David Barrie

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David Barrie (born 05 April 1964) is a producer and director of urban renewal and broadcast media projects. Barrie has produced and directed factual television programming for broadcasters including the BBC, Channel 4, WNET, National Geographic and CNN. He has produced documentary films on subjects like the pre-history of the Sahara Desert, the death of rock star Michael Hutchence, the rise of the National Front (France), the invention of Oboe (navigation) systems by Alec Reeves of Standard Telephones and Cables during the Second World War and the arms trade in Liberia, West Africa. Barrie's programmes have included interviews with Jean-Luc Godard, Georg Baselitz, Alexander McQueen, Victoria Beckham and Sadie Frost. In 2000, Barrie was arrested and imprisoned on false charges of espionage by President Charles Taylor (Liberia) while making a documentary in the country with journalist Sorious Samura.

In a series of innovative, high profile public projects in the U.K., Barrie has pursued a keen interest in design, media, urbanism and public management. This work has been broadcast on television, featured in The New York Times and The Observer and exhibited in China, the United States, Russia and Europe. Barrie has also presented this work to professional conferences in Hong Kong and India.

The Castleford Project is an £11m ($21m) program of urban renewal in the deprived, former coalfields town of Castleford, West Yorkshire. Starting with a corporate social investment of £100k ($194k) by Channel 4 Television in 2003, the project is enabling a program of improvement of the public realm of the town, is supported by an especially formed partnership of public agencies and has been credited with leveraging new investment in the town valued at £250m ($484m). The project features the commission of new work by architects and artists, including Martha Schwartz (U.S.A.), Jan Gehl Architects (Denmark), Winter + Horbelt (Germany), Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba) and U.K. designers Renato Benedetti, DSDHA and Sarah Wigglesworth. The project's social innovation, development of open systems of public administration and culture-led development has been highlighted at several international conferences.

In 1995, Barrie conceived and ran Power to Change, an art and design initiative on the adaptive reuse of the decommissioning Magnox nuclear power facility in Trawsfynydd, in the Snowdonia National Park, Wales. This project featured new work by architects Will Alsop, Kathryn Findlay and James Wines, artist Bruce McLean, music composer Gavin Bryars, photographer John Davies and engineers Arup Associates. It included the participation of artist Rachel Whiteread, architect Cedric Price and was broadcast by BBC Television. It has featured in several histories of contemporary design.

The Spaghetti Junction Project was a design ideas initiative on the adaptive reuse of vacant wasteland beneath the cloverleaf highway interchange in the West Midlands, U.K. known as Spaghetti Junction. The project ran in 1990, was televised by the BBC and featured new work by architects Edward Cullinan, Robert Adam, landscape architect Pirkko Higson and Narrative Architecture Today designer Melanie Sainsbury.

Barrie is currently working with designers, community groups, farmers, horticulturalists and public agencies in Middlesbrough, North East England on a project that is investigating opportunities for urban agriculture and local food production in the urban planning of post-industrial towns and cities.

[edit] Trivia

Barrie is nephew of the late Cyril Bennett, the former Controller of Programmes and one of the founding fathers of London Weekend Television, the U.K. broadcaster and TV producer.