A shared mission of sustainable growth

Clare Devaney reports back from the US on approaches to citizenship and inclusive growth, and finds a new, human-centred development model emerging in its major cities.

‘Inclusive growth’ acknowledges the need to address a real and growing economic imbalance.

As urbanisation casts major cities as the engines of economic growth, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. The emphasis on agglomeration and intensive investment in the perceived drivers of economic growth, which has tended to manifest in a concentration of wealth and capital in city-centres, ‘innovation districts’ and around anchor institutions such as universities and large corporates, has arguably contributed to increasing exclusion and inequality beyond those focal points.

The evidence and impacts of this tension, which sits at the centre of current city growth models, can be seen and felt locally, nationally and globally, and left unchallenged, it is of potentially immeasurable consequence.

Writing in The Guardian this past week, Professor Stephen Hawking cites rising inequality as the greatest threat to our planet. The principle of ‘inclusive growth’ has emerged in response to this powerful imperative.

The important work of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission (for which the deadline for submissions of evidence is 31st December 2016) has been a key driver in shaping and driving the agenda. Its core aims — to integrate social and economic policy to achieve shared goals, and to create broader, ‘people-shaped’ parameters for growth and economic development — have been welcomed, and it has prompted a discernible policy shift in the UK over the last year.

However, the language of inclusive growth has proven more challenging, bringing with it a problematic and inherent paradox. By presenting ‘growth’ as a defined object and adding ‘inclusive’ as a descriptor, there is room for the inference that the growth exists outside of, and by extension before, the inclusion; that it is, in effect, exclusive of the inclusion. But can growth exist if it is anything but inclusive?

In the UK’s major cities, the answer is not only clearly demonstrated in the numbers. A recent report from the University of Manchester’s newly launched Inclusive Growth Analysis Unit concludes that –

“The improvements witnessed in prosperity therefore have not been sufficient in magnitude or shared enough in their benefits across the population to translate into a sustained narrowing of economic inactivity gaps between Greater Manchester and the core city region average.”

It is starkly evidenced on our streets and in the daily lives of millions; intensified further by the austerity agenda, increasing pressure on local budgets and consequent cuts to front-line services. Approaching growth and equality as discrete — and diverging — agendas presents its own, pressing, and unsustainable, paradox.

At the same time, the difficulty of pursuing inclusive growth in practice by ‘retro-fitting’ inclusion to established growth models is also becoming apparent, giving rise to thinking that sustainable growth — embracing inclusion as critical in addressing the core disparity between growth and equality — will require a more fundamental systemic change.

In practice, that means a move away from framing ‘inclusion’ as simply engagement with and consultation in existing growth strategies to instead pro-actively employing open and participatory approaches in the co-design, governance and implementation of strategies from the outset, as the basis for new, and inherently inclusive, systems.

Approaches to inclusion and growth

Working in partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), the RSA has set out to explore local, national and international approaches to inclusion and growth, to examine participatory models of strategic design, delivery and oversight, and specifically to understand the role and nature of citizenship and citizens within those models.

Focussing on three key themes — inclusion, innovation and impact, initial fieldwork has explored approaches and case studies — Boston, Seattle and Detroit -in the United States (with work in Europe and South America to follow), alongside an open call for evidence and early work with a number of UK cities to draw out local good practice and synthesise learning.

Our aim in this initial stage has been to better understand the inter-relationship between inclusion, citizenship, participatory practice and systemic change, in order to inform more intensive work with selected UK cities in the later stages of the project.

Lessons from America on civic innovation and sustainable growth

The recent US election has provided a pertinent and challenging backdrop to our fieldwork research on citizen engagement and inclusive growth.

Established US democratic processes, already under intense scrutiny, have been called into further question, and the resurgence of President-elect Trump has exposed the limitations of pre- and post-electoral polling and analysis in offering accurate insight. Our exploration of citizenship and participation has sat in stark contrast to an election campaign widely regarded as the most bitterly contested, controversial and dominated by ‘the establishment’ in recent times.

In spite of the ensuing national (and international) state of flux, and perhaps in the first lesson we can draw from the US approach in regards to UK devolution, the emphasis at a city level remains fixed on local growth and sustainability.

Detroit

A number of US cities are pursuing ‘place-based’ strategies and testing alternative, non-electoral routes for participation in decision-making processes.

Detroit’s resurgence has benefited from both. For example, its Future City programme, launched as an interactive ‘civic planning’ process in response to large-scale blight and vacancy across the city (utilising a combination of 30 interconnected engagement tactics including an online game — Detroit 24/7 — that alone generated 8000 responses) and now operates as a platform for open-sourced innovation. The city is also currently undertaking pioneering work with the US-wide Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative, developing parks, open spaces and public realm as ad-hoc innovation labs.

Detroit is a city which has tackled the notion of ‘hard to reach’ by inviting and enabling its people to interact with its physical fabric.

Boston

In Boston, widely acknowledged as a global leader in innovation thanks largely to the presence of Harvard University and MIT and the clustering effect of large corporate tech and biotech firms around those anchor points, there is a growing sense of the need to apply its vast knowledge capital to the city’s ‘wicked problems’. Positioned on the Atlantic coast, and with much of its development along that coastline built on landfill, climate change and rising water levels are of particular concern. This year saw the inaugural Hub Week, a ‘festival of innovation’ which included a series of open-sourced, place-based challenges inviting innovative responses to issues around the city’s bodies of water, generating a range of actionable and multiple-bottom line ideas, including water cleansing bio-pellets made from the city’s significant food waste.

Whilst its status as a global innovation lead remains secure, there is acknowledgement from its civic leadership that Boston is a relative newcomer to this civic innovation space. Participatory programmes and approaches to inclusion have tended to sit within its municipal arts and cultural offer, such as the recent six-month public co-design process to develop its Boston Creates cultural strategy. Noteworthy developments include the opening of the Roxbury Innovation Centre, Boston’s first ‘community innovation hub’ in a planned series of hubs in suburban neighbourhoods, and initiatives such as The Ujima Project, a public/private/civic community capital fund which is trialling a range of interventions including participatory budgeting, worker cooperatives and alternative local currencies. These developments signal a new and emerging organic innovation ecosystem in the city.

Seattle

In Seattle, a city celebrated for its rich heritage in the arts, culture, and creativity, the civic leadership is working with citizens groups and the city’s emerging network of SMEs, start-ups and social enterprises to harness and apply that creativity to addressing some of its challenges. Most notably, Seattle is trying to tackle its significant and rising homelessness levels, which has been declared as a ‘state of emergency’.

In Pioneer Square, a downtown district in which there is a concentration of homelessness shelters and missions, The Alliance for Pioneer Square, which formed initially as a campaign to support development of the square at the city of the district (and has since led development of the square as a successful multi-use civic space), is now acting as a platform through which public, private, third sector and civic stakeholders are collaborating to generate and action innovative solutions.

Beyond the binary

Responses to our open call for evidence (which remains open for contributions) include references to a sense of distance, disconnect and “An ‘us and them’ mentality”.

The opportunity for participatory approaches to scale within a binary, ‘us and them’ system which distinguishes between ‘economic’ in fiscal terms and ‘social’ to refer to anything outside of that, but predominantly in reference to people, is limited. There is a strong and emerging argument that the distinction between economic and social in these terms 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 remains critical to enabling effective, dynamic new models of participation to gain traction in practice.

Taken collectively, the practice we see emerging from our US case studies indicates a shift in favour of open approaches to strategic development, harnessing the human resource, capacity and capital of a place — its people — in shaping and delivering strategies which meet the needs of those places and people; and driving an organic growth.

The emergence of these ‘ground up’ approaches mirrors a conceptual move through place-blind and latterly place-based strategies to place-driven; a distinction on which we might reflect ahead of UK devolution.

That said, evidence from the US is largely project specific. Scaling and replication of participatory approaches appears limited by a number of factors including a reliance on grant and project-based charitable funding, orchestration and administration at distance, a prevailing characterisation of projects as ‘social investment’, ‘community development’ and ‘outreach’ to be delivered in suburbs and neighbourhoods (away from, and separate to, the downtown ‘economic core’, thereby excluding citizens in the core from regard as communities), and a continued reliance on fiscal evaluation and ‘cost benefit’ to demonstrate impact.

In our deeper dive case studies, working with Boston and Seattle, both cities are exploring new ways to measure and evaluate impact, focussing on human emotion, wellbeing and sentiment. In both cities, this is driven by the civic leadership — in Seattle, through the Mayor’s recently established Office of Policy and Innovation, which is also exploring ‘human centre design’ in its strategic decision making processes, and in Boston through the Boston Planning Authority. However, it is an interesting aside to note the difference in applying this approach, with Seattle’s focus on applying quantifiable metrics to sentiments such as ‘hope’, ‘happiness’ and ‘self-belief’, and Boston’s adoption of ‘The Misery Index’.

In both cities too there is an acknowledgment of what is often (and arguably euphemistically) referred to as the ‘unintentional social impacts’ of hyper-investment in ‘innovation hot-spots’, particularly universities, corporate campuses and suburban science parks, and of how these ‘innovation districts’ are very often neighboured by significantly poorer areas, with a notable correlation between negative impact and proximity.

Boston is attempting to address the democratic deficit in how innovation is currently defined and manifest through strategic development of new ‘innovation districts’ in selected neighbourhoods, such as the Roxbury Innovation Centre. Seattle’s approach is more organic, and driven by strong small business and social enterprise networks in districts such as Pioneer Square.

Social innovation in both cities is strengthened by the presence of new anchors such as Impact Hubs, which operate more openly than traditional anchors such as universities. In Detroit, this redefinition of innovation anchors has been taken one step further to include parks and social spaces as ‘civic commons’. In a similar movement as can be observed from place-based to place-driven strategies, in cities like Detroit we are seeing a shift from social innovation to a distinct civic innovation.

This direction of travel is characteristic of an emerging economic model, one which is not constrained by artificial economic and social parameters, confined by a territorial understanding of place, or focussed on innovation as a thing to be produced and owned, but which is driven by place, sustained by a dynamic process of continuous innovation, and which behaves — as people do — in multi-faceted, cross-boundary and interconnected ways. It is a system built on freeing innovation and human capital, which brings the people of a place together in working toward a shared mission of sustainable growth, in which inclusion is not the goal, but the catalyst.