Thriving too

Looking for examples of people-led libraries

Two weeks ago I opened a library in Rotterdam. Or rather, a Reading Room. In a reaction to the closing of the public library we, residents of Rotterdam West, decided it was time to take action. But not by protesting, but by creating something else, something new, hey even something better (see earlier post here and here). So now we are open 5 days a week from 10 till 8, and all based on the voluntary participation of a lot of people from the neighbourhood.

Part of the reason I’m involved in, is because I have been inspired by the many examples I came across in the last two years of people-led libraries from around the world. They are part of a growing number of examples of people-led initiatives in many different places building community in exciting, collaborative ways such as The Uni Project (New York) and the Truly Public Library (Manila).

But hang on, people-led you say? Wasn’t there a project which tries to showcase people-led initiatives from around the world creating communities? You are right and it is called the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe. A collaborative effort from voluntary editors in over 60 city to showcase the many different ways in which people create communities. Next to geographic editions, we have topic-related editions, such as those on empty shops and food which should come out this year.

Since we think libraries are one of those topics around which people also create great new initiatives, we have decided it is time to make a Community Lover’s Guide on Libraries. The ‘we’ involved in editing this particular edition are Tessy Britton, Laura Billings, Tim Ahrensbach, Jerry Stein and Maurice Specht. Because we all think there is a lot of exciting stuff happening and we see great potential in other places for such initiatives we want to get it out as soon as possible.

We have drawn up a list of potential chapters and are sending out invitations to them as we speak. But we are always looking for new, unknown examples, so if you know of any examples of people-led libraries you think should be added to this particular book, please get in contact with any of us.

A bit more background on this particular issue can be found on a blog post I wrote on Shareable last October. We weren’t able to stick to the initial timeframe we mentioned there, but are now aiming to publish by the end of April. 

A(re)imagined Library: organizing by doing part 2 (of …)

My head is still spinning from last week’s events. Two and a half months ago I wrote about my day in the park, trying to start conversations with people about organizing an alternative to the library which was closing. What I didn’t know then, was I would be co-organizing a 5-day festival showcasing to everyone what kind of ideas we picked up during the first 6 months of conversations.

There is a lot to tell about the festival, but my head is too tired to write it down (and I have to take a step back first too, something which writing this isn’t helping J). But I want to reflect a bit on the reason why we organized the festival the way we did it.

First why a festival? Why not take everything we learned during our conversations, turn it into a project plan and ask people to back us? Why not write a proposal and see if we could find partners which can help us launch the Reading Room? Why pop-up for 5 days, make people excited, and then close shop again? These are good questions, but part of the answers is we weren’t sure what we wanted to create. The conversations gave us first glimpses of what it could be like, but no clear indication of what it should be. So we decided that we needed to experiment. On my desktop I have this picture from a slide by Tom Hulme from IDEO, and that is exactly what we did in this case. By organizing the festival we gave ourselves the opportunity to learn what we want to create.

Secondly by organizing the festival we could directly engage a lot of people. The whole festival was only made possible by the involvement of some 70 volunteers. Some just added a small bit, some were instrumental to the success (spoiler alert: yes the festival was a big success. The space looked stunning and most elements where well visited and liked). During the day in the park we met Martin, who was into Linux and computers and who volunteered to create a whole network for us with 5 working computers and wifi. Then there was Ruud, who is an interior designer by profession and who volunteered to create a stunning space. And then there where Karin and Merel. The first designed our logo and flyers, the second our pr-plan and our website. They all added their professionals expertise to enable us to make an even better statement.

Because that is the third reason why we organized the festival. Because no matter how good Joke and I can write, we would never have been able to put into words what we created during the festival. First of all, we would never have set out for a building of such scale. For we got a building from a housing corporation for free for a month which was 300 square meters. It was a former hamam which had been empty for more than a year. The scale of the building was a bit frightening at first, but once we got used to it and started to work there, we saw all kinds of potential. Since there was no natural light in the back of the space, and it was partly closed off, we added a cinema to the original plans, showcasing films by Rotterdam filmmakers. All these little surprises added to the great programmed we put together. We organized the festival around 5 themes: learning, reading, reading to, meeting and sharing. Each theme was made tangible by organizing related activities during the day. This ranged from organizing workshops on day one (based on the principles of Trade School) to readings by poets and a meeting between reading groups on day two. Day three all kinds of activities for kids were organized and the fourth day was a day full of events set up for like-minded people to meet each other. On the final day we explored the possibilities of sharing by hosting several conversations. We closed off the week with great lentil soup from the neighbors from across and music by Jaap Hekman en Klaas Blonk (you will hear them in the video attached at the end of this post). 

And next to all these activities we had fresh coffee and tea, wifi, magazines, daily newspapers (3 dutch, one Turkish, and one Chinese) and more than a 1000 books which people could just take home. So even if there was no program people came to talk, work, take a book or just drink a cup of coffee and enjoy the nice atmosphere.

Adding all this together, we now have a great argument in our hands to start conversations with all kinds of parties in the city to see how they can help us to keep this public space open. So we have been creating a community by doing the festival and together we can now make a better argument of what we want to do. And even more so, we now actually have an idea what we want to create. And finally we want to do it in this particular space if possible. For where the space first was a bit frightening, I now can see no other use for it than a Reading Room.

There is much more to reflect back on – which I will be doing over the coming weeks – and I will be sharing this with you. As things stand, we now aim to open our doors again in 1 march. In the mean time we will be making plans, talk to a lot of people and do small interventions from time to time (so people won’t forget us, but also to test out new ideas). But first I’m going to close my eyes, think back about all the exciting stuff which happened in the last week, and smile!

leeszaal delen from fcr on Vimeo.

 

 

A Potluck Breakfast in Rotterdam

Every month or so we organize a breakfast at our office for friends, co-workers and everyone else who wants to attend. Normally we charge € 5,-- a person and anywhere between 10 and 25 people show up. In a very informal and relax atmosphere we start the day just eating and talking. We always do these kinds of breakfasts on a Wednesday morning, so when Tessy and Laura asked me whether I wanted to host a dinner for the launch of their new website www.potluck.so I quickly thaught I should combine the two.

(our regular stock)

So we put the breakfast online, put the call out through Facebook and waited. And soon the first people said they would attend. Some of them just used Facebook, but others used the website. But what was nice to see is that at both places people offered to bring stuff, instead of money. Thinks where looking great and this would sure make our work on the day before and itself lighter.But still there was this voice in the back of our mind that we where organizing our own regular breakfast, so we ended up buying the basics to cover just in case.

(covering the basics just in case ....)

O, if only we would have trusted the concepts, because people brought what they promised and more. So we ended up having people bringing bread, fruit salad, cup cakes, relish and cheese. And on top of that good conversation (today mainly about today’s elections). And in the end, two people volunteered to do the dishes and around 11.00 people could actually start working and things looked even cleaner than before. 

(but people deliverd ....)

(fresh baked bread)

I think the system is great to organize a breakfast among people without having tons of emails and stuff going back and forth. It just requires us to trust the system, something I always have difficulty with.

Thanks Laura and Tessy for launching this great platform and I will be surely using it in the future!!!

A (re-)Imagined Library: organizing by doing

A little more than a year ago, I was asked to give a talk during the opening of a library. This was rather strange, given that in the same month the public library announced it would be closing 15 of the 21 libraries across Rotterdam in the coming 3 years. But this was no ordinary library. It was actually situated in a flat which was going to be refurbished in the coming years and was one of the actions undertaken by the resident group. Their reasoning behind it was simple, but very smart: the refurbishment has put quite a strain on the people living in the flat and we have mostly negotiated with the housing corporation up till now; it is time to change this. So let’s create a place where we can actually meet each other and have a conversation. They convinced the housing corporation to give them one of the empty apartments in the building for free and turned it into a conversation-cafe. After a couple of month, they realized a bit more was necessary to get people in and one of them came up with the idea of a library. And no ordinary library, no, the collection would consist of all the books from the people living in the building. Within a month they had a) another apartment from the housing corporation b) a 1000 books c) book cases and a computer from the concierge of the estate who found these in the basement and d) a couple of volunteers who would actually run the library.

Since I had been thinking, talking and experimenting a lot with abundance and the use of what we have spare (time, stuff, places, knowledge), a friend of mine who was involved in this asked me and Joke van der Zwaard to give two opening speeches. It was a great day, especially given its timing. But what I didn't realize then is that it would be the start of a long term project.

Because since then I have been on the lookout for people and projects who where re-imagining libraries across the globe. And believe me; once you start looking there are many, many examples that can inspire you. I started collecting them over at thelibrarylab.tumblr.com (Feel free to add examples if you want to)

 But it didn't stop at just looking for examples, since we had a situation on our hands in Rotterdam too: the closure of 15 out of 21 libraries. The argument for closing these neighbourhood-libraries was pretty straight forward: less and less people are coming to these libraries, people are getting their information elsewhere, and we have to do with a smaller budget. True as that may be (although I seriously doubt the first argument, and the second is no argument for closing a library), it raises the question what to do next. People organized themselves, protested and got a lot of signatures on a petition to keep the library open, but alas, it was a lost caused.

And maybe, if we where honest to ourselves, it had been a lost cause for a while, Joke van der Zwaard, whom I gave the talk with in September, said to me while we were having another conversation. For the neighbourhood libraries where no longer what they used to be. For the last 10 years they lost their adult-section, a lot of newspapers and magazines, staff, and opening hours where ever more diminished. Maybe these libraries were not something we should preserve after all, maybe it was time to reinvent them. This was the start of a project which is called Leeszaal Rotterdam West (Leeszaal means Reading Room. We deliberately don't call it a library because we want to distinguish it from the current library, although we will have books).

Off course we immediately had all kinds of ideas what such a Leeszaal should look like, but we thought that if we wanted it to be run by the people from Rotterdam West on a voluntary basis it was best to engage them right from the start and see what they would like the Leeszaal to become. So we devised a strategy to get information, but also to get people engaged from as early as possible.

Using some of the lessons I learned from Tessy Britton and her travelling pantry methodology we organized a couple of meetings to get peoples imagination of what a future Leeszaal should look like going. This information was then processed by Joke and myself and turned into a proposal for a 5 day festival this November. The idea behind the festival is to test out the ideas that we received from the residents (is it actually something they want; do they want to be involved in organizing it), to built a community around the future Leeszaal (by involving people now, we will have a community supporting us, if the Leeszaal actually materializes) and helps us built a public argument (something I learned from Jerry Stein while he was over here in January) to convince public officials and skeptics that this is a good thing.

(Another way to put this last point is by calling it a prefigurative intervention. This is a term I learned from this great book “Beautiful Trouble. A toolbox for revolution”, composed by Andrew Boyd. He described the prefigurative intervention in the following way: "prefigurative interventions are direct actions sited at the point of assumption — where beliefs are made and unmade, and the limits of the possible can be stretched. The goal of a prefigurative intervention is twofold: to offer a compelling glimpse of a possible, and better, future, and also — slyly or baldly — to point up the poverty of imagination of the world we actually do live in.")

In order for people to get to know us, to get involved with us and to just keep the whole process fun, we jumped on the opportunity to be part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the neighbourhood park this Saturday. Inspired by the people from Bureau M.E.S.T. , who where again inspired by Lars van Trier's Dogville, we created an Imagined Leeszaal by using nothing else but some tape and some objects. 

During the day, a lot of people joined us for coffee and tea and gave us their time and ideas about what the Leeszaal could look like, but also what they could offer. We were also giving away books for free and we made some people very happy with copies of Stephen Hawkins The Universe (the illustrated version), Marx Communist Manifesto and Alain de Botton’s ‘The pleasure and sorrows of work’ and some nice novels too. People were surprised we were giving away the books for free, but once we explained the way we were doing it, it got them thinking.

 

Over the day we collected a lot of ideas and email-addresses, which we will use to invite people to come to our next meeting, where we will be forming working groups to help us put together the festival in November.

I like where this is all heading very much. The project enables me to bring together both some of my more fundamental questions (how to reclaim our publicness and built it in new ways), the many inspiring examples and people I know across the globe, and experiment with all this in my own backyard. I will keep you posted on the developments of this concrete experiment in re-inventing the public.

ps: a nice addition to the story about the flat-library is that it is a home for people of 55 and beyond. The group consists of people whose average age is well beyond 65 and the oldest lady involved (who also came up with the original idea) is almost 80). So sharing, bartering and taking public institutions is not only something done by younger people, but can actually be done by all age groups. Maybe it is even easier for the elderly to imagine taking matters in one’s own hands, since some of the stuff we now imagine needs to be taken care for by a professional was something that was being done by people themselves when they were growing up. Part of what we are doing now is re-inventing what we have lost in the last 40 years. This doesn't mean that we are reverting back nostalgically to 'the good old days', but it means we are re-appropriating and re-imagining what we have come to realize we didn't want to lose in the first place.  

 

More information on the whole project can be found here; you can find the whole plan for the festival here

Alas both pages are in Dutch.

Bringing big ideas to life

Pop-ups events are becoming a very important part of our work.  The reason is that bringing things to life in a visible tangible form is a very exciting thing to do.  You can talk and write all you like – but if concepts are new to your audience they can remain sceptical unless they can see and feel the difference you are trying to describe.  In the next few months  we are helping a few communities pop-up in spaces they would like to re-imagine.  Like books, workshops and exhibitions these pop-up events provide a concentrated way of introducing new ideas for projects and intiatives, while giving people the pleasure and inspiration of experiencing a new type of social space – usually one they can create collaboratively together long term.

One of my favourite stories on re-imagining spaces was via the Ted talk I saw over the weekend given by the lovely Jason Roberts from Better Blocks. 

Jason had become rather hooked on his new habit of conjuring up new civic projects – one of them a pretend group to bring back the local tram – which has since turned into a live project with masses of funding.  And “drunk with excitement and enthusiasm” he looked at a local parade of dead shops and started to wonder how he could bring some magic there. 

He looked at the city regulations and discovered that there were so many old regulations that people weren’t even able to but chairs and tables on the pavement. I particularly liked the rule on 'crowds'.

So he arranged a pop-up day where the community designed some interventions expressly to break all the rules.  In so doing the community came together to show what was possible – including detouring trees and starting one-day restaurants.

Last year we saw a wonderful pop-up phenomenon sparked by friend Dan Thomson.  He started the #riotcleanuptag on twitter which led to 90,000 people spontaneously coming out to help their communities clean up.  This has led to a new project recently launched with Dan, Sophie Collard and Lloyd Davis called We Will Gather which supports people using Twitter to make projects and ideas happen locally. And it is really great to see the support being given to the project by Nesta, the Cabinet Office, VInspired and the RSA!  If you would like to attend the launch on the 11 September please register here.

And later on October 20^th I am taking part in a panel at Battle of Ideas called Pop-up communities: here to stay? where with fellow panelists Hugh Flouch and Dave Clements we will to talking about active citizenship and the role of the state in trying to stimulate and support communities to do new things.

We are also producing an event with 00:/ to reimigine St Laurence Church in Norwich on the 13 October with the Church Conversvation Trust who are doing some incredible work bringing churchs into new use - including a circus school! So if you live in Norwich and would like to help us co-produce the event please get in touch!

Helsinki Beyond Dreams

A delightful new book just arrived from Hella Hernberg.  Her collection of perspectives on projects and ideas in and around Helsinki is subtitled 'Actions towards a creative and sustainable hometown'.  She introduces the book:

 

"You are witness to a documentary of a new Helskinki, a city where grassroots culture is flourishing.  In the past few years our previously quiet and reserved Nordic hometown has been a source of constant surprise.  Thanks to a new we-spirit and the enthusiasm of its people, Helsinki is breaking free and becoming a more intreguing and enjoyable place - a city where you can feel at home.

 

The Finnish traditions of "sisu" and "everyman's rights" are merging into a new urban attitude that has the potential to take Helskini beyond our dreams. Sisu is our word for fortitude - the special Finnish kind of perseverance and guts.

 

... When you want to make something unusual happen in Helsinki it still takes a great deal of perserverance to wade your way throgh the jungle of the city's strong bureaucracy. Knowing this we cannot but admire the people who take the initiative."

 

Such inspiring stuff!  Thanks Hella!

 

Pot Luck - Food in Common

Pot Luck – Food in common.

A Pot Luck is a shared meal - where everyone brings something to contribute. Someone can decide to host a communal meal, either by themselves or with friends –and perhaps with a theme to the food such as a country, style or even colour; or around a certain conversation or local happening.

Hosts register the meal online at www.potluck.so and list the things needed to make it happen, for example a certain ingredient, a cooked dish, cutlery or help setting up.  People join in by each bringing something requested by the host. It only works if everyone helps out - and with everyone bringing a little bit, it soon grows into an amazing feast!

People want more shared spaces

Our experience from working with people in many different communities over the past 18 months or more, and learning from inspiring projects around the world through the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe – is that people want new types of common spaces. Places that have community ownership and mutual respect, and where artificial divides between ages, races, genders or occupations are broken down; and new connections and relationships are forged. We also know that creating social capital has positive effects on long-term systemic issues such as health, employment and crime (see the RSA’s work on Connected Communities as one example).

Social dining vs restaurants and private dinners

Sharing a meal is a great way to get to know people. Food is both a common denominator and a social convenor. For a good explanation of social dining, and how it is different from buying a meal in a restaurant, or having dinner at a friend’s house see Tessy’s previous post on social dining and new behaviours. 

In essence – buying a meal in a restaurant is in a commercial space, with transactional relationships. You are paying for a service, and will likely behave in the expected role of customer. It is possible, but you  are unlikely to forge new friendships this way - do you know the name of the last person who served or sold you food?

Going to a meal at a friend’s house, or inviting friends over is likely to include only your current social circle or perhaps a little wider, and take place in private property behind closed doors. Whilst this is also important to the social fabric, communal dining has the added bonus of being able to change the culture of a space publicly, and help reduce social divides by increasing the amount or variety of people attending.

Collaboration and shared resources

Another couple of experiences recently have added new thoughts to the mix.

Firstly, during a trip to see Maurice (Social Spaces Netherlands) in Rotterdam earlier in the year, we joined a regular open shared breakfast, hosted in his co-working space. People arrived armed with bread rolls, egg salad, cheese, jam, and fruit. Maurice had the coffee pot warming. Tessy and I chopped bananas for a fruit salad. Various people put down knives and forks, cups and plates. And the final touch - candles.

No-one individually had to do a lot. Everyone took part, brought what they could, and did a little. Together we created a slightly mismatched, homely, welcoming and beautiful table. And then we all shared a breakfast, listened to a talk, asked questions and chatted. Asking someone to pass the jam, or pouring the person next to you a coffee before asking their view on open education, felt very different to awkwardly trying to ‘network’, while balancing a plate of snacks served at a conference somewhere. And we worked to capture some of the social aspects to knowledge building recently in the Ad Hoc Enquiry dinners.

Secondly, co-founding and running Trade School London as part of the global Trade School coop. Trade School is an open learning space, that runs on barter and mutual respect. Anyone can offer to teach a class, and pupils sign up by agreeing to meet the teachers requests (things like art supplies, advice, or food).

One of the most profound experiences has been how different this mechanism of value exchange feels, compared to financial or service level transactions- having a social nature that is missing from many others throughout the normal day. Knowing this intellectually and reliably experiencing it at each lesson are different things, and watching other's delight around discovering this has been amazing.

As hosts, taking care to welcome people with refreshments and introductions also helps create a social atmosphere, and these things mean that the quality of the relationship between teacher and pupil is different – more equal, more personal. There isn't a financial barrier to taking part, and everyone brings something of value to create the experience together.

Global platform

Trade School is supported by some clever technology – the website developed by Or Zubalsky for registering teachers, listing classes, and signing up pupils, and which has allowed Trade Schools to start opening all over the world.

Why is there not more social dining?

So given both the benefits and enjoyment to be had from social dining - why is there not more of it springing up around us?

Perhaps because there are few genuinely open public spaces left. Communities are often struggling to find venues, buildings, green spaces that don’t charge for use, or have restrictions on activities.

The cost of hosting a meal for large groups is getting harder to bear in times of reduced funding and tighter personal budgets.

And as with a lot of community initiatives, a small group of committed people are often left with the burden of organising and creating activities, and almost delivering community back to their neighbours who are put in a position of behaving more like consumers than collaborators.

Introducing Pot Luck

Building on this thinking and experiences, and working collaboratively with Or and the Trade School technology – we are developing www.potluck.so as a tool for communities everywhere to create shared meals, without needing to wait for funding, and in a way that brings out skills and resources from everyone. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like to cook, you could help set table, or clear up. Or offer some entertainment or a room to host in.

We are currently piloting Pot Luck in collaboration with residents on the Tulse Hill Estate, as part of a joint project with Lambeth Council looking at ways to surface and share various resources, skills and ideas on the estate.

We will update with progress, and information about the first meals shortly. If you want to find out more or see Pot Luck in your area, get in touch.

Weaving friendships

A lovely project from our friends Beccy McCray and Hannah Elbourne at the Crafternoon Tea Club (who wrote a chapter for the Community Lover's Guide to Hackney that you can read online or download).

The Wick Woven Web is made from hundreds of huge friendship bracelets, woven into a colourful web between the branches of a big tree. The friendship bracelets have been made by people living nearby, from unwanted fabrics. And when the installation is taken down, the bracelets will go back to their makers.

The aim was to help foster new friendships, and the final web is a visual representation of the social networks in the area. As Beccy and Hannah say "The installation is literally made from the fabric of the community."

Find out more: www.crafternoonteaclub.com

Skills behind every door

The Travelling Pantry mini hit the road again today stuffed to the limits with bright furniture, refreshments, posters and our favourite shiney tea urn - heading for the Tulse Hill Estate in Brixton. We've been getting to know the area and the people that live there recently, as part of a collaboration with Lambeth Council and the Residents Association.

The Tulse Hill estate is full of people with skills and resources, aspirations and ideas; and there are several nice green and communal spaces. But they aren't being used perhaps as much as they could be, and there aren't a lot of opportunities for people to meet their neighbours, or spend time in the open spaces. So we're working to help surface and link the many assets in the area, through projects that will introduce more people to each other, teach skills, and share resources.

There is a roving exhibition featuring inspiring and positive community-led projects from around the world that show the potential to do a lot with a little when many different people are included. And with a space for people to add their ideas for what they want to see more of on Tulse Hill Estate. And today, we did a pop up cafe on the grass between the blocks. With ice cold juice, biscuits and free conversation in the afternoon sunshine – we were introducing the idea of a Trade School and had a Skills Game to show just how many skills people have that are often taken for granted.

The idea was received positively by people we spoke to, and during our conversations some of the lessons that people felt they could offer included ‘how to make compost from kitchen waste’, ‘an introduction to world politics’ and ‘children’s activities – how to keep your kids happy and safe’. And the Skills Game board soon filled up with ticks as people picked out the things they knew how to do - starting to show the unique variety of classes that Trade School Tulse Hill might include.

Even standing on the grass in sight of maybe 40 or so windows today, it's amazing to think about just how many skills and ideas and interests are part of the people behind each one...

(Adapted from blogs first posted on the Lambeth Council Cooperative Toolkit)

Trade School everywhere

Trade School London is back! Summer season opens Sunday 1 July with 'You versus Photography' and 'Keep cool and carry on: making icecream with dry ice". Not things you'd normally find in an education centre...

As last time, there is a growing sense of excitement as the class list starts to fill up... I never knew I wanted to learn how to cast and pour concrete to make beautiful unique bricks, but now I can't imagine not knowing how! And as last time, we are oversubscribed with teachers - people wanting to share what they are passionate or knowledgable about - and trying to fit more classes into the schedule.

As Trade School moves home again, to a large outdoor site for the summer season, I am reminded of the power of a project such as this being run as a platform - with the team in New York supporting people to open Trade Schools everywhere.

If you're wondering what it's all about, sign up for class and come along to Canning Town Carvanserai in July and swap cookbooks, paintbrushes, basic French, pieces of fruit, art supplies, advice and more for the chance to learn some amazing new skills. It's all there around us, Trade School is a fantastic way to surface, share and link what we have in our heads and around our communities.

We want to build an open source software platform to share with local Trade School chapters around the world. Help us open Trade Schools everywhere! 

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. In the cafe was an amazing exhibition of photos by Jane Baker - featuring local people working - really beautiful and inspiring work.

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