Participatory City Camp
Insights from our Wasan Island Retreat
In this post we are sharing some reflections from inspiring moments throughout our co-creation journey to Wasan Island on July 2019 to explore the potential of building a Participatory City model for Canada. I welcome your thoughts and comments. Your contributions will help us ensure that we have a compelling set of insights to inform future conversations on the development of Participatory City in Canada.
This piece has come to life as a result of a collective thinking process. I am deeply grateful to Jayne Engle and Tessy Britton for their wisdom and guidance throughout this learning journey. Their thinking has shed light upon our reflection process as we weave together the insights from our conversations at Wasan. Their contributions have fuelled our creativity, weaved our hearts, souls and minds together and elevated our thinking to a level of transcendence.
I would also like to thank Ariel Sim for being an enabler of safety, inclusion, equity, creativity and collaboration at all times as a facilitator but also as a sense-maker as we were collecting insights and putting together the pieces of this puzzle. Our beautiful visual facilitation and graphic recordings would not have been possible without the support of Paul Messer, who is a creative genius at making sense of the most complex ideas through compelling visuals. Last but not least, I would like to thank our team leads (Alex Ryan, Patrick Dubé, Sophia Horwitz), our McConnell — Cities for People fellows (Jonathan Lapalme, Matthew Claudel) and our campers for being a key part of our ideation process in bringing this report to life by sharing reflections and providing valuable input that has helped inform our potential model adaptation of Participatory City in Canada.
Insights from a co-creation journey
The McConnell Foundation, Participatory City Foundation, la Maison de l’innovation Sociale (MIS) and MaRS Solutions Lab co-hosted a Participatory City Camp on July 15–18, 2019 and brought together a group of city builders and civic innovators from Canada and abroad. The team explored ways to build, scale and finance the Participatory City London model in Canadian communities.
For McConnell, Participatory City London is an innovative example of resident-led neighbourhood transformation to foster a transition toward regenerative and inclusive communities. The methodology of Participatory City London aligns well with our vision to support active and meaningful civic engagement for community well-being, especially for children and the most vulnerable residents.
This document is a summary of the key insights from those four days of learning, co-creation and activation with the delegations from two cities (Montreal and Halifax) as well as the pan-Canadian team responsible for scoping a preliminary vision of the methodology and infrastructure required to activate, connect, and fund the city pilots.
“We will create, to the greatest extent possible, a resistance economy. This means local cooperative networks of mutual support, which circulate social and material wealth within the community. The astonishing work of Participatory City, with Barking and Dagenham council in London, shows us one way of doing this.”
Our communities are at the epicenters of global crises
As the 2020s begin, we are experiencing several interconnected global challenges. Structural inequality, environmental degradation and declining public trust, continue on an unprecedented scale. Many of the societal institutions and systems that we have built are no longer fit for purpose.
The growing protest movements paint a picture of the state of things: anger with political and economic elites, and the fervent desire of people to act collectively and have agency to create a better future.
If we are to rise to the challenges, we need new models for a great transition to shift culture for the long term and model alternate ways to collectively build more caring societies.
We must make “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid the catastrophic events of climate change.
Participatory City is one viable approach to turn the tide
Participatory City provides a compelling narrative and a tangible manifestation of what transition can look like, at the scale of the neighbourhood.
It represents a model that can connect with similar movements of change, scale across neighbourhoods, and be adapted to cities anywhere.
Simply put, it provides an inspiration for us to re-imagine how we live and work together in the future.
Placing children at the centre of the participatory ecosystem
Participatory City provides a flexible, fully inclusive ecosystem of practical activities, connected to an infrastructure of support to build social capital through activities in everyday life between neighbours.
Parents and children are essential for inclusive participation. Children are participants, but also co-creators of their own spaces, alongside adults. The estimated number of children participants between Year 1 and Year 2 grew from 180 to 950. Their attendance and engagement enable social cohesion, connectedness and community resilience so that neighbours can work together better in times of disaster.
A platform for inclusive practical participation
The Participatory City model builds an enabling platform for meaningful, resident-driven participation centred around useful, everyday activities. These activities include batch cooking, gardening, childcare, sewing, and can evolve into neighborhood-driven small businesses. The enabling platform includes storefronts, workshops, and other spaces in the neighbourhoods.
Resident-driven initiatives are enabled by a small team of project designers and platform stewards, re-localizing economies. By setting up the basic infrastructure for most basic activities, the model creates a viable alternative to modern consumerism. This helps to build resilience and makes the neighbourhood less dependent on global big business.
If Participatory City represents a microcosm at the neighbourhood scale of a better world we could build, then, we wonder, how could we go about adapting this model in Canada? What are the barriers to building this kind of ambitious large-scale change?
Adapting and building the Participatory City model in Canada
We listened collectively to the London team to get a foundational knowledge from Participatory City London. This would enable us to develop a shared language for Canada. Below are some insights from this exercise:
The London model is neither top-down nor bottom-up. This model is actually in the middle, co-designing and co-leading with residents.
A people-sensed approach. What people experience and benefit from participation is essential. There is no judgement about where ideas come from. All ideas are co-owned and open sourced.
An ecosystem of opportunity. Residents hosting sessions. The platform meets the needs of individual projects by allowing for iteration, replication and support to initiatives that are dormant. Those initiatives are connected to a network of residents who can step in and provide leadership support.
Building an open-source ecosystem in which anyone can plug in requires investment in Social R&D. This represents a shift from supporting a project toward building an ecosystem of practical participation.
Giving ideas the best chance of succeeding. Risks are shared and mitigated by the support platform. Exposure to failure is an important learning opportunity in the piloting phase (people not attending an activity), which allows for trust building, risk management and iteration.
Different levels, different mindsets. Designing an inclusive participatory ecosystem involves engaging with residents working on the ground, just as much as we are planning to engage with high-level stakeholders. The closer residents work to the ground, the easier they understand local challenges.
A communications strategy allows for information sharing and co-production throughout the ecosystem, mobilising for behaviour change. Every One Every Day newspapers enable Participatory City team to tell a story in a way that processes do not. Newspapers are a marketing tool, with a focus on the doing. For more information on Participatory City’s communications strategy, read their Year 1 and Year 2 Reports.
Measuring outcomes through preventative impacts to better understand when the project is achieving scale. Community cohesion can be measured through the progression of people’s lives into employment and studying. More impact data in the Tools to Act Year 2 Report.
Working together to enhance participation. Participatory City London is working with tenants, associations and community centres on distributing close to where people live. As of Fall 2019, there have been 26,000 shop visits and session attendances.
Conflict mediation. This model is not conflictual since residents do not have to have consensus on a project. Conflicts happen rarely. There is flexibility in the co-production model between what is considered to be the team’s responsibility and what is not. The platform holds the insurance in the spirit of providing support for new ideas to thrive.
“A core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”
Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics
Developing the Participatory City Canada model in two communities and building a pan-Canadian vision and strategy
A team from Montreal and a team from Halifax joined us to explore how this model could be built. These two communities have made significant progress on the ideation phase and they have been active in hosting conversations with residents. For example, in November 2018 a Participatory City collective from Montreal organized a one-day workshop with Tessy Britton and a public talk to learn more about the infrastructure of Participatory City in London. Below are some insights on how Montreal and Halifax envision their models within the participatory ecosystem in Canada:
Participatory City Montreal
The model needs to acknowledge the wisdom and the existing relationships that local groups have been cultivating with residents over time in order to find ways to meaningfully engage them into the broader ecosystem. The goal of the participatory platform in Montreal would be to harness and propel the Montreal participation model, unlocking the capabilities and principles of inclusive design, and a clear vision of impact centered on regeneration of land, communities and individuals.
Ville de villages
Participatory City Montreal would be amplified through a mobilizing narrative that welcomes diversity and places neighbourhood life at the heart of city planning. Montreal would be placed at the intersection of participation and inclusion.
Participatory City Halifax
The Halifax team at Wasan Island involved representatives from COLAB, City of Halifax, Develop Nova Scotia and the Mi’kmaw Friendship Centre.
Since Wasan, Develop Nova Scotia has supported the teams advancing a broader partnership with local groups to co-create the first phase of Participatory City. Pulling this together would require building a project team and pilot project. Funds are currently being leveraged to capitalize the planning horizon of the site and produce a community-led master plan for Dartmouth Cove.
Over the next 18 months the Halifax team will focus on engaging organizations and residents in common purpose planning and design for a pilot project that will form the participatory platform. An Initial 6 months iteration stage is conceived before the development of the pilot. The Mi’kmaw Friendship Centre and other partner organizations will be invited to join this iteration team. The data collected throughout this stage will help build the case for supporting the launch of the initiative for the coming phases. Iteration of ideas will take place in participatory storefronts.
Learn, fund, build, scale: Steps to activate the pilot. Inspired by the Halifax conversations
Building a financial model for Participatory City Halifax will require clear statements to help other funders understand the uniqueness of their engagement, and perceive Participatory City as a living ecosystem instead of a project.
Building a pan-Canadian vision and strategy
“What if we dared to indigenize the way we construct modern cities, integrate Indigenous knowledge systems and make them core to transform places and how people relate?”
Melanie Sack, Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Society
Canada needs the participation of every one, every day in order to face the challenges of our time. Responding to the needs of communities, a pan-Canadian infrastructure for Participatory City could share viral good news stories, provide funding for cities, hold a community of practice, document the commons, provide teaching, learning and evaluation, and advocate for policy change.
A third group at our Wasan Participatory City Camp focused on building the strategy for a pan-Canadian framework that would support the scaling of place-based interventions across communities. The following elements were identified as crucial in order to catalyze this model:
Embed reconciliation within the pan-Canadian model. Indigenous communities must be meaningfully engaged in the design process of Participatory City Canada.
Design and integration of the platform as a living ecosystem.
Support to projects outside target locations. Connecting and supporting residents who do not live in the sites where interventions will take place to better integrate their needs in the design of the model.
Build innovative partnerships with municipal and provincial authorities to advance institutional and regulatory innovations to launch Participatory City and strengthen community resilience in the context of the current climate crisis.
Connect academic institutions and civic spaces into the participatory ecosystem.
Provide a platform for residents to experiment and scale new ideas to address social issues.
Mapping the usual and unusual suspects to invite them to take part in this transformative movement for change.
Challenges
To adapt Participatory City, there are a number of challenges and questions we hold that are both uncertain and impactful on the success of the initiative, such as:
Funding. How do we ensure that the model is sustainable in the long term? Enable hybrid collaborations with public and private sectors.
Need to invest in resources and time into training to ensure that the Participatory City London model can be scaled in other places.
Building indicators of success and finding convergence between communities. Ensuring that the model is reflective of the work taking place on the ground by developing indicators that are flexible enough to adapt to local geographies, while providing a cohesive infrastructure to guide our pan-Canadian ecosystem and avoid consensus paralysis (not getting things done).
Developing a scaling strategy to make sure that the model is deeply rooted in communities before scaling up to other neighbourhoods, while being mindful of avoiding to institutionalize participation. We explored two possible models for organizing to scale Participatory City in Canada. The choice of funding model and funding sources will strongly influence the organizing structure.
Building a cohesive narrative. Working across different geographies means that we need to set up effective practices to weave a cohesive narrative that helps residents, governments and funders alike understand the uniqueness of this model.
Go where the resources are vs go where the demand is. Connecting local ecosystems to neighbourhood needs.
Making a small start versus making a more ambitious start, managing expectations. Defining the scale of the first interventions will help us determine if and how to accelerate scaling elsewhere. Our final decision has to be enough to help us move the needle.
Critical uncertainties
1.Are we expecting too much from a single model?
2.Who gets to decide?
3.How do we decide what decisions exist at the local vs the pan-Canadian level?
4.Is community ownership vital?
5.What is the role of financial contribution to ensure skin in the game?
6.What are the restrictions that different funding sources impose?
7.Assumption: requires funders with a minimum 5 year time frame
8.What are the implications of investing millions in resident peer-to-peer participation and co-production in a context where other public services are being de-funded?
9.How does practical participation work look like during Canada’s winters?
10.What are the characteristics of shops that we seek to reproduce — how they look and feel to create a common and inclusive shared space?
11.What is the role of the gig economy and the sharing economy?
Moving ahead
Participatory City is an opportunity to invest in long term transformation toward a more inclusive future. Throughout these four days at Participatory City Camp, 24 civic innovators connected, built together and explored opportunities to build, fund and scale the model across geographies.
Participatory City Camp provided a first-hand learning experience of the vision of the London model. Together, we identified common values and potential pathways for adaptation. Conversations have continued to emerge following the Wasan retreat. The Halifax team has organized exploratory meetings throughout the fall and winter to consolidate their vision and strategy.
McConnell is also in the process of recruiting a Participatory City Development Manager who will help us advance this work as we weave a common narrative for Participatory City Canada. Meanwhile in London, Participatory City has launched their Year 2 Report, which includes valuable insights on the progress of their Every One Every Day initiative in Barking and Dagenham, and presents indicators and impacts achieved so far in promoting well-being through participation.
We are so grateful to participants who joined us throughout this journey and we look forward to continuing our conversations in 2020 to foster more inclusive, innovative and participatory communities!
“We need each other, and with the right opportunities, the right invitation, at the right time, in in the right space, we simply can’t resist being together.”
Tessy Britton. Chief Executive, Participatory City Foundation
“ Participatory City, heralded as holding the seeds of social transformation in the UK, is coming to Canada.
This is happening when Canadians are at a precipitous moment, when everything we do matters, and it matters that we do everything we can. Over the course of the next decade we must massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously building a society that replaces a broken and genocidal relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.
Positive systemic change at the necessary depth and speed is not something that can be imposed from elsewhere,
or for that matter, that governments or the private sector can accomplish by themselves. It requires community-wide mobilisation.
By connecting people and ideas where they live and work with a sense that we can and must do better, Participatory City and its partners are creating the conditions for an enduring and hopeful societal transformation.”
Stephen Huddart, Chief Executive, McConnell Foundation
