Principles-driven work | Example #2: Place Lab’s Ethical Redevelopment

Following yesterday’s post highlighting principles in Impact Hub Birmingham’s Maker Manifesto, here is another set of principles which have inspired us on our journey. These have been framed as emerging principles of Ethical Redevelopment, “drawn from artist-led, neighborhood-based development work on Chicago’s South Side”. Chicago’s Place Lab website explains:

Ethical Redevelopment makes the case for mindful city-building. By utilizing cross-city networks and cross-sector innovation, Ethical Redevelopment encapsulates a philosophy by which to shift the value system from conventional, profit-driven development practices to conscientious interventions in the urban context.

The emerging principles and associated narratives were articulated by Place Lab in 2017 (see full document below). Here we’ve listed the 9 principles, along with some of the wonderful guidance and observations from this work in progress.

• repurpose + re-propose | Take stock of what is around you. Use what you have or what is available at the time. If a thing is discarded because it no longer has value or use to its previous owner, accept and receive it. Make it work for you. Compel yourself to have a deep engagement with discarded things. Make resources work for you in new and unintended ways. Repurposing is an act of redemption, an act of imagination. Artistry is alchemy—it allows one thing to become another. Be an alchemist in your community. In new hands, there is renewed possibility for the discarded and overlooked. This approach to city - or community -building is about resource availability and ingenuity — start with what you have and recognise existing local assets and latent value in the discarded and overlooked.
• engaged participation | Invite others to get involved. Approach participants authentically as you would a neighbour. Work with the people who believe in the place: locals embedded by proximity, those connected by a desire to contribute or commitment to a mission. Provide multiple access points or ways to participate. Participation drives the transformation of a place and of those involved. Work as a resident and citizen to spur civic engagement, drawing a relationship between citizen participation and citizen power. This work is for many, with many, and, ultimately, by many.
• pedagogical moments | Moments of learning and teaching unfold in all aspects of work. Consider the steps in each project that could be instructive. By tapping into the existing, possibly latent talent within a community and putting it to use for the community, exchanges for transfer of knowledge reach across identities, roles, practices, disciplines, generations, and localities. Young people need opportunities to experiment, gain experience, and imagine their future. Adults, who are looking for new chances, benefit as well. Bring everyone along for the journey. Cultivate the talent they bring and foster new talent in work that excites them. Experience is the teacher; exposure is the lab. Without leveraging these structures and moments for pedagogical exchange, opportunities for teaching, learning, and cultivating talent are unrealized.
• the indeterminate | Suspend knowing. Embrace uncertainty. Accept ambiguity. Allow the work to offer solutions; ask questions in response to “problems” facing a neighbourhood or city. Resource inequity can be reduced with imagination. Leave room for the unexpected and unanticipated. It may be the best part of the work.
• design | Everyone deserves to see and be a part of the transformation of their spaces into places. Beauty is a basic service often not extended to “forgotten parts” of the city. It is an amenity considered incongruent with certain places. Beautiful objects come from and belong in blighted spaces, just as they do in high investment areas of a city. Creative people can play a pivotal role in how this happens. Beauty has magnetism. It defines character. It promotes reverence. Design can enhance the desirability of a neglected site, corridor, or block while illustrating the reverence and care of a neighbourhood and its residents. Aesthetics may speak loudly or whisper, but, either way, they draw people in. It provides value, respect, importance, and regard for the character of a community. Urban design thinking asks about the connections that could happen between one house and another, one neighbour and another.
• place over time | A sense of place cannot be developed overnight. Actions, interventions, site-specific experiments, and investments need adequate time to be realized. Likewise, neglect, abandonment, and divestment of a place happen over time. Pockets of cities deteriorate gradually. Thus activation, density, and vibrancy require cultivation for an extended duration, not short, quick fixes. Place is more about the people who inhabit it and the activities they engage in than the space itself. Participants come to rely on anchor spaces as consistent resources of cultural and spiritual sustenance.
• stack, leverage +access | Projects like these require belief and motivation more than they require funding. Whether an intervention is a single project, location, or gesture, it has impact and reverberation. Early, small success can enable the next project. Leverage the attention garnered by the work to amplify it. Let the work attract more believers. Demonstrating capacity permits access to greater resources. Proof of infrastructure is persuasive.
• constellations | Projects need visionaries, believers, implementers, collaborators, and evaluators. A vibrant constellation or a rich ecosystem is responsive to the pairings and groupings that suddenly emerge. Some webs of connectivity mature more slowly, gradually revealing formerly unforeseen affinities. A project taps into a particular kind of power when it refuses to be singular, when it takes up space and assembles believers from disparate corners.
• platforms | A platform is a mechanism to propel work forward —
  it creates conditions of multiplicity, compounds ideas, expands relationships, germinates opportunities, and widens access. A stage or platform is often invisible. It operates not in service of itself but to reinforce what can be. The event — what is happening — is beside the point. The point is that folks are meeting, exchanging, and learning… It builds bonds, which build community. A space that encourages deep conversation, new friendships, and, ultimately, a community of people who want to be a part of transformative work in the neighbourhood.

We referred frequently to the Ethical Redevelopment principles in Detectorism Insights #1 because they both inspired us and resonated deeply with findings from our lab work in 2017. We’d love to hear about principles which inspire you in your work or thinking.