Category: Uncategorized

Deeply woven into the psyche of our cities planners are many challenges of great significance: traffic lights, pedestrianisation and the night time economy to name but three. The third member of this triumvirate of city signifiers  brings many benefits but has also led to the emergence of a rather peculiar and problematic cityscape feature: the urination hot spot.

 That’s right: those places in the city which quietly and unassumingly attract hundreds upon hundreds of visitors nightly to relieve themselves before they gleefully hop back up the street to join their fellow cavorters in fuelling themselves up before visiting the next urination hot spot. No need for a tourist guide, website or city ambassador  here: urination hotspots apparently announce themselves with the minimum of fanfare but with the maximum of impact. 

Now there’s nothing odd about having a piss outside: it’s something that is as natural as eating kebab and chips in windy bus stops. No, what’s remarkable is that our collective pissing has generated places which are like magnets to urine: places which call to our bladders, ‘Piss here, please piss here! Not over there but just right here!’  Just as our architects have dreamt up fabulous new city vistas, so our collective bladders have replied to those dreams with their own unmistakeable response to city living: the urination hot spot.

Now what’s that all about? Intuitively you might imagine that the pattern of piss over a city centre in one night would be randomly spread: people pissing wherever the fancy takes them, whenever it takes them. But apparently not: the phenomenon of the urination hot spot suggests that certain spaces in cities are privileged with being pissed on more than others; and that there is something magnetic about those spaces where, like in all good capitalist morality tales, wealth attracts wealth and piss attracts piss. 

We might ask ourselves: is there something in the architecture of the city which attracts piss heads to piss where others have pissed before them? Or is there something  hormonal about piss which biologically communicates with other people’s bladders over the ectoplasmic equivalent of wifi and which urges passing strangers to “piss here! Not there but here!”  Or is it a cultural phenomenon? A kind of “I pissed there cos my dad pissed there and his dad pissed there before him?”

Whatever the reason, you’ve soon got a urination hot spot on your hands (if you’re very unlucky). And if you’re a city planner  you’ve got an even bigger problem in your face (or nose) if your job is to improve the quality of living in your city: how are you going to get rid of such urination hot spots?

Given the managerialist culture those planners work within, there’s only one thing you can do first of all: measure them and implement interventions  which are intended to reduce or remove them altogether. And this is where it gets tricky. How do you baseline a urination hot spot?

Presumably you would need to measure the volume of piss poured into the hot spot over night and compare measurements both before and after your intervention strategy.  But before that happened, you’d have to have a definition of what constituted a urination hot spot in the first place. How would 15 rugby players emptying their bladders over half an hour register on the UHS scale? (See, there’s an acronym already – a sure sign we’re working in a genuine managerialist culture). And how would them drinking Guiness compare with a gaggle of estate agents drinking litres of Pino Grigio over the same period of time?

The managerial challenges are endless but one thing is certain: the Urination Hot Spot is, along with pigeons, McDonalds and inexplicable public art, here to adorn our streets and boulevards for many years to come.  

Reasons to (start up your) biz cheerful (Part 3)

Why don’t you get right out of bed?,

Why don’t you get right out of bed? (x5)

Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3)

Son of Richard Branson

Looking rather handsome

Never ending dreaming

Liverpool visioning,

driving up your missioning

Scribble out your plans

Partnerships sole traders

putting on your waders

Ignoring all the fakers

Blue chips on the rich list

Internet top lists

with your SEOs

Printing all your t shirts, stopping where it hurts

Dressing up in suits, office flirts

Dressing to impress, dining to invest

Investing your time, paying no fines

Designing handsome logos, customers going loco

dance an office pogo

Cash flow and income,

spending all you’ve got

Fascinating knots,

balancing the sheets

Reasons to biz Cheerful (Part 3) x 3

Reasons to be Cheerful – one, two, three

Reasons to biz Cheerful (Part 3)

Martha Lane fox, Changing your socks

Mending the locks, Calling the shots

A bit of grin and bear it a bit of come and share it

You’re welcome, do come again, red reminders

Too small for VAT, PAYE

Going all legit, no nasty shocks

The never ending day, emails all the way,

Working in your car, driving afar

thrashing your laptop, Sit down take a break?

you’re having a laugh!

Looking for investors, all other tasters

Splitting the difference, taking lots of punts,

spotting opportunities,

Facing up to dragons

Duncan Bannatyne, Hilary Devey,

Theo Paphitis, Deborah Meaden,

Peter Jones

Reasons to biz Cheerful (Part 3) x 3

Reasons to be Cheerful – one, two, three

Immense thanks of course to Ian Dury.

Why do we have charities?

I’ve some great thought provoking responses from colleagues about the CEO SleepOut campaign I’m involved in which have got to the heart of the matter.

Such as, why don’t the organisers invite some homeless people along to the evening and enable them to talk directly with participants? And isn’t what homeless people need is to be given respect rather than been seeing as beneficiaries of charity? I’ve raised these questions with the organisers so we’ll see what they say about that.

But more fundamentally, these questions ask some important questions about why we have charities at all, what the relationship is between donors, charitable organisations and beneficiaries, and whether the act of ‘doing good’ or ‘just giving’ actually does more harm than good (in that it just provides short term, superficial Elastoplast solutions to things which require more systematic, substantial solutions to deep rooted social issues): or actually takes more than it gives (in that campaigning takes the focus of the problem away from the root cause of that problem and ‘gives’ the focus to those people who are on the receiving end of the charitable ‘give’.

One obvious answer is that if charities didn’t do what they do, no-one else (e.g. The State) is going to step up to the mark to address the short term pressures that people face here and now, rather than in some distant future when the state might have stepped up. So if a charity’s purpose can only be short term – then that’s because the long term is too distant a proposition for those who need solutions, right here, right now.

But there’s lot to think about here so many thanks for your responses!

But in the meantime, if you can contribute to the campaign, it would be great to hear from you just here:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Nick-Owen8