Capturing Cardiff: can Cardiff's historical arcades survive the 21st century?

Cardiff is a city of shops. That, I remember, was one of my first impressions of the Welsh capital when I moved here last October. It seemed shopping and being shopped at were primary activities that kept the local population busy. No matter what time of day, or whichever day of the week, the main pedestrianized drag of Queen Street or the various glass-fronted shopping malls that led off it would be awash with people; shoppers bearing their bags, having a pause at the nearest café, before setting off on round two. It wasn’t till a few days later that I discovered some very special parts of the city that put its retail profile today in an historical perspective. Cardiff was not a city of shops after all. More accurately put, it was one of arcades.

In total, there are 12 arcades in the city’s centre ranging from Royal Arcade, the oldest, built 150 years ago in 1858, to the very newest, St David’s 2 (pictured below) due to open its doors later this year in September. 


For most visitors to Cardiff, myself included, it is the older, harder-to-find historic arcades that capture the imagination with their old-age charm, stylish architecture and independent shops. In fact, these arcades of the late 1800s and early 1900s are integral to the character of the city. For many they are monuments preserving the pride of an era that saw the region flourish on the profits from the mines. For others, they are part of what makes Cardiff unique: the city boasts the highest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian shopping arcades in the UK. I've pinpointed the six oldest ones and the busy central indoor market on this satellite map.


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Unfortunately, recent events may be putting the arcades’ future in jeopardy. The impending St David's 2 development, a plan to prevent car access to St Mary’s Street (a road that many arcades open out onto) and, of course, the looming economic recession mean many shops they house are facing tougher times than ever before. Nick Turner and his family have run the Digital Camera Centre from the Morgan Arcade for 35 years. Without a thriving online business running alongside the traditional shop, he says they would not have survived so long. He doesn’t know how neighbouring businesses not exploiting the Internet can afford to keep afloat. In the coming months he says, ‘ I wouldn’t be surprised if ten percent of the shops in the arcade closed down.’

With similar sentiments is Andrew Mitchell, owner of Capital Books (captured in the picture below), a second-hand bookshop in the neighbouring Royal Arcade.

While surviving 25 years in the arcade, he has witnessed many newer shops come and go, crippled by rising rents and the drop in passing trade. Partly to blame for this, he claims, is the ongoing pedestrianization of St Mary’s Street, which has turned people away from that entrance to the arcade as well as the lack of vehicle access on the other side of the arcade due to building works on the St David’s 2 shopping centre on The Hayes. 

The saddest loss for many has been the demise of Woodies, a 112 year-old men’s clothing emporium that closed its doors last December. Its disappearance came just months after owner Ray Beacon commented on the dramatic loss of trade due to St Mary’s street plans. A second branch in Bristol closed too: immediately after the new Broadmead Shopping Centre opened in the town centre, trade for the independent business dwindled by a half.

While the St David’s 2 development may carry similar risks to Cardiff’s arcades' smaller, independent stores, most owners are holding out in the hope the centre will attract enough new trade to the city that there'll be benefits for all. Added to this are local people's sentiments about the arcades which might serve to protect them for the future. As David Hughes-Lewis, owner of Jonathan David Jewellers in Morgan Arcade, says, ‘the arcades are the heart of Cardiff and nobody wants to see that heart ripped out’.

A place in time

In the light of the St David's 2 development, local artist Jennie Savage is embarking on "The Arcades Project: a 3D documentary." By inviting participation from shopkeepers and customers of the historical arcades and the central market she hopes to draw on local knowledge to create archives and insights into the life and times of the spaces held within the architecture of the arcades. The project is inspired by a study of Parisian arcades in the 1920s by Walter Benjamin. He considered the arcades to be 'the most important architectural form of the 19th century'. Perhaps through bearing witness to their past, through photographs, interviews and oral histories, this project might act to secure a place and a meaning for the arcades in the future.

For more about what inspired Jennie's project please click on the audio link below.

Power and the revolution

The media revolution rages on and continues to affect you, me, and the 1.4 billion other people online. The ying and yang of our new media world, according to Anthony Mayfield, are the 'search' and the 'social'. He sees the two existing in symbiosis, the one sustaining the other - a partnership that's mutually beneficial, useful and fair.

The social is easy to identify - that's us, the 1.4 billion; the search is easier to locate because it lies in far fewer hands, hands that are reaching out to grab us to steer our way through the worldwide web. It's hardly surprising that Google, the Internet's most successful navigation tool, now tracks over 1 trillion web pages, a massive, exponentially growing figure representing just a quarter of what's actually out there.

Now with 80% of the UK market share, Google defined what search engines are today and helped make the Internet work. Unlike Yahoo, who put their highest paying ads at the top of the page, Google won users over by putting our needs first. in a Google search, only the best and most useful ads can nudge their way to the top.

Increasingly, Google holds the key to the Internet's superabundance of content. The company enjoys a widely accepted monopoly on the worldwide search market. As the 'social', our acceptance of it is grounded on trust and the belief it's 'doing the right thing'. Can a brand that fits so smoothly into our daily lives and that has such an innocuous motto as "Don't do evil", be anything but a benevolent giant? Is this the ying and yang harmony of web media in play?

How then a couple of years ago did Google do the unthinkable when it decided to self-censor to create google.cn in China? Why did the world's biggest information giver come to deny the very freedom of that information? Despite Google's protestations, its presence in China appeared at odds with the company's founding mission. Google argues it will play a more powerful and useful role by participating in China than by boycotting it. By avoiding the Chinese web firewall through google.com searches from within China, it promised a faster and easier engine for users.

Opinons divided over the issue. For some, Google's move was a pragmatic business decision. If you're big on the Internet, you'll want to be big in China. The deal allowed it greater access to China's fast-growing market and to directly compete with baidu.com, the region's most popular search engine.

For others, Google was helping itself more than China; more "do no evil, unless it's with communists." In failing to square its ethical stance with its global ambitions, the company helped deny Chinese people the knowledge and understanding of democracy that might be the only way forward to improve their human rights and society. As such, google.cn aids Chinese authorities by compounding ignorance of sensitive issues within its own history. The Beijing University students in this video are perplexed when shown images of tanks on Tiananmen Square.

No mention of 1989s bloody student protests there can be found through google.cn. Mayfield's ying and yang/search and social hardly exists here, the relation between the two cannot be described in black and white, rather varying shades of grey.

So has Google 'done the right thing' by China, itself, or, equally, by web media and its future? Now is the time for influential players like Google to stand up for their values and be counted. It's disappointing that Google, with its huge influence and power, risk setting the ethical bar dangerously low, by acting on market pressure rather than principle. Can ethics survive the Internet revolution? Black or white, yes or no, there was no third way for Google in China, but was it a price worth paying?

What's your story?

Everyone has a story to tell. That’s the premise of BBC Capture Wales, a project enabling people to create digital shorts about their real-life experiences using their own photos, words and voices. The tales provide snapshots into the lives of ordinary people, sometimes revealing depths of experience often missed in the humdrum of daily life, like this one.

As well as creating beautiful, bold stories, one of the main drives of the project is to improve digital literacy. In a world where sounds and images increasingly rule, director of the project Daniel Meadows counts the ability to communicate in these ways as the basic literacy of our age. In fact he directly correlates social and digital inclusion by pointing to high levels of digital illiteracy among the unemployed.

These ideas reminded me of a similar project I came across in Kenya. Slum TV is a Nairobi-based film project documenting life in Mathare, the country’s largest and most dangerous slum. Since it began just a year ago it's emerged as a means for young locals to express themselves and initiate dialogue both within and outside their community. Like Capture Wales, a group of volunteer ‘facilitators’ teach the technological and storytelling skills needed for the young journalists to produce their own material. And what they produce are intimate stories from the inside: tales and perspectives that the national, let alone the international, media could never access.

Back in Wales, Daniel Meadows stresses that to make participatory journalism like this work, there’s an absolute need that what is made is shared. Equally, vital parts of Slum TV are the regular public screenings shown to Mathare’s residents. I was lucky enough to be at the very first screening, projected from the back of a pick-up truck onto a huge whitewashed wall in the heart of the slum. The project’s founding idea that the camera ‘always attracts attention’ never rang more true as hundreds of residents crammed into a makeshift clearing, all eyes glued to the images flickering on the wall.

That was in October 2007, three months later Kenya was to erupt in a storm of post-election violence. Mathare, home to almost 500,000 people from different tribes, was to bear some of the worst of this violence as residents took up arms against each other. It was in the midst of this that Slum TV really proved its worth both inside and outside the community. The volunteers began recording the bloodshed through the eyes of those living within it, offering unparalleled human perspectives of the crisis to the outside world. Below is the first part of an Al Jazeera special report on what the Slum TV journalists got up to:



At the same time, Kenyan citizen journalists began to collaborate on a web-based platform called Ushahidi, meaning ‘testimony’ in Swahili. It’s goal was to crowd-source crisis information by allowing anyone to submit information via mobile texts, email or, interestingly, social networking sites like twitter and Facebook. It took just two days to launch Ushahidi and immediately it began bridging the gap between relief efforts and distress calls from around the country. User-generated reports were collected and then visualized on the Internet using Google maps, giving a more accurate picture of what was happening on the ground and helping direct emergency aid to affected areas.

Similar technology was used after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, but the fact that this happened in Africa amazes and excites me. Since January 2008, the same platform has been employed in South Africa to monitor and map anti-immigrant violence in the early summer of 2008. And I don’t expect this to be the last occasion it’s used. The implications of this kind of citizen journalism are huge and I hope they’ll change the way complex crises in the news are communicated and understood by the wider world.

Capture Wales, Slum TV and Ushahidi prove that if you give people the tools and the knowledge to use them, they will, because within us all it seems there’s a story waiting to be told.

User-generated controversy

Many journalists feel threatened by the increasing amount of ‘user-generated content’ in mainstream news. At the same time, the demands of our ‘24-hour breaking news’ culture ensure that traditional media organizations are ever more reliant on images taken at the scene of an event by a camera-wielding public. Perhaps the quality is a bit poor, but this just makes the footage all the more authentic. After all, whose images do we most vividly remember from the London bombings or the Asian tsunami?

This is hardly a new phenomenon – perhaps the most famous example of ‘citizen’ journalism is the amateur video capturing the assassination of JFK. As technology and the Internet become more available, I expect we’ll see an increase in first-account images and stories that paid journalists have no chance of scooping themselves.

So does this mean that anyone with a camera and access to the Internet is a potential journalist, or are they simply witnesses with recordable eyes? I’d veer towards the latter, as it’s the journalists who have the time to follow up, research and refine the facts that turn the images into a story. Except that now it’s user-generated words, not images that are unnerving the media world.

The public voice is heard no more loudly than on USG ‘citizen’ journalism sites like allvoices, Helium or CNN’s iReport. A recent hoax post on iReport – claiming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack – led to freefall of Apple shares on the US financial market and served to highlight one of the most serious criticisms of this type of news: what, if any, code of ethics do these ‘journalists’ work by? And more importantly, can they be trusted?

Clearly such sites are a leap forward for the freedoms of both speech and information – Helium’s motif ‘learn what you need, share what you know’ summarizes their worth. But, can we really just rely on the ‘self-correcting nature’ of these sites put forward by web journalists like Jeff Jarvis? After all, they argue, it never takes too long for a hoax to be uncovered – but is this really good enough? I don’t think many Apple shareholders would agree.

I’d like to see more new sites incorporating voting systems like those on Digg and Slashdot where readers rate their favourite, and likely, most trusted contributors. Perhaps in the future there’ll be more that take the Huffington Post model only giving out passwords to ‘syndicated’ contributors.

The potential of user-generated content is enormous. Most obviously, there's just so much news, and this news covers enormous ground, territory that traditional outlets often lack time, resources or will to explore. The very fact that there are so many users engaged with what’s going on around them and interacting is great, not just for democracy, but for a more cohesive society. Talk of censorship is disturbing but complaints will continue to be raised when content fails to fall in line with traditional media standards.

As demand for USG increases, the media using the material must avoid encouraging citizen journalists, keen to see their footage on the television or in the paper, into potentially dangerous situations to which they would never send their own staff. Ultimately, for the two streams to co-exist and feed positively off one another, both the amateurs and the professionals need to find ways that ensure responsible output without sacrificing quality for quantity.

Patch Web 2.0

The news consumer, to borrow a phrase, has never had it so good. Initially, the Internet’s phase Web 1.0 allowed us to multi-source news by foraging among media outlets from town to country, from print to broadcast, for nothing more than a few clicks on a mouse. Then along came its sequel – ‘interactive’ Web 2.0 – bringing the opportunity not just of browsing, but of being browsed. We the consumer now had the tools to create and share our news and opinions on platforms such as blogs and Wikis, as well as on video-sharing and social-networking sites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.

Great news for most, but what exactly have these changes meant for journalists? Well, I’ve recently started studying journalism at the University of Cardiff and, like any working journalist, have been assigned my patch. Of course, my research began scanning websites and search engines but has gradually branched into territories previously unknown: I’m now finding my bearings in a new world of RSS feeding, book-marking, twitter-following and now, blogging. In fact, Web 2.0 networks provide an extension of my patch on the ground, a vital source to be kept close, consulted and worked upon.

So Web 2.0 is broadening the scope for journalists looking to generate and refine their stories. Passive media consumption is a thing of the past. Through web pages such as the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ or the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’, the public can now communicate their views and expertise to the audience, and to the reporter.

And so we can start to see journalism as being ‘a process, not a product’. These are the words of David Cohn, a journalist making his career developing the very practice of open source journalism. This intimacy between reporters and their audience creates a two-way process that makes journalists set their stories free. The final copy is now nothing of the sort. Audience feedback and exchange force the journalist to really listen and, in turn, to do a better job. As the Guardian’s Emily Bell explains, such collaboration can bring to a story the depth of ‘insider knowledge, with an outsider’s perspective’.

For Jeff Jarvis, the changing relationship that a journalist has with the audience and with the story should not mean 'surrendering control of the process'. Specifically, he suggests the journalist act as 'curator' so that dogmatic or offensive posts are simply edited out. In his words, we must figure out 'who the smart people are'. And perhaps he's right. Why shouldn't we oust those who use such platforms to rant, and make way for opinion that moves the debate along?

Or maybe the way forward is to educate the contributing audience à Le Monde. The French newspaper is confronting the online problem in a different way. They are appointing an editorial 'coach' to improve the standards of their contributors' postings.

Whichever line you take it is clear that the journalist's role hasn't actually changed so very much. It is still their job to filter information, in this case from forum feeds and blogs, and then to select the most significant aspects they find to inform their work. After all, we cannot assume that the unheard and silent majority not sharing their views online are any less engaged with the issues than those who are.