by Mike
Over the past couple of months, we (T4P and friends) have put on a series of small events playing around the edges of the official ‘Vision for Leeds 2030′ process – stimulated by it, contributing to it… and hopefully challenging it. The inspiration came from several people saying they’d never considered what Leeds might be like in 2030 – and, more importantly, that they might have a role in shaping it.
We wanted to do something independent of the official process – contributing to it, and also able to challenge it. Mike Chitty talks about the ‘violence of vision’, that I take to mean the impossibility of formulating a unitary vision that – of necessity – marginalises or excludes competing visions.
And therefore, alongside What if Leeds, it’s great that many different people are trying to provoke people to think about vision for the city; I’ve taken part in Mike Chitty’s and Imran Ali’s Innovation Lab and Culture Vultures Cultural Conversations, to name but two. Now, without doing violence to the good anarchy of all this, is it possible that all of this forms part of an urban social movement for change? And what might that look like?
In our inquiry process, we decided to work with Appreciative Inquiry – a visioning tool that seeks out the best of “what is” to help ignite the collective imagination of “what might be”. By asking people to remember their experiences of where and when they were happiest, we hoped to find out what makes for a good place to live. The questions we asked were:
- Tell us a story or share an experience about when you were happiest, most alive or felt most connected to Leeds or to any other city you have lived in. What was going on? Why were you so happy, so alive? What happened? Who else was involved?
- How did the city contribute to this experience? Were there any special conditions or elements about the city that stand out for you in that experience?
- What do you dream of or hope for Leeds in the future, and what part would you like to play in making that come to reality?
We’ve met some great people and heard happy and inspiring stories. We’re now sitting down to look at what we’ve got and what to do next.
There’s no copyright on the questions above, and we’d love it if other people (eg you) used them and found some way of gathering up what they (you again!) hear. We’ve had people interviewing each other and then talking together in a group, and we’ve interviewed people over tea and cake.
We’re thinking on how we feed what we’ve heard into the bloodstream of the city and would love to hear any ideas you may have…
September 28, 2010 at 10:58 am |
Mike, I love the appreciative enquiry approach.
But we always have to remind ourselves about what works well for whom. There is a real danger that in the ‘what we loved’ enquiry we can lose sight of those who may have been excluded from, or paid the price for, our progress.
Especially when we divide society into groups like ‘business’.
October 13, 2010 at 7:53 pm |
As usual T4P puts me into pictures I’d vaguely heard about but never seen before. So I tried to start a WhatifLeeds discussion stream (What if we became a truly inter-cultural city?). But it didn’t seem to work. Or maybe it’s being vetted before it goes live? And I’d heard about CultureVultures but now I know a lot more about them. And having met the Lady Mayoress of Armley at one or two events, and been impressed, I now think (a) my boring events might benefit from her brilliance and (b) I suppose I should try and think of something witty an brilliant to contribute to the CV pages.
But as to the conversation Mike is having about being happy/happiest in the city, that does make me think. I arrived here in 1968, from Hemel Hempstead and I immediately fell in love with the Brotherton library’s circular reading room (and all those beautiful books), with the walk down through grimy Little London and up through mysterious Chapeltown to my cold garret opposite the lovely Chapel Allerton Park.
What exactly was it about this that made me happy? Partly, it was not being in Hemel Hempstead. Mainly, it was the anarchists and bohemians I soon fell in with who inhabited the Brotherton and the grubby houses around Blenheim Square, and the self-declared pimp who showed me the way up Chapeltown Road back to my digs one very late November night. So I guess it’s a combination of place and people that makes me happy. Places can be planned, I suppose; but people are much more complicated, and rightly resist all efforts to plan them. But we can engage in deep and dangerous discussions about what makes us happy, and we can try and persuade the planners to take that it account.