge sharing. Beginning with nine pilot cities, the GCIF has now developed into a global network of over 255 cities across 81 countries. Building on these core indicators, this work has evolved into a new ISO Standard (ISO 37120) and the concurrent creation of the World Council on City Data.

The big news about the data that the university is collecting is that it is now able to do so under the imprimatur of an ISO standard. It means that the data are being gathered under clear standards for comparability. The ISO standard provides an enormous boost to the value of such data and will increase the level of interest (and investment) in such data by those seeking to support cities with ‘smart’ urban infrastructure. We can expect to see a huge uplift in intelligent analyses of these kinds of data that will provide a kind of ‘meta’ overview of urban performance. See for example the establishment of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in New York, a public-private research center that “observes, analyzes, and models cities to optimize outcomes, prototype new solutions, formalize new tools and processes, and develop new expertise/experts in ‘Urban Informatics’.

I am interested in how this development of a ‘smart city’ movement and the enrichment and availability of data to understand urban performance relates to our own perspectives on work, workplaces, and the city. It suggests that our analyses of workplace data should now be related to wider perspectives on where and how work is happening on an urban scale in new kinds of working environments – some of them public or semi-public, some of them embedded in all sorts of different kinds of environments (residential, social, retail, educational etc.). Many of these new workplaces are mixed-use environments, with work taking places alongside many other kinds of functions and uses. So what are some of the avenues to explore further?

• We know that most office workplaces are grossly under-occupied (average active occupancy is around 43%).
• We know that staff in many organizations are already working in a variety of non-office based places and spaces in cities.
• We don’t have the tools to measure and analyze how this wider network of workplaces is being occupied and used and how it should be designed and provided for in the future.

The smart city movement and the availability of rich datasets from global cities means there is a huge opportunity to explore urban-scale working patterns. I am looking forward to researching and defining new kinds of performance goals for these emerging kinds of networked urban buildings and places.

Andrew Laing (andrew.laing@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Strategy Plus practice.

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I recently wrote a soon-to-be-published article for iCroner that outlined the “Journey of Leadership in the Workplace”, defining the skills a leader would need in 10 years to lead and manage in a more consumer-type workplace, as defined by the ArchTam workplace research. I argued that leaders would need to be able to redefine boundaries and rules, and ensure that they are established throughout the social context. They will need to have a high level of emotional intelligence, demonstrate benevolence towards others, have the intellectual capability to get the job done, and the ability to communicate messages consistently and frequently, so that staff are fully aware of what is expected of them, including the requirement to interact with, and be an active member of the organisation in a consumer-like manner.

With these ideas fresh in my head, I then went to the ballet to see “Cubania” with Carlos Acosta. You may think what does this have to do with leadership and the workplace?,  but I saw pushing, challenging and working within boundaries. Metal bars signified a box on stage and, one by one, each dancer would enter the box, dance, then step out of the box and watch the others do the same, until eventually they all danced in the box: sometimes in sync with one another, sometimes complementing one another, and sometimes dancing their own dance whilst still in the box with the others.

Inspiration struck, and I started to think that, just like in this dance, in the workplace leaders and teams watch each other, are sometimes in sync, sometimes complementary and sometimes doing their own task. For the future workplace, I started to think that leaders and managers may not only need to look to define boundaries from a task perspective, but also in a behavioural and personality arena.

Most leaders, managers and staff members have a “work face” that they put on. When they go home, they put on their “home face”. Cynically, this is thought of as people being two-faced; in a business arena, as being professional, or rather showing professionalism at work. In the future, if (as I argue in my article) we will need a more holistic leadership style, then we will need to interact with the whole person – more than just the “work face”.

So what does that mean? Expectations will change and we will need to accept that we are interacting not just with part of a person, but the whole person – and that means that leaders will need to lead and manage the whole person. A person cannot always be professional, so this will mean we need to be able to manage emotion. I don’t mean our own emotion, in the sense that we hide it – exactly the opposite. We will need to learn how to cope when someone is emotional. What will we do when someone cries? Will we pretend it is not happening, which tends to happen now? What happens when someone shouts? Will we run away and hide? Bury our head? Or face it head on?

How we deal with emotion in our personal lives now will transpire into the workplace as both places meld into one. The expectation of “professional” will actually disappear, as no one person will always be professional.

And so back to that dance – sometimes we will be in sync with one another, sometimes we will complement each other and sometimes we will be doing our own dance. Whatever the case may be, we will need to accept, adapt and cope with these new emotional boundaries.

Jennifer Bryan (jennifer.bryan@archtam.com) is head of organisational development within ArchTam’s Consultancy practice.

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What is the one thing you’d like to do before you die? Candy Chang – artist, designer and urban planner – lost an important person in her life, and her grief led her to ask this question of the public as part of an installation on an abandoned house in her hometown of New Orleans. The public response ranged from answers hand-written on the house, and feedback on photos shared by Chang online, to replica installations in cities all around the world. Chang recently shared her experience at the Sydney Vivid Festival of Ideas, one of a number of events attended by the Strategy Plus team.

Chang also spoke about how she had been guided into her field through what she called ‘creating your own discipline’, the bringing together of a person’s unique skills and interests to provide a distinctive offering. Chang’s work uniquely connects public spaces with her identity and sense of self, and unashamedly expresses personal aspects of her character and life experience. Chang frequently referred to Jung’s process of ‘individuation’, or discovering one’s true self, as a guiding factor in her work.

Personal identity is often suppressed in the workplace in favour of corporate brand, with work-specific clothing, focus on ‘objective’ interactions, and bland – and often sterile – office environments. Recent years, however, have seen our professional and personal lives increasingly blend together. In our Strategy Plus practice, we increasingly see people seeking opportunities to create their own disciplines through bringing personal interests into their work.

A common example of this blending is the rise in social media use – people are willing to publish personal and professional information on the same blog, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram account. Another is the prevalence of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), where people can use their chosen device for both business and personal use.

Organisations are increasingly recognising the benefits of having a workforce empowered to bring their authentic selves to work, illustrated by the rise of community managers in the workplace. A deliberate approach to community management in the workplace is becoming even more important with distributed and agile workforces.

The personal experience of work was a common theme in some of the other Vivid talks in Sydney. In Scoring in the Workplace: Curating the ultimate workspace experience, Gauri Bhalla from the UTS Business School spoke about how important it is for workplaces to promote personal authenticity and expression of identity through  providing increased flexibility.

GPT’s Sam Nickless, in The Big (SHIFT) to Smarter Working, articulated the value of internal social media as a key tool for building community in the workplace and breaking down hierarchies by democratising the flow of information. Workplace connections are now created through both business and social imperatives.

The divide between the personal and the professional elements of identity has been further disintegrated in a residential and mixed-use building recently designed for Antwerp by architects C.F. Møller & Brut. The concept is for a built environment which reinforces the blend between residential and office environments, and a key feature of the building is a rooftop terrace where both residents and workers can mingle.

Image: C.F. Møller & Brut

Rather than work crossing the boundary into personal life, there are more opportunities for people to bring their authentic selves into the workplace. Increased flexibility allows for customisation of the workplace to suit individual needs or desires, and environments where ad-hoc encounters and increased interactions are encouraged provides further opportunities for meaningful personal contributions.

Do you feel as though you are empowered to bring your authentic self to work, and if so, how do you do this?

Are you going to share this blog on your personal or professional social media accounts?

Monica McClure (monica.mclure@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney, and makes friends at work by sharing her fancy tea collection. If you’re not close enough for a cup of tea, you can still connect with Monica on LinkedIn or by email.

This blog was co-written with Monica’s tea buddies Aurora Braddon and Charlotte Fliegner, also consultants with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney.

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The Re-con Man is reconstituting (or perhaps more simply re-defining) what it means to be masculine and male. As “women get an even footing with men in terms of education and income, a generation will have to re-adjust,”believes David Autor, associate department head of MIT’s Department of Economics

Image courtesy of LS:N Global.

The Re-con Man is more comfortable with his home life and defines himself as much by his role as a father as by his career or job title. He embraces simplicity and back-to-basics values. He’s drawn to a more democratic, consensual workplace instead of traditional hierarchical male models. He responds less to celebrity hype, prioritising mate-ship and looking up to friends and local heroes thanks to social media and peer-to-peer culture.

The Athena Woman meanwhile is educated, confident, active and optimistic. She will rise to the top of her company, or start her own. She embraces community, both online and offline. She expects her partner to be her equal at home and work, and has more choice in how and when she starts a family. She wants to be spoken to not as a woman but as an individual. She keeps a busy lifestyle, and places increasing importance on fitness and wellbeing, with success increasingly meaning health and happiness.

Image courtesy of Adidas / LS:N Global.

So what can we learn from the Athena Woman and Re-con Man? They don’t really paint a picture of who people are or will be, but rather of what people across generations might aspire to be in the near future. This is useful in the context of understanding what might attract and inspire people to work, so our workplaces need to quickly respond to the concept of the Athena Woman and Re-con Man in the following ways:

• prioritising health, fitness and wellbeing at work;
• celebrating real-time and relatable success stories of peers (local heroes);
• de-coupling flexible working from motherhood;
• pulling the plug on gender stereotypes (as they’re becoming less relevant to both sexes).

As Chris Sanderson from The Future Laboratory started to describe Generation I (defined as being born after 2002) – potentially the offspring of our Athena Woman and Re-con Man – I started to see more of an insight into what the future workforce may be, and what it may demand from its various places of work.

As a generation born of “Sharents” (in Britain, 77 percent of parents upload photos of their children to social networks), the Generation I will crave experiences that allow them to be the stars of the show and curate how others see their lives. At work, how do we allow individual stories and personalities to be expressed physically and virtually? Do we provide the infrastructure, or just allow the flexibility for individuals to own and create this for themselves?

Image courtesy of LS:N Global.

Generation I won’t be passengers of the digital environment; they will want to get their digital hands dirty by messing around with the building blocks, so organisations need to allow them to code and hack. They are also used to accessing the latest technologies, and fast. What does this mean for corporate IT systems, or standard-issue technology kit? Balancing digital security and fast access to new technologies and applications will be the challenge here.

Personalised, non-linear experiences are the norm, so the employee experience at work should also be experimental, immersive and responsive to personal needs (using an ever-expanding base of data). And with this focus on personalisation and individuality, we need to stop designing environments that assume everyone functions the same way, and start creating those that let individual talents emerge and flourish.

As a member of Gen Y, I look forward to grappling with the challenges that will come with managing this next group of young upstarts! And importantly, I’m excited by the ways they expect to be able to work will influence the ways and places we work across the entire multi-generational workforce.

What do you think?

Allison Webb is a senior consultant in ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice.

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ABC news Australia recently reported that 10 million people in the U.S. are unemployed.  Forty percent of these people have been unemployed for more than six months. Ten million is a huge number to grasp, until you think of it like this: Australia has a population of 23 million people. Imagine every other person being out of work. (In the U.S. it’s every 30th person.)

The story featured Janice, a former government worker, supporting two young children as well as her niece and nephew. Her kids wanted new toys and books, but the little money that was provided from welfare benefits and family support was spent on essentials like rent and food.

Which got me thinking: are shops that are not shops the future in our cities?

My favourite city is Berlin, and in my former neighbourhood, Prenzlauer Berg, there was Leila – a shop that was not a shop – divided into two parts: things that are free and things that you can borrow.

Project  initiator and not-shop-keeper Nikolai Wolfert once gave me a tour of the store. According to Nikolai the average western home has more than 10,000 items of stuff! Nikolai is passionate about sharing, trust, and creating good relationships in our communities. Ultimately he wants to help change our consumer behaviour. He is also a huge fan of Sydney’s Rachel Botsman, the leading advocate in collaborative consumption, whose book I recently borrowed from my friend Bronwyn’s friend Sam.

The free section of the shop is filled with things or stuff that people in the neighbourhood no longer need or don’t really have space for. Books, CDs, DVDs, china, cutlery, trinkets, clothes, shoes, bags, garden seeds and even welly boots adorn homemade shelves. You name it and it’s there! You basically go in and take it, but only if you really need it.

The second section is dedicated to borrowing. Two whole rooms of amazing stuff that you can use free of charge and then give back. People in the community have donated their things for other people to use. It’s the ultimate in creating a resilient community and being good neighbours. You can borrow almost anything: musical instruments, dining room chairs, camping equipment, gardening tools, outdoor furniture, yoga mats, skateboards, children’s toys, kid’s books, cookery books, suitcases, hairdryers, irons and ironing boards, cots, baby change tables, rice cookers, blenders, saucepans, blankets, children’s car seats, bikes, cycle helmets, BBQs, picnic baskets, car tools and DIY books. You can even borrow gardening overalls!

I’ll confess the day I first visited I felt a fraud. After several days trawling around the second hand stores and the flea market without success, I had had to go and buy a clothes airer from a department store. Whilst at first I felt a bit embarrassed and ashamed of my shiny, plastic-wrapped, new purchase, I left the not-shop feeling happy…because I’d agreed to donate my airer to Leila when I left Berlin.

Normalising borrowing is going to be a long journey. When Prince Charles talked of his environmentally friendly lifestyle – recycling old curtains into cushion covers – it was scoffed at by the media as penny pinching.

Most of us have spare rooms, garages, cupboards, and wardrobes full of stuff and junk we neither use nor want. We are addicted to stuff. I’ll be the first to admit that only yesterday another handbag, that I don’t need and I can’t afford, caught my eye! (Note: I didn’t buy it because I’m buying nothing new in 2014!)

But things really are changing. British chain Marks & Spencer offers customers discounts in exchange for unwanted clothes, which are then donated to Oxfam. Last year in Sydney, meanwhile, more than 7,500 sellers took part in the Garage Sale Trail, an event to promote community recycling of unwanted stuff…and yes, most people took part because they wanted to de-clutter their homes.

These stories, and what I’ve seen at Leila, show that sharing, borrowing, lending, making, and mending might just be the future of shopping in our cities in these times of global austerity. I reckon Janice and Mrs. Merkel would agree. What do you think?

Check out the Leila shop at www.leila-berlin.de.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

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