Co-creating a people-powered city.

In March 2020, in the last Wolverhampton for Everyone (WE) pre-Covid face-to-face partnership gathering, we identified systems rooted in individualism and short-termism that lead to disconnected service provision (doing for), rather than an abundant system of collective, long-term, collaborative co-creation (doing with). We were, at the time, in the process of co-creating We Make Our City 2020 with talented people across Wolverhampton. Then lockdown happened, and we had to unfortunately cancel the festival; but we had the opportunity to pause, reflect and pivot. 18 months on, we were celebrating and reflecting on our first in-person events: WE Make Our City and Make:Shift.

A recap of what WE are doing…

“Platforms don’t provide a service, they enable and invite. They try to reduce dependency and invite co-production. They don’t prescribe solutions but are open-ended. They thrive and depend on unpredictable inputs of many unpredictable players. They offer a basic infrastructure and set some rules of engagement within which ‘everything’ is possible.”

Joost Beunderman, Civic Systems Lab

Since 2018, Wolverhampton for Everyone has been building a platform that creates conditions for people to imagine and connect with other people and resources so they can co-create the city they want. To do this, we have been connecting people from disconnected groups to help build a connected ecosystem of individuals and groups working towards a long-term shared vision, and sharing resources:

“In an unstable complex system, small islands of coherence have the potential to change the whole system.” Ilya Prigogine

Wolverhampton for Everyone aims to support thriving ecosystems and constellations, which Louise Armstrong describes as:

• Different people in different places and levels coming and working together and organising around things that matter and a big ordatious vision.
• Learning by doing, showing what is possible, and inviting many people to participate in this.
• Reframing and experimenting with different narratives to make things relevant to people, informed by ecological design and nature systems to work with what emerges.
• Working across different levels of the system with different actors on big challenges made relevant locally, inviting everyone to step in rather than waiting for others to do it for them.
• Paying attention to how we organise, allowing as many people as possible to come into this approach.
• Small agile team creating big impacts but also distributed people that come in at different times and parts of the cycles — bringing the clever types of skills at different times.
• Investing in people — spaces, teams, cultures and digital commons.
• Avoiding projectification of things, supporting the long-term, and creating space for different people and groups to come together and push the potential of this.

We have been engaging with people across Wolverhampton, and beyond, to build meaningful connections and relationships to create a platform for their gifts and talents. Our outputs are emergent, not prescriptive; they emerge from the imagination and drive of the people in our ecosystem. This involves using our principles to listen, learn from and adapt to what emerges. Guided by our principles, we are piecing together resources without losing sight of the long view, co-creating a place-based ecosystem where everyone feels able to participate in creating the Wolverhampton they want to live, work and play in.

Cyclical doing and learning

Building relationships and nurturing an ecosystem of curiosity and connection takes time. We’ve moved from feeling a need for constant activity, to slowing down and embracing working with the seasons for cyclical action and learning.

Late Summer / Autumn — harvesting ideas

In August 2020, Wolverhampton locals and friends took part in our RE:IMAGINE gathering where we collectively imagined what Wolverhampton could look like in 10 years. In our RE:IGNITE gathering in September, locals started to develop ideas for doing across the different themes that had come out of our RE:IMAGINE gathering.

Winter — pausing and dreaming

In January 2021, the WE team regrouped to think about what resources we could find to help bring some of the ideas from Autumn to life in the next stage: RE:ACTIVATE. We teamed up with the Co-op Foundation and Creative Black Country’s The ‘F’ Words Project to start planning how we can support locals to collectively experiment with ideas and activities across Wolverhampton. To help us do this, the team used Rob Hopkins and Rob Shorter’s imagination sundial to help us identify and experiment with ways to help rebuild people’s imaginative capacity. The team shared which segments of the sundial they’d been working in.

The strength of colours at the core of the imagination sundial represent how many WE team members selected that segment.

The team reflected that, following our RE:IMAGINE and RE:IGNITE sessions of 2020, we had been focussed on:

• Welcoming people to RE:IMAGINE and RE:IGNITE
• Sharing inspiration to show what is possible
• Asking Wulfrunians what if to generate future imaginaries of Wolverhampton
• Celebrating the ideas and enthusiasm that had been shared by Wulfrunians
• Connecting people to other catalysts, businesses and residents and resources following the re:imagine and re:ignite sessions
• Slowing to reflect on how we could move towards the next phase (re:activate)
• Looking forward to how we could reconnect people with street, local and nature through sending RE:ACTIVATE packs to Wulfrunians.

Spring — sprouting activities

As we emerged from winter, experiments began to sprout across Wolverhampton:

• Residents were planning a vaccine walk
• An online growing and gardening group had emerged out of Trade School Online which WE, CoLab Dudley and Bearwood Community Hub convened in Summer 2020.
• WE had been working with colleagues in health inequalities to convene What If? events listening to people who want to imagine different ecosystem in health services
• Our second Trade school online
• Empowering Social Entrepreneurs
• Activation packs were created and shared to connect people back to real-life sharing rather than just over digital spaces. This seeded ideas for people to do something ‘together’ whilst we were not allowed to meet in person. Activation packs included ideas and tips for hosting playing out events, and for growing seeds.

These projects, combined with other ideas brewing, shifted us to new segments in the sundial: opening, making and playing.

The WE team used the imagination sundial to map learning generated from our actions in expanding others’ capacity to imagine. The strength of colours at the core of the top right sundial represent the shifting focus of the team.

Summer — flourish and nurture

With people meeting face-to-face again, WE were able to bring We Make Our City into 2021. We were guided by Looby Macnamara’s Design Web from her books People and Permaculture and Cultural Emergence. The web is a framework for people-based designs and supports a holistic and responsive approach to finding out where we want to go and how to get there. It has 12 anchor points that help us navigate between and focus on different areas:

Source

The WE team developed a design canvas on Miro (an infinite whiteboard online) based on Macnamara’s Design Web and adapted to our context and principles. We recognised that one of the strengths of the web is that you can bounce between anchor points, and not have to go through it in a linear way, but the linear design canvas below really helped the team navigate the anchor points in our fast-paced co-creation session.

This approach enabled the team to bring together ideas that were grounded in our vision and principles, and move us towards action. Within 6 weeks we welcomed Wulfrunians to bring their imagination and talents to co-create a micro people-powered city at the Mander Centre Community Hub for 6 days.

In our previous blog, we shared what happened at and what we learnt from We Make Our City.