From designing alliances to future stories, our quest for a collaborative Brussels
2019 is here! And many of us are waiting for something big to happen, to move from transition to transformation. Something that will shake the current system and bring us to a point of no return. I’m not saying this in the light of the doomsday scenario of climate crisis, nor in relation to the 2019 European elections or the Belgian federal ones, or even the Brexit. I’m referring to the irreversible forces that are transforming the rhythms of the city from below — the citizens!
In the last climate walk in Brussels, Belgium, the number of citizens rose from 35.000 to 70.000. It was a Sunday, 27 January — a very cold and rainy day. Outsiders might not realise this, but for a small country like Belgium, this number is huge! The marchers were from all over Belgium, some spoke French, some spoke Dutch and others English. For this day, all differences/linguistic complications were put aside; what mattered was the cause and even more so, the collective disappointment in the system.
The youth of the country, especially, is furious: not just about their own future, but about the insanity of what we have become — extremely greedy and destructive. Today while I’m writing this, is the sixth consecutive week that students from all over the country skip school to march together, determined to bring some sanity in our world. Just visit the hashtags to understand the intensity of this movement #claimtheclimat #Youthforclimate #youth4climate or #marchepourleclimat. Going a step further, these young people are not just skipping school to protest on the streets: they are also thinking of proposals, which they’ve submitted to the government.
What happens in 2019 elections will matter — but what matters more is to empower these irreversible forces with right tools and future stories!
We hear louder than ever the gap between the slow action and increasing challenges of our times, thanks to these movements. I have two fears though around this movement that I would rather call “problems that require action”. The first fear or problem is that this movement can be used for selfish political motives whether left, centre or right. However I’m afraid there is nothing much we can do about it other than try to stay neutral and inclusive. The second fear that I have is the message of this movement can get diluted due to the lack of enough knowledge and the lack of clarity on the future we want. What happens in 2019 elections will matter — but what matters more is to empower these irreversible forces with right tools and collectively built future stories!
We are currently addressing the second problem around awareness and envisioning collectively the futures at Civic Innovation Network (CIN). CIN is a local initiative that a few of us co-instigated two years ago, an initiative that studied one research question in Brussels: “how to make collaboration the norm in the city?”.
Search of a novel recipe for collaboration
So what brought us to work around future stories in Brussels? To be able to answer that, I’ll have to give you some background. However ambitious our research question may sound, we made some real humble efforts, thanks to a passionate team, to achieve our goals. In the first year, we created innovative alliances between complementary players that often do not work together around an urban challenge. We called it Impact Joint Venture (IJV). We were very quickly seen as a neutral actor in the city to facilitate these collaborations.
We were so thrilled by imagining that soon, Impact Joint Ventures will pop up all over the city, like Atomiums spread over our capital.
The concept immediately spoke to changemakers, who were tired of competition. We triggered more than 10 IJV scenarios for the city of Brussels by mapping stakeholders, facilitating roundtables, building and communicating scenarios. We were so thrilled by imagining that soon, Impact Joint Ventures will pop up all over the city, like Atomiums spread over our capital.
Our “AHA moment” was when one of the IJV — a consortium of fablabs and schools that was built and facilitated by us — applied collectively for a regional funding instead of sending in individual applications. The best part is that they won the call and received a 600,000€ grant to cover more than 20 schools in 2018–2019.
So did our dream of IJVs popping up all over the city come true? We faced a few challenges in the process: first was the challenge of resources. Collaboration between the players with different projects doesn’t happen over 3 or 4 roundtables. It requires quite some time until finally, the trust is built and collaborators can start seeing value in it. We didn’t have time or rather we didn’t have resources to enable that time both for us and for the IJV stakeholders.
Our second challenge was the lack of legal and technological support for such collaborations to thrive. What kind of legal contracts could we have to ensure that all these projects can work together, invest their time and money and have a fair system? Does such collaboration always need a person to be the neutral facilitator? We did a lot of research on these questions but we didn’t have all the answers not to mention time was running, and resources were decreasing. What did happen while we were working on these IJVs is that we caught a lot of attention. Our image of neutral facilitator gained momentum and we were approached by several public agencies to facilitate thematic topics like production, governance and culture for the city.
We started working with different public partners by guiding them through a systems-thinking approach. This approach involves analysis of the context, studying of the links and influencers of the system, mapping of stakeholders, exploring external inspirations and co-creation workshops. Though all the cases followed a similar approach in the process, each case had its own intricacies. For example, in the case of CityDev (a public real estate infrastructure agency), our objective was to make them think beyond the acquisition of machines for a new fablab. We wanted them to question what it means to bring a new equipped fablab in a city where there are already several bottom-up fablabs. Hence the focus was drawn on how can all existing fablabs collectively participate in designing the direction of a new fablab that is created by a public actor.
In the second example, with the Brussels Environment (a public agency administering environment and energy), we immersed even deeper in the investigation. Brussels Environment made a study on low carbon giving the city a tool to establish a low carbon strategy for Brussels. However, how do you achieve such goals without a collective agreement on governance for this process? So the vital question in this investigation became “what kind of governance do we need in Brussels to achieve the low carbon goals by 2050?”. The way we explored the answers to that question can be read in the report published by Brussels Environment and Civic Innovation Network.
Changemaker’s Dilemma: naivety or impatience
What followed the series of investigations on city topics in partnership with public agencies was a sense of disorientation and dissatisfaction in the team. It was always challenging to collaborate with public agencies in general, due to indifference in the values of transparency, co-creation and agility. We realised we were not in the best position to make the change happen faster. So we immersed ourselves for three months to rethink our next steps, and we came to the following conclusions:
- We initiated a process that not many people dared to do and brought on the table the bold ideas that no one was talking about. We also met important actors of the city and we explored the vaults of the city.
- Now we need to convince more insiders in public agencies to accelerate the change, we cannot work as consultants for systemic change. It is going to be a long transition, but we need to make everyone understand the urgency of the matter and to be able to think clearly.
- The overwhelming nature of today’s challenges results in inaction from people. This inaction becomes a barrier to collaboration and puts at stake a viable future. To combat that, we have to step out of the confinement of our built reality and experiment with the lens of future thinking and imagination.
The experience of the last two years and the above conclusions brought us to this new journey of working on future stories for Brussels. We want to influence the present of our city by prompting the citizens to question the future. We want to create awareness in the city through collaboratively envisaging and communicating about future narratives. Future narratives that will guide people to think positively and critically about what comes next, and work together towards it. And in order to do so, we will work with the CIN community that composes of local partners, mentors and our circle of local thinkers and visionaries.
Let’s not let the climate movement become just another political game. Let’s build tools and future stories that can reinforce this movement and empower the citizens. And simultaneously future stories for many other movements of change for our city. We can’t wait to start this journey with you. In the coming weeks, we will announce our concrete plans.
To the journey where adventure and hope await us!
A big hug to the core team members who dreamed of this transformation journey Ellen Anthoni P-A Klein Timothée Brès Xavier Van Den Bossche , special thanks to all other team members (old and new) for their invaluable contribution and everyone else who crossed our paths!
