Spot the difference: Urban Rooms and CoLab Dudley
There is a sudden flurry of interest in Urban Rooms in the West Midlands, as a result of the Urban Rooms Roadshow. Locally to us, the roadshow has been promoted by the West Midlands Combined Authority, who are looking to invest in Urban Rooms. The events seek to introduce the Urban Room model, present case studies of current and past Urban Rooms across the UK, and describe the impact that they have had in facilitating creative community engagement in placemaking. (Eventbrite)
People we have met or been connected with recently have said things like:
“I know that CoLab Dudley is like an Urban Room.”
“We are very interested in Urban Rooms, I’d love to come and visit you and find out more about what you do.”
I completely understand where these comments and approaches are coming from, because when I first came across the Urban Room concept a while back I eagerly looked through their explainers and resources. I was driven by curiosity around the potential overlap between social labs (CoLab Dudley is a social lab) and Urban Rooms. Might CoLab Dudley, as a place based social lab, inadvertently also be an Urban Room? I soon ascertained that no, we aren’t, although on the face of it we have lots in common.
Along with other kinds of interventions, projects and platforms, we each have our niche. You need to spend a little longer looking if you are to spot the differences between Urban Rooms and CoLab Dudley. Below I outline some features which look similar at a glance, and why they are fundamentally different once you look harder.
Transdisciplinary teams
The Urban Rooms Network includes members drawn from the arts, planning, architecture, education, heritage, culture, community and local government. (Urban Rooms Network)
Social labs start by bringing together diverse participants to work in a team that acts collectively. (Zaid Hassan). CoLab Dudley’s network of team members and Time Rebels includes people who bring practices from architecture, participatory research, geography, design, community development, social art, regeneration, visual art, poetry, cultural production, crafts, public health, education and more.
However it’s when you look at why these diverse teams are coming together that distinctions appear.
“Often the initial vision for an Urban Room comes from an individual or small group with a passion for participatory placemaking. It is important to maintain that vision while expanding the team in order to deliver the Urban Room in reality.” (Urban Rooms Toolkit p55)
CoLab Dudley is not about placemaking. We are concerned that placemaking suggests separation from and power over place by a small number of privileged people. Placemaking is a managerialist understanding of place, and aligns with the kinds of (extractive and capitalist) regeneration thinking and actions that often lead to displacement and gentrification.
We see any place — with it’s diverse multitude of entangled place based wisdoms, stories, identities, and more-than-human kin — as already existing. We are not here to make it. We are not separate from it. Nor are we interested in attempts to impose the vision of small group of humans onto a place. Instead we learn from and with place in all its complexity, in the context of social and ecological crises. We do this by focusing upon potential of place. We seek to cultivate collective imagination and expand who/what gets to imagine futures of place that expand who and what will thrive in those futures. Critically, we are focused on nurturing the capabilities that support a form of creative community resilience (regenerative resilience) that helps us transition together to those futures where both people and planet thrive.
We appreciate that Urban Rooms, for example Live Works in Sheffield are seeking to “develop socially and environmentally sustainable design solutions for the city’s buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.” (Urban Room Stories: Live Works). However in CoLab Dudley we’re interested in a justice focused shift from sustainable to regenerative approaches.
CoLab Dudley emerged in 2014 from over a decade of explorations around community influence and power in Dudley, undertaken through Dudley’s Community Empowerment Network. The intention behind CoLab Dudley has always been to unlock and connect the abundance of imagination, creativity, knowledge, skills and other kinds of resources we have in Dudley borough. CoLab Dudley now brings an urgency and energy to the role of culture, creatives and communities in responding to climate, ecological and other entangled emergencies. These emergencies are all rooted in colonial, mechanistic and extractive ways of relating to the world, and thus demand new kinds of relationships if we are to transition away from them.
Sophia Parker, Director of Emerging Futures at Joseph Rowntree Foundation articulates an important characteristic of Emerging Futures pioneers as: “Starting from a different place: understanding the work as building a post-industrial regenerative economy that centres human and ecological wellbeing, rather than trying to address or fix current problems.” CoLab Dudley’s team are among the network of pioneers and changemakers being referred to by Sophia.
Physical spaces
“Every town and city should have a physical space where people can go to understand, debate and get involved in the past, present and future of where they live, work and play. The purpose of these Urban Rooms is to foster meaningful connections between people and place, using creative methods of engagement to encourage active participation in the future of our buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.” (Urban Rooms Network)
We couldn’t agree more!
Securing a dedicated lab space on a High Street was really important for us, and continues to be. The experiments and projects led by CoLab Dudley’s Time Rebels make all kinds of invitations to local people to understand, debate and get involved in the past, present and future of where they live, work and play, using creative methods of engagement.
However while the Urban Room is “a tool for place-based community engagement”, CoLab Dudley is a experimental social and imagination infrastructure. Another of Sophia Parker’s characteristics of the kind of work we do is illuminating here. She sees a defining characteristic of our work as: “Bringing a propositional and iterative mindset:these are people who practice something as well as think deeply; they build in the real world, and through that work learn more about what else needs to change.” (JRF). CoLab Dudley isn’t an engagement tool. It is an act of prefiguration which is shaped by everyone involved. We are enacting and manifesting possible futures in relation to governance, social infrastructure, convening and collaboration, rehearsing the futures we want.
Principles that guide behaviour
“Although they can be different in many ways Urban Rooms share the same principles:
- a focus on our shared built environment — streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces
- an open door — all welcome, especially those who are traditionally under-represented in decision making about the future of our towns and cities
- exploration through creative activities — to prompt curiosity and fresh thinking
- to be ‘on-site’, that is, located in the places that are being discussed.”
These principles resonate somewhat with CoLab Dudley work, but again, there are substantial and critical distinctions.
Our focus is not just on our shared built environment
We’ve paid a lot of attention to the built environment as a result of locating on Dudley High Street. We have been collaborating with architects and students from Birmingham City University’s School of Architecture and Design for 4 years. We’ve experimented with parklets on the traffic filled, High Street in Dudley. We’ve observed, explored and done unusual things in public spaces on and around the High Street.
We will continue to be curious about the built environment and public space, and invite people to pay attention it to through creative activities which prompt curiosity and new thinking. We will bring mindful attention to our more-than-human relations in the urban environment, which Urban Rooms (to date) don’t seem to deem as relevant/vital.
However we are not solely focused on the built environment. We are interested in addressing change across multiple, interlocking systems simultaneously (Sophia Parker, JRF). This is evident in our convening of Time Rebels, our work on cultural strategy in action and current work to establish Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice.
We have an open door, and we work on our own anti-oppressive practices
All are welcome to participate in our Time Rebel experiments and projects and activities we curate. We acknowledge that racism, ableism, sexism and other oppressions are experienced by people we meet and work with. We seek to minimise our own unconscious discrimination and instances of unwitting microagressions, all of which impact, unseen, on our abilities to engage those most marginalised.
We recognise that there are complex, cumulative ways in which multiple forms of discrimination combine or intersect, particularly in the experiences of those most marginalised. We understand that such experiences arise through interlocking systems of domination in systems and structures in a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society. We are actively working to increase our critical consciousness and cultivate anti-oppressive practices.
Beyond exploration through creative activities to live experimentation.
Social labs are experimental. They “are not one-off experiences. They’re ongoing and sustained efforts. The team doing the work takes an iterative approach to the challenges it wants to address, prototyping interventions and managing a portfolio of promising solutions. This reflects the experimental nature of social labs, as opposed to the project-based nature of many social interventions.” (Zaid Hassan) This is illustrated in our work on Dudley Creates: a 100 year cultural strategy in action. The orientation is long term, and the focus is learning through action.
(Re. being ‘on-site’, see above re. physical spaces.)
Our principles evolve and are fundamental to our learning and evaluation approach
CoLab Dudley’s principles aren’t static, they evolve as we learn, as our context shifts and in response to changes in people leading the work. Our principles are values based and GUIDEing. They speak to our wider aspirations to cultivate regenerative practices and behaviours, collective imagination, connection with the rest of nature, and intergenerational justice. Our GUIDEing principles are fundamental to our behaviours, decision making, learning and evaluation processes. “Learning to evaluate principles, and applying what you learn from doing so, takes on increasing importance in an ever more complex world where our effectiveness depends on adapting to context.” https://www.utilization-focusedevaluation.org/principles-focused-evaluation
- Invite curiosity and creativity to nurture the conditions for collectively imagined futures.
- Learn by doing together; co-design and build creative experiences and spaces. Shared learning emerges as we co-create and then reflect upon the process, creation and ripples from our doing together.
- Nurture connection; create conditions for meaningful connections (between people, between people and place, and between people and the more-than-human) that animate multiple diverse peer networks shaped by reciprocity, creativity, care and interdependence.
- Seek living systems health through collective sensemaking and collaborative design. 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.
- Be Good Ancestors (this is our North Star Principle); champion and act with care for our planet and future generations. We make responsible use of existing resources and lifesources, and help to release overlooked potential. We embrace and share regenerative practice; always thinking long-term, strategically and systemically.
I could go on. Some of the methods featured on the Urban Rooms site look strikingly similar to approaches and experiments our Time Rebels have been leading. However I could for each draw out distinctions in relation to power, and whether or not intention behind the use of a method embraces deeper, critical, justice driven perspectives on an extractive economy and the multitude of ways in which that creates and maintains marginalisation, exclusion and damage to lives (of all species) in a place.
A framework we find useful to help see the patterns which enable this making of distinctions is the Three Horizons, as applied to regenerative culture. There’s a great explainer by Daniel Christian Wahl: The Three Horizons of innovation and culture change. We also like to use this quick (7 minute) video introduction by Kate Raworth:
We’re working to cultivate an ecological approach to culture in Dudley. This means seeing culture as a collective and interconnected endeavour, with multiple values. We are paying attention to the ever changing, evolving and entangled nature of relationships which might help or hinder cultural possibilities in Dudley borough. We also embrace an understanding of place; ways that our local places shape us and our cultures.
We are interested in the voices and ideas that Urban Rooms might bring to the cultural landscape in Dudley borough, and ways that the thinking and activities of Urban Rooms might be shaped through their interactions with others in our local cultural ecosystem. We extend an open invitation to seasonal Cultural Collaborators gatherings, such as our upcoming Winter Gathering. They are an opportunity to share learning and weave relationships across our cultural ecosystem.
With thanks to CoLab Dudley team members Jo Orchard-Webb and Holly Doron for affirmation and additions to this Lab Note.
