The Big City Plan is, as the name implies, a rather big plan to sort out the city of Birmingham, specifically the 800 or so hectares in the middle. The consultation period starts soon and, given the nature of the thing, one would be forgiven for thinking it ain’t gonna amount to much. Our glorious leaders will do whatever they want to do and we mere mortals who are far too busy actually doing stuff that makes the city what it is won’t have a look in. Or even if you don’t go down the terminally pessimistic route the scope of the plan is so great that any interesting ideas are either going to be too disruptive or are going to fly under the radar.

Stef Lewandowski has been involved with this for a while now and has constantly encouraged more accountability. As such he’s pushing a more positive message about the contribution we can make and not wanting to be one of those arseholes who just bitch, and as someone who does give a damn what happens to this city, I’m going to give it a go.

My dream suggestion would be to radically overhaul the way the city is led. The weak link in this city, from what I can see, is the quality and attitude of our leaders, not just in the city council but in the various agencies like AWM. There are good people working in them who really do care but they’re held back by at best political infighting and at worst sheer idiocy. But that would require some major root and branch surgery to the bureaucracy and I accept it’s not a simple recommendation that might be added to the plan.

So here’s a less disruptive but hopefully equally revolutionary idea.

Get artists to paint 20 or so buildings in Digbeth.

The starting point for thinking about this is Casa Batlló in Barcelona. If you’re not familiar with the building it was designed by Gaudi and looks like this:

Photo by 3Dom.

Obviously we can’t dump a Gaudi building in the city. That would be silly. But there are two key points worth remembering about this.

1) It was designed by an artist.

2) There are 34,000 photos of it on Flickr alone.

Digbeth, in the Big City Plan, is the “creative quarter”. The problem is a lot of this creativity goes on in offices and studios and, even with the galleries, isn’t visible from the outside. There isn’t an immediate visual hit that tells you “this is where the artists be at”. So my idea is to get 20 artists to decorate 20 buildings from top to bottom in whatever way they see fit. That would make the area itself a destination and feed into the creative activity that’s going on there.

We actually have some prior art for this idea.

Photo by Westy

The DEP studios on Fazeley St have been demolished, unfortunately, but for years UB40’s studio had this audacious mural on it.

Photo by Paul Harris

Opposite this is another painted building. It used to have a load of animals on it but recently was transformed into the above. The story I heard 3rd hand was that a couple of Mexican artists did this before moving on to a celebrated show in London. I keep meaning to research it further but the fact that, if true, this isn’t common knowledge is something of an indictment of how the city deals with visual art. If anyone knows the story please let us know in the comments.

Photo by Gwenllian Evans

The Custard Factory has a lot of public art but in this context the fact that it has buildings painted in bold single colours is really interesting, especially when viewed from a distance. It’s a beacon that something interesting may well be happening there. Simple and very effective.

There’s also a mural on the side of the the Friends of the Earth building on Alison St. It’s hidden behind a tree and, in all honesty, is a bit crap, but it’s worth noting. (Better photo to follow if I find one.)

The only problem I can see is the regeneration of Digbeth will see existing buildings either restored to their redbrick glory or replaced with shiny new things that might not lend themselves to being covered in art. Certainly there may be more of this in what’s becoming known as the Custard Factory Quarter but that only covers the area bordered by Heath Mill Lane and Fazeley Street. We need these kinds of dramatic visual identifiers at the entrance points to Digbeth and to be visible from the main transport routes. Wouldn’t it be nice if Bradford Street (where the number 50 bus brings thousands of people into the city centre) had a massive piece of art painted along it rather than the usual BNP graffiti? Imagine if some artist was allowed to go crazy with this:

Photo by ray_wilkes2003

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

And then Digbeth will become internationally known as that place in Great Britain where they have all the crazy painted buildings. Which can’t be a bad thing.

[Update]

Jon Newbold on Twitter drew my attention to the Albanian capital city Tirana where Edi Rama, the mayor and a former artist, had many of the buildings painted in bright colours as part of a massive and urgent regeneration program after the fall of communism wrecked the city. Here’s a gallery of photos.

Any other examples of this sort of thing being done on a massive city-wide scale, please let me know!