Why Christchurch should not plan for the future
By Stuart Candy
First published in Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. Freerange Press. 2014. [here for details and purchase]
Stuart Candy, [@futuryst], PhD, works around the world as a strategist, educator, facilitator and producer of transmedia interventions. Currently based in Toronto, he is director of the Situation Lab and Assistant Professor of Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University. Stuart helped launch the Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA) in postearthquake Christchurch, worked on the award-winning ‘massively multiplayer forecasting game’ Superstruct, and served as advisor to the Future We Want project for the United Nations Rio+20 Summit. This article is based in part on the closing presentation delivered by the author at TEDxChristchurch in October 2013, ‘Whose Future Is This?’.
It is nothing new to remark on the complexity of the contemporary change environment, or its relentlessly accelerating pace. [1] And it does not take a military strategist to recognise the wisdom in the observation that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’, [2] because these days the enemy of most large-scale human enterprises — what often brings them to grief — is not an opposing army, but rather the sheer difficulty of keeping up with what is going on both within and around them.
As Christchurch gets on with the epochal task of ‘planning for the future’, or reimagining and rebuilding itself, this essay offers a simple reminder in three parts: first, that what we call ‘the future’ is not really a singular thing, but an imaginary space of plural possibilities; second, that a city is not a product, but a process; and third, that a community shaping itself is inherently not a task for the few, but a participatory and co-creative act to be shared in by as many as possible. [3]
The upshot of these three observations — on plurality, process and participation — is that the idiom of ‘planning’ may not be the best fit for this situation. What is called for may be better framed as ‘design for emergence’. I suggest that the need for rethinking governance through design and emergence is more urgent and far-reaching, and simultaneously more possible, than most of us seem to realise.
Plurality
My work as a futurist involves helping people map and navigate the possibility space of an unknowable future more creatively and systematically. I have done strategic foresight consulting and facilitation with many groups and agendas around the world. I think the wellbeing of communities of every sort and scale depends on how well we are able to engage with what might lie ahead.
The foresight field [4] takes as its point of departure a recognition that the future is by definition unwritten, and should therefore always be treated as plural. [5] On this view, thinking ahead well means construing the future as a space of alternative possibilities.This allows us to exercise anticipation while also avoiding the trap of constantly trying to predict, and constantly being wrong. [6]
A key activity in this regard is crystallising, out of the fog of possibility space, a set of specific stories — ‘scenarios’ — to represent a range of alternative futures that could unfold, and to consider carefully what we might do in each case. Futurist and political scientist Jim Dator worked out in the 1970s that the countless possible stories we tell about the future may be boiled down to a handful of trajectories or narrative logics, which he called the ‘generic images of the future’. [7] These are now widely used as a way to craft illuminating scenario sets, and there are various other ways to do the same thing. [8]
Scenarios are at this point seen as essential to doing policy, strategy and planning well in a wide variety of settings. 9 So here is an important question for the present discussion: what kinds of assumptions about the future have been embedded in planning conversation to date, and what if events were to challenge or overturn any of those assumptions? (For instance, what kinds of thinking are we doing about the potential collapse of cheap oil, which has fuelled the last century of global economic growth, including ubiquitous personal vehicles and enormous flows of people and goods?)
It is impossible to account exhaustively for all possible eventualities. But at this point, to undertake a city-scale design project without comprehensively addressing the palpable uncertainties of our planetary future would be rampant folly. As one of Kurt Vonnegut’s characters says ‘History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.’ [10]
Process
Futurists have for decades been speaking of possible, probable and preferable futures. [11] All three of these categories are subjective, contested and in constant motion: the future is a process, not a product.The same is true of organisations, communities, cities, countries and civilisations. [12]
Among the twentieth century’s key futures scholars was a Dutch sociologist named Fred Polak, who was Jewish and spent the SecondWorldWar hiding out in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Amazingly, he emerged from that experience with a strong sense of humanity as a ‘future-creating being’, [13] and went on to write a seminal two-volume work called The Image of the Future. [14] Polak looked at how the future had been imagined in societies throughout time, and he found the following pattern: ‘The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive.’ [15]
In other words, our collective ability to realise a positive future depends upon our ability to imagine it.
The importance of such vision can also be seen, perhaps even more readily, on smaller scales. An organisation begins to lose staff and stock value when people lose confidence in it. A relationship is in trouble when the people in it can’t imagine being happy together any longer.
What about cities, regions or even countries? It may be tempting to conclude that a well-engineered plan — an official image of the future — must be the key to success, regardless of its origins. This would be to draw the wrong lesson from Polak or, more to the point, from history. If the future imaginary is diagnostically useful or historically catalytic, it is because of what it reflects about the state of health of a culture, the ever-unfolding process that is a human community.We may wonder whether a meaningful future image can be made to order like an industrial product (as in Chairman Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward), and well may we doubt any approach to urbanism that assumes a country or city’s future should be blueprinted in the same way that a building can be.
Long-range plans are brittle without a foresight context to make them elastic; but what’s really needed is the lifeblood of a learning process circulating continually throughout. It is all too common for organisations of various sorts to assume that it should be enough to pay attention to some suitably remote round-number date, say 2030 or 2050, on a one-time basis, then to sit back and wait for some inevitable surprise to come along and blow away their best laid plans. [16] By contrast, I recently led a foresight process for the Singaporean government to identify and test assumptions underpinning their National Sustainability Blueprint for the year 2030, which was originally prepared in 2008. [17] Recognising the inherent uncertainties of change by revisiting a visionary document — as they did in this case — means admitting, in effect, ‘we might be wrong’. No wonder it is uncommon.
It is critical to recognise and take account of the open-ended, constantly self-reinventing quality of community.This means seeing how the planning process is an ongoing part of a wider process — also ongoing — that is the city itself.
Winston Churchill observed that ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards they shape us.’ 18 Casting his gaze further upstream, Marshall McLuhan is said to have made the same remark in relation to our tools. 19 And moving yet further in this direction, the point holds in regard to the visions and plans in service of which we wield those tools.We shape our imaginaries, while they shape us, and on the cycle goes.
Participation
We may speak about the role of participation in all this by borrowing an insight from the software world. Some years ago, computer programmer Eric Raymond evoked the difference between the top-down orderliness of the traditional way of making software — programmed, planned and engineered — versus the bottom-up emergence inherent in the software whose code is Open Source and thus written, edited and co-created in peer-to-peer fashion by a community. He used an architectural metaphor to contrast the two approaches, dubbing them respectively the ‘cathedral’ and the ‘bazaar’. [20] Many organisations and governments, being themselves in a sense blueprinted edifices, have a persistent bias in favour of the cathedral. But being far-sighted doesn’t mean simply planning and building things to last forever. On the contrary, the temporariness and transitionality of the bazaar are part of life, and the seeds of the better future are often planted not by ‘visionary’ plans, but by experiment, improvisation and accident.The will to permanence is a trap. As John Lennon is supposed to have said, ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’.Wise words for city-makers to heed.
In Christchurch, Gap Filler and the Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA) are wonderful examples of bazaar-like structures. [21] As a member of the advisory board for the inaugural FESTA, I recall how thrilled we were when the opening for its first year (October 2012) brought crowds to the downtown core that were larger than any seen since the earthquakes. [22] This was not an official city programme and by no means was it lavishly funded. It was an ingenious, resourceful and authentically citizen-led activity: a case of a structure enabling life to go on while we were making other plans.The question arises, then, to what extent does and can the city rebuild take its cue from the cathedral, and to what extent from the bazaar? This is for others to answer, but I suggest it is worth pausing to consider.
A broader context for this conversation seems to be the question of how one can ‘plan’ for a bazaar. The challenge in hand involves what the hybrid artistengineer and New York University professor Natalie Jeremijenko has called ‘structures of participations’. [23]
The crowd-created Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most visited website, is a striking example, consisting of 30 million articles in 287 languages (4.5 million in English) — and counting. The contents are generated by users, and enabled by the affordances and constraints of a platform maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. [24]
For a real life illustration, consider the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, where for one week each year some 70,000 participants — the community has grown exponentially since the first gathering of twenty people in 1986 — co-create a temporary city on the blank canvas of an alkali dustbowl, before leaving without a trace. [25]
A third example: during my former role as a full-time foresight consultant, in 2012 I led the process design for a project called CoMConnect, which was about enlisting the public in helping to devise a Digital Strategy for the City of Melbourne. [26] The weekend-long kick-off event involved a maximum capacity group of 150 attendees from across all sectors. Every session was proposed and run by participants, with no detailed advance agenda or training necessary. [27] The result was described by the one of the city’s staff a month later as an ‘epiphany’. It is not yet common practice for governments to include citizens so comprehensively and so early in a policy conversation, but this is going to have to change. [28]
Whether collecting a vast body of knowledge, enabling a temporary urban community of tens of thousands, or crafting a city’s digital strategy: each of these designed structures of participation is fundamentally about governance. (We may even venture that the design of suitable structures of participation is the primary task of governance.) In any case, with organisations aspiring to cathedralesque orderliness increasingly obviously outpaced by massive complexity, exploring participatory and bazaar-like governance structures to harmonise with and harness such complexity becomes increasingly necessary.
Designing for emergence
There is evidently a tension between, on the one hand, accommodating actors’ autonomy and agency while, on the other, making certain executive decisions that constitute the rules and parameters for the website, physical space, event or whatever. This trade-off is not susceptible to a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires a case-by-case consideration of what one shall attempt to fix in place by design, and what operations and opportunities shall be left to surprise and learning.
Designer Greg Van Alstyne and physicist Robert Logan have written on the relationship of design and emergence, pointing out that the former is characterised by ‘the intentionality of the designer’, ‘top-down’ structure and ‘controlling’ agendas, while the latter in contrast is about ‘the autonomy of massively multiple agents’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘influencing’ agendas. [29] In a sense we might say that the notion of design for emergence is precisely the challenge of balancing the cathedral and the bazaar.
Van Alstyne and Logan’s ‘design for emergence’ seems a much more suitable frame for understanding what is at stake, and is more likely to help with the challenge at hand than the common default frame of ‘planning for the future’.
What then should be done? Many points of intervention are available, but among the most potent and underappreciated is public imagination. (Remember: way upstream of buildings, we shape our imaginaries, and thereafter they shape us.) From my point of view as a design futurist, this has to do with enabling what Richard Slaughter called ‘social foresight’ [30] by co-creating, and helping others also to co-create, experiential futures — immersive, tangible and playable fragments of the possible worlds before us. [31] Experiential futures practice cultivates a cultural capacity for collective imagining, and thereby a basis for wiser choices. [32]
With this in mind, one of the most powerful catalysts for emergent cocreation would be to establish a participatory, plural process for public imagination. [33] It has been encouraging to see elements of the conversation in Christchurch gesture in this direction, for instance through a series of reports in the Press published three years to the day after the worst earthquake struck. These stories embodied alternative ‘versions’ of Christchurch on 22 February 2031, the disaster’s twentieth anniversary. [34]
The rebuild of a city after a seismic upheaval is bound to be a fraught process, but it comes with an opportunity to respond to profound challenges increasingly evident in all quarters, not only within but also well beyond Canterbury and New Zealand. There is a chance here to approach afresh how the political process occurs. Consider the Arab Spring, Wikileaks, and the Occupy movement: three recent systemic warnings that our existing political designs are ill-equipped to accommodate the technology-enabled emergence of powerful networked movements. We should expect more profound disruptions to come. What if we saw this moment in Christchurch as a gift of history: an invitation to reimagine not just how the city looks, but the very processes through which it is made?
Among the first structures to seek to build, it seems to me, are processes properly enabling people to generate and pursue their own diverse preferred futures. Co-authoring our collective story is the challenge of our time, and from the multitude of possible worlds, the future we get is — or at least ought to be — a story we tell together. Everywhere we look, the task at hand is about deepening people’s awareness, understanding and capacity to realise genuine alternative futures.
It is not about selling them one.
Footnotes:
1 Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–169; James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (London: Little, Brown, 1999).
2 The original observation that this modern business-school quote distils was Helmuth Von Moltke in the midnineteenth century: ”No plan of operations survives the first collision with the main body of the enemy.” See Foreword in Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel J. Hughes (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993).
3 This article has not been written as a specific commentary on the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan; more grounded and locally informed responses are elsewhere throughout this collection. It is instead a set of general observations from an observer abroad (an Australian futurist living in Canada) on the conceptual context in which the Christchurch conversation is taking place.
4 Perhaps the most comprehensive overview of foresight as a field, though it is not easy to obtain: Richard A. Slaughter, ed., The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (5 vols, Professional edition, CDROM) (Indooroopilly, Queensland: Foresight International, 2005).
5 A powerful statement of this perspective appears in Ashis Nandy, “Bearing Witness to the Future,”Futures 28 (1996): 636–639.
6 Consider Dator’s first law of the future: ‘“The future” cannot be “predicted” zbecause “the future” does not exist.’ Jim Dator, “What Futures Studies Is, and Is Not” (Honolulu: Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, 1995), http://futures.hawaii.edu/publications/futures-studies/ WhatFSis1995.pdf.
7 James A. Dator, “The Futures of Culture or Cultures of the Future,” in Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Psychology, eds Anthony J. Marsella, Roland G. Tharp and Thomas J. Ciboroski (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 369–388; see also: Jim Dator, “Alternative Futures at the Manoa School”, Journal of Futures Studies 14, no. 2 (2009): 1–18, http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/14-2/A01.pdf.
8 For a comparative examination of scenario generation approaches see for instance: Andrew Curry and Wendy Schultz, “Roads Less Travelled: Different Methods, Different Futures,” Journal of Futures Studies 13, no. 4 (2009): 35–60. http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/13-4/AE03.pdf.
9 See for example: Paul J. H. Schoemaker, “Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter (1995), http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/ scenario-planning-a-tool-for-strategic-thinking/ and Charles Roxburgh, “The Use and Abuse of Scenarios,” McKinsey Quarterly, November (2009), http://www. mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/the_use_and_abuse_of_ scenarios.
10 Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick: or, Lonesome no more! (New York: Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, 1976), 226.
11 This trio is usually (mis)attributed to the article which popularised it: Roy Amara, “The Futures Field: Searching for Definitions and Boundaries,” The Futurist 15(1) (1981): 25–29. However these terms appeared over a decade earlier in Toffler’s bestselling Future Shock: ‘Every society faces not merely a Succession of Probable Futures, but an Array of Possible Futures, and a Conflict over Preferable Futures,’ Alvin Toffler, ed., Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 460. Earlier still, the introduction to de Jouvenel’s seminal The Art of Conjecture offers a similar — if less memorably alliterative — typology. See Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Art of Conjecture (trans. Nikita Lary) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), 3–21.
12 For a marvellously process-minded way of looking at a place, see this talk by former festival organiser and broadcaster Marcus Westbury, who initiated a project called ‘Renew Newcastle’ that has been credited with turning around the fortunes of the downtown core in that Australian city: Marcus Westbury, “The City as a Process” (presentation delivered at Arup Melbourne, Foresight and Innovation Talks series, February 3, 2012), http://vimeo. com/38546750
13 In the phrase of Elise Boulding, from her Translator’s Preface to the abridged single-volume edition of Polak’s work: Fred Polak, The Image of the Future, trans. and abridged by Elise Boulding (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), viii.
14 Fred L. Polak, The Image of the Future: Enlightening the Past, Orientating the Present, Forecasting the Future, 2 vols, trans. Elise Boulding, (Leyden: A. W. Sythoff, 1961).
15 Polak 1973, The Image of the Future, 19.
16 See for instance the story of ‘Hawaii 2000’, a public foresight process of unparalleled scale and ambition which ran in the islands in 1970–71, and yet which failed to be carried forward by political institutions and processes, and so did not catalyse its hoped-for outcomes by the turn of the century. Jim Dator et al., Hawaii 2000: Past, Present and Future (report prepared for the Office of Planning, Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, Honolulu, Hawaii 1999), http://hawaii2050. org/images/uploads/HI2KDBEDTReport_1299.pdf.
17 Government of Singapore, A Lively and Liveable Singapore: Strategies for Sustainable Growth (Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources and Ministry of National Development, Singapore 2009), http://app.mewr.gov.sg/ data/imgcont/1292/sustainbleblueprint_forweb.pdf.
18 Winston Churchill, 28 October 1943, (speech to Britain’s House of Commons), quoted in Berry, Leonard L. et al., ‘The Business Case for Better Buildings,’ Frontiers of Health Services Management 21(1), 5, http://faculty.arch. tamu.edu/khamilton/HamiltonPDFs/Publications/Berry_ etal_TheBusinessCaseForBetterBuildings.PDF.
19 A. Kuskis, 2013, “We Shape our Tools and Thereafter our Tools Shape Us,” McLuhan Galaxy, 1 April, http:// mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shapeour-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/. This formula was adopted by futurist Jim Dator as his ‘Third law of the future’.
20 Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, revised edition (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001).
21 Gap Filler website, http://www.gapfiller.org.nz; FESTA website, http://festa.org.nz; see also: Barnaby Bennett, Eugenio Boidi and Irene Boles, eds, Christchurch: The Transitional City, Pt. IV (rev. ed.) (Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2012).
22 Charley Mann, “Festival Brings Light Back to Inner City,” The Press, October 21, 2012, http://www.stuff.co.nz/ the-press/news/7844726/Festival-brings-light-back-toinner-city.
23 “Faculty: Natalie Jeremijenko,” New York University, accessed June 14, 2014, http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_ bios/view/Natalie_Jeremijenko; see also: Tim O’Reilly, “The Architecture of Participation,” O’Reilly website, June 2004, http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/ architecture_of_participation.html.
24 “Wikipedia,” Wikipedia, accessed June 14, 2014, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.
25 Burning Man website, http://www.burningman.com/.
26 Melbourne’s Digital City Unconference Overview: CoMConnect, 2012, http://vimeo.com/52357281.
27 We were working with a (non-proprietary) meeting format called Open Space, which has been used thousands of times around the world over the past three decades. See for example: Harrison Owen, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, 3rd edition (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2008). Others have used the same process to redesign an Olympic pavilion in three days; to redesign aircraft doors; to downsize and restructure part of a large organisation, and so on. For a range of (early) case studies see: Harrison Owen, Tales from Open Space (Cabin John, MD: Abbott Publishing, 1995), http://www.openspaceworld.com/tales. pdf.
28 IAP2 (International Association for Public Participation), 2007, “IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation,” IAP2 website, http://www.iap2.org/resource/resmgr/imported/ IAP2%20Spectrum_vertical.pdf. In an increasingly networked polity, systemic pressures seem to be pushing public expectations swiftly and steadily to the right of this continuum; that is, towards more frequent, direct and deep involvement in matters where public sector representatives used to have more discretion; on the application of OST for foresight purposes, see: Stuart Candy, “Open Space for Futures: A Brief Introduction,” Journal of Futures Studies 10, no. 1 (2005): 109–114, http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/10.1.109.pdf, and Stuart Candy, “Open Space for Analog Crowdsourcing” (presentation given at Crowdsourcing Week, Singapore, June 5, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fAO_ RhtHq8.
29 Greg Van Alstyne and Robert K. Logan, “Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design,” Artifact 1, no. 2 (2007), https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index. php/artifact/article/view/1360.
30 Richard A. Slaughter, “Futures Studies: From Individual to Social Capacity,”Futures, 28, no. 8 (1996): 751–762.
31 Stuart Candy, The Futures of Everyday Life (doctoral dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2010), http://www.scribd.com/ doc/68901075/Candy-2010-The-Futures-of-EverydayLife; also: The Sceptical Futuryst website, http://futuryst. blogspot.com.
32 Candy, 2010, Chapter 7, 287–317.
33 See Stuart Candy, “Dreaming Together: Experiential Futures as a Platform for Public Imagination,” in ed. Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger, Made Up: Design’s Fictions (Zurich: Art Center Graduate Press / JRP Ringier, forthcoming).
34 “City Vision,” The Press, Mainlander section, February 22, 2014, C1-C4, http://www.scribd.com/doc/214017769/ The-Press-22-February-2014-Christchurch-in-2031.
