Why Dudley High Street needs Time Rebels
You may have noticed mention of Time Rebels in our last few lab notes and through other social media. Over coming weeks and months we’ll be introducing Dudley’s Time Rebels and the ideas and participatory creative projects they are developing. They will also contribute to this collection of lab notes charting our shared learning journey. It feels important too, to articulate more about why we think Dudley High Street needs Time Rebels.
In this lab note we draw on Joanna Macy’s three stories of our time, which offer incredibly helpful narratives around the deep, interconnected causes of many of the challenges and forces at play on Dudley High Street. We began exploring these as a lab team in 2017, digging into inhibitors to community resilience such as the (limited) types of commerce; the physical shape and declining condition of the built environment; power (and associated mindsets); and poverty.
As we began to bring Dudley’s Time Rebels together through Orientation sessions we felt it was important to bring attention to these forces which shape the High Street, though lightly. We were able to do this with a couple of simple visuals (shared below) created by lab team member Holly Doron as she listened to a couple of us struggle with how to convey this. You’ll also see below that during Orientation we drew attention to the fact that the buildings on one entire side of the High Street are owned by a single overseas company. And who better to speak to the challenge of nurturing collective imagination than Rob Hopkins? The video of his What If talk shared below was central to conveying our why.
Before that though, let’s explore these three stories of our time.
Three Stories of our Time
Joanna Macy describes three stories of our time: Business As Usual, the Great Unravelling and the Great Turning. All three stories are happening simultaneously at the moment.
Business As Usual is where we can carry on the with the status quo, where no change is needed, and the world our grandchildren will inherit will not be so different to where we are now. It is a comfortable story to live in, with no changes of behaviour required or forced upon us. It is, however, unrealistic to not expect change.
The story of the Great Unravelling is the story of collapse, chaos, disintegration, hardship, and destruction. The fabric of social and ecosystems frays and comes undone, causing a domino effect of challenges. People and planet slowly or quickly die.
The third story is the Great Turning, the shift in direction and the movement towards a life-sustaining culture, a place of harmony, peace, and health, for people and planet. Rob Hokins calls this The Story of How Things Turn Out OK. Charles Einsenstein names it The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.
— Looby Macnamara, Cultural Emergence
Business As Usual
Joanna Macy explains that the central plot of the Business As Usual story is about getting ahead and competing for profit and power by “growing the economy.” Economic recessions, extreme weather conditions, and social unrest are just temporary difficulties from which mainstream society will surely recover and from which corporations can benefit. This story functions to maintain the power and privilege of “the 1%” while legitimizing the impoverishment and disempowerment of everyone else. Furthermore: Business as Usual discredits the essential labor that enslaved and colonized peoples have contributed to the apparent success of industrialized world, even as it has destroyed their lives, freedom, and cultures.
Business as Usual is represented on our High Street context image above as:
- socio-cultural systems that concentrate power with some, while actively disempowering and disadvantaging others (e.g. the patriarchy; white privilege; ableism); and the
- extractive economy ~ a paradigm in which extractive business practices deplete resources and downgrade capital. This mental model underpins how many of us see and behave in the world, and is so prevalent that it is easy to assume this is the only reality.
Anyone trying to carve out a livelihood, do social good or develop creative activities on Dudley High Street immediately runs face first into mindsets which shape the Business as Usual story. One way they manifest is as rentier capitalism: the gaining of ‘rentier’ income from ownership or control of assets that generate economic rents… without contribution to society.
How is the story of Business as Usual shaping what is possible on Dudley High Street, or on your local High Street?
Who are the people telling this story and what do they stand to gain from it? Who loses?
(For a friendly, tasty sounding economic vision which challenges Business as Usual, and to see the practical, transformative action it is inspiring in town, cities, regions and countries around the globe check out Doughnut Economics.)
The Great Unravelling
The Great Unravelling is the story told by scientists, journalists, and activists who have not been bought off or intimidated by the forces of the Industrial Growth Society. Drawing attention to the disasters caused by Business As Usual, their accounts give evidence of the on-going derangement and collapse of biological, ecological, economic, and social systems.
The Great Unraveling may be more apparent today, because of the accelerating rate of change and technological advances in communication, but the living systems of Earth have been unraveling for generations. Under colonial expansion and rule, indigenous, brown, black, and impoverished communities have carried the weight of the unraveling for centuries. Refineries, mines, and toxic waste have been sited in and near their communities, with direct and lethal impacts on the health of the people.
Now the climate itself is unraveling world-wide and the sixth great extinction of species is underway. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, amplified by global warming, leave millions of people without shelter, food, or potable water. Bee colonies are collapsing. Whole ecosystems are being destroyed.
— Joanna Macy, The Work That Reconnects website
The Great Unravelling is represented on our High Street context image as climate emergency. It is likely not directly felt by people who live, work and play on Dudley High Street, except perhaps those with lung or heart problems struggling with the air pollution. We would like to generate some experiments to track air quality on the High Street itself (if you’re interested in this do get in touch with us).
However we have met numerous people on Dudley High Street who are aware of it, are making changes in their own actions because of it, and some who developed ideas or projects for collective action in relation to it. From Repair Cafe Dudley to Do Fest and Trade School sessions on reducing or re-using waste. We support local social entrepreneurs working with children around waste, and a plastic re-purposing initiative.
If we paid closer attention what signs of the Great Unravelling might we find on Dudley High Street?
Who are the people telling this story in Dudley and who is listening?
The Great Turning
We hear the story of a Great Turning from some who see the Great Unraveling and don’t want it to have the last word...
Attitudes shift from exploitation to respect, from extraction to regeneration, from competition to cooperation. More and more people come to see how interwoven we areas peoples, and recognize that solidarity with one another is a way through these crises. So we join together to act for the sake of life on Earth.
The story of the Great Turning involves the emergence of new and creative human responses, as well as a reawakening of sustainable indigenous traditions. We gratefully acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous traditions that came before us, and are re-emerging today, bearing strong witness to the interconnectedness of all life.
(This ripples back to my last lab note: Indigenous Wisdom, Deep Time, Dreaming and Imagination.)
It is here in the Great Turning description that we come to Time Rebels, as Joanna advises:
Let us also borrow the perspective of future generations and, in that larger context of time, look at how this Great Turning is gaining momentum, accelerated by the choices of countless individuals as they band together in networks and campaigns all over the world.
Roman Krznaric calls people who borrow this perspective and inspired his latest book Time Rebels, and he brings our attention to an emerging global movement of ‘time rebels’ dedicated to intergenerational justice and long-term thinking.
CoLab Dudley’s Strategic Partner Civic Square, co-founded by Time Rebel Imandeep Kaur, are on this list, along with many people and initiatives we have been actively learning from, and others we are yet to find out more about.
Time Rebels of Dudley High Street
So long-term thinking is a critical capacity if we are to turn away from Business as Usual and mitigate the effects of the Great Unravelling. Which is why at the end of Autumn 2020 the CoLab Dudley team put our heads together to think about who in our networks could help to lead a time rebellion in Dudley. We felt that a focus on imagination was critical to nurture long-term thinking, so we also lifted up Rob Hopkin’s recent work on imagination and What If.
After a few virtual coffees we had drawn together an initial crew of time rebels curious about our invitation to:
Join us on year-long adventure in which we seek to rebuild and release the imaginative capacity of people in Dudley.
We outlined our ambition for the Time Rebels of Dudley High Street to combine their own practices, lab resources, and our collective networks, knowledges and experiences in exciting and ingenious ways. To discover and draw attention to artefacts and stories of our pasts. To lever in external resources as required to fuel creative missions to a future Dudley High Street where Everything Worked Out OK.
The lab team will undertake network weaving activities so that Dudley’s intrepid time travellers can be supported by a Ground Crew to safely return with stories, sounds, images, smells, tastes and other artefacts from the future. Together we will create the conditions for the people of Dudley to gather to collectively make sense of these offerings from the future, and generate stories of how they came to be.
Our Mission: to travel to 2031 with local people, and return with Memories of the Future.
Winter 2020: Orientation and Navigation
One of our GUIDEing Principles is use nature’s guidebook. One way we do that is by responding to the seasons. Winter is a time when the energy of trees is channeled to roots and their connections. We drew on winter’s invitation in our convening of Time Rebels, suggesting that we could use the season to retreat together, to dream in the dark, and generate shared visions for this work as we get to know each other.
Given we were bringing a new group of people together online we very much wanted everyone to orient themselves in relation to Dudley High Street, as well as to the thinking behind the work and the ways we work. We ran Orientation and Navigation sessions at different times of the day in order to respond to the different responsibilities and life/work patterns of individuals. (We also host regular informal online lunch and dinner time meet ups and coffee chats for Time Rebels, so that relationships can grow, ideas can be shared and projects developed in dialogue.)
To orient ourselves in place we considered that:
- 45,000 people live within a 15–20 minute walk of the High Street.
- A significant length of the High Street is taken up by 17 of the 34 retail units which make up the Trident Centre, a shopping centre sold for around £5 million in summer 2018 to Marvida Properties, a Bahrain based group of companies.
- CoLab Dudley is renting one of these units and within it we have created an Imaginarium for exhibitions and performances, a Workshop space for hands-on doing, a Retreat for withdrawal and creative incubation, and an Observatory in which to record and display ideas, experiments, stories and dreams.
- Our neighbours on the High Street, many of whose livelihoods depend on a thriving High Street, include cafes, pubs, takeaways, beauty services, the Post Office, small supermarkets and various other retail offerings.
- At the top of the hill on the other side of the High Street is Top Church, which has been situated there for nearly 850 years. The building which stands there today was built in 1818, replacing the original church. We are connecting with the Top Church Team, as they are surfacing and celebrating stories of the past with Heritage Lottery funding they have.
To orient ourselves in lab time we shared stories of CoLab Dudley’s arrival on the High Street, the making of Do Fest 2017, and that after 2 years of supporting hands-on doing, making and sharing projects in a single premises we looked out into our networks to convene a Collective of creative people to co-design Do Fest 2019, which would be a festival of fun and street experiments — taking the doing, making and creativity outdoors and to other spaces.
To orient ourselves in relation to big challenges which relate to the three stories of our time shared by Joanna Macy above, we suggested that:
- One big challenge is around long term thinking and a longer now. The short now has got us to a crumbling, market driven, Black Friday shaped High Street. Any number of short term ‘regeneration’ strategies and schemes have been applied to High Streets up and down the country and have failed. The Long Now invites empathy for future generations and respect for past histories and our ancestors. Without long term thinking we won’t survive the huge challenges of our age. And there is a dance here — we need to “act with the urgency of tomorrow and also with the patience of 1,000 years.” (Jayesh Bhai)
- A second big challenge is around imagination. We handed over to Rob Hopkins to outline this, by sharing this video:
Returning to the three stories of our time, Joanna Macy suggests we can see this Great Turning happening simultaneously in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing:
1) actions to resist and slow down the damage to Earth and all its beings;
2) analysis and transformation of the socio-economic foundations of our common life; and
3) a perceptual, cognitive, and moral shift to biocentric values and world views that affirm our human responsibility to life in all its richness and diversity and to future generations.Many people are engaged in all three dimensions of this Great Turning, all of which are necessary for the creation of a life-sustaining and just society.
Below is our Dudley High Street context with our GUIDEing Principles added as soil building and root growing catalysts, our first step in illustrating part of the narrative of the Great Turning.
Our next lab note, by lab team members Jo Orchard-Webb and Holly Doron offers an overview of tools we shared in Navigation sessions with Time Rebels.
Thank you so much for your interest in our work. We’d love to hear from you if our work and sources of inspiration spark something. Connect with us here on Medium, or @colabdudley on Twitter, or email us at: colabdudley@gmail.com
