Thriving too

Dance Willesden

Taking a little break in editing the Community Lover's Guide to Hackney, and reviewing plans for workshops and activities with parents at Furness Primary in Willesden. I've already been enjoying watching the sun rise above Willesden Junction station on my early morning trips to the school breakfast club. But I just came across Dance Willesden by Rose Rouse. Apart from the fact that watching a group of people dressed in bright red dance up and down the side of Willesden station is bound to bring a smile to your face, i think there are some interesting and important things going on here.

Dance Willesden Junction from Rose Rouse on Vimeo.

A lot of the projects that fascinate me are the ones where people don't wait for permission, or funds, or services - but who take small actions to change the world around them for the better. And do it in a way that keeps the door open for others to experience, collaborate and join in.

There is something quite magical about the moment a guy in a flourescent jacket does a tiny dance move, hanging back a little. And just wait until you see the bus driver let loose!

Rose notes something key to this way of doing things: "breaking down the wall between participants and audience dissolves the wall of criticism"

It's often the case that we see an 'us and them' situation - with services, us the taxpayers, them the council. With campaigner, us the downtrodden, them the ones holding power. With companies, us the consumer, them the producer. Dancing in the street might not be your thing, but there are a lot of other ways we can work together in a more equal and open manner.

Thank you Rose for being brave enough to dance in the streets and share it.

The Ad Hoc Enquiries: Do you have a new theory?

Starting in February 2012 Social Spaces will be running a series of 12 exploratory new events at Hub Westminster.

The primary assumption for the project is that there is new knowledge to be built and that we need to find new collaborative ways of building it.

These weekly Enquiries are structured events designed to give people who have designed and implemented innovation local projects an opportunity to describe their work and their emerging insights to a group of interested and experienced peers. These innovation projects are required to be working specifically in the participatory paradigm where creative and strategic solution seeking and collaborative working are their most evident characteristics. 

What happens at an Enquiry?

The evenings will begin with a sociable supper, during which the ‘theorist(s)’ will present their project, their theory of change and new emergent theory - followed by a number pieces of evidence to support their theory. 

Each participant in turn will state their core disciplinary perspective e.g. science, philosophy, design etc and offers either a supporting or challenging statement for the theory, connecting with other knowledge bases to understand and interpret the new theory. 

How will the Enquiries be documented?

Each week the event will ‘extreme’ recorded to a structured and pre-set format and set into a large format digital/on demand book including all participants names and responses. The events will be audio live streamed - and later converted into podcasts.

Why are they called The Ad Hoc Enquiries?

Enquiry

The name ‘enquiry’ goes some way to describe the format for the evenings. The name implies that the answers to our new questions are not currently evident and that some specific process is needed to draw out the ideas and examine the evidence.

The purpose of these events is a serious one, and the idea of calling it an ‘enquiry’ implies that some noteworthy and important work will take place during these evenings.   ‘Enquiry’ is also an academic term to describe an investigation into a specific topic or question.

Ad Hoc

The word ‘ad hoc’ is a term used in a number of contexts including scientific and philosophical theory; national investigations; technology systems and networks theory. There is also a link to the term Adhocracy, described by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock to mean an organisational structure working in the opposite way to a bureauracy.

How have we developed the format?

We have used understanding of how thinking in a new type of social setting might take place to develop this new format.  The events are structured to achieve knowledge creation through social and intellectual interaction and to be respectful of people’s ideas and the time they are offering to the project through the documentation and sharing process. 

The format takes account of the different phases individual and collective cognition might take place: stimulation/processing/connection/discussion/synthesis/building further on emergent ideas. 

The structure secures the serious aspects of the project's aims, and will therefor also allow a great deal of playfulness and fun to be injected into the evenings. We will be running these events in *very* strict order... possibly even using a gavel....

Call for new theories - do you have one?

 The first stage in preparing for these events is to ask people to submit their ideas for a theory they would like to present.

1. Have you developed an innovative local project?

2. Does this project work in the Creative/Collaborative paradigm?  

What we mean here is the work should not work in the Consumer, Representative, Charity or Challenge participatory paradigms.  There may be some of these in the mixture - but overall the project needs to work more collaboratively with communities and local authorities, possibly reconfiguring existing systems and fundamentally changing the way the community interacts in some way (See here and here for more details on how we see the Creative/Collaborative paradigm)

Apply here!

Deadline for applications to present a theory: 25 January 2012 

Register early interest to attend and participate in an Ad Hoc Enquiry here!

More pics of our cubes

 

Social Business: A response to the Portas Review on highstreet revival

(Photo credit London Shop Fronts blog by Emily Webber)

Over the Christmas break I read the Portas Review into the future of our highstreets - and I agree with the sentiment expressed that highstreets seem to be an often under-used or under-respected asset; and that in order for high streets and communities to thrive that we need a mix of commercial retail, with other cultural and social experiences; and that we would benefit from people making the shift from consumer to more active co-creator.

However, I found myself questioning some of the methods or solutions proposed - and here is some of my thinking why.

Representative 'Town Teams' to create shared vision of high street 

I like the idea of a group of passionate people working together for the benefit of the whole high street. Bringing together retailers, building owners, Council and residents to collaborate and develop new possibilities. But I think that as we make the shift to 'co-creators' we are learning new roles, and new ways of working together that are unlikely to happen spontaneously in a classic meeting or planning setting. As Portas notes later in the report "quite often it is only the noisy minority that contribute" which can sometimes be an issue with small groups claiming to be representative of a whole community. We've seen the positive impact of leaving things 'unfinished' so that people can contribute in meaningful ways - perhaps if the whole vision is completed and curated by a small representative group this may hamper wider involvement and co-creation. I think that because we need a more sophisticated shift in thinking and acting, we need to move past getting people together to problem solve, and employ both new meeting techniques and some creative ways for people to engage in different ways. See Tessy's post for more on the differences between representative and creative collaborative paradigm.

Serving a community's needs and community consultation

The report states the role of a town centre is to serve a communities needs. But what if the role of a town centre were to be an asset, a resource for a communities aspirations, and a source of inspiration? It also says that people should be consulted on town centre development - with big corporates putting money behind a campaign to get more people involved in town planning. Getting more people involved is something I would agree with - but again I think that it needs to be more nuanced than traditional consultation (we listen and go and design what you want, then bring it back as a finished product for you to consume). What if instead of 'consulting' local councils were there to encourage and facilitate involvement, create connections and help make ideas a reality.  

Community use of vacant properties and short term 'meanwhile' uses

While I agree with the need for highstreets to enable innovative, creative activities I think that hosting this solely in vacant or temporary spaces is perhaps not the best way forward. Why are we reducing the social uses to short term animation and temporary spaces? If we acknowledge that the high street needs to be a 'dynamic social place with a sense of belonging' we need to give people time to get to know each other, give the social elements time to bed down and be a permanent part of the mix. And by viewing the social simply as a colonisation method that can then be transplanted by 'real' business and full rates when it's successful in bringing in more people, new ideas and connections -  begins to price the social out again, and keeps the current competitive profit driven model at top of hierarchy, potentially loosing the extra social value found in supportive co-creation methods.

Social as a secondary effect of economic activity

The report says that the high street is social space: people interact by chatting in the market place, or sharing an enjoyable consumer experience. Social connections and the positive benefits from this are seen as an important secondary effect of shopping on the local highstreet. I wouldn't disagree with this - knowing the name of my local green grocer feels like something important to my sense of place (but I'll be honest, in a decade or more of local shopping I've not made new friends through the experience, because a straight transactional relationship is not really conducive to this). So if the secondary (perhaps unintended) social benefits are clearly a valuable thing then why are we stopping there? Imagine the secondary effects of a truly co-created high street experience - what if people had the opportunity to meet over baking, growing, building, making. Building lasting relationships through shared activities - rather than chance greetings over transient commercial transactions.

The individual's role to shop locally

The report highlights our responsibility to 'meet, trade and shop in high streets' in order for them to thrive. I don't disagree - I personally chose to support local businesses as much as I can and feel much happier about my contribution going to Hassan and his family up the road, that the bottomless pockets of Tesco. But as noted above, I think that this consumer model that we know so well reduces us to simply economic players in the town centre. It is our role to be there and shop. We aren't expected to, and largely don't have the opportunity to create, or build it. We are there to consume - and it could be argued that is is this pattern of behaviour that created the out of town shopping phenomena, largely responsible for the decline in high street success, in the first place.

 

Shops can be more than just shops

I read through 55 pages to find the bit that most interested me, right at the end...There is a suggestion that an ideal would be "big shops being more than just shops" and the examples cited are book shops in cafes, or a running club meeting point in a sports shop. And perhaps a 'swap shop' for different skills, and work hubs.
This sounds more like it to me... we need to bring back the social to the highstreet in an integrated, co-created way. From the grass roots up, skillfully facilitatied by those who know their way round the red tape and systems - be that local authorities, landlords, or retailers.

What's the alternative?
I think that if we are a bit braver in our expectations of the high street, more critical of the impact of our current repeated patterns of behaviour, and made the best of our opportunities to reimaging the assets and resources contained in it, we could begin to create a much richer social space ogether. 

If instead of another service that is provided for us to consume, (albeit by a new wider group of players than previously) we could be genuinely involved in the creation of social, cultural, and educational experiences. Instead of reducing the social to occasional spaces or secondary effects, I think we should aspire to create a truly integrated social high street. 

Putting it into practise
Mary Portas ends by recommending that several trials and pilots are initiated to take this report forward. If anyone would like to offer a highstreet to start putting this into practise, do get in touch - we'd be more than happy to get stuck in...