Thriving too

Somewhereto_ … Can we have one for everyone?

I was invited to an Action Group last Tuesday on Giving Spaces at the Cabinet Office, set up by the people at Somewhereto_, led by Sam Conniff of Livity.  If you aren’t familiar with Somewhereto_, it is an amazing project which has been unlocking empty spaces for young people to experiment and use. 

somewhereto_ aims to:

• unlock space to help young people
• create a movement which will enable young people to engage with their creative and cultural passions
• transform use of space throughout local communities

To date, somewhereto_ has…

• unlocked 308,000 sq ft of space,
• negotiated 1732 somewhereto_ space matches, between young people and space holders
• worked with youth partners to engage with young people and space partners who have access to the space which young people need
• highlighted we have potentially leveraged £1.6m in premises costs^.

 I have been a fan of the project since it was in planning and have been astonished at how well the project has been implemented.  On Tuesday we heard from two young people who had used the spaces that were made available to them, not only to fulfil their own aspirations and showcase their own talents and ideas… but also to support other young people do the same.  It was pretty inspiring.

Also inspiring was the dedication  and enthusiasm shown by the local project organisers who have been taking on the tougher side – speaking to local councils and businesses to release the spaces and to cut through red tape … of which there is a lot.

The frustrations won’t surprise you. How do they get more spaces unlocked quicker? How can we change some of the systems which mean the local authorities act with extreme caution, rather that with realism and imagination?

There is certainly willing… but a long way to go …

The meeting was under Chatham House rules, but I do feel at liberty to quote the Minister that was present who called for local authorities ‘to be bolder’ and to use the ‘General Power of Competence’ to find reasons for saying yes to more of these initiatives.

I came away inspired by a brilliantly conceived project, being brilliantly executed … and wishing that we could have a bigger Somewhereto_ that unlocked spaces for everyone’s use,  as well as young people … and also with renewed conviction that these sorts of projects only work this well when there is expert facilitation.

Thanks to Sam for the invitation and to Miranda Sawyer for such animated faciliation and Oli Barrett for bringing his whistle ... and in particlar to the young people who came and shared their inspiring stories! 

Trade School London - barter for knowledge

Today Miriam taught us about analogue photography and how to make cyanotype prints with sunlight. Last week Ansel brought his wormery in from home to teach us how to make compost. The week before (among other things) we were turning whales pink with photoshop thanks to Tanya, designing usable websites with Rae, and growing food in the city with Kristen.

Trade School London has been up and running for a few weeks now - and there is still a chance to come along to the last few classes in our first season. Breadbaking, poetry and cycle maintenance are still open to attend - just book online and bring your exchange item to give to the teacher.

Trade School runs on a barter and exchange system. Not in the sense of haggling someone down to the cheapest price possible - but offering things of value other than money, in exchange for the opportunity to learn something new.

It has been a fascinating experience seeing how people react to the idea, and how we can revalue what we find important. We are still mid season, and I'm sure more realisations will trickle through in the coming weeks, but some initial thoughts...

Normally, on the way out of the door, I grab bag, phone, keys, wallet and off. I know if there is something I want during the day, I can exchange money for it without consciously thinking beyond the numerical price attached to it. (Actually, my ethics are stronger than that, but for the sake of argument..!) For Trade School I was thinking several days in advance of the class what I would bring the teacher, wondering if it was suitable, weighing up if it was a fair deal, and remembering to get it sorted out. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking from the start.

At the classes, sometimes before, and sometimes after, each person would explain their item and pass it on to the teacher. It felt much more personal and intimate than paying with money. People had baked cakes, brought plants they'd grown from seed, passed on books they had enjoyed, gathered various belongings. As a teacher of one class myself I had a longer attachment to the experience and the people that came as I ate some of the swapped bananas for breakfast the next morning, started reading the book and looked up some music suggestions I was given. Not only does each item have a story attached to it. more importantly it has a person attached to it. It's something that links two or more people together in an experience, over time. Now tell me the last time you felt like that about a banana!

It does take a while to get your head round - although the Trade School concept is simple, the underlying ideas around alternative economics and exchange are complex. The current financial economic model is so embedded in our thinking and behaviour it takes a while to unpick and feel comfortable with something else. But based on the positive feedback from people so far - there is a lot of value in this way of treating one another and the resources we have, that we are often currently over looking.

***

Trade School is a great way to learn, share resources, and make new connections. The first season runs until end April, then we are taking a quick break. If you would like to find out more, or start a Trade School in your area - get in touch!
london [@] tradeschool.coop

www.tradeschool.coop/london

Mobile & Mint - free workshops around East London

Mobile & Mint is hitting the streets...

Offering free community workshops around East London - to spread new ideas, and inspire collaborative action. Click to book!

Available for community groups, networks of interest, residents associations, voluntary organisations, groups of friends, anyone interested in positive change... Around Hackney and Tower Hamlets - cycle lanes permitting!

Based on the Travelling Pantry project, Mobile & Mint shares new ideas from community practise around the world (collected through collaborative books Hand Made and The Community Lover's Guide to the Universe); plus a series of tried and tested methods to encourage the co-design of new types of community projects.

+ learn about new types of community activities from around the world
+ design new collaborative projects
+ apply strategic planning and positively re-assess available resources

Click to book!

Launching 19 April with a class at Trade School London, with special guest Maurice. 
Thu 19 Apr, 8pm. FARM:shop, 20 Dalston Lane. More on the Trade School London site.

And fitting in as many workshops as possible from then.

Thank you to...
Lindsay Noble for her inspired design
Christian from East London Furniture for the custom built fruit crate
The Hackney Bike Workshop, Bikeworks, and Paul Gleeson for joint effort helping me to get the wheels on straight.
More pics here 

Community Lover's Guide: One down, many more to come!

Almost a year after suggesting we make a local edition of Hand Made, 9 March saw the official launch of the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam! A collection of 14 initiatives highlighting inspiring and creative ways in which people have been forging bonds and creating communities. Using empty spaces, shops, kids, food, greenery, sand, books, stories, art, and symbols in new and old ways has resulted in some amazing projects.

Making the book has been a thrilling experience. In showed me again how many people are actively trying to make their city into a better place to live. I decided to start the book with an introductory chapter explaining this feeling. So the first draft of this chapter was called 'For the love of public space'  because what I think all the projects collected in this book show is the care, pride and ambition people show for their environment and each other. But it didn't quite get to the significance I started these initiatives had.

So I ended up writting a different chapter called 'Desire Lines', arguing that we should see the projects brought together as social equivalents of the desire lines you see in public space. And just as city planners don't really know how to deal with these desire lines (ignore them, take them into account and make them into official roads, or pave them over from time to time to keep the appearance of the official world as the only way up) policymakers, scientists, media and fellow citizens also find it difficult to relate to these projects. They like them, but what is their particular value? I don't have an answer to this question, but have put it out there as an invitation to explore this with me.

We launched the book in a ‘Community Lover's Lab’ over the course of 3 days, in an empty shop on one of the main shopping streets in Rotterdam. People were welcomed in with a Pie Lab (offering free pie on a china plate), and invited to share what they wanted to see more of in their neighbourhood, and to add assets to a big map of the area. Some were just curious and left after a small exchange, others stayed for an hour talking about the neighbourhood, but also the economy, the value of money, education and coffee shops. It was a really fun and energizing experience.

more pictures of the lab can be found at: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/communityloverslab

Other activities included a conversation with a mixed group of project initiators, urban professionals and researchers gathering to try and find the right language to grasp the value and meaning of the projects brought together in the book. In turned out to be a very difficult thing to do; to have a conversation publicly allowing for doubt in understanding what is happening around us. It has led to a new experiment called 'Doubt-lab' in which we will be trying to find safe conversation formats to publicly express and work with doubts. More will be up on the Social Lab before too long – and it would be great to share others experiences.

You can find all the Dutch chapters here, or buy the book here. The English edition of the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam will be available online for free, and in hard copy print from mid-April. So keep a close I on Twitter (@mauricespecht) for the announcements 

We have also developed a 3 day ' Immerse Learning'  experience around the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam in which we invite people from abroad to explore and learn from these inspiring projects first hand. We call this trip 'Into the Field'. More details can be found here 

All in all what started a year ago as a quaint remark has now gone into its second phase. With the first book coming out, and other editions from different cities as London (Hackney), West-Alabama, Birmingham, Utrecht and Minneapolis around the corner, the potential of this project is becoming more and more clear to me. It's an inspiring way of building a local and an international network of people changing the world bit by bit.For an overview of all the future edition visit Community Lover's Guide to the Universe.

 

Social Brain Lab: Introduction to trust building

{Image above from the S1NGLETOWN installation)

For nearly two weeks I have had writing this post on trust on my list.  However every day I do or say something stupid myself... and if I wait until I am better at this stuff myself this will never get written... so here it is.  

Why is trust so important?

We all know its important, particularly when we want to work with others.  The more complex the situation or collaboration, the more trust plays a part in achieving success.  Studies have shown that relational trust, or more particularly lack of trust between people, has a direct cost to organisations – everything costs more money because it slows everything down and without trust you also have to create much more elaborate processes to compensate…

Studies have shown that relational trust also has indirect effects and collectively this can have some powerful results.

A large and influential study that focused on the importance of relationships within school communities was conducted by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider and was published as Trust in Schools, in 2002.  This important work studied the effects of high and low relational trust in schools and they concluded that there was a direct correlation between the levels of relational trust in the whole school community: students, parents and teachers, and the academic results of the students.  Additionally they concluded that:

Relationship trust is forged in daily social exchanges. . .Relational trust constitutes the connective tissue that binds these individuals together around advancing the education and welfare of children. (Bryk &  Schneider, 2002, p 137 + 144)

 So high levels of relational trust makes things faster, cheaper and better….

Trust and the Social Brain

Chances are that without understanding in detail how trust works, we may be trustworthy in some ways and not others. The problem is that parts of the human brain sort of aggregate all the data about us, and then print out a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the trust question without saying how it got this answer.  Trust is a very finely tuned biological safety feature.  We all know about our 'fight or flight', an automated system, which is constantly and instantaneously on the look out for signs of danger. On a more subtle scale this system is quietly gathering data on everything going on around us – then it synthesizes all that information and jumps to a conclusion. On the one hand very useful and on the other sometimes rather annoying.

What this means is that there is no way around the system. Although our brains might be more or less finely tuned (we can for example become 'hyper-vigilant' to trust issues after a few negative experiences) …  no amount of acting classes are going get you past the everyday ability of a human to detect a lack a trustworthiness in another person.

We are so biologically tuned into one another that we effect each other's heart rate and blood pressure within minutes of entering the same space.  The blood-pressure of a sick person reduces when another person sits with them - even if they are unconscious or asleep.  This subtle back and forth between us leads us to share moods quickly and easily, and it also gives us very strong instincts about trust... sometimes instantly and sometimes based on a lot of data gathered by our brains over time.

Trust behaviours 

At the highest level trust is about being honest and maintaining a high degree of integrity.  The word ‘integrity’ means ‘being whole’… integrated.  So what you show on the outside should reflect what’s on the inside.If it isn't... if we pick up some inconguity, however sublte or hard to define, between what people might being presenting to us, and what we think their real intentions might be, we start to distrust.  Being a person with a good reputation for integrity also involves a person demonstrating their integrity outwardly.  If you are a hermit it would be difficult for people to know if you were trustworthy or not.  

You might not wish to think that you are being highly judgmental about people around you – but you will find that your brain likely has been working on your behalf.

Trust in a community context

We said that our focus in the Social Brain Lab was to look at these issues in the community context.  I mentioned above that in the Trust in Schools research they showed that relational trust correlated to student’s grades. How many other effects might come from a high trust community?

I have blogged a lot against approaches to getting communities active that use conflict as a deliberate tool.  Agitating groups of people around grievances I believe is very manipulative and very ineffectual long term.  If you believe, as I do, that we are going to develop better social outcomes through collaboration, between local authorities, schools, community groups, councilors etc ... then building relational trust has to be an integral part of building ‘collaborative capacity’.

In my experience conflict in local communities divides and fractures existing social networks … and people can behave in shocking ways.  The most common narrative is that the object, person, organization takes on some very unpleasant characteristics.  This ‘demonising’ gives the campaigning group permission to do or say pretty much anything in order to win.  

If you want to collaborate on community projects trust is also essential.  When you work in organizations there are processes, which to some extent compensates (poorly) for lack of trust. 

We have for years tried to do this in communities by working through stifling committee structures, often attracting only the most determined and skilled… but repelling the majority.   Thankfully we see signs of change... and in all the new examples of communities working creatively and collaboratively that we have studied,  you will find trust at the core of their success.

My favourite quote on trust:

"Having spent many years trying to define the essential of trust, I have arrived at the position that if two people could say two things to each other and mean them, then there was the basis for trust.  The two things are “I mean you no harm” and “I seek your greatest good”

Jim Meehan, British Psychologist and Poet 

Surfacing the good stuff - and then showing it to everyone ...

Some conversations this week have reminded me of some projects that I thought I would share with you,  All of the projects below  have used photography to highlight people and activities in communities.  Photography is used a lot for this purpose - and you may have done something similiar yourself - these projects just stand out a little in terms of showing different ways of doing it.

Hello Neighbour

"Students from ten middle schools across Portland and Central Oregon are participating in Caldera's Hello Neighbor project. Along with photographer Julie Keefe, the students have begun to identify, interview and photograph diverse people of all ages in their neighborhoods. 

From their work, the Caldera students will create photo-and-word portraits to be displayed on large, 7 foot by 5 foot banners throughout their communities."

Rotterdam de Zuiderlingen

In 2008, 155 portraits with between 4,000 and 5,000 residents of Southern Rotterdam were shown through a book and an (outside) exhibition. They also mapped all the groups.

Birmingham Community Tea Room - I am Stirchley

I did a workshop/surgery in Birmingham last year in a pop-up community cafe arranged by Inhabit - they had been featuring local people in their exhibition - really beautiful stuff.

JR

And of course all the amazing work of photographer JR.

 

Do these sorts of projects make a difference to a community?  I think that they do. Work around 'social norms marketing' would suggest that by revealing actual activities in a community you can alter a community's perception of where they live.  Social norms marketing (different from 'social marketing') came out of research that showed that young people at colleges in the US perceived that other people drank more alcohol than they really did... and this exagerated perception of what others were drinking made them drink more.  So they went into a community, did quantative research into the real drinking patterns and then promoted those real figures, instead of the inflated ones that students were imagining.  This reduced alcohol consumption.  Rather than broadcasting, revealing the reality has powerful effects.

There is a common perception that people are disinterested in getting involved in their communities, that they 'don't care anymore'. Another is that there 'isn't that much going on around here'.  This is where these sorts of projects become invaluable.  They don't broadcast a false 'this place is great'.... but instead they show good stuff that is just a bit hidden from view.

It is one the great things about the Collaborative 3D Asset Mapping activity we do in workshops - people are pretty thrilled when they discover that when all their collective knowledge is pooled to make the map their neighbourhood is full of activities and opportunities that they didn't know about.  The act of revealing these people, ideas, spaces and other opportunities means there is much more chance they will be connected and built on.

Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam

This revealing process is what we are doing with the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe project.  Yesteday I had the thrill of seeing the hard copy of the first of the series to be published.  Edited by Maurice Specht, the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam is launching with a 3 day event on the 8/9/10 March - in an old laundomat in Rotterdam.

 

Social Brain Lab: Introduction to Social Cognition

Last week I introduced the Social Brain Lab, and our intention to work with others to create some helpful tools based on selective, condensed knowledge about how people function.

The key points from the learning models I described from my research is that firstly, when knowledge is applied well it can make our interpretations of situations more accurate and interpersonal exchanges more positive … and secondly, that the knowledge itself can trigger an ongoing learning process of self-observation and self-direction.

In a series of posts I wanted to focus on some aspects of social brain research, which might help a person working in a community achieve more positive results. 

What is social cognition?

Today I am going to introduce social cognition, a term used in a few different ways.  The social cognition I am referring to here is the ability to understand another person’s mental states and thought processes.  From the age of 5 children start to understand that other people may think differently from them… this natural phenomena is labelled Theory of Mind.  This whole area of study has become very intricate and over recent years a number of extremely detailed and interconnected disciplines have emerged, many resulting from the application of new research from neuroscience. An example of this is 'social neuroscience' which is a relatively new field first developed by John Cacioppo at Chicago University.

Although I am personally fascinated with the academic research, what I am most interested in is the key pieces of knowledge that a regular person might find helpful in managing themselves and navigating interpersonal relationships. In the Social Brain Lab we are intent on focusing on how key pieces of knowledge might be helpful in community/social settings.

The community scenario

The scenario you could imagine is that you are regular person who is interested in making your community a nicer place to live.  You know that this will require a great deal of collaboration and co-operation, with groups of people working together to make positive things happen.  Your motivation for getting involved in such community building activity is that you would like to see divisions between age or culture bridged… and believe that a genuine opportunity now exists among residents to make and shape their social and physical environment of the neighbourhood.  You are realistic however, and understand that this can be difficult. New community activity often challenges existing social and professional structures and hierarchies and even the most positive activities can create controversy – in turn possibly leading to difficult conversations.  

In these complex situations you want to be able to communicate well.  You want people to understand what you are saying in substance, but also clearly understand your intentions and motivations.  You also want to be able to understand other people well, not misinterpreting what people say, or making negative assumptions about their intentions. As well as the diplomattic communication burdens you recognise that communicating ideas, stimulating ideas in other people and helping groups work together productively is very important in achieving your aims. 

In his important the new book Together, sociolist Richard Sennett is very persuasive in his argument that co-operation requires skill as well as goodwill - particularly when trying to work with people who aren't of the same mindset or background as ourselves - the type of co-operation that puts a much higher burdern on social cognition. You can listen to his recent RSA talk here.

Understanding what is going on in your own head is difficult.  Monitoring a conversation in a live situation to ensure that what you say is an accurate reflection of what you mean, is even more difficult.  Then when you add ‘social cognition’  - trying to understanding what is happening in the other person’s head as they process what you are saying… is very challenging indeed … but not impossible.

Communicating well in every single situation we find ourselves in is too much to ask of any undividual in my opinion, there are simply too many stresses in daily life to demand that degree of concentration of ourselves.  But we can learn to communicate well regularly with some practice, improving our social cognition abilities over time, but not without understanding how our minds work - particularly many minds together.

Applying social cognition to workshop activities

We use this understanding of social cognition thinking and Theory of Mind in some of the activities we have designed for workshops already.  We call them ‘talking tools’, but basically they are activities to help a group of individuals surface and share their mindsets.  We used these activities in public workshops with Reading Council, and are about to test a similar new health related activity later this month.  Our experience is that these tools perform an interesting function – people are genuinely surprised to discover that people think differently from them, that they have differing attitudes to the role of the council vs the potential role of local residents., and the way the conversation is structured through the activity leads people to be intrigued to find these differences.

What to learn more?

There are two ways you can explore social cognition in more detail if this topic interests you.

Firstly, you can start to delve into the academic research.  A good place to start would be to listen to some of the free lectures from Berkeley that you can get from iTunes U – I would recommend as a good starting point lectures 19, 20 and 21 from this series of lectures by John Kihlstrom. 

Secondly, you can look at the more practical literature on communication. The two best books I have read on communication are Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations. 

In summary

High level communications are incredibly valuable. They can be learned, with knowledge and practice, but the type of good communication that I am promoting here is not the same as masterful manipulation - smooth talking attempts are often designed to get people to do what others want them to do - and thankfully they regularly and predictably get exposed for what they are. 

In my experience, important collaborative relationships, creating genuine mutual understanding and dialogue, can only be developed with completely ruthless self-honestly. We need to challenge ourselves constantly to avoid getting stuck in our own group mindsets, defensive, inaccurate or unhelpful narratives. Genuine dialogue also requires generosity of thought - ingredients for understanding the frames and perspectives of other people.

Which leads me neatly onto the next post on the Social Brain Lab .... where I will talk about trust building. 

Knowledge, learning and the Social Brain Lab

We have started the Social Brain Lab to develop some practical tools to use in communities.  

All the projects we study at Social Spaces involve connecting people at local level. The projects often have multiple effects: raising awareness of environmental issues, introducing new ways to encourage informal learning or starting enterprises. 

However, we know that connection itself is important for two primary reasons:

 1. Positive relationships, trust and denser networks lead to new things happening

2. Creating social connection is valuable in itself.

More detail on this here.

Drawing on our existing research and knowledge in metacognition, collaboration and learning... plus our long running study of emergent community projects which, by design, fundamentally change how people interact face-to-face, the Social Brain Lab aims to collaborate with others to condense the large volume of research and data (social capital, social neuroscience, wellbeing etc) into a number of tools designed specifically to give a practical working knowledge of these important insights and stimulate further project ideas in a community workshop setting.

My interest in knowledge really grew doing the research and analysis for my MA Ed.  I used Lewin’s Equation to describe the overarching question “does knowledge about how we function change the way we behave?”.  Lewin’s Equation states that

B=ƒ(P,E)  Behaviour = Function of (Personality in their Environment). 

Do specific pieces of knowledge add to the influences of personality and environment? 

Are there automated human responses that can be drawn into more conscious decision-making processes with knowledge? 

Does knowledge help us to interpret life situations more accurately to inform our choices and subsequent behaviours?

Tracking knowledge through cognitive processes is a pretty complex and time consuming process. The research that I undertook involved teaching 200 teenagers over 2 years in a number of very different schools a set of experiential lessons on human functioning from many different disciplines.  I interviewed students at various stages, looking for cognitive patterns and learning processes in the analysis.

I took my emergent results to a number of specialists to help understand what the analysis was revealing, including long time friend and inspiration Colleen McLaughlin from Cambridge University… and Ian Morris, Head of Wellbeing at Wellington College, who had worked with me with the original student lessons.

The final learning model that emerged is described in the diagram below which I called Informed Autonomy, a model which I believe to be original in this type of research and strongly supports the idea of teaching young people about human functioning, as I expressed in this RSA article in 2008. 

The most significant results of the research were as follows:

-       Knowledge matters – knowing about how we function can change behaviour firstly on a conscious level .. eventually at a judgement level.

-       Knowledge matters more when you process it fully, connecting it to your personal experiences. Knowledge + cognitive processes + experience is the essential combination required for learning.

-       Knowledge triggers self-observation, repeated instances of self-observation lead to building personal knowledge.

-       You don’t need to use therapeutic methods (such as group self-disclosure) to build personal knowledge.

-       Higher level cognitive processes are required. In Blooms Taxonomy terms this equates to ‘Applying’ upwards… which comes after ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’.

Worth noting here is the brilliant work of the RSA's Social Brain project who have also done some work since on the value of teaching people about how their brains work.

So what has all this got to do with the Social Brain Lab?

In the same way that knowledge was condenced into the most relevant elements for the original research we are hoping to do the same for people designing community social projects. What knowledge from neuroscience and social neuroscience could help when applied to this setting? Can this type of knowledge help people collaborate better, design projects better ...?

We would like to develop these new tools in collaboration with other people because we know there is a lot of deep understanding out there about what knowledge is most up-to-date in research terms, and what tried and tested methods and social processes continue to work. We think that mixing this up with some design thinking could create some really helpful open source tools for communities to use.  

There is an open invitation to take part in this work, so if you are interested please do get in touch!

If you are interested in new ways of building knowledge, and want to see how this might work in a social context, please join us in the Ad Hoc Enquiries!

{NB If you are an organisation that would like to use the learning models above in your work, for non commercial purposes only, please do get in touch for permissions and more detail on the research process}

 

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...

 

Unfinished Business

In the last two weeks a particular quality of community projects and spaces which seem to be working particularly well, has became clear to me: being unfinished as built in quality to engage people.This is counterintuitive to the way we have think about services or our public spaces. They are built around things being in order, sorted out, and meticulously planned out. (Social) Designers are very much consciously aware of this. They have all kind of possibilities of designing in, mostly unaware to us, a particular and desired kind of behaviour. Dan Lockton’s set of card ‘Design with intent’ offers 101 examples of things designers can do to influence our behaviour through design. His set of cards can be found here. Leaving things unfinished isn’t part of his extensive repertoire.

Thinking about changing people behavior through design has recently got a big push through the work of Thaler and Sunnstein on nudging. Their concept of a choice architecture deals with the same thing. Through this design thinking has been introduced to both a more general public and to a much wider variety of domains.

One thing we should remember is that people don’t always use the way things are intended. They deviate from the way things were meant to be used. A nice example in public space is offered by this picture (on the highly recommendable blog Urban Bricolage by Eric Hooge, a collection of people tinkering with urban space)

The caption of this picture reads: 

“A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.”

This deviating behavior already points to an openness in every design for users to explore particular ways of using it. But this deviant behavior is mostly seen, especially from the perspective from the designer or the planned world, as undesirable. But what if this openness is exactly what helps define a good public space or community project? And is keeping things unfinished as a design choice a way of designing in this openness? To explore this first two examples which made me realize ‘being unfinished’ might be a particular quality you could use and could help us explain their value and what it offers different from services.

The first time this became clear to me was while visiting the Arcola Theater during a study trip organized by Inspiring Cities. During this visit Ben Todd gave a talk explaining how the theatre came about and how it operates. There were many interesting things happening at this place, but one remark stuck with me ‘we try to keep the project unfinished to make people feel able to relate to it’. By keeping things open, you give people the opportunity to not only act as a user, a client or a customer. You give them the possibility to appropriate things, make them (part of) their own. From a user you are given the opportunity to co-own something. This doesn’t mean that you do not offer anything. It’s not about offering nothing; it’s about keeping a particular openness for people to relate to objects or spaces in a different manner than consumer mode.

 



The second recent encounter with the value of being unfinished occurred to me while visiting socialspaces.be at the Media, Arts and Design Acadamy in Genk. One of their researchers, Ben Hagenaars told about a former project of his, Animation Vegetation. In this project he has created 3D jute dolls filled with soil and grass to drop in the public space. Inspired by the graffiti movement, the dolls aim to generate more green spaces in public spaces. What makes this project interesting is that Ben has put a tutorial on his website which enables everyone to make their own. So he gives away a template to intervene in public spaces, thus enabling others to do something with it. Again this is a nice example of the added value of leaving something unfinished.

Leaving things unfinished invites people to engage with things in a deeper, more personal manner. It is an invitation to appropriate something, to make it your own, to add value and meaning to it. Moreover it hands over responsibility, ownership and control to people. It asks them to make something, not out of nothing, but at least make something happen. They can add their skills, knowledge, experiences and dreams. By keeping it unfinished people who join in later can still add something.

So where does this leave us. Should we just do nothing and leave it up to people to fill in all those things which we leave intentionally unfinished. No, that would be pushing it. Instead we should be looking at ways in which we could strategically built in the unfinished. To help me articulate this and finish off this post, I want to refer to a text by Joop de Boer en Jeroen Beekmans. They run a website 'The Pop-Up City' collecting examples of temporary and flexible Interventions in urban space. In the recently published book ‘The spontaneous city’ by Urhahn Design, they have written a text in which they argue that in a sense spontaneity is overrated, or maybe it’s too optimistic a view on how to work with and on cities. Instead they argue that we should not expect things to happen spontaneous by nature, we should try and induce spontaneous action in people. They call it ‘Artificial Spontaneity’. Although a good party has a spontaneous feel to it, it requires a lot of preparation. What this implies for designers is thus that is not about ‘the spontaneity of the intervention, but about giving rise to the spontaneous social interaction’. Leaving things unfinished is one way of creating such artificial spontaneity. I leave it at that, maybe unfinished, but ready for you to take it further wherever you want to. 

 

Social Spaces: Civic Engagement, Social Capital and Unemployment

A fascinating post on the Social Capital Blog details two recent studies in the US which show correlations between civic engagement and levels of unemployment.  At one end of the scale Nevada, where less than 5% percent worked with neighbours, has unemployment of 10% - 12%... while at the top end is Alaska, where 15% worked with neighbours, has unemployment of 0% - 2%.

While they are quick to point out that the study does not prove causation. However Bob Graham thinks that taken together with other studies that these finding will be proven real:

"Assuming this finding turns out to be real, one might wonder about the mechanisms.  My hunch of the most likely culprit is that in higher social capital places, firms are more likely to share the pain through across-the-board cutback in hours rather than concentrate the pain through layoffs and firings.  Levine and Dietz posit other explanatory factors:

• stronger social networks make it easier for people to get re-employed;
• civic engagement helps generate skills and confidence that translate into employability;
• civic engagement helps spread information that make it easier for individuals to learn about job openings or training programs;
• civic engagement produces higher trust and higher trust leads to better economic performance (although social trust wasn’t directly measured in the CPS survey);
• governments are more responsible and responsive in high civic engagement states; or
• people in more engaged communities may feel greater community attachment which leads them to invest more locally."

This study supports the idea that community and connection can have a real impact on difficult problems - working very much in the area of 'effects'.  In April I wrote about protective factors for young people in particular and the idea that a connected community would have the 'secondary effect' of helping support young people better than some of the more direct interventions.

Social Spaces: Why Pie?

When the lovely people over at Westminster Hub asked us to hold some sort of event for their Changemakers’ Fayre on the 27/28^th October we thought long and hard about what sort of event we could do that would fit with the Hub’s ambitions to seed thousands of new conversations during the Fayre … and also our own ideas and work.

Our first thought was to shape an event that brought together some of the amazing people we know to share some of the research, strategies, and other transdisciplinary emergent community stuff our heads are currently immersed in.  Which of course would have been lovely… and we hope to be doing a lot of that sort of event in the coming months.

But instead we decided to do a PieLab event for the whole day on the 28^th  – thanks to some bright thinking from Laura Billings.  This means that we will just to be hanging out at the Hub, sharing free pie and chatting to everyone that wants to pop by.

In all our workshops we talk about PieLab in Greensboro Alabama – one of our most inspiring projects.  The Changemakers’ Fayre gives us an opportunity not only to talk about PieLab, publish books about PieLab … but to actually ‘do’ PieLab.

We talk about PieLab for two very important reasons:

There are no short cuts

PieLab is a brilliant example of how a project can (and should) start from the smallest point of contact between people.  When we look at the Theory of Change and assumptions that people are working to on many existing community projects we often see that a common ‘failure to engage’ is often caused by a ‘failure to start small enough’.

And with so much talk around at the moment about taking over community buildings and services, and even social enterprise, it is easy to see how in our haste we could forget that absolutely nothing happens in communities without the relationships that drive any ideas and projects forward. 

PieLab started by holding free pie events, with the simple proposition that ‘life can be bad, free pie isn’t’ …. And now have permanent premises in the high street out of which they still produce pies, but also have created an amazing community space through which all sorts of enterprising initiatives have emerged – from BikeLab to apprenticeships …

Below is the PieLab piece that they wrote for  the Hand Made so you can read their story for yourself.

Social is Social Change

So while we might see that building on relationships can be a great strategy for developing bigger more transformative projects, for many people the social can be the social change they really need.  We spent some wonderful time last week in Oldham, Manchester with a group called the Friends of Stoneleigh Park, that had started by focusing on their local park (which is beautiful), but now hold a lot of events for the community more widely.  We found that the level of care that this group are showing as they plan their events really inspiring – right down to picking elderly people up from their homes to attend a coffee morning or book swap… and even making sure they had someone they knew to sit next to.  Bringing people that might otherwise be isolated or lonely into enjoyable and comfortable contact is vital and valuable social change in itself.

Noel Hatch mentions the PieLab in his post here, quoting Toby Blume's post 'Food is Love' "If the ultimate act of love is to nurture another human being, then how can providing nutritious and delicious food be anything other than a hugely caring and generous deed?

My friend in the US, Jack Ricciuto in this interview extract  talks about exactly this point – saying that when you have a lot of money you can be preoccupied with scaling up as fast as possible, but when you want to engage people in the community it is the ‘small acts’ which really make a difference.

Invitation to PieLab

On Friday myself and Laura Billings will be bringing lots of pies (some we will even have made ourselves) to the Westminster Hub and we hope that many people will stop by and talk to us about their ideas and plans for social change – what they think community is all about and how we can all ‘do’ community in our own places and spaces.

A Big Thank You

We also wanted to give a big thank you to Tim, Alice and Indy at the Hub for letting us loose on their formally pristine greenhouse meeting room to bring in our This is Community installation - pics here and here.  Thanks for the confidence and trust… and above all the sense of creativity and fun you’ve allowed us… and of course to make something beautiful, visual and tangible out of our ideas and work.

And thank you also to all the lovely folk over in the US who created PieLab from the beginning – especially Megan Deal and Amanda Buck  who have wished us a lovely day on Friday and have always been so supportive of the Social Spaces project!

 

Update: Nice commentary piece by David Wilcox reporting the event

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More community

I am here

Spotted this beautiful photography project in Haggerston this morning. Huge faces peering out of windows! Such a simple and effective way to make people visible and real - the street felt welcoming with all the cheery smiles. Found myself smiling back...

More: www.iamhere.org.uk

 

Eat the Scenery

 

Waiting for the bus  isn't my favourite pastime, but if I lived on Landor Road in Brixton, it might soon be, thanks to a group of local residents getting together to create... the edible busstop!

A door drop with 400 leaflets brought out over 40 people to tend for a piece of neglected land, and you can see the resulting bloom here: www.theediblebusstop.org

Excitingly, the guys behind this project are branching out (!) into Park(ing) day which is an internatinoal campaign to reclaim the roads and put real parks in parking bays. Visit Southbank on 16 Sept to see it in action! www.parkingday.org

I 'heart' London

I'll admit it, I was getting a little tired of the rush and bustle, the concrete and the mess. Then I took a little break away carting the Mindapples tree round to festivals (more shortly) and came back home to find my local shops boarded, windows broken, fires being started. Hmm. Didn't help my urges to jack in city living and join the circus...

Then something special happened and I remembered why I love it here, and why it's still home.

Incident 1: Passing Clouds, Dalston.
Passing Clouds is an artist / musician owned venue in east London and Saturday night was a glorious 8 piece African drumming band which I went to with a friend from FARM:shop that I started volunteering at this time last year. We had our faces painted by some lovely ladies wearing head-dresses made from recycled plastic bags and danced til we dropped with new friends.

It's also home to the People's Kitchen on a Sunday - food by the people, for the people - using food surplus that would otherwise go to waste. Turn up from 3pm and help chop, peel and wash. Or come for a communal dinner and film in the early evening (for a donation.) Last time I was there I was so bowled over by the feast I forgot to take photos! So you'll have to do with the one I found above. We had soup and bread, salad and veg stew, fruit and yogurt, banana milkshakes, plus an amazing plum crumble from a mirabelle glut over in the park. SCRUMMY!

Incident 2: Bethnal Green Superstore
THis is my local mini-mart on Bethnal Green road and I've been shopping there for 7 years. Hassan let me walk out with £15 of shopping when I forgot my wallet once. I went last week to check his shop was ok in the riots and he was one of only two still open in the evening. And we had a giggle on Saturday when I did my shopping at 3am on the way back from Passing Clouds still covered in swirly blue face paint.

Incident 3: Love in a Cup
So then to Sunday. I went to the FARM:shop to help at Grow Sunday, then cycled back home via  Broadway Market and bumped into Christian from East London Furniture, and met Cash from Love in a Cup. This morning I popped in on my way to Mindapples HQ in town to say hi. Not only can I highly recommend the special with a curl of orange peel (which makes a flat white taste like a chocolate orange - YUM!) but the guy is a one man community making machine. He'll remember your name, your favourite coffee and your last conversation. I was there for less than 15 mins before 3 regulars dropped in to say hi and chat. "Hey Dom, double flat white with brown sugar? And did you find something for your mother's birthday present?"

And here's my point (finally!). London feels like home when you know people's names. When you walk or cycle the streets and stop to say hi. When you can join the dots. I've read 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox recently, and got rather downhearted about the analysis of the English social inadequacy and how we need props in order to talk to one another. Got me thinking what 'props' we already have we could use as an excuse. Cups of coffee? Communual meals? Buying your shopping?...

Social Spaces: First Community Kitchen in Lambeth Tomorrow Night

Lambeth Council, better known as the first Co-operative Council, is hosting a 'Volunteering Speed Dating' event tomorrow night 17th August between 6pm - 8pm.  The idea of the event has come out of the many offers of support the council has received over the last week following the civic disturbances.

As Lambeth have described, the evening will be an opportunity to:

• Meet people like you from across the borough
• Talk to community organisations and groups needing further support
• Get advice on how your skills can be used in Lambeth
• Commit to volunteer or just talk to experts about the sort of thing you want to do
• Get involved or be a wallflower, you can just listen to what's being discussed
• Celebrate what they have here in Lambeth.

Social Spaces will be running a Community Kitchen workshop in the Canteen between 7pm - 8pm for all residents who would like to start conversations about how the community can build further in the wonderful spirit in the area.

In planning for months now, the Community Kitchen is a new project planned to launch in the next few weeks, but we are bringing the project out early for this event.  Community Kitchen has evolved out of the Travelling Pantry project, and aims to give communities a new tool around which to hold positive conversations for stronger communities.  Community Kitchen will take on different guises and formats, but we hope that they will become, with the help of some accessible tools, regular self-arranged get-togethers for communities.  

Unlike traditional committee meetings and forums, Community Kitchens will encourage informal and creative conversations around developing new community projects with an asset-based focus rather than a problem solving or deficit-focused one.  The full launch of Community Kitchen will officially begin in September, and will see a large number of workshops being rolled out by a Local Authority as part of their innovative Community Engagement Strategy. 

Please join us on Wednesday 17th August between 7pm - 8pm in the Canteen (appropriately) at the Assembly Hall, Lambeth Town Hall, Town Hall, London SW2 1RW

We will be re-opening the free Travelling Pantry project in the next few weeks  - offering workshops to community groups in response to requests following the riots -  in Lambeth and Peckham... and other areas .... so please register your interest here.

This is Community: Why the Clean-ups Are So Important

The analysis in the media of why the UK erupted in street violence last week have offered us a buffet of reasoning across the political spectrum.

We've been offered: greed, gangs, the recession, unemployment, bad parenting, cultural disintegration, harsh policing, lax policing, slack sentencing, attitudes, social norms, the media scandal, the banking scandal, the expenses scandal, government cuts, professional incompetence, social contagion, opportunism, backlash.  

We've seen the argument swerve dangerously (usually in the same programme) from individual responsibility to state responsibility - depending on which political party you are supporting. 

Finally the arguments ended the week  in a horrible intellectual heap of ridiculousness at the doors of David Starkey.

I offer my own brief observations with some understanding that a week on we have all pretty much had enough of the analysis and political point scoring. So I am sticking to some person thoughts from my own experience... and reflecting on things that have been helpful this week.

A great many young people involved in the riot activities in the last week will have been 'known to the authorities'.  It is unusual to go from a stay-at-home teenager to looting in one step.  If the are 'known' at all, they will have been on the system of several agencies, possibly including youth offending, social services, the police, education teams, employment schemes.  Having worked for a short period in a Youth Offending Team (YOT) I can assure you of the tightness of these processes in steering a young person through a system.  There is hardly a crack through which any small degree of anti-social behaviour can slip through.  There are endless rounds of meetings they must attend.  If they miss meetings they are back in court for further measures.  They are sent on courses, their parents are counselled, they go on restorative justice programmes, they do 'community service'....  Seriously, there is very little not deployed to reform and shape a young person's behaviour to a more pro-social way of living.  

The government has made cuts to Youth Offending Teams - and probably this is one of the many reasons why the violence erupted... but the professional practice of YOTs will not have altered much with the change in government.  

But my own experience of YOTs work, as valuable and important as it is, is that it does not compensate for what a caring community could do for young people.  Most kids with ASBOs are shunned by the community in which they live, the families are shunned and likely to schools exclude those children.  I wrote about these experiences in more detail in this post on Protective Factors, Systems Thinking and People Power.

The main point here being that communities can do for young people that no amount of services can do for them.  These services cannot give them a feeling of belonging, a feeling of importance, a sense that their talents and contributions to society are valued and valuable.  These services cannot help them build relationships with helpful adults, build their own social capital and empower them ultimately into economic independence and civic participation and contribution. There are things that only communities can do for each other.

The citizen-led clean-ups that happened across the effected areas in the days that followed the riots, lifted our spirits and gave us back a bit of hope that society hadn't quite unravelled in the way much of the press seemed happy to promote.  But they are much more important than simply extending hope.  They were statements of ownership across those neighbourhoods.  They were statements about the strong feelings of anger that local residents had towards the violence and the destruction of neighbourhoods.  

And the Local Authority clean-up squads couldn't send that sort of message.... and instinctively these local folk knew that the message was as important as the clearn-up and the message could not be delivered by the local authority.

I wrote recently about a programme in Chicago called CeaseFire designed by an expert in the spread of infectious diseases called Gary Slutkin who has used the power of community outrage as part of a detailed strategy which has reduced violence by 45%  - 75%.  Every time there is violence the community demonstrate against the violence. Note:  They don't march against the authorities to stop the violence, they march against the violent behaviours from their own community members.  They express a collective rejection of these behaviours.  As Slutkin says ‘for these communities violence is simply normal – we work to make it unusual’.

The Peace Rallies which have started to emerge this weekend are further really powerful examples of how citizens see this need to make social expressions of peace.

And this is essentially what these clean-ups have done, with the addition of showing pride on where these residents live.  And perhaps all rolled up that is why we have found them so heartening, and why more than likely they have contributed to the riots reducing. 

Now all we need to figure out is how to make young people get more of their sense of community from the clean-ups teams and less from their gangs - and thankfully that small detail is very much in our hands.

[For a more detailed and academic exploration of encouraging autonomy in young people I wrote this RSA article in 2008 following my own research.]

Pic: Notice board in Peckham where people posted messages of peace and tolerance.

 

Big Society: Time for Outrage?

I am not sure how I missed this story - I have found it so interesting and I thought it worth blogging about in case other's might have missed it too?  

Stephane Hessell released a 3 page pamphlet in France last October entitled “Indignez-Vous!” which has sold over 1.5 million copies.  The number of sales on this slim volume – sold for €3 - is pretty remarkable.

Hessell is 94.  He lived through the WWII, was active in the French Resistance, survived concentration camps, was involved in drafting the Declaration of Human Rights, spend much of his life as a diplomat and an active agent of positive change.  His experience and his life are significant factors in the spread of this recent work… but its timing has also contributed perhaps to how his message has been received.

So what is his message? I have read and reread it over the last couple of weeks – an English version here – wanting to blog about it, but thinking how important it is to drawn honestly on his text.  ‘Time for Outrage’ is a call to action on both political and social justice issues. Hessell draws our attention to a number of negative issues currently alive and well in society, examples include the widening gap between rich and poor, the powers of the press (ironically given the recent press scandals), the treatment of immigrants and more controversial issues concerning Israel and Palestine.

Here are some of the interpretations.. and further questions I have made from Hassell’s piece:

-       He asks for people not to ignore things that are happening subtly through the effects of social norms etc – such as showing a lack of respect to immigrants. The insidious permeation of behaviours, which add up to a terrible negative culture.  

-       He asks us to wake up to how the powers have been at work very quietly to dominate decision-making …. As well as waking up to our own contributions to the situation through passivity and via our smaller contributions.

-       He asks us to get active… but to work through peaceful means.  In fact his closing statement is ‘To create is to resist; to resist is to create.”

I recently read the book Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan and reading Hessell’s essay resonated with some of the things that Heffernan talks about.  In Willful Blindness Heffernan catalogues all the ways that we are blind to the bigger truths, sometimes in our personal lives, but also in work or public related ways.  One example is how the subprime mortgage crisis occurred not because of an individual ‘someone’ doing something hugely stupid (although Alan Greenspan ....) … but because literally 100s of people, at hundreds of organisations, across all levels, turned a blind eye to what they saw directly in front of them.  Individual employees were approving multiple mortgages on the same property on the same day.  It is a fascinating book with dozens of examples of how the mind works to make us ‘not know’ things that we sort of really do know but don’t want to confront even with ourselves. 

In another example Heffernan describes a firm in the US that kept a mine open for years with full knowledge that the high levels of asbestos in the dust was killing not only the workers in the mine – but the whole town.  When this knowledge was revealed publically the town did not want to know either – despite people actually dying around them at ridiculously young ages.  Most shocking in that story was the small fact that the head teacher at the town’s school did not reveal the fact for 5 years that the school’s running track was build on foundations of waste from the mine.  For 5 years after knowing the risks to health the students still performed athletics on contaminated dust!

What must things be like for Hessel – to live through one of the most shocking instances of crimes against humanity – to win – to make all sorts of huge and fundamental strides towards creating a better world – such as writing the Declaration of Human Rights … only to see some of those gains slip quietly away due to inattention or passivity or lack of knowledge or insight? It does feel as though Hessell is shouting …in frustation.

The questions that Hassel asks are ones that many have been asking for a long time:

-       How do we make obvious things that are often so slow or so invisible that we don’t see them until the full impact has been gathered. 

-       How do we take responsibility for our individual behaviours – knowing that they contribute powerfully to the collective that shapes our social culture.

-       How do we ‘create to resist’?  What does that look like?  Is the call that Hessell makes here a call to encourage citizens to pro-actively shape the world they want to live in – a ‘call to action’ rather than a ‘call to arms’ which its title initially suggests?

Hessel's work is controversial in many ways - there are many who are trying to dismiss it or criticise it - there were certainly many points that I noted seemed in need of further investigation.... but I can also see that there are many reasons why this commentary has drawn so many people in France to buy it, why it is so timely... and why Hessel's voice within this text has made it's appeal so strong.

I see many points of comparison with Big Society, a concept I still wholeheartedly support. Isn’t Big Society after all, at its most fundamental, a call  ... or an idea, to help people get more involved in shaping society – rather than simply acting as consumers or critiquing society from afar?

Imagine 1.5 million copies sold of a leaflet talking about Big Society? Can't see that happening somehow....

 

Social Spaces: Parklets --- A San Francisco Wonder

In San Francisco they have a new type of urban re-occupation called Parklets.  Basicially a restaurant or shop extends from the pavement area to occupy the parking spaces in front as well! They are getting pretty popular - being described as 'parking for people' .... even appearing outside residential homes recently.

"Livable City director Tom Radulovich also spoke at the event, talking about how the streets were traditionally the gathering and social spaces in cities, until transportation planners started to value the efficient movement and storage of automobiles over a more inclusive view of streets. But the parklets – along with temporary street seizures like the Sunday Streets events – are part of a movement back to a more holistic view of city spaces."

 

Take Your Seats

 

Following on from the success of the Exmouth Market pallet project, East London Furniture have now set up home in 151 Hoxton Street.

The pallet project was park of Clerckenwell Design week, and saw 21 pieces made over 10 days, from over 50 pallets that were found and diverted from waste. Each table or chair is stamped with a number, and you can trace it back to the original pallet on the project website.

As Christian says "Our aim is to use materials that already exist, are considered waste and are proximate to the location where our furniture is made. So we are looking forward to working with the people of Hoxton to minamise waste and have a positive impact on the (pretty amazing) community."

The site might be temporary, so go and visit this summer while you can!

More: East London Furniture

Social Spaces: Liberating new Forms of Conversation

A near perfect publication!  This booklet, the NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation, which you can read below, contains all the my favourite key elements: social geekery and design geekery all in one!

Above is a pic showing how to layout a room for different social events ... and below is a pic showing the beautiful icons they have designed to represent different types of social gathering...

Open publication

Posted by Tessy in Communication, Community, Design, Geeky Stuff, Inspiration, Lovely things, Social Spaces | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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This evening I was at the ELBA summer reception on the rooftop of Nomura - a rather smart investment bank in the city with their very own sushi chef. The East London Business Alliance work to create opportunities in East London, by ensuring community investment is well directed and managed.

It was a fantastic evening - and not just because of the bravery and team work of the Eagles throwing each other several feet into the air. I undertook the 'Extreme Interview Challenge' which consisted of an interview role play, attempting to answer questions while someone whispered negative messages in the other ear "what you're saying isn't interesting... you can't really do that...". A powerful way to convey the barriers to employment facing some people.

And I did the tombola and won a tennis ball when I really wanted the trilby hat. But the clever part was that your ticket also had a question to ask the young people running the stall. Mine was 'what is the biggest issue facing young people today?', and the opinion from the year 10's was stereotyping and demonising of young people as a group, and assuming they are all the same.

It was also very interesting speaking to someone in corporate CSR express frustration at the government cutting so many services, organisations or programmes that once helped identify and nurture talent from a variety of backgrounds, and bridge the economic and cultural gap that enabled their business programmes to create routes out of poverty and into employment in the areas that need it most.

But the room was also full of people with energy and ideas, determined to make things work! Including the Ministry of Stories, who gifted me the monster name 'Professor Pointy-Toes' and offered jars of thick snot (aka lemon curd). I think you might need to see to believe...

Today ladies and gentlemen, I ventured south... From Whitechapel to North Lambeth via West Norwood. And had a lovely day at two amazing gatherings.

Stop One - West Norwood Feast (below) brought to you by Spacemakers and the lovely people of Norwood. Sprinkled along the length of Knight's Hill and Norwood Road and taking in the St Lukes garden and other hubs - there is capoiera on the lawn and flamenco in the library; food stalls, an arts market, and gardening corner is full of plants to sell or swap. And cafes and shops along the way are decorated with bunting and posters.

Stop Two - Pearman Street Big Lunch (above)

I don't know if it's cheating to go to someone elses Big Lunch but it was organised by my friend Claire and it was her birthday (which her neighbours marked with a lovely cake). The street was decorated all the way up with balloons and ribbons, and there was a potluck feast and bbq with contributions from everyone. And we braved out the rain!

So it got me to thinking. What both of these events had done successfully is string together islands of people and activity. They stopped the streets feeling like a thoroughfare you would rush along with your head down, and gave them a new purpose. An end in themselves, not just a means to another destination. And despite getting utterly soaked in the downpour, there was a very warm welcome.

>

Last October Sheffield was the first Travelling Pantry workshop and I was delighted to hear that some of the particpants connected to St Mary's church had been so inspired by Pie Lab in Alabama that they have opened The Sharrow Pie Experiment, which will run until September.  The point of the first PieLab was that it was designed to create a space for conversation, with no commercial ambitions at all.  You can read their full story in the Chapter of Hand Made below.

What they are doing in Sheffield is equally marvellous... as Supervisor Amanda Ganley said to the BBC a couple of days ago:

"Hopefully people will get a bit of inspiration to think about what they would like to change or see in their community and maybe make connections with other people who want the same thing. And then could set a spark going and it could spread."

A couple of weeks ago The Star described the project

"Locals are encouraged to come to this small shop/cafe/grandma’s front room for free pie and tea. Once there, they are invited to sit down with their slice and chat to the person next to them. Through talking, networks are established, ideas are generated, projects are born and people are inspired to improve the area in which they live. Through that empowerment and relationship-building, social cohesion is increased, vibrancy created and local knowledge boosted, thus creating the perfect conditions for happiness, health and safety." 

They even got onto Radio Sheffield yesterday! 

It isn't just about pie, these projects are examples of new creative activism... something which is emerging around the world.  And it is certainly part of the bigger discussion about how to effect positive change - through power dynamics or creative human-centred means?

 Congratulations to all the team from St Mary's involved in the project - I hope that some great ideas and relationships emerge!

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More community

 

Bridging the Gap

This evening I was at the ELBA summer reception on the rooftop of Nomura - a rather smart investment bank in the city with their very own sushi chef. The East London Business Alliance work to create opportunities in East London, by ensuring community investment is well directed and managed.

It was a fantastic evening - and not just because of the bravery and team work of the Eagles throwing each other several feet into the air. I undertook the 'Extreme Interview Challenge' which consisted of an interview role play, attempting to answer questions while someone whispered negative messages in the other ear "what you're saying isn't interesting... you can't really do that...". A powerful way to convey the barriers to employment facing some people.

And I did the tombola and won a tennis ball when I really wanted the trilby hat. But the clever part was that your ticket also had a question to ask the young people running the stall. Mine was 'what is the biggest issue facing young people today?', and the opinion from the year 10's was stereotyping and demonising of young people as a group, and assuming they are all the same.

It was also very interesting speaking to someone in corporate CSR express frustration at the government cutting so many services, organisations or programmes that once helped identify and nurture talent from a variety of backgrounds, and bridge the economic and cultural gap that enabled their business programmes to create routes out of poverty and into employment in the areas that need it most.

But the room was also full of people with energy and ideas, determined to make things work! Including the Ministry of Stories, who gifted me the monster name 'Professor Pointy-Toes' and offered jars of thick snot (aka lemon curd). I think you might need to see to believe...

Tour du Sud

Today ladies and gentlemen, I ventured south... From Whitechapel to North Lambeth via West Norwood. And had a lovely day at two amazing gatherings.

Stop One - West Norwood Feast (below) brought to you by Spacemakers and the lovely people of Norwood. Sprinkled along the length of Knight's Hill and Norwood Road and taking in the St Lukes garden and other hubs - there is capoiera on the lawn and flamenco in the library; food stalls, an arts market, and gardening corner is full of plants to sell or swap. And cafes and shops along the way are decorated with bunting and posters.

Stop Two - Pearman Street Big Lunch (above)

I don't know if it's cheating to go to someone elses Big Lunch but it was organised by my friend Claire and it was her birthday (which her neighbours marked with a lovely cake). The street was decorated all the way up with balloons and ribbons, and there was a potluck feast and bbq with contributions from everyone. And we braved out the rain!

So it got me to thinking. What both of these events had done successfully is string together islands of people and activity. They stopped the streets feeling like a thoroughfare you would rush along with your head down, and gave them a new purpose. An end in themselves, not just a means to another destination. And despite getting utterly soaked in the downpour, there was a very warm welcome.

>

Social Spaces: The Sharrow Pie Experiment

Last October Sheffield was the first Travelling Pantry workshop and I was delighted to hear that some of the particpants connected to St Mary's church had been so inspired by Pie Lab in Alabama that they have opened The Sharrow Pie Experiment, which will run until September.  The point of the first PieLab was that it was designed to create a space for conversation, with no commercial ambitions at all.  You can read their full story in the Chapter of Hand Made below.

What they are doing in Sheffield is equally marvellous... as Supervisor Amanda Ganley said to the BBC a couple of days ago:

"Hopefully people will get a bit of inspiration to think about what they would like to change or see in their community and maybe make connections with other people who want the same thing. And then could set a spark going and it could spread."

A couple of weeks ago The Star described the project

"Locals are encouraged to come to this small shop/cafe/grandma’s front room for free pie and tea. Once there, they are invited to sit down with their slice and chat to the person next to them. Through talking, networks are established, ideas are generated, projects are born and people are inspired to improve the area in which they live. Through that empowerment and relationship-building, social cohesion is increased, vibrancy created and local knowledge boosted, thus creating the perfect conditions for happiness, health and safety." 

They even got onto Radio Sheffield yesterday! 

It isn't just about pie, these projects are examples of new creative activism... something which is emerging around the world.  And it is certainly part of the bigger discussion about how to effect positive change - through power dynamics or creative human-centred means?

 Congratulations to all the team from St Mary's involved in the project - I hope that some great ideas and relationships emerge!

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More community