The Citizens and Inclusive Growth project wants your ideas on how we can let cities thrive. So we’ve opened our interim report for your comments and feedback — tell us your views in our Citizens and Inclusive Growth Interim Report.

Over the last six months, the RSA has looked across the USA, Latin America and Europe to understand global best practice in civic engagement. Taken collectively, the direction of travel we see emerging from our case studies and initial literature review indicates a shift toward more agile and open approaches to strategic development, harnessing the human resource, capacity and capital of a place — its people — in shaping and delivering strategies which directly meet the needs of those places and people; and as a result driving an organic, collective, and potentially self-sustaining growth.

That said, evidence from our case studies in the US is largely project specific. Scaling and replication of participatory approaches appears limited by a number of factors including a reliance on project-limited public grant and charitable funding, a prevailing characterisation of projects as ‘social investment’, ‘community development’ and ‘outreach’ to be delivered in suburbs and neighbourhoods, and a continued reliance on fiscal evaluation and ‘cost benefit’ to demonstrate impact. Attempts to replicate the successful participatory budgeting exercise in Porto Alegre at a state level came at the cost of opening it up to political and corporate agendas, with budget-led decisions resulting in economies being made in the depth of engagement (one open assembly per issue, as opposed to two), and the adoption of district councils as mediators in the process, collectively and quickly resulting in the failure and cessation of the state-level programme. [1]

Success appears to be better served by a ‘hyper local’ approach — expanding the breadth and depth of engagement to include citizens from across all sectors of the community. To support this, our understanding of communities and citizens must embrace a more holistic view of what they mean; ‘the community’ is not confined to the suburbs and professional status does not preclude citizenship. Citizens living within city-centres are routinely overlooked in so-called community initiatives, and those initiatives tend to be dominated by representation from the public and third sectors. Similarly, distinctions between ‘professionals’ and ‘ordinary people’ are over-simplistic, and can contribute to a falsely polarised positioning. By bringing multiple players together in setting mission-oriented goals for cities, and by working collaboratively toward those goals, it becomes clear that issues such as public health, housing and good quality public spaces are of broad-scope interest and benefit. Breaking down the divisions between ‘professionals’ and ‘citizens’ is essential in order to navigate the increasingly networked forms of governance that shape our social and economic lives. The complex challenges we face cannot be resolved by working in silos. [2]

In a number of our case studies cities, but acutely demonstrated in Boston and Seattle, there is evidence of what is referred to as the ‘unintentional social impacts’ of hyper-investment in ‘innovation hot-spots’, particularly universities, corporate campuses and suburban science parks [3]. These ‘innovation districts’ are very often neighboured by significantly poorer areas, with a notable correlation between negative impact and proximity. In its role at the forefront of Finland’s Innovative Cities programme, Helsinki demonstrates a clear alternative, avoiding this phenomenon by supporting open, dynamic, non-territorial innovation platforms and open data sharing. The experiences of Boston and Seattle reinforce the need to ensure that inclusive growth is underpinned by inclusive participation that hands genuine power and voice to communities traditionally excluded from economic growth and governance. [4] Opening up economic decision-making to citizens without addressing the inequities in participation risks fuelling ‘middle class capture’ and skewing growth and investment decisions to the benefit of higher skilled and more prosperous groups. Without genuine and inclusive involvement and a sense of shared values, there is a danger that citizen engagement simply serves to legitimise economic orthodoxies that worsen inequality.

Social innovation in all of our case study cities is strengthened by the presence of a new breed of anchor institutions such as Impact Hubs, collaborative workspaces designed to support social enterprise and innovation, which operate more openly than traditional anchors such as universities. As the evidence review also shows, civic participation tends to be sustained when community anchors are wedded into a place, helping to build the capacity and skills of citizens as well as professionals to co-produce, as well as to foster a participatory culture and sustainable institutional assets. The evidence suggests that past experiences of citizen engagement can help drive stronger participation, [5] highlighting the important role that anchors and strongly embedded participatory institutions can play.

In Detroit, this redefinition of innovation anchors has been taken one step further to include parks and social spaces as ‘civic commons’. Maurice D. Cox, Detroit’s Director of Planning and Development at the City of Detroit describes how:

“Through the Civic Commons initiative, we hope to rekindle the sense of pride current residents should have living in a neighbourhood adjacent to such wonderful institutions of higher learning. Vacant lots turned into a park and greenway connecting Marygrove College and University of Detroit Mercy complement our effort to rehab and reoccupy 100 vacant homes in the neighbourhood, and to help strengthen the entire fabric of the community.”[6]

The importance of squares and public spaces as places to meet, interact, debate and share ideas is a marked feature in a number of our case study cities — in Detroit, through its civic commons, Helsinki’s Lab project[7] and its focus on digitalised ‘slow spaces’ (designed to facilitate slow movement through public spaces and to increase real and virtual interaction) and in Boston, where the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a central greenspace created by landfill over a former central highway which runs through the core of its downtown, was transformed this year’s inaugural Hub Week as an outdoor innovation hub. Interacting with its streets and an awareness of the fabric of the city is part of Barcelona’s cultural profile, and has been critical in the development of the city and its story of citizenship. Its ‘Superblocks’ initiative[8], which is set to be enforced this year, and which is predicted to cut the city’s air pollution by a third, is designed to eradicate non-citizens from driving within designated 12-block square areas, is implementable with ease thanks to the famously pedestrian-friendly grid model of spatial development (designed by the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà in the late nineteenth century). Barcelona en Comú rose from those same streets in the 2011 civic action and street protests fuelled by the economic crisis.

Both Barcelona, particularly in terms of its scale, and Seattle, through its experience of an inherent lack of diversity, have experienced challenges with supporting open governance and accountability through a system of neighbourhood councils.

The digital and virtual space is potentially transformative in terms of citizen engagement[9], but also has clear implications for inclusion, which must be managed[10]. Cities are recognising the potency of online platforms, and through our case studies we demonstrate how digital initiatives can augment every aspect of citizenship, from open data, increased democratic participation and live-streamed policy making, to digitalised built environments, open-sourced tech-based innovation challenges and online real-time evaluation. The digital space offers an open and independent space which sits beyond the limitations of ‘place’ and, as such, which arguably lends itself more readily to scaling and replication without the challenges other modes of engagement meet at scale. The evidence points to the importance of an appropriate mix of digital and face-to-face engagement. Engaging citizens in economic decisions that have a major impact on their lives requires building trust and empathy, and fostering a different set of relationships. This cannot be achieved by digital means alone.

Interim Conclusions

• Strategic integration of social and economic policy
• A shared vision of success, at human and city scale
• New ways of evaluating success which prioritise human-centred indicators such as happiness, hope and wellbeing
• Open and independent space — for consensus and dissent
• Balance between ‘high tech’ and ‘high touch’

Responses to our open call for evidence (which remains open for contributions) include references to a sense of distance and disconnect from decision-making processes; described as “an ‘us and them’ mentality”.

Whilst there is evidence of the success of particular approaches to citizen engagement at a project level, the opportunity for these participatory approaches to scale within the predominant growth model, which is dominated by top-down interventions, and which by continuing to polarise ‘economic’ and ‘social’ reflects the distinction between ‘us and them’, is extremely limited. There is a strong and emerging argument that this is a false, and unhelpfully static, dichotomy. Integrating social and economic policy sits at the heart of what ‘inclusive growth’ seeks to achieve at a strategic level, and its realisation is critical to the efficacy and impact of citizen engagement, and to enabling dynamic new models of participation to gain traction in practice.

Escaping this polarised binary is not impossible, and a number of our case study cities including Helsinki, Barcelona, Boston and Seattle are renegotiating the boundary between social and economic by, for example, testing new ways of evaluating impact which look beyond fiscal and productivity measures, and toward more human-centred indicators such as happiness, hope and wellbeing. Creating impact at a human and city scale requires a shared vision of success, at an individual and collective level. This co-relationship between visioning and impact means a move beyond an understanding of ‘human centred design’ as a self-contained element of an engagement process, toward an embedded process which is collaborative throughout — from visioning to evaluation, and in all aspects.

The presence of open and independent space is emerging as key to both inclusion and effective citizen engagement. Whether through the rise of innovation spaces and labs, civic commons and the re-appropriation of public space, Barcelona’s super-blocks, or the emergence of online and virtual platforms, there is a clear demonstration of the importance of creating space — for both consensus, and dissent.

Cities are also navigating the space between digital and face-to-face engagement; between ‘high tech’ and ‘high touch’. The evidence suggests that most successful approaches combine the two, as in the case studies of Helsinki, and in particular its Helsinki Lab initiative, and Barcelona, augmenting its deliberative public policy meetings with online streaming.

The importance of balance between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’, between ‘high tech’ and ‘high touch’ in successful engagement supports the call for equilibrium put forward in our core hypothesis. The critical factor in that hypothesis, and supported by emerging evidence, is the third element to achieving balance. Some approaches, for example, demonstrate good balance between strategy and creativity (Boston), between creativity and values (Seattle), or between strategy and values (Barcelona), but the evidence suggests that all three must share equal prominence to support inclusive growth.

Next Steps

The next phase of the project focusses on UK cities, bringing forward a number of selected case studies to demonstrate citizen engagement tools and methods in a UK context, and presenting two city-based workshops — in Manchester and Birmingham — which will gather responses from citizens in those cities to our core research themes and questions, and which will enable collaborative synthesis of learning from our fieldwork.

The workshops will be designed to bring authority together with creativity and values, working with citizen stakeholders to find new pathways in maximising opportunities and confronting acknowledged challenges for those cities. We will bring diverse voices together in exploring the true nature of these challenges and opportunities, exploring successful responses already happening in cities (regardless of scale) and considering some of the tools we have encountered in our fieldwork including community wealth chests, civic commons and augmented intelligence platforms, and interrogate issues and barriers within specific city contexts; all with a view to identifying — and finding ways to scale — a collective response to those opportunities and challenges.

Workshops will contribute to, and be complemented by, our next phase of evidential review which will further explore the nexus between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ initiatives, between scale and influence, and between ‘high tech and high touch’. Using a reverse theory of change model, we will test the direct and indirect impacts and efficacy of selected engagement tools and methods, isolating key factors of success, limitation and challenge. We will look for common elements, and explore patterns of correlation. Selected case studies from across all stages of research will be further developed to test and interrogate the emerging theory of change.

Through this process, and in collaboration with city stakeholders, we will seek to produce a practical, but place-driven and responsive guide to convening citizen engagement in inclusive growth, in contribution to a subsequent UK call to action.

A final report detailing findings and case studies will be published in April 2017.

The RSA is working in partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to explore how citizens can participate more fully in designing strategies for growth on their cities. We have looked at how cities around the world are engaging with their citizens to co-design strategies for growth.

This is an extract from the Citizens and Inclusive Growth Interim Report.

[1] Goldfrank, B (2007), highlights that a study of 103 Brazilian cities with participatory budgeting during the 1997–2000 period showing that in 28 percent of the cases, participatory budgeting was discontinued by the initiating or the subsequent administration. (p.103)

[2] For example, see Nabatchi, T. (2010)

[3] Martin, J and Vance, A (2015), The Boston Indicators report highlights the increasing gap between the rich and poor in the city, and the continuing disparities in education and opportunities for those in low-income neighbourhoods;

[4] On the importance of this in a UK devolution context, see for example Etherington, D. and Jones, M. (2016)

[5] For example Yang (2005)

[6] http://civiccommons.us/detroit.html

[7] See Bollier. D, (2016) for more on cities as labs

[8] See the Barcelona Urban Mobility Plan, 2016

[9] World Bank (2016), the World Development Report demonstrates that it is vital to consider the enabling conditions around digital citizen engagement platforms to give them the highest chance of success. (p.176–77)

[10] Martin et al. (2016), find that those who are socially excluded are less likely to use the internet and benefit from the internet applications that may help them tackle their exclusion. (p.28)