Street Wisdom at Do Fest Dudley
By July I’d been working with CoLab Dudley’s Time Rebels for nine months, being present as they shared and connected questions they wanted to explore, watching their experiment plans grow on a collaborative Miro board, and helping to bring together a burst of activity on and around the High Street during Do Fest Dudley. Realising everyone inviting participation would just be getting on with it, I saw an opportunity to run a little experiment of my own, using an incredibly well tried and tested experience called Street Wisdom.
Slowing down can change how you feel about a place
Following a wonderful Street Wisdom experience in Dudley during their World Wide Wander in 2019, I’ve been keen to invite more people to slow down and look for answers to challenges in the streets. Two local people who took part in the Street Wisdom session I held in Dudley in 2019 spoke about how much it connected them to the town. It surfaced happy memories they had, and they talked about feeling safer in Dudley because of slowing down during Street Wisdom. It changed how they felt about the town.
Street Wisdom holds a space in time to have conversations with complete strangers, as well as to notice things about the urban landscape which you’d usually walk straight past. It also creates space in your mind. One participant returned from his wander and announced “I really needed that.” By which he meant the invitation and support to slow down.
I think a key to intergenerational justice work, to being a Time Rebel (as Roman Krznaric enticingly frames it), is slowing down. And I think that slowing down while working on intergenerational justice is a really nuanced dance at the moment, given urgent needs for change to mitigate species extinction, climate chaos and other threats to all life on the planet. A need for fast pace and large scale is what we instinctively call for. Yet I think that paradoxically to shift systems towards health demands slowing down; to imagine, to observe and to pay attention to effects of actions, rather than mindlessly rushing on to more action.
Could Street Wisdom help to create space for imagining?
Through Do Fest Dudley in 2021 we sought to bring forgotten and unloved spaces and places to life, share stories and mementos which reveal hidden histories of Dudley and get super-curious about where we might find and generate dreams for the future of Dudley’s streets and people.
For Do Fest Dudley we had framed our experiments around ‘What If…?’ questions (inspired by Rob Hopkins’ fantastic book). I thought I’d have a little play with Street Wisdom to see what happened if participants set out on quests with those What If questions, instead of bringing their own personal challenges as you would do to a regular Street Wisdom experience.
I ran this idea by Time Rebels as Do Fest approached, and immediately saw a connection to Bill and Helen’s more-than-human High Street experiment. I explained that I would be inviting people to tune into the streets and I was curious to learn how their workshops would help people to tune into the more-than-human. There was also an interesting relationship between Street Widsom and the Street Detectorism which Holly was prototyping at Do Fest.
I also wanted to see if the Street Wisdom process lent itself to creating space for imagination. I know it creates space for reflection, but I wasn’t sure if it could create mental space for people to imagine. The creator of Street Wisdom, David Pearl, is happy for people to play with and iterate Street Wisdom. When you take part in Street Wisdom the aim isn’t particularly to solve a problem, challenge or question you have, but rather to spend time with it. I wondered if that could support imagining.
How would the streets of Dudley respond to ‘What If…?’ questions?
I was joined by Saffi and Finlay for an afternoon of Street Wisdom in Dudley on Saturday 31 July. We connected to the streets using some of Street Wisdom’s wonderful tune up practices— you can have a go at these yourself using thier audio prompts on Spotify (the first four very short episodes). Finlay spotted the most fascinating pattern; when two people are walking together they tend to fall into a rhythm such that they take steps at the same time. I can’t stop looking for this now!
We then headed out on our Quests. This is the middle part of a Street Wisdom session, which we took about an hour for. Saffi headed out with a Do Fest Dudley question which spoke to her: What if our streets could be transformed with play? and Finlay and I were both drawn to the question What if we could all become time rebels?
Finlay returned with a story of an encounter with a student in some college grounds he discovered, and the mysterious repeated appearance of a woman in a beautiful Victorian red coat, who he eventually followed into a large, strange shop full of all kinds of objects spilling everywhere.
Saffi returned energised from conversations about playfulness and places to play, and a joyous observation of two children stopping to dance on the street outside a shop which had music playing from the doorway.
I had been quite visually focused and taken quite a few pictures on the first half of my quest, and then switched to a listening mode. Recurring themes from both ways of learning from the streets included how powerfully we are drawn to natural ingredients, natural patterns and cycles, and also there was something threading through around economics!
In relation to what we learned, Finlay shared that it was fun to be a more confident version of himself, he’d stepped out of his teenage shoes and felt like a future self in his mid 40s! Saffi felt she had learned that we are probably not as far away from what we want as we think we are. And she reflected that it is good to learn by talking to people; you might not necessarily learn new things, but your thinking can shift forwards.
Some learning from this little experiment
After some reflection on this Street Wisdom experiment, I feel I’ve learned that the magic of bringing strangers together on quests to learn from the streets is the diversity of the questions they bring or generate, the stories they have to tell when they return and the unexpected insights they might share.
Having used shorter versions of Street Wisdom with different teams I work with, and even trying an adaptation out in an urban park, I think if the questions and quests aren’t around personal challenges, then they could be around a shared challenge which is held by a group of people who have a collective interest in and commitment to working on that challenge together. There is something powerful about really wanting to find answers and take action. That sense of agency isn’t perhaps generated through ‘What If…?’ questions. This didn’t impede enjoyment or learning among the three of us, it simply taught me something about different kinds of questions and their different uses.
The day after Street Wisdom at Do Fest I was interviewed by Jo Orchard-Webb about this experiment and she reflected back:
What I’m hearing in terms of the link to creating space for imagining is about the emotional and mental space, the mental care that is needed in order to imagine… so Street Wisdom is almost a precursor to the imagining.
And the other thing I was thinking about is Time Rebel practices, and our learning that key among these are detectorist skills; sensing, observing, taking time and creating space to reflect. And that’s exactly what you’ve done on the street. So this was time rebel practice; inviting people who might not identify as having time rebel practices as sort of flexing of some of those muscles. Because if we’re harried and manic every day, there’s no room for the future, we default to cynicism, and nihilism.
As always, I’ll continue to draw from, blend and play with many ideas, approaches and experiences that are out there. Street Wisdom will be something I return to, now with a deeper appreciation of the contexts in which it is most powerful.
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve experienced the magic of Street Wisdom, or have been playing with the urban environment as a catalyst for imagination.
