On new shoots of growth…
Recent opportunities to speak at both the RSA’s Northern Forum event on Placemaking and at UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity have provided some space for me to reflect on our change and growth over the last few years.
I’m on a definite journey with public speaking. Despite my drama background I really struggle to take (make) the time to craft all the ‘work’ into learning and coherent thoughts to present when giving a talk. I often experience my own harsh internal critic being louder than anything else I can focus on during presentations and never really feel like I’ve turned all that we do, stand for and reflect on in to bite-sized chucks for people to take away. I criticise myself for not being shiny and charismatic on stage like the speakers I often see and admire for being able to distil their journey and complex work in accessible, humorous and articulate ways.
But practicing harder, running the talks through for long suffering family and friends and writing notes on postcards has helped me to have a couple of better experiences recently (along with rescue remedy!). Hopefully these will help me to grow some more confidence and start to feel a little more comfortable about being in my own skin, sharing what I’m passionate about, telling more stories.
One thing I’ve noticed that helps is when I’ve managed to pick one thing to highlight our approach and way of working — like a trojan horse I suppose. At the Northern Forum event I presented under the topic of ‘Unlocking a gridlocked city… with Empathy’ and through this was able to share examples of our pioneering work in Bradford aiming to reduce short car trips through a creative and non linear approach to:
a. identify key pedestrian routes people connecting schools to homes, madrassahs, shops and parks (lots of these are unloved snickets)
b. empathise with their often poor condition; overgrown vegetation, fly-tipping, rubbish and smells
c. work with teenage girls to develop ideas to transform these spaces
d. bring ideas to life in the snicket (with the help of partners)
This isn’t the only way to unlock a gridlocked city, but it could be the start of a locally rooted, creative and community based approach to really understand the real life barriers to walking locally and start in a small, practical ways to make walking easier, safer, more attractive and ultimately less hostile. You can read more about Safer Snickets and how we’re hoping to scale this up here.
More recently I was asked to speak about some of our work playing the role as a catalyst sitting firmly in the mess in between community members and local authorities by UCL Institute for Global Prosperity as part of their series on Prosperity in East London, a citizen’s view. This was an exciting opportunity to join a panel of super inspiring speakers all sharing their perspectives and stories on their role enabling this.
A couple of years on from our on the ground projects in Barking — Her Barking and the Barking Bridge Project — two worthy examples of large scale ‘do it ourselves’ actions to create the change residents wanted to see in the face of inaction from other actors. Doing something with a little to see if we could improve perceptions of safety, increase levels of pride, reduce fly-tipping and ASB that plagues daily life for people (mostly women and children) using these in between, vitally connecting pedestrian routes to get around.
Now obviously, this is hugely ambitious. Some might even say foolish and naive. Some might say it would be better to do nothing until an amount of funding that is realistic to create a proper transformation is in place. Or the agreements about who’s going to maintain the intervention, or until all the place actors are assembled, in support and are on the same page for the long term.
I don’t know the answer. Would anything have ever happened if we’d continued to ask politely (as many residents had been doing for years)? In some ways our way of working as ‘experiments’ is about bringing collective attention to these spaces — to highlight their existence and the strength of community feeling about their plight. As all experiments — some things will not work. This is painful, and can feel like a step backwards in the fight to create spaces that feel safe.
For example, when the festoon lighting was damaged and left hanging for a few days in St Awdry’s Walk (after weeks of looking lovely), or the solar lighting canopy that didn’t light up after a few days. Some might say this makes people feel worse or more neglected, does more damage. I’m not sure.. everything is a journey and this work is tricky because the practicing is in public!
But it felt great to share the imperfections of our work.. to highlight we know that more is needed. Being able to ask questions:
How can ‘place actors’ work together in a place in an equitable way?
How and who can coordinate interventions that respond directly to community concerns in a collaborative and relational way?
How can these small projects be scaled up to create maximum impact (and also influence how larger regeneration projects happen)?
How can we really build community capacity and support community members to continuously shape local neighbourhoods?
How can we embed a spirit of iteration into our communities and our urban fabric?
And if we really want to reshape the role of the citizen in low income communities (and others) we need to shift resource (think UBI and more!) in a meaningful way.
