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"For some people there’s a question of ‘what am I supposed to be doing now’. I think it's important to understand the work each of us are doing and how it relates to historical moments, future moments, but also the idea of needing to bloom where you’re planted."
—Bianca Wylie
In our founding strategy and early vision for CIVIC SQUARE, we shared the intention to be one part of, and to nurture a creative and participatory ecosystem, with a multitude of entry points that start putting into practice and demonstrating today, the futures many people were imagining, and which the challenges all around us were calling us to transition into. From participation that created everyday entry and meeting points, to larger convening, festivals and unforgettable experiences, were a critical layer that nurtured civic agency, imagination and local action — ultimately supporting pathways towards organising collectively towards bigger systemic challenges together. At the heart of the approach in the first phase of CIVIC SQUARE, the Creative + Participatory Ecosystem was interested in the practices and spaces that enabled the democratisation of our collective capacity to dream, create, participate, and imagine together. This dynamic area of our work sought to give tangible form to many areas of our mission and to the practice of building the deep trust, cultures, and environments needed for the transformative work required of us all in these times.
Through this ecosystem approach, acting as one part of a formal and informal organising networks at many different scales and approaches, we were and are focused on developing inclusive, low threshold, high ambition participatory experiences, events, activities, programming, projects, festivals, experiments and interventions of our own across the neighbourhood, and be a part of the work of others, to contribute to a shared ecology that contributes to growing connectedness, compounds learning, nurtures agency and creative confidence . As part of a range of new and existing neighbourhood exchanges and flows, we are creating ever-changing starting points that connect our everyday experiences to our imaginations of what alternatives could look, feel, and even taste like in rapidly changing contexts. We recognise that this starts from building trust, shared experience and bridging social capital, particularly at the edges, which in nature is where the most biodiversity occurs, and in our social systems more so where new intersections and ways of combining ideas and building together can bloom.
<aside> <img src="/icons/compose_lightgray.svg" alt="/icons/compose_lightgray.svg" width="40px" /> In this chapter and subsection of the work, we use the term ‘community’ to refer to all of the many communities we are in relationship with, are inspired by and that we work alongside, as well the geographical neighbourhood we call home as described in 03 | Our Neighbourhood.
We use this language to acknowledge DEAL’s methodological Community Portrait of Place approach and thoughtful differentiation between the Data and Community Portraits as equally important ingredients to this work, whilst also recognising that the term ‘community’ is plural, that it can have many different nested meanings, as well as the geographical focus of our work. Therefore, we use the term openly, as an expression of the many relationships and connections, and as part of an ecology. We attempt to make it clear when we are referring to our geographical neighbourhood, and where we are referring to a wider community of practice, place and partners.
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CIVIC SQUARE’s adventure into this work began with open movement building and unpacking the core principles of reimagining economic possibility and the ideas of Doughnut Economics in 2017, as explained in Historical Context, when we began to understand — early on — what happens when you put these ideas into people’s hands. Between 2017 and 2022 we have crafted hundreds of entry points, documenting as much as we can, in as many different ways as possible, as we go.
In 2020 we designed this into a first phase of intentional co-creation. It’s worth nothing that, at this stage, the DEAL methodology didn’t exist for this way of creating a Portrait with your community and was developing as a global community of renegade economists began to get their ideas in their hands. As we have progressed on this journey, we focused on the many and varied entry points that were creative and immersive, experimenting with bringing together the dark, dream and everyday matters (as described in 05 | How We Organise).
As we learnt more and more every single week through this way of being and organising around the ideas, we built and iterated upon it, and continued to do so over the first three years. At this stage it means this Portrait is mostly about the stories and methodology, and the types of entry points and why we chose them. It is not necessarily plotted against the Four Lenses or around specific domains as the Data Portrait of Place, nor is it a deep synthesis of the learnings so far. We also have some big gaps in the history of our neighbourhood that we hope to dive into more deeply in 2023 and beyond. That said, it’s been an honour to work alongside neighbours of all ages from our neighbourhood, people exploring at this particular scale around the world, as well as people interested in regenerative, human(e), playful economic possibilities for our places across the city and the country over the last five years. The aims of sharing it in this way is to enable people to explore the journey, the stories, access tools and inspiration of the participatory and everyday entry points that might be relevant for your homes, streets and neighbourhoods as well as more formal programmatic organising. It also aims to show how the dance between the formal and informal, the data and the people stories of our neighbourhood as essential ingredients to how we have been working, with neither being more or less important, instead a diversity of approaches and organising strategies.
"Good systemic designers know you have to work on twin tracks. Not to rip up the current entirely but to work with that and create something new that can replace the existing. Iteratively improve at the same time as radically reimagine."
―Cat Drew, Developing our new Systemic Design Framework