Stories of Place as compost and social imagination practice
Winters are good for pauses. It gives us a chance to compost the learning we’ve harvested in autumn, and use this to nurture ideas and activity emerging in the spring.
Stories of Place is a monthly and seasonal gathering of curious people to explore the stories that have been found and created on Dudley High Street and to collectively prototype experiments inspired by these stories. This ritual with place invites us to be in relation with land and nature.
‘Some Indigenous people embrace the worldview, “I’m the land and the land is me”. This depicts a different relationship with nature, emphasising relationality and reciprocity (as opposed to the worldview that sees land as a commodity) allowing identity formation to be contextual. Building a new theory and praxis of identity will be fundamental to engaging and unleashing a deep praxis of freedom.’
Fang-Jui Chang and Indy Johar (2022) Radicle Civics: Unconstituting Society (p.23)
In the last Stories of Place lab note, we were gearing up towards an October prototyping day for Stories of Place to share what had been explored so far with people on Dudley High Street. Afterwards, Stories of Place friends gathered to reflect on a year of curiosity, tangential conversations, and inspiring collaborations. This lab note shares the learning that came out of these, and how this has been composting to feed future experiments and social imagination practice.
Stories of place prototyping day
Dionne and Miriam brought the window to life with photos and stories from Afro Histories Dudley, and bringing nature to the High Street with a banana plant! People were invited to discover food that had journeyed to the High Street: plantain, sugar cane, green bananas, okra, and chillies.
Lorna had transformed half the space into a journey through deep and long time, sharing stories from Dudley’s past and future, with invitations for passersby to share their own scrolls of the past, present polaroids, or zines of future dreams.
People were invited to become Street Detectorists, choosing a tool from nature to accompany them as they journey along the High Street with awakened senses.
Stitchers in Time joined us to continue making their stunning patchwork of stitched photos of Dudley.
Helen and Bill were out on the High Street, recording people’s responses to ‘Who owns Dudley High Street?’ after discovering only 5% of the High Street is owned by independent shops.
We ended the day with hearts full from new and deepened connections, and of stories from Dudley High Street, ready for rest.
Harvest + sparks
On a November evening, Stories of Place friends convened on the High Street and virtual High Street to wander through the past year together, harvesting what we’d discovered or learned. Aided with our miro board, we revisited snippets of thoughts, ideas and photos of our sessions together.
What immediately emerged was the value in creating space for cyclical reflection. Looking back on our conversations and activities a year ago invited sharing of artefacts created since, or discovering forgotten ideas that had been germinating and transforming in the background.
Kirren reminisced about inviting people to create more-than-human stories, using materials from the Stories of Place archive. She had since based her Masters in Architecture dissertation on this, which she gifted back to the group.
In our first session, Bill had mentioned the idea of archaeology of water and stories being sediment. He forgot about this idea, but Bill and Helen are now experimenting with water as a climate provocation through their project, Getting into Hot Water. The creative documentation of our sessions enabled us to recognise seeds of ideas, and for us all to connect to emerging experiments — Stories of Placers soon got into in depth conversations about drought and waste.
Several reflections tied to how much we had valued having space and time for peer-to-peer sharing of curiosity and collective imagination, creativity and exploration. Over the year, we shared books and inspiration that re-emerged in experiments and ideas. Coming together with different perspectives and experiences was “resourceful and useful” with the expectation that there will be conversational adventures “off on tangents and circles” where “all ideas are welcomed”. This led to a new perspective on everyday conversations; an “inspirational” alternative is possible. The depth and detail to invitations helped bring us all together over the year. Giving space for ideas to be explored “pushes what we’re trying to generate”. Trust developed that people would do something with the ideas and conversations.
“The process of exploring has been respected.”
Our experiments on the High Street had helped us recognise that we can connect and strengthen our relationship with our places. Ritual with place had sustained excitement and connection. Embodied activities and nature lenses led to lasting transformations of our perceptions of the High Street. In relation to Miles Richardson’s 5 pathways to nature connectedness, Stories of Place experiments had:
- Senses — Invited us to use our different senses, not only to the sights, sounds and smells of nature but imagining we are different parts of nature (e.g. grasshopper legs and potato hairs) to focus our senses.
- Emotion — By mapping, thinking about nature in the past, present and future, and perceiving ourselves as part of nature, we strengthened our emotional bond with nature.
- Beauty — Many of the experiments invited us to connect to nature through poetry, collage and noise making.
- Meaning — The cycle and ritual of our gathering sessions and activities were centred around the seasons and natural imagery: sprouting prototypes in spring, celebrating and inviting cross-pollination of ideas in the summer, harvesting what we learnt in autumn, and hibernating over winter.
- Compassion — Our conversations and prototypes explored how we could develop deeper care for nature, now and into the future.
‘Earth teaches people the gift of wisdom when we learn to be rooted in place, in presence, and in relationship. We understand wisdom not as a state to achieve but rather a presence of (inter and trans)being with other human and more-than-human beings and the animacy of place (or pulse of life), that must be continually nurtured with reciprocity and care.’
Jayne Engle, Julian Agyeman and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook (2022) Imagine Shaping Cities as if People, Land, and Nature Were Sacred (p.17)
These experiences influenced conversations in our wider networks, and Stories of Placers wanted to take this approach to other places they care about. Collectively curating the Stories of Place prototyping day had helped to reveal connections between all the ideas over the year.
“It feels more possible now we’ve tested it.”
We ended our session with sparks of ideas for a time capsule to gift to the future — pearls of wisdom, a bottle of water, creative artefacts for provocations, and treasure from experiments to awaken different senses.
Composting
From our previous lab notes, we shared Stories of Place practice that had started to emerge through (italicised text is from Regenesis Group’s regenerative development framework):
- Developing an understanding of place through developing a ritual with time and place and shifting towards cultural democracy.
- Designing for harmony with place through integrating nature into design processes and experiences.
- Creating a culture of co-evolution through collective discovery, learning and reflection.
Over autumn and winter, the learning from Stories of Place composted with reflections from other Time Rebel experiments on the High Street and our 100 year cultural strategy in action. In one composting session with the CoLab team and social artists, Helen and Bill, we were reflecting on social art processes on the High Street as collective discovery, unlearning, documenting and making, which we thought might be a form of imagination infrastructuring. This seeded the idea of social imagination practice. Reflecting on stories of place with this lens, is social imagination practice perhaps creating space for:
- Cyclical sharing, learning, doing and reflecting
- Ideas to emerge, be revisited and combined
- Peer-to-peer sharing of curiosities and resources
- The expectation of tangential creative conversations and listening, breaking from the (current) every day norm
- People coming together with different perspectives and experiences
- Collective and adjacent prototyping to reveal connections and rehearsing futures
- Respect and trust for exploration and action
- Connecting and strengthening our relationships with our places through embodied pausing rituals rooted in nature and awakening our senses
- Tools or practice for individuals to pollinate and gift in other contexts and networks
- Meaningful invitations
- Gifting to the future
We are now bringing this compost with us as we venture with uncertainty into the next cycle of experimenting on Dudley High Street — for example, the emerging co-designed peer-to-peer curriculum of the Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice (but more on that another time). In the meantime, we’d love to hear whether any of this resonates with your curiosity, thoughts, experiments or places.
