From numbers to narratives — suggestions for a framework and a new way of talking about life within planetary boundaries
Telling stories about climate neutrality in cities — a potentially transformative practice
In order to speed up the transition to climate-neutral cities, the Swedish innovation program Viable Cities has developed methods and processes based on the art of storytelling that form a transformative practice that shifts the conception and conversation about the necessary changes needed in our way of life. Using stories that are created to be emotionally true, locally relevant, and scientifically accurate, the framework makes it clear to policymakers and public officials that a high quality of life is possible within planetary boundaries — and that many people are already living that way in every city. Please note: this is work in progress.
Introduction: From numbers to narratives
Early in 1930, a few months after the Wall Street stock market crashed, Nathanael West began working on Miss Lonelyhearts, the darkly satirical novel he’s probably best known for. Some years earlier, his family had experienced the financial difficulties that millions of people across America now faced as the country grappled with a great depression. To support himself, he had gotten a job as night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan.
This was a position West was able to keep even as many of the people he knew not only lost their jobs and thus their financial stability but saw their dreams shattered too. “Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears”, West later wrote in The Day of the Locust, a novel that is also set in the era of the Great Depression.
Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears
Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. Miss Lonelyhearts revolves around an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column for the lovelorn and lonesome in New York City during these difficult years in the early 1930s. As he reads dozens of letters from desperate New Yorkers, the columnist is burdened by their stories, eventually becoming cynical and falling into a cycle of deep depression accompanied by heavy drinking.
One of the episodes in the novel involves a news clipping where a supreme pontiff of the Liberal Church of America insists that prayers for the soul of a condemned murderer will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers, the pontiff explained, constitute the only universal language.
This idea of numbers as the embodiment of neutrality, used as key performance indicators to measure progress, as signals to understand complex systems, or as science-based targets have proven to be astonishingly robust and contagious. When people fail to comprehend an explanation of what progress or a planned project looks like, I’ve often heard them say, “Show me the numbers!” As if I was a magician to explain an act of reality-distorting illusion and as if numbers aren’t able to distort reality themselves. As the old joke goes, remember that 28.6 per cent of all statistics are made up!
Reality distortion is always made by stories, not numbers. A good story is irresistible because our brains are wired for the stuff. Storytelling is “built into the human plan. We come with it”, as Margaret Atwood observed. No one remembers the exact figures that underpinned Rachel Carson’s argument in her pioneering book Silent Spring because the title told the story.
It was inspired by a poem by John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, which contained the lines: “The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.” Originally intended as a title for the chapter on birds, Carson’s literary agent suggested it would be a good metaphorical title for the entire book, suggesting a bleak future for the whole natural world rather than a chapter on the possible absence of birdsong when commercial pesticides killed all the bugs and thus all the birds. Carson’s view of the future was as depressing as Miss Lonelyhearts’.
At the climate conference in Glasgow, I heard someone claim that “the numbers speak for themselves; we need to get below a 1.5-degree increase in global temperature.” Never mind that numbers in fact do not speak, getting numbers thrown at you doesn’t help you understand how to interpret them or what to do to affect those numbers. Numbers may feel safe, and be perceived as irrefutable facts, but they never tell you the story. And as someone pointed out to me in an ironic tone of voice, people who say there’s safety in numbers haven’t looked at the stock market recently.
John Kerry, the United States envoy on the climate, told the BBC he viewed the climate conference as “the last best chance” to avert the worst environmental consequences for the world. Still, the outcome of the conference was bleak, leaving a lot of people disillusioned about the power of politics.
The general tone of Miss Lonelyhearts is also dark, one of extreme disillusionment with depression-era American society, a consistent theme in West’s novels. To an increasing degree, the same can be said on the depressing news of the diminishing numbers describing our chances of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In 2017 the American Association of Psychologists issued a guidebook for its members for how to address the impacts on mental health related to climate change, something we now simply call climate anxiety. To help individuals to prepare for and recover from climate change-related mental trauma, the AAP has a few recommendations to offer: a) build a belief in one’s own resilience, b) foster optimism, c) cultivate active coping and self-regulation skills, d) maintain practices that help to provide a sense of meaning, and finally e) promote connectedness to family, place, culture, and community.
We seem to be obsessed with numbers and especially so when it comes to stating the desired outcome of the much-needed transformation of our communities. Three hundred and fifty ppm! One tonne of CO2 each per year! Forty-eight per cent reduction by 2050! Despite this, there’s little in the AAP guidelines to suggest that numbers alone have the power to foster optimism, provide a sense of meaning, or promote connectedness.
Presenting facts as numbers, graphs, charts, and figures seems to have surprisingly little impact when it comes to igniting change in people. Even though you may attribute great value and importance to the data presented to you, acting accordingly does not automatically follow. This psychological phenomenon at play is called the “value-action gap”.
Rather the opposite seems true: the more rooted in science your argument is, the less likely you are to move someone to act. Or to put it in simpler terms, the more factual you are, the more boring you may be. And God knows there are a vast number of really important and really boring science papers out there. I’ve read my fair share of them during the past few years.
As Bill McGuire once put it: “Scientific papers, however well-written, rarely carry the emotional weight of a good story. Stories have been the prime means of imparting knowledge and warnings throughout human history. Even in today’s data-rich world, they hold a visceral clout that no amount of graphs, charts or figures can replace.”
Nathanael West’s novel about how New Yorkers were impacted by the great recession contained nothing presented as science, yet his fiction was univocally perceived as something inherently truthful. Not only as an eye-witness account of that time, but apparently also with regard to the human condition. Miss Lonelyheart has been adapted for film (three times!), a Broadway play (albeit with bad reviews), and an opera (as recent as 2006). There is supposedly something about the story that says something about the joys and sorrows of life that audiences have been able to relate to for almost a century.
Relatability is needed to get someone to believe the stories they’re told. It’s an insight shared by military personnel engaged in psychological operations trying to sway an opinion, as well as authors writing spy novels trying to sway critics. In disinformation as well as in fiction, relatability is important. It engages the audience.
It can thus be helpful to view the climate crisis as an effect of decades of disengagement, of a collective failure of the scientific community as well as of the environmental movement to engage people for something better. Or to put it differently, there is a lack of stories we can relate to.
In his book The Politics of Climate Change, Anthony Giddens observed that no matter how much we’re told about the threats we face, they seem somehow unreal and “in the meantime, there’s a life to be lived, with all its pressures and pleasures.” He argues that because the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate, or visible in the course of day-to-day life, however great they might be, many will sit on their hands and do nothing about them. (This has since been called the Giddens’ paradox, a version of the value-action gap described above.)
After all, the human brain is not a computer. “It’s a story processor”, writes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “not a logic processor.” Stories emerge from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. And a stubborn processor it is too. Getting someone to change their way of thinking, the brain’s internal structures, is hard.
The neurobiologist Bruce Wexler describes that once established, the brain filters information according to these structures. “Instead of the internal structures being shaped by the environment, the individual now acts to preserve established structures in the face of environmental challenges, and finds changes in structure difficult and painful.” We respond to such challenges with distorted thinking, argument, or aggression. As Wexler writes, “We ignore, forget or attempt to actively discredit information that is inconsistent with these structures.”
The human brain is not a computer, it’s a story processor
The dangers of global warming have been widely known for decades, the effects are visible and tangible all around us, and the connection to our own consumption behaviours is well established. By now, most people agree that climate change is a problem and many of us have heard numerous stories about what city life will be like in a sustainable future. And yet most of us continue to buy stuff we don’t need using money we don’t have to impress people we don’t know.
What if the reason for partying or consuming like there is no tomorrow is that one doesn’t want to think about tomorrow? Again and again, Miss Lonelyhearts orders another whiskey because “it is good and is making him feel warm and sure.” To many people, the future feels anything but warm and sure. Changing behaviour is hard, and whenever someone reminds us that we cannot go on like this forever, we cling to the things we know because the future seems to threaten our very way of life.
It certainly doesn’t help that zero-emission lifestyles often are presented in a zero emotional way, as a green utopia where food is vegan, cars are shared, and everything is local. To some people, that sounds more like a dystopia where burgers will be forbidden, your car will be taken away, and where one will never again be able to fly to Spain. In other words, a good life with less emissions may appear less of a good life as we’ve come to know it. (This may explain the value-action gap.)
As Will Storr concludes in his book The Science of Storytelling, whenever we encounter something that is consistent with our model of reality, the brain gives a subtle feeling of yes. If it’s not, it gives the subconscious feeling of no. These emotional responses happen before we go through any process of conscious reasoning. They exert a powerful influence over us. To our brain, perceived reality is reality.
It certainly seems like Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was created with this insight in mind. Even though the stories he told were light on facts, he had the ability to tell stories that people could relate to. What we feel to be true is more true that what the truth actually might be.
This is obviously nothing new. A political promise is inherently non-factual and is judged on the emotions it evokes among voters. In 1980 Ronald Reagan ran for office using the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again”, and as an actor he knew how to make people feel that to be true. Barack Obama promised “Change” and made people feel good about that.
What made the Trump 2016 campaign stand out was that it was very light on details and plans and facts. Instead, it relied heavily on emotions and a polarising message of “us” vs. “them”. Nothing unites us as much as a common enemy, imaginary or not.
The campaign also stood apart in the sense that it never shifted from the poetry of campaigning to the prose of governing. Almost as soon as the campaign was over, a re-election campaign followed, much like another season of reality television would.
“Getting re-elected isn’t that hard,” a local politician once explained to me. “If people feel that their quality of life has improved, they will trust you another term. If not, they will vote for the other guy.” Even if people might resist change, most people will take a shot at improving their quality of life — if they feel it’s possible.
Miss Lonelyhearts is a short novel, bordering on a short story. I recently came across one edition that only spans fifty-eight pages! There’s no literary excesses, no flowery language, few descriptions of faces or places. How did Nathanael West then manage to create what is now considered a timeless classic, on par with The Great Gatsby? Perhaps it is because West was able to access and explore the most basic, most tragic element of the human condition: the existential crisis.
Throughout the story, the protagonist is looking for “some spiritual reality to believe in and live by”, and when I read that line I thought, “Aren’t we all?” His quest ends in tragic disillusionment that causes depression. And who wouldn’t be depressed in his position, I say. On most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, “stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife”. Think about all those depressing climate crisis stories in the media. What are they if not all stamped from the dough of suffering? Could this be why so many people experience the existential crisis as climate anxiety?
What if we made a mistake talking about how inconvenient the truth is, rather than talking about how convenient the future will be? Did we focus too much on presenting the facts about the dire condition of nature, rather than considering the facts about how human nature works? What if we accidently exaggerated the change needed to live a sustainable life to a point where people felt that a lot of things that made life worth living were going to be taken away from them?
Looking at the data on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere right now, it seems we did. In good faith, yes. Based on science and with the best of intentions, sure. Nevertheless, we made some mistakes and didn’t get the desired results. Even if we collectively understood the changes needed, too few of us desired that change enough to do something about it. In the meantime, we kept on living the life we knew, with all its pressures and pleasures. No meaningful impact on the greenhouse effect was detected, and here we are.
As Jonathan Franzen put it in his infamous piece in the New Yorker in 2019 — what if we stopped pretending? We failed. We did not prevent climate change.
Still, there are lots of things that can be done. Unlike Miss Lonelyhearts, we can avoid becoming cynical or falling into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking. Sure, have a drink if you must. Cry over all the lost chances of preventing climate change that we had and missed if it makes you feel better. By all means, cry if you must — for then all hope is not yet lost! “For only those who still have hope can benefit from tears”, to quote Nathanael West.
Moving from numbers to narratives and learning how to tell stories in a relatable way may be the best chance we have of getting people to change everyday behaviours. Facts cannot do that. Hannah Arendt pointed out that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. Focusing on how high quality of life is possible while having a low footprint might shift the conversation from what we will lose to what we will keep.
Moving from numbers to narratives and learning how to tell stories in a relatable way may be the best chance we have of getting people to change everyday behaviours.
As Miss Lonelyhearts writes in response to one of the many letters he receives, “Life is worthwhile, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.”
Having faith in the ability to live a worthwhile life within the planetary boundaries is key to driving systematic change in our society and at a speed faster than before. Talking about how to achieve a high quality of life with low emissions is what gives meaning and direction to change, for a city official as well as citizens. While there may be different opinions on the activities needed to get there or about the speed at which changes should happen, the striving for increased quality of life unites people across party lines.
To paraphrase Margaret Mead, we shouldn’t doubt that telling relatable stories about how high quality of life is possible in a not-too-distant future has the potential to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
A transformative practice
In order to speed up the transition to climate-neutral cities, Viable Cities has developed methods and processes based on the art of storytelling. Together, they form a transformative practice that shifts the conception and conversation about the necessary changes in our way of life.
Using stories that are created to be emotionally true, locally relevant, and scientifically based, the practice makes it clear to policy makers and public officials that a high quality of life is possible within planetary boundaries — and that many people are already living that way in their city.
This profound insight refocuses the efforts of policy makers and public officials to become enablers of a better way of life for the citizens they serve. This renders any discussion on whether the transformation is possible into a debate on the speed the transformation should take. In addition, it will help increase trust in public servants and institutions as purveyors of the public good.
While currently in beta testing, the practice with its methods and processes is being documented to be released under a creative commons licence later this year. It is designed to be run by a team within the city government tasked with making the city become climate neutral.
The purpose is for as many cities as possible to benefit from Viable Cities’ transformative practice in order to make their cities more viable in the future.
From science to fiction
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” goes the first line of The White Album, Joan Didion’s essay about the death of the American Dream and her own psychological distress. The climate is also in distress, and as the realisation that we cannot go on living and consuming like this sinks in, we also need to tell ourselves stories about how we will live in the not-too-distant future.
The primary disadvantage of using science-based goals to inform our decisions about the future of our societies is that they are boring. Even if they convey important information on where our societies need to be a few years from now, they say nothing about what that will feel like.
The obvious problem with the future is that it’s not here yet. The only collective experience we have from the future is actually from science fiction. Acknowledging that there is no conclusive definition of this genre, for the sake of argument we’ll describe it as a branch of literature that deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.
It’s important to understand that what enabled this genre to remain popular for more than 150 years — from Jules Verne’s book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) to the TV series The Jetsons (1962) to Pixar Animation Studio’s Wall-E (2008) — is that the science is less important than the fiction. In other words, it’s always been about how humans feel experiencing scientific and technological changes, rather than the technology itself. This is why it’s helpful to look at science fiction for a clue on how to tell engaging stories about what a climate-neutral future will look — and more importantly — feel like.
In science fiction movies, directors paint a very different image of future cities than city planners envision how our cities will look in the future. In Luc Besson’s sci-fi adventure The Fifth Element, New York City is a world riddled with the scars of environmental mistreatment and the capitalist evolution of 80th-floor McDonald’s drive-thrus.
In contrast, when illustrating future projects city planners usually include an abundance of lush greenery, and groups of smiling white people populate wide pavements running along streets where fleets of hydrogen buses emit nothing but air and water.
Still, even though The Fifth Element is a story set in the 23rd century when the survival of Earth rests in the hands of five alien elements and Bruce Willis, it somehow feels more realistic than many of the illustrations. How is that possible? The answer may lie in how the story is told. The focus is not on the city itself but on what it’s like to live in that city.
Figuratively and literally, the stories set in fictional cities always have shadows and light, whereas illustrations of future cities are more often than not artificial and superficial. Even if we cannot relate to the flying taxi Bruce Willis is driving, we can relate to all the feelings he displays while manoeuvring his vessel in the city. And that’s how science fiction manages to make the future more relatable and real than any 3D-rendered hyper-realistic footage of future developments can ever be.
Making quality of life central
In 2019, Viable Cities set out to develop a method to help policy makers and public officials understand what a climate-neutral future would feel like. There was already enough science to underpin how citizens would need to change their everyday behaviour to reach zero emissions, as well as plenty of knowledge on how the city would need to be structured to nudge and support sustainable behaviour. What was lacking was an insight into how it would feel to live a day without emissions.
- Our first hypothesis is that narratives are more effective than numbers when conveying what the future will look and feel like. There’s actually plenty of scientific evidence to support this.
Everybody knows our emissions need to go down, but will our quality of life also decrease as a result of that? Like science fiction, there’s no exact definition of “quality of life”, and it’s a matter of personal preferences. Still, even if your thing is to smoke weed and mine is weeding, we can still agree that our quality of life is important. Not only is human nature prone to keeping or increasing its quality of life, policy makers and public officials are sensitive to that urge.
Even if we have a large individual responsibility to lower our climate footprint by changing the way we eat (Not too much. Mostly plants.), consume (Reuse, Repair, Recycle) and move (on the ground, electric), cities can do much in order to make it easier for us to do the right things. Most of those changes are made possible by policy makers and public officials, which is why we focused our efforts on them, but our conclusions can be applied to any audience.
If they don’t feel it’s possible to combine a high quality of life with a low-emissions lifestyle, they will be hesitant to suggest the necessary structural reforms our society needs. No politician seeking re-election will campaign on a promise to decrease the current quality of life for people, which is the narrative often heard when it comes to changing our society. It simply makes no sense.
- Our second hypothesis is to help an audience of policy makers and public officials understand that a high quality of life was possible within planetary boundaries.
The question of how far in the future a story should be placed to be realistic took some time to consider. We knew that all 23 Swedish cities that are part of the Viable Cities program aim to be climate neutral by 2030, so naturally, a story needed to be placed in time sometime between now and then. But when? The stories we wanted to tell about a day in a life that is without emissions needed to be based on science, but they were also to be fiction. Most science fiction stories are set in a distant future, thirty or three hundred years from now, probably because that allows creative freedom such as travelling at warp speed or having everyone wear velour (as in the first two seasons of Star Trek).
Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. And it’s true. A lot of people are already living within planetary boundaries all over the world, using existing technology to perform everyday tasks in a way that enables them to have a high quality of life.
This insight led to one of the foundational approaches in how stories are told using our method. Rather than focusing on all the transformative structural changes needed to make our cities climate neutral, we decided to put people who already are living sustainably at the centre of the stories of the future we are to tell.
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed
In addition, it was decided that technology should not play an important role in these stories, figuratively and literally, as this might give the false impression that future technology is the answer to our problems rather than everyday lifestyle choices. Even though a piece of future technology might be added to the story as a hint that the story is indeed set in the future, the overwhelming takeaway needs to be that the future is already here, even if it’s not evenly distributed.
- Our third hypothesis is that scenarios that are set in the very near future will make the future less frightening while helping people to understand that change is possible.
Over the past few years, we’ve been able to verify these hypotheses in a number of ways, and they now form the basis for how stories are to be told using our method. As straightforward and simple as the process may sound from this testimony, the reality was something else. But as film writer Jean Luc Godard pointed out, “Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.” Which speaks to the power of storytelling.
The method and its processes
Change is only frightening if you don’t understand what the result will be, or if it will affect the quality of life for you or others in a negative way.
Stories about what a day in life is like for someone who is living within planetary boundaries in a city show that a high quality of life is already possible to combine with low emissions. Using narratives that focus on the emotional experience of everyday scenarios helps us understand that the future will not feel that different or frightening and that it is within reach.
The practice is divided into five core processes, with methods to support each step.
1. Picking a story theme
n the opening of the novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This observation can be translated into how cities see themselves. All stories about the happy future of a city look the same, whereas every city is unhappily unsustainable in its own way.
However, the foundational problems are similar. A majority of direct and indirect emissions come from transportation, consumption, and our choice of food, which means a story about the future could be mapped on story themes for each of these topics.
Based on the focus of their climate mitigation strategy, a city will pick one of the universal story themes we’ve created and then adopt it for it to feel locally relevant.
All story themes focus on a day in the life of one citizen, called “the hero”, and have ready-made narratives structured around events in an order that creates and releases tension and thus creates the desired emotional connection to the audience.
All stories about the happy future of a city look the same, whereas every city is unhappily unsustainable in its own way.
Cities will also find that their current mitigation strategies can be mapped to events in the theme (such as using public transport rather than taking your own car to reduce emissions) because, as I said before, all happy cities are the same.
The creative format for all themes is set. We use documentary photography and the result is always a PowerPoint presentation with imagery. Video never escapes the fact that it’s edited and altered, just as illustration and animation can never escape the fact that it’s not reality, whereas photos in a documentary style are perceived as snapshots from reality. Using PowerPoint is also a deliberate choice because it’s a universally used tool in city governments around the world. It’s also easy to change and interact with.
Another reason for relying heavily on photography stems from a realisation that “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”, to quote Wittgenstein. The visual language we use is more inviting and engaging, and less excluding, than if we would have relied primarily on text. As they tell you in creative writing courses — show, don’t tell.
It’s important to stress that all story themes are based on science and fiction. They are based on the latest in behavioural science and sustainable consumption insights. These insights are fused with how fictional stories are best told to engage people, a craft known and developed for hundreds of years to create a structure that underpins everything from Shakespeare’s dramas to Jane Austen novels, to The Crown on Netflix.
In these stories, we get to follow the heroine as she goes through the day in the city, encountering emotional and functional friction everyone can relate to (e.g. being late to a meeting, forgetting to eat a proper lunch, discovering the bike is stolen) as well as equally relatable small joys (e.g. enjoying nature during a bike ride, having a pointless Zoom-call being cancelled, eating a greasy hamburger, getting together for a pint with a friend). In other words, a pretty ordinary and somewhat boring day. The big revelation comes at the end when the audience realises that all activities performed and portrayed have caused zero emissions.
The story themes are divided into a number of modules that encapsulate the main events that happen during the day. For each of these events, there are a number of layers that underpin the individual and collective choices in the event, as well as general practices and planetary boundaries that together make various aspects of the event possible and the value they provide.
One example could be how the hero’s choice to hold a video meeting is enabled by an individual choice that saves time and avoids commuting as well as her employer’s policy to allow working remotely using green cloud services.
Process
Based on the focus and priorities of their local climate mitigation strategy, the team will pick one of the universal story themes available and adopt it for it to feel locally relevant.
At this point, the team will look at the modules in the structure to see how they can be adjusted to fit local circumstances. While the story structure of the theme will remain intact, the modules will be adapted to local priorities. These priorities should be at most five and need to be written down at this time in order to check that they are included in the final story script.
Whereas one city might identify that it is crucial to increase the use of public transport to reach zero emissions, another might want to push bike-sharing schemes. For our hero to get from point A to B in a module, the first city might decide that she should take a bus while the second city will want her to use a shared bike.
Teams also need to consider the locations where in the city the story will take place using maps to plot various places and the possible routes to move between those places. During our pilots, we found that it’s always helpful to have at least two possible locations for each module as well as two options for how our hero can move between each module.
In general, cities will find that their current mitigation strategies can be mapped to events in the theme (such as using public transport rather than taking your own car to reduce emissions) because, as mentioned before, all happy cities are the same.
This is also where the team will start to consider who is to play the hero in the story. This is a crucial task, for as Stephen King put it, “I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.”
Ideally, it should be someone working in city government who emphasises the intention of city officials to walk the talk in order to strengthen trust in our institutions. Diversity issues need to be considered as well, especially if the city plans to do several story themes.
When casting the hero, it’s important that this person have some knowledge of the sustainability aspects of the chosen theme, but they need not be an expert. The most important trait is that the person has a sense of humour and self-distance enough to be able to assume a character. The person will play themself, but a slightly different version of themselves. People with a background in improv theatre are the best because they are naturally aware of the importance of exaggerating emotional responses for maximum clarity in photos.
The person should not be a political figure, a well-known advocate for sustainability or a sceptic because this will affect how the story is perceived.
Interviewing the potential heroes about what they do to minimise their carbon footprint is not only a good way to understand if they would fit the role, but also a way of learning if they would add something to it. It will reveal the level of understanding of the story theme, but may also add important details that make the story even more relevant.
2. Making the story local
J.K. Rowling has said, “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.” In order to make the audience believe that a high quality of life is possible within their own city, the story needs to be rich in details that make sense from a local perspective.
Having adjusted the modules, the teams will now add details that make the story locally relevant. In the city of Umeå a study found that a key driver for getting people to travel by bike was the ability to enjoy nature, and the team then made sure that in the story our hero passed by the Ume river on her way from A to B.
Process
Teams should identify uniquely local habits, traits, and foods that can be woven into the story and make it locally relevant. Adding a heap of salad drenched in Rhode Island sauce on top of a traditional pizza before rolling it up into a squashy handheld tube while drinking a fruity soda may seem like something only an insane person would do. But in Umeå, everybody does it. And frankly, it’s a surprisingly tasty local speciality called ‘rullpizza’ and was something the hero of Umeå our pilot story had for lunch. In Gothenburg, our hero had something called ‘a half special’, which includes hot dogs buried under a mountain of mashed potatoes, whereas in Malmö falafel was on the menu. Making the story locally relevant is key.
The teams will now start crafting the final story script based on the story themes. Each module needs to be assigned a location, the events need to be described, and important details for what makes the module locally relevant need to be specified. It’s a good idea to involve the hero in this process because she might have important ideas and contacts that can help realise the documentation of the events included in the module.
The required material, partners, permits, and other details need to be worked out and included in a production schedule. If it has been decided that the hero should bike past a hydrogen-powered garbage collecting truck because the city wants to show off such a truck, a whole range of details needs to be worked out. Not only are a truck and a bike needed, but they also need to be at a place that works out in the general schedule for the day and the weather conditions, and the milieu needs to fit the story structure.
And not to forget, a date has to be set, a photographer with experience in documentary or journalistic photography needs to be hired, and everything in the production schedule needs to be gone through, again and again.
3. Capturing a day in the life of the hero
It sounds easy, but it will be a long day. The team will need sneakers and expect to take 20,000 steps.
Process
Besides the hero, you need a photographer that can make the hero smile and make other relevant facial gestures in order to make sure that the emotional reaction is clearly visible. A director needs to be close at hand to ensure that the most important events in each module are captured and to make decisions on what isn’t needed. A production manager will be watching her clock, making sure it all stays on schedule and staying in touch with partners in order to make sure everything works and to deal with delays and unexpected events, as well as making sure the team has rest breaks every now and then.
4. Making the story come to life.
The fourth step is to compile the story in a PowerPoint format, where it will be divided into modules and layers will be added.
Each module consists of a number of events associated with a number of layers outlining the various factors that influence or enable the actions included in the event.
Process
Having compiled the story, the team will rely on experts from various departments to create layers. They will be invited to a workshop with the purpose to map various layers in order to understand the complexity of events. Layers may include that the hero chose the place to have lunch, that the restaurant serves vegan food, that the power used in the building is renewable, that the city approved outdoor seating, or that the ecosystem services provided by the trees nearby clean the air.
Together these layers reveal the many hidden layers and actors in our society that make a sustainable life possible without us really thinking about it. Layers not only display the actions already taken on multiple levels to help achieve climate and environmental goals, they also provide various departments within the city administration with the opportunity to understand how each one of them contributes to enabling a sustainable life for citizens.
Initially, the story will be presented to them as a way for them to understand that a climate-neutral future is possible with sustained quality of life.
The workshop is also an opportunity to break down the walls between organisational silos and for everyone involved to understand more about how they can support each other. The process of having them discuss and decide on 5–10 layers for each action in each event also anchors the story in the organisation in order, which is needed in order to increase the speed of the transition. Already having the buy-in from experts will also make a difference when policy makers and public officials want to increase the speed of transition.
5. Making it all come together
Science fiction writer Brandon Sanderson once wrote that “the purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” That sums up the ambition with the fifth and final step in what is our transformational practice.
Before the final step, the team assembled the story in a neat PowerPoint format complete with modules, events, actions, and layers. They will then invite a dozen or so policy makers and public officials for a workshop on quality of life and personal climate leadership.
Process
During a 3-hour workshop, participants are presented with the story followed by guided discussions and a shared meal. At the beginning of the meeting, they are told that they have been selected for their various perspectives and their in-depth knowledge of how to get things done in the organisation.
They are then told that the workshop will explore aspects of how to increase the speed of climate transition within the current organisational structures but — and this is liberating — that the workshop will not result in more things added to their to-do lists and they will not have to report on something afterwards. During the session, they will see a third of the story and then pause to collectively reflect on their own quality of life. This is followed by another third of the story reflecting on messaging, and finally discussing what advice they would give to someone wanting to change the pace of transition using the current system. In the end, when the participants have seen the full story, we initiate a discussion on how the quality of life can be used as a north star in the needed transformation of society.
During the session, design principles are used to help participants reflect on the fact that high quality of life can be combined with a low-emission lifestyle, which is a scientific fact. While our purpose is not to bridge ideological divides, the session will establish that such discussions should focus on how one can increase the number of people already living within planetary boundaries, not just if it is possible because the participants have already seen, felt, and experienced that it is.
The workshop is repeated with as many people as possible, allowing a substantial number of senior officials in city government to reflect on what it means to put the quality of life as a new north star for all transition initiatives in the city.
Conclusion
Throughout history, a lot of people have arrived at the same conclusion — storytellers rule the world. If we are to shape the world, our societies, our cities, and our very way of life to be climate neutral, storytelling needs to be deployed to achieve that goal. Indeed, storytelling is integral to how humans process information, and it influences our actions.
Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner went as far as to conclude that “stories constitute the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal.” In the war against climate change and in the fight for making cities climate neutral by 2030, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to deploy that weapon.
Using the Viable Cities transformative practice, we can tell stories that influence the very people that arguably can make the biggest difference in enabling as many people as possible to simultaneously increase their quality of life and decrease their carbon footprint. In the process, they will have the opportunity to reconnect with the core purpose of being in public service; to serve the public in improving the lives of all.
The practice is also designed to combat climate anxiety by using storytelling to follow the recommendations of the AAP. First, they advise that one build belief in one’s own resilience, foster optimism, and cultivate active coping and self-regulation skills. Stories about how a valuable life within planetary boundaries is possible will achieve all three of those goals. Finally, they advise us to maintain practices that help to provide a sense of meaning and to promote connectedness to family, place, culture, and community. Which is what stories that are emotionally true, locally relevant, and based on science can do.
In times of climate crisis, Viable Cities’ transformational practice has the methods and processes needed to remind people that another world is still possible, if we act on our values. It reminds us that, to use Nathanael West’s words in Miss Lonelyhearts, “Life is worthwhile, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.” Telling ourselves stories about the future is the clear white flame we need because storytelling can indeed transform the world.
Viable Cities is a strategic innovation programme focusing on the transition to climate-neutral and sustainable cities. The programme’s mission is climate neutral cities 2030 with a good life for all within planetary boundaries.
Viable Cities is a catalyst for new forms of cooperation between cities, industry, academia, research institutes and civil society. This is to mobilise to change the way our cities operate in line with our national climate and sustainability goals as well as our international commitments linked to the Global Sustainability Goals — Agenda 2030 — and the Paris Agreement.
Viable Cities’ work is closely linked to the European mobilization around “Mission Climate Neutral and Smart Cities 2030”.
The programme is implemented with support in a concerted effort by Vinnova, the Swedish Energy Agency and Formas.
