Rethinking what it means to have a vision
Why we seek many, varied visions, and ways in which Time Rebels are leaning towards futures rooted in co-evolution and imaging, as well as imagining.
“What is your vision for Dudley High Street?”
This question was asked of CoLab Dudley team members in September 2021 by architecture Masters student Michelle. Similarly, in 2018 our funding manager from the National Lottery Community Fund asked us:
“What is your vision?”
I wriggle uncomfortably away from answering such questions. In this lab note I share some reflections on this discomfort, and what I’ve been paying attention to because of awareness of this unease.
Digging into my discomfort
My first reaction when asked about a vision for the work I’m helping to steward in a place is panic! I assume that the person asking the question is seeking a pithy vision statement, or at most a one minute elevator pitch. Such things are not my forte. (Perhaps with good reason.*)
The panic swiftly shifts to feeling that the work and my fairly undefined role in it are not deserving of attention by people from organisations which have clearly articulated visions, structures and roles descriptions. (Such is the grip of myths and stories about what is of value and importance in our culture.)
And then… I find some way of clumsily talking about what is at the root of my discomfort with a request for a vision for a place, which is fundamentally a question of privilege.
I don’t think my vision(s), or those of a small team (of middle aged, educated, able, white people) should be offered up as the vision for a place and/or community. I believe that as many diverse perspectives and visions as possible should be invited from people willing to commit to working together on them over time, in a place. And I feel that it is a responsibility of those willing and in a position to do such work to seek, listen to and honour the ideas, hopes, dreams, concerns and experiences of those unable to make such commitment.
Over the last four years this resolve has drawn me, our lab work and our collaborations towards a delightful and ever evolving array of ideas and concepts which have vigorously extended our thinking on visions, imagination, (eco)systems and wholes, futures and flourishing. Below I touch on some of this journey. In a lab note to follow, lab team member Jo introduces examples of CoLab Dudley’s work as imagination infrastructure which supports collective public imagining and creative action for regenerative futures in Dudley.
Imagination in a place; and who gets to imagine
As we were evolving our lab work in early 2019, weaving a collective of doers, makers and creatives to generate creative and cultural activities in public spaces on and around Dudley High Street, lab team member Jo Orchard-Webb introduced us to the concept of spatial imaginaries.
A spatial imaginary is:
“a shared or collective understanding of a particular space produced in association with the practices of living in that space. Importantly, spatial imaginaries are more than ‘just’ cognitive frameworks / representations; they structure and co-constitute social practices and have material effects.” (Nerlich and Morris, 2015)
Our conversations, collaborations and shared learning with people on Dudley High Street through 2017 and 2018 had led us to appreciate that:
There is a growing articulation to collectively redesign Dudley High Street. This future spatial imaginary is rooted in a desire for social justice, collective agency and a reanimated sense of place and belonging. It is underpinned by the everyday creative power and talents of local people. This reimagining is mindful of the town’s history, but also seeks to re-weave a more regenerative connection with nature into that story. (Jo Orchard-Webb, in a Lab Note: Re-imagining Dudley High Street, June 2019)
A year later, Jo and I logged in to hear Rob Hopkins talk at Civic Square’s Department of Dreams Re Festival, and Jo was captivated by the Imagination Sundial tool designed by Rob Shorter, which was briefly shared.
Shortly afterwards, Rob Hopkins published a post Introducing the Imagination Sundial and writes:
… imagination, to a degree, is a function of privilege, in that it is very hard to live an imaginative life when your basic needs aren’t met and when you are stressed or in trauma. We recognise the impacts of colonisation, in that colonisation and exclusion based on race, gender, class or sexuality determine whose imagination actually gets to shape and determine the future of a particular place. As Adrienne Maree Brown puts it: “We are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include us.
Having successfully encouraged our lab team to experiment with the Imagination Sundial in summer 2020, Jo introduced it to Time Rebels as a key navigation tool. In a lab note about testing out the Imagination Sundial, Jo brings the following to our attention:
- Spatial injustice scars our future High Street as long as who gets to imagine and shape the future is a function of existing privilege.
- Decolonising the future means designing our experiments in a way that enables the imaginative agency for everyone on the High Street. How do we/ others do that? How might we generate conversations, awareness, imaginaries and action around this?
This essential focus upon who gets to imagine the future of the High Street comes up again and again in almost every aspect of our work. Our High Streets are often the result of a concentration of power and social structures that mean the vision of our High Street is one dimensional and caught in a dystopian ground hog day of extractive economy perpetuating regeneration cycles. This needs to change. Being intentional in designing safe spaces for everyone to imagine an alternative High Street is the platform responsibility.
A key charateristic of social labs (such as CoLab Dudley) is that they are social. The starting point is a team of people who bring a diversity of knowledges, experiences and abilities. We add to this diversity through a collective of 50+ Time Rebels, who live, work and/or learn in Dudley, from students to grandparents. We nurture deep collaborations which centre conditions for imagination. (See our work with BCU’s Co.LAB and Extinction Rebellion Architecture studio.) And together we cultivate connected experiments which invite conversation, connection and sharing of visions by people who live, work and play in Dudley. Over the last two years this has led to over 80 What If…? questions being been developed and explored… that’s over 80 visions being considered and experimented with.
It’s perhaps worth saying that we’re not generating and exploring multiple visions in order to reduce or conflate them into a single vision statement, or to find a point of convergence. One of my fellow Doughnut Economics Learning Journey hosts, Mona Ebdrup recently posted a great reflection on the importance of work being pluralistic, which eloquently makes the point I’m trying to get at here. And Space 10, a research and design lab recently shared learning from an enquiry around what constitutes good design in our day and age. This is their first takeaway (with thanks to Holly Doron for sending this my way):
Good design is regional
Designing with community, at local and bioregional scales, means arriving at not one but multiple futures. Not all ideas should scale. ‘The idea of a single solution for all isn’t taking into consideration cultural nuances,’ Seetal Solanki says. Good design embraces Indigenous knowledge, vernacular techniques and local materials to find solutions specific to each unique entanglement of people, climate, and place.
Co-evolution and imaging
In the recently published Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergence, urbanist Sarah Ichioka and architect Michael Pawlyn introduce five key paradigm shifts that they believe are “critical if human cultures are to meaningfully survive the urgent global crises that we have unleashed.” One of these is co-evolution as nature: stewardship and living systems.
This sets out a rethinking of the dualistic view, which sees humans as separate from rest of the living world, towards a new paradigm in which humans co-evolve as an integrated part of nature…
Shifting towards a holistic view of humans and nature will involve a deliberate rethinking of frames and language. For instance, rather than referring to ‘the environment’, which implies something abstract, from which humans are separate, it is more consistent with regenerative thinking to refer to ‘the living world’…
Contemplate also the huge difference between the terms ‘living things’ and ‘living beings’. This calls to mind cultural historian Thomas Berry’s assertion “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”
And Carol Sanford has written about the fact that visions and visioning tend to centre ourselves and on human experience. There may be other species and other natural features in our visions, however they are often there to serve us; to feed us perhaps, or help our wellbeing. (Most of the visioning I’ve done is totally guilty of this.)
Even centered on all of human life, visioning does not arise from an understanding of humans within larger systems. Instead it isolates us from Earth and community. We think of ourselves as units in static environments, not as living entities in living ecosystems. Visioning sessions are imbued with this anthropomorphic experience of the world, usually based on only the most limited view of humans, how we work, and what makes us healthy. This is not always, but it is far too often. This is one of the core reasons we are so destructive to the world and others around us. Visioning fosters this effect.
A proposed alternative is imaging, which Sanford suggests gives us the ability to understand how life really works.
For example, how does a wetland work when it is healthy and vital? We can only answer this question by understanding through imaging — not by “ima-gin-ing”, which is making up ideas pretty much within our own minds. Imaging means to formulate an image, to put our mind to work to try to see how something is — not what it could be, what it is. Imaging is the stuff of science. It answers the big, important questions, such as, how does human motivation work? How does planetary climate work?
The more I give attention to thinking like this, and read books such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, the more critical it feels that we all develop our imaging, as well as our imagining abilities. It has been wonderful to see Time Rebels helping local people to do this. The More-Than-Human High Street experiment designed by Time Rebels Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne in 2021 led the way: “utilising our curiosity and creativity to imagine a more-than-human future, maybe together we can start to change things for the better…”
Stories of Place, stewarded by Time Rebel and lab team member Holly Doron helps to nurture ongoing more-than-human explorations, such as student Time Rebel Kirren’s More-Than-Human High Street Stories session at our Open Project Night in November 2021.
Research undertaken by BCU’s Extinction Rebellion Architecture studio in collaboration with our lab and involving local people through a series of interventions in Dudley marketplace and exhibitions on the High Street have helped to continue such explorations and get people thinking about co-evolution through a range of different ideas.
Time Rebel Helen is weaving in some ‘plant talk’ to the Radio Public project currently underway at CoLab Dudley.
Experiments, enquiries and visions like these can help to challenge the unconscious anthropocentrism in notions of visions for a place. Now that I understand ways in which most visions centre humans and human life, I desire more to stretch and shift how we think and imagine.
Some alternative questions to ‘what is your vision?’
I’ve come up with 3 questions I’d rather be asked about work in a place. How would you feel being asked them? How might the questions and/or your responses support or challenge a vision that you have, or that your group, network or organisation has? Or that your local authority has for the place you live?
- What are some of the many visions people have for this place?
- Who is taking creative action towards alternative futures in this place?
And in considering ourselves as living entities entangled in living ecosystems in a place, Carol Sanford might ask:
- What work is being done to help people becoming conscious participants in and stewards of life’s evolutionary processes in this place? (from Indirect Work)
Bringing increased awareness of entanglement (which is at the heart of the question above) has helped our lab team to evolve one of our GUIDEing Principles which reminds us to use systems thinking (we called it Join the Dots). We’ve recently refined this principle to better reflect our collective interdependency with all beings. Years of experimenting and shared learning on the High Street mean that we now better understand that collective sense making and collaborative design are essential processes within the imagining and imaging. Our new GUIDEing Principle is: Seek living systems health (through collective sensemaking and collaborative design). We explain it as follows:
As regenerative designers we seek to discover and align with the unique potential of people and places.
We connect issues and reveal patterns by joining the dots across and within systems so that we reveal, understand, and design mindfully for this interdependency.
The lab team will be sharing more about our refined and smaller number of GUIDEing lab principles in the coming weeks.
Footnote
*In the process of drafting this lab note I happened to listen Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead poscast epsidode with Dr Linda Hill. I experienced a sinking feeling when I heard Dr Linda Hill say that her mentors taught her that “leadership was about dealing with change, change when you’re trying to lead change you have a vision, you communicate that vision, and you try to inspire people to want to follow you, if you will, to the future.”
However she went on to summarise her 20 years of research into leading innovation as follows:
It turns out when I was describing that to people at Pixar and other places that I began to study, they said, “Well, you know, Linda, when you are trying to do breakthrough innovation, you actually have no vision. You don’t know the answer. You can’t communicate it to anybody, and you can’t inspire to go there because you don’t actually know.” What you do have is a purpose and a purpose is different than a vision. A purpose is sort of why we’re going and what we’re trying to do together, it’s not where we’re going. So, you’ve got to be clear about your purpose and who you’re trying to serve or the problem you’re trying to solve and that’s very different from having a vision. [chuckle] And many of them said, one of the leaders who is a fabulous one said to me, “You know, I stopped reading leadership books because on page two it said I was supposed to have a vision and the only reason I come to work every day is because I have no vision.”
