Who makes a city?
By Mike Fisher. This article was first published in The Press on the 6th of March 2017.
At some point in the history of city making a shift has taken place where the power, creativity, ideas and connectedness of citizens has been ceded to a group of people who make up local government, and further up the chain the regional or national governments.
Citizens for a large part have moved from being change makers, problem solvers and “owners” of their streets, districts and neighbourhoods to consumers and customers who wait, demand, hope, or protest that government will make the city they want.
Residents, business owners, artists, students, property developers on one side and government on the other. One group needing permission to act and the other deciding when the community is allowed out of the box.
This continues a downward spiral where each eyes the other wearily with dwindling trust, missing the opportunity to develop partnerships that would be a powerful force for making a dynamic city.
So can it change? Could a council be at the forefront of change and rethink how government operated? Could it, instead of structuring the organisation around function and building its own capacity, seek as its fundamental principle, to build the capacity of its citizens and unleash them to make places that serve them? And if so, where does it start?
This change is possible, and it starts with leaders in local government who understand that to have a vibrant city they need to harness the energy and creativity that already exists within the community. It needs those leaders to demonstrate and mirror the changes it wants to see in the community.
I moved to Adelaide from Christchurch in 2014 with my family to join the Adelaide City Council to help them make this change. The Council realised that in order to shift from being known as Australia’s “Invisible City” and the place where you need to leave to try something, they would have to take a completely different approach.
They knew that to break the cycle of distrust and disempowerment of the community, they needed to take some bold steps.
Building the capacity of the community became their underlying philosophy and they embraced placemaking, an approach built upon the premise that local people make great places and have the skills, ideas and energy to work in partnership with government to do it.
The council began building momentum with small steps and a programme called Splash Adelaide. This gave people the opportunity to get an idea off the ground and bring people back into tired or underutilised public spaces. Whether fruit trees on a berm, vintage car rally, market, street party or a children’s imagination playground, the council staff were there to help grease the wheels and ensure the projects got underway quickly.
This, quite suddenly, sent a strong message that the city was full of possibilities and that the community — whether a business owner, student, artist or office worker — were pivotal to bringing life to Adelaide.
As it was seeking projects and new ideas, the council also began reflecting on what it was doing that might be holding people back from doing more. As a result it found that of the over 500 policies the council had, about 200 were obsolete and another 115 needed urgent review.
The council removed the obsolete policies in one meeting and began the process of changing the others so they supported its vision for a city where you can try something and make something happen.
This strong signal to the community demonstrated that not only was the council changing, but that the community were now at the forefront of making the city.
The next step was to develop lasting relationships with the community and change the conversation from “the council should be doing that!” to “the council can help you do that”.
The realisation was that understanding and working with the people who live, work and play in the city was crucial to success. While relationships take work to build and maintain, it was understood that taking the time to form them will pay huge dividends in the future.
A council staff member was allocated to specific parts of the city to build relationships with the people who lived, worked, owned property, or wanted to start a business there.
These council staff helped to facilitate people’s ideas for projects to transform spaces and support them through council processes. Where someone maybe only encountered the council at a public meeting or when paying for a parking ticket, they now had a person whose job it was to help them create the future they wanted for their street, neighbourhood or wider district.
And supporting that staff member were specialists from across the rest of the council organisation who could help to enable quick changes and then begin to work with the community to develop longer term plans for that place.
None of this meant the council disappeared, but rather it flipped how it worked and shifted its philosophy from “we know best”, to “we have the resources to help you make the best city possible”.
Cities do not always need bigger budgets to see real and lasting change. They need leadership with vision. It is not necessarily about the structure of the organisation, it is about the culture and openness of the organisation to support their communities make meaningful changes so they can shift from being customers within a city, to owners of it.
Mike Fisher was formally the Placemaking Coordinator at the Adelaide City Council and Manager of City Planning and Development. He is back living and working in Christchurch where he has started his own business, Urbantacticians.
