Exploring Pathways Between Community Health, Community Design and Artistic Thinking

In the last blog post, I got ahead of myself too quickly having created a new platform,  New Community Paradigms Wiki Map, to use in these explorations and experiments to discover new paradigms of change for our communities. 

Having covered the same material a number of times, I  can forget that people who may come across this blog more often than not have no idea about what has been done and little awareness of systems thinking as its foundation. One can't assume that people will be impressed you found something if they did not realize it was needed but undiscovered. 

The NCP Wiki map is a tool and while useful, not necessarily that important on its own, the same navigation can be achieved through the New Community Paradigms Wiki itself. It is the compass helping to find the way, not the destination to be discovered. However, having a strong interest in the New Community Paradigms Wiki Kumu Map (stand alone version) not only as my creation but as a different means of creative discovery, I am still going to use it as the basis for navigating some of the concepts included in this blog post.

An original intention of this blog and its related wiki was to provide online resources which could be used to create new community paradigms. The New Community Paradigms Wiki Map is designed to assist in that effort. 

A recent update to the New Community Paradigm wiki, under the Community Design wiki-page, is the Un-School of Disruptive Design | Experimental Knowledge in New York City which encourages people from diverse professional backgrounds to reorient, as the NCP Wiki map seeks to do, the way they perceive and act in the world, learning how to maximize their capacity to influence and affect positive social and environmental change. The concept of disruptive in the teaching design of an experimental un-school is what was appealing. Unlike many if not most of the resources provided in the NCP wiki though there is usually a cost to taking the courses they offer.

This is not the first occurrence of being willing to look at community design experimentally considered. The BMW Guggenheim Lab, also under Community Design was considered back in 2011 in the blog post, Placemaking for communities the canvas becomes the art. The experiment was concluded by 2014. The idea at the time, having had been recently introduced to the concept of placemaking (still not in the dictionary), being that a community’s geographically located, place-based foundation was previously thought of as being only a stage or canvas upon which creative community life happened but instead should be considered essential and integral to the community in its own right. Other resources provided under the Community Design wiki-page are more pragmatic and hands-on related to on-the-ground efforts. 

There is a connection through the wiki-focus page, Community Design to Greater Places | The Community for Urban Design, a crowdsourced “How-To” manual for creating great communities – cities, suburbs and rural areas.  Think of a Pinterest or Houzz for community design.”

“WHAT IS COMMUNITY DESIGN? Community design is about people, the places we live, and the spaces we share. Community design is also about how we come together and make decisions that affect our communities and neighbors: from crossroads in the country to homeowners’ associations in the suburbs to new apartments in the city.” 

There is continued interest and now greater ability to see how these resources and the concept of Community Design can be related to other concepts under new community paradigms, particularly at the mental model level of the Systems Thinking Iceberg Model. 

At the top of the Community Design wiki page, there is a link to its specific location in an NCP Kumu Wiki map. In this instance, a link will not be provided on these pages in the hope that readers will click on the designated link within the wiki-page. 

Mousing then over the revealed highlighted (green circled) element on the map points to other elements seen as being most closely related to Community Design, including most directly being Community Places and seen as being indirectly related to Community Arts and Planning the Urban Landscape. Clicking on these elements will open their respective narrative sections. Clicking on the white space of the map will open the narrative section of the entire map revealing all of the elements in the underlying Places map. 

This post is going to focus on the related idea of Community Arts. Clicking on the URL provided within the narrative section will take you to the Community Arts wiki page with its own collection of web-based resources. Bringing up the concept of disruptive again, a previous blog post, Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms can be found near the top of the wiki-page.

A Community Engagement question was, What's the impact of community art projects? A common response to this question leans towards finding the right metrics in terms of economic impact. However, as a result of new resources added to the New Community Paradigms Community Arts wiki-page, I now believe that focus is limited, that we make a mistake if we only think of integrating art and especially artistic thinking into our systems of community as window dressing for our economic development activities. We should instead be looking to art as a means of transforming and invigorating not only our economic development activities but also our community design and community governance as well.

Artistic thinking then has the potential to become a basis for developing new mental models. One question is how such a mental model and resources could be applied to efforts at Planning for Healthy Communities discussed in the last post. (mouse over Art and Healthy Communities). This is not meant to provide answers rather pathways for exploration. 

Then click on Planning for Healthy Communities. Clicking on the Healthy Communities link provided in the Planning for Healthy Communities narrative bridges over to the Healthy Communities map. One of the first NCP blog posts, Collaborating to Create Healthy Cities, can be found within Healthy Cities (click the URL).

The city of Richmond, California was one of the first cities in the United States to develop a comprehensive general plan element that addressed the link between public health and community design. A full profile on this effort is available from the Prevention Institute of Oakland, CA and more information can be found at the Healthy Cities blog. 

Adding, even more, resources to the Healthy Cities wiki—page was Pathways to Healthy Communities which came later.

“Davidson Design for Life (DD4L) is an initiative of the Town of Davidson to foster healthy community design through the use of health impact assessments (HIA), public participation, and collaborative efforts in Davidson, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region, and North Carolina.”

Even though a small community of 11,750 people (2013) with Davidson College nearby with 1,920 students, the site provides information on “Health Impact Assessment: What is it?”, for the surrounding region and information on HIA in the US.

Pathways to Healthy Communities expands and makes more complex the network of connections, working at multiple levels. Incorporating artistic thinking effectively into these processes will take a great deal of insight and effort and will require finding the right leverage points.

Artistic-thinking was also seen as an approach that has the potential to be useful in broad-based, multifaceted change efforts such as Collective Impact as in Under The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3.

Artistic thinking can help reach deeper insights, generate more ideas and seep into the community's fabric so that its influence becomes one more of dispersion within a complex community system rather than a transfer of information from one institution to another. An artistic perspective should not be left to the end though but made foundational in community design through design thinking, systems thinking, and other approaches to achieve Collective Impact through new community paradigms.

Collective Impact is, however, seen as being a number of steps or degrees away from Places and its internal connections to Community Design and Community Arts (click “In Places” to reveal), not being directly related to other efforts but an indirect accumulation of those efforts and seen, and in this evolving configuration, as being mitigated through Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking under Systems Thinking, Governance through Community under Community Governance and Design Thinking, placed under Community Management and Technology (you can also find by using the search box at the top right corner of the map section). Closer examinations may reveal means of strengthening these pathways. One path of exploration for the future is integrating Asset Based Community Development into both Collective Impact and Healthy Communities. 

These are not the only correct pathways available to integrate artistic thinking, community design and planning for healthy communities together but they at least point out potential pathways.

Coming Back to Learn about ABCD

Ok, I am confessing to a perhaps obvious truth, I am a bad blogger. First, it has been about ninety days since my last post and some time before that one, not blogging bad. The usual excuse, working in other areas and easier to stay with the more introspective capable Kumu than switching with Blogger media. Focus has been on updating past done systems thinking oriented Kumu maps, mainly on participatory and deliberative democracy, and means of collaboration. Other perhaps less obvious reasons for being a bad blogger are good bloggers are said to write what audience is interested in, write what they (bloggers) know, and write short pieces. I don’t do any of that. So, don’t have thousands of followers but okay with that. This is a means of interacting with new ideas of interest. Most things written about have been about things that were at first of little knowledge, including Systems Thinking, but one learns over time by engaging.

So showing up again to write about something of increasing interest but currently of little knowledge, Asset Based Community Development or ABCD. Why now though? It has been on the mental back burner for some time, actually a year, since writing on Collective Impact and Kumu Relational Mapping - Creating New Ways of Seeing Our Community, which showed up today as  a Facebook memory, and again in Using Systems Thinking to Explore Amplifying the Voices of Community Members in which ABCD was first mentioned in a Kumu map, as well as again in Living Cities Collective Impact • Modules 1 to 2 Bridge / Collective Impact - Living Cities online course • Kumu. 

Still have more questions and concerns than knowledge on Collective Impact but he focus went elsewhere. More recently though have been following @CormacRussell on Twitter, a faculty member of the ABCD Institute, and Managing Director of Nurture Development offering an interesting contrast to fellow ABCD Institute faculty member, Dan Duncan, who was featured in the Living Cities’ approach to Collective Impact, an arguably Grasstops down perspective. So the original question was how does ABCD relate to Collective Impact? Or perhaps better, does ABCD relate to Collective Impact the way I am being told that it does?

The Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) approach has some useful tools to determine what assets exist in a community, and how they can be leveraged. In short, the ABCD approach seeks to discover the skills and passion of local community members, ask them to share those gifts, and then connect with others to create meaningful solutions, according to an article by Living Cities. "Amplifying the Voice of Community in Collective Impact" which cites an article by H. Daniels Duncan, “Effective Collective Impact: Through the Power of ABCD and RBA”

True resident engagement requires institutions, funders, local governments and nonprofits to lead by stepping back to create space for residents to be involved as producers. To accomplish this it is imperative to ask five strategic questions to drive institutional actions: 

1. What are the things that only residents can do? 
2. What are the things that residents and institutions or government can accomplish together?
3. What are the things that only institutions or government can do? 
4. What can we stop doing to create space for resident action? And, 
5. What can we offer to the community beyond the services we deliver to support resident action?

RBA {Results Based Accountability(tm)} questions to drive action and results.

1. What are the quality-of-life conditions (population results) we want for the children, adults, and families who live in our community?

2. What would these conditions look like if we could see them?

3. How can we measure these conditions?

4. How are we doing on the most important of these measures?

5. Who are the partners that have a role to play in doing better?

6. What works to do better, including no-cost and low-cost ideas?

7. What do we propose to do?

ABCD provides an effective framework to answer the RBA questions 5, 6, and 7 and provides the structure to work collectively with the community...

On the other side of the same coin, Effective Collective Impact Starts with a Clear, Common Purpose · Living Cities, which is featured in a blog series  on the four components of effective Collective Impact and The Four Components of Effective Collective Impact: Through the Lens of Asset-Based Community Development and Results-Based Accountability, again from H. Daniels Duncan.

1. Community engagement and co-production

2. Relationships and trust

3. Results and accountability; and

4. A clear, common purpose.

So I have finally gotten something written on ABCD and Collective Impact but the sense I get, with my limited familiarity, is that Cormac’s and Nurture Development’s approach is somewhat different. 

The closest I could find from Cormac on Collective Impact was, “… the collective impact of air conditioning on the cumulative heat and cooling down time of a city, particularly at night (most Older People, infants, and vulnerable people die at night during heat waves)” as in the more importantly concerned impact upon people rather than by institutions. Cormac seems far more likely to write about collective in terms of, “direct collective energy towards collective action” or, “a way that is inclusive and supports people to generate disparate energy into collective democratic power.”

Not judging here, though biases may peek through. Still far more that I don’t know than I do know about ABCD. Don’t know to what extent my own, systems thinking oriented approach is in truth in line with Cormac’s and ABCD. I have discussed briefly with Cormac, the complexity of citizen interaction with civic professionals and building community efficacy on Twitter (mostly everything on Twitter is brief). 

Latest twitter discussion has raised complex questions of art and community empowerment and ABCD. Still not sure though what ABCD has to do with it. Cormac hasn’t had any input yet but I originated the discussion in his Twitter account. I included @ArtsFwd in the conversation as I knew that they have background in this area having been featured in the past with Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms, and New Community Paradigms Require a Creative Community not just a Creative Economy. 

So a number of new and interesting ideas to follow up on to learn more about Collective Impact and now more about Asset Based Community Development (along with new wiki-page), both independently and how they could be related. 

I will leave off with another numbered list from another organization held in high esteem and learned about through the Living Cities Collective Impact course, Tamarack, an Institute for Community Engagement. The folks at Tamarack came up with 5 Big Ideas from their 2014 CI Summit in Toronto which while not explicitly has, from my limited insight, a more ABCD feel to it in perhaps finding a balance.

Collective Impact 3.0:

Big Idea #1: "Collective Impact" Does Not Need to be Applied to Every Collaboration

Big Idea #2: "Context Experts" and "Content Experts," a 50/50 Proposition

Context Experts are residents with lived experience, including children and youth. Typically, they are the people who experientially know about the issue. Content Experts are professionals, providers, and leaders with formal power who have knowledge, tools, and resources to address the issue. Typically, they are people with technical knowhow.

Big Idea #3: Ownership and Buy-In are Not the Same Things

Big Idea #4: Best Practices are the Enemy of Emergence

Big Idea #5: Change Happens at the Speed of Trust

People can tell me if I am getting any of this wrong, a matter as someone as told me of trial and learning. I will be following up, though to be honest, I will be going back to a more close knit inquiry,  using Kumu, into effective virtual collaboration with Systems Thinking and other ongoing concerns. With any luck, I will have something to blog about that in the not too distant future, well hopefully at least before another ninety days.

New Community Paradigms Require a Creative Community not just a Creative Economy

This blog’s last post, Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms began looking at the role of art in creating new paradigms for communities from both ‘community engagement’ and ‘economic development’ perspectives by citing a number of related LinkedIn discussions within both arenas. The idea is to crowdsource diverse ideas from a collection of professional and pro-amateur colleagues. The two groups are of similar size but have very little overlap. Only one LinkedIn colleague seems to belong to both camps, Della Rucker of Wise Economy. The discussion within each group though seems to begin reaching over the fence for insights from the other. Economic development is beginning to realize that it must expand its concerns to the entire community, not just the municipal revenue generators, and many in community engagement are realizing that clients need a seat at the table in deciding budgetary issues and that programs need to also be financially sustainable to be effective. The last post leaned more to the community engagement side of the equation.

From a more global economic perspective, the idea of art being a driver in municipal economic development ties in with the concept of Creative Cities as proposed by Richard Florida and related issues as to whether the concept can also be applied to non-metro locales. Although there is more affinity with the Florida perspective than with counterarguments proposed by his detractors, this blog has not taken a firm position. There is an even greater affinity with the ideas of Jane Jacobs as contrasted say with those of Alfred Marshall. However, these are complex issues and if one is to depend upon any one thinker as a foundation for future ideas then it would be Warren Weaver who originated the concept of ‘organized complexity’ in his 1948 paper Science and complexity(pdf).

Another group discussion among Economic Development Professionals raised a number of these issues in Development, Creative Class, Artists & Creative Clusters Addressing the Fuzzy Logic of the Appeal through a paper in the Oxford Journal of Economic Geography, Emoting with their feet: Bohemian attraction to creative milieu†. The discussion itself raised questions on the seemingly inevitable gentrification occurring after the establishment of an artistic milieu within a community. This is definitely a concern. One that, as was cited through ArtsFwd.org in the last post, is starting to be addressed by art organizations such as Fourth Arts Block in New York City. However, although such a connection can be made, the Journal of Economic Geography article, from my perspective, dealt more with the creation of ‘creative milieus’ as part of enhancing the dynamics of economic development in a community.

The study is dated from 2007. It is though, in my view, a more nuanced study of the issues than found in a standard Florida vs Kotkin debate, not jumping to the defense of one camp or the other. It honestly admits to being incapable of coming to definitive conclusions when appropriate. They point out that Florida's concept incorporates aspects of both Jane Jacobs and Alfred Marshall. It also points out weaknesses in current creative cities arguments such as the need to utilize an aggregate creative class construct that defines a class of nominally creative workers using broad occupational categories that, “conflates high human capital requirements with creativity and includes some detailed occupations with little requirement for either.” The study, therefore, asserts that “This indefiniteness does not allow concluding that a particular strategy for promoting the arts will increase economic dynamism.” The operative word here being ‘particular’ as in single, distinct and usually predetermined. The study still provides other important insights.

The reason that creativity is of such interest is the belief that stimulating the creative energies of a place will generate new economic opportunities that are sustainable and resilient, inspiring a number of initiatives to promote ‘Creative Cities' by trying to provide interactions within urban creative milieus that both energizes productive lives and fulfills personal lives.

The study differentiates between artistic, innovative and creative milieus while pointing out that one does not necessarily lead to the other. What differentiates a creative milieu from an artistic milieu is a greater diversity of knowledge. A creative milieu is a place where, “face-to-face interaction among a critical mass of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, social activists, artists, administrators, power brokers or students helps to create new ideas, artifacts, products, services and institutions which contributes to economic success.”

An innovative milieu construct would alternatively focus on the creative interaction among firms and their workers related to innovation and economic competitiveness and would further assert that members of the so-called creative class seek to permeate creativity in all aspects of their lives as consumers of artistic venues. The artists follow the economic generators, not the other way around. 

The factor of allowing knowledge spillovers, “between a diverse set of actors contributing ideas from a range of knowledge domains” that differentiates creative milieus from artistic milieus also characterizes a difference with an innovation milieu. A creative milieu is seen as a more difficult construct to precisely differentiate from innovative milieus through concrete identification of actors, structures and mechanisms.

The study warns that it takes more than bringing together a diverse set of creative agents in a particular place as this may not generate enough interaction across domains to result in a creative milieu.

The study did indicate that evidence of even a weak creative milieu which helps ensure a city’s attractiveness to artists also serves as an important indicator of its ability to retain and attract creative workers. They see their main contribution as empirical confirmation that a relative surplus of Bohemians is likely to reveal a vibrant creative milieu.

They did find suggestions of interesting connections between newly founded entrepreneurialism and creative milieus within non-metro locations. One means of measuring economic dynamism due to a creative milieu is the generation of new products and services created through net firm formation. The study asserts that despite the difficulties identifying the components of a creative milieu, such as greater human-scale interaction, better restaurants, and other factors, creative milieus appear to have increased entrepreneurial dynamism in their non-metro counties sample. Such a claim could not be made though for the metro sample of their study.

They stressed though that their findings, “of a strong creative milieu in non-metro counties did not resolve the debate over the importance of local arts communities to regional innovation and competitiveness.”

In contrast to more conventional studies examining the geography of innovation, the study's explanation of regional performance does not rely on particular quantifiable metrics such as human capital, R&D spending, transportation or infrastructure regarding a location of quantities in a place but in devising a proxy variable in calculating a more complex function for a particular quality of place. The non-metro results are more likely to demonstrate what is a place’s and its community's true contribution to economic dynamism where it is, “not conflated with the density of creative agents randomly ‘rubbing elbows’ in the city”. It is not only a question of culminating creative types but also the nature of community networking and the means of engaging in that network within a larger and sometimes chaotic environment.

The study suggests that it is structural complexity that makes determining a correlation between enhanced economic development activities and a cultural milieu as an attractor difficult because precise identification is difficult. There is also a question of spatial dependence as through “the propensity for nearby locations to influence each other and to possess similar attributes”, a spatial lag in the metro equations might be an indication of the importance of clustering and agglomeration that might be swamping any effects from a creative milieu.

The study also suggests that the role of artists in identifying a creative milieu might be similar to indicator species in ecology studies in identifying complex environmental conditions. “In both cases, the environmental phenomena of interest are observable, although very costly or difficult to measure.” This could be useful though in overcoming some of the fuzzy conceptual logic issues found with the ‘Creative Cities’ concept. This is a different way of looking at the issues that when combined with a community engagement perspective could potentially bring about some new insights into creating new community paradigms.

Placemaking for communities the canvas becomes the art

So far new community paradigms have been loosely defined as the changes brought purposely about by communities to redefine themselves as being more "livable".  More livable was defined on the onset as offering healthy environments for the members of the community.  We also began discussions on the essential inclusion of economics into the equation and the challenge of complexity in addressing these paradigms.

All of this has to take "Place" somewhere. "Place", particularly when speaking of community, is a defining element of a livable city.  How we define "Place" is an important component of creating new paradigms for our communities.  We have available to us a number of resources that can assist us with this endeavor.  As way of introducing them I am going to introduce a page from the New Community Paradigms wiki that is being created in parallel with this blog. The Places wikipage will be a depository for community resources addressing ideas regarding "place" as a community asset. Right now there are two categories Community Places, which will be examined in this post. Soul of a Community will be dealt with in a future post. 

The first offering in New Community Paradigm Community Places is PPS Project for PUBLIC SPACES. The About page for PPS informs us that PPS was founded in 1975 to expand on the work of William (Holly) Whyte, the author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.  As a resource for this effort, it is important to note that:

In addition to leading projects in our nine program areas, PPS also trains more than 10,000 people every year and reaches countless more through our websites and publications. PPS has become an internationally recognized center for resources, tools and inspiration about Placemaking.

The most important question maybe though,

What is Placemaking?

Categories: Articles, Creating Public Multi-use Destinations, Multi-Use, Placemaking 101

“’Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” -Metropolitan Planning Council of Chicago

Placemaking, as PPS so aptly puts it comes From the Heart of a Community. 

Other work being done with Placemaking can be found on the PPS Facebook site. Facebook, because it is so popular, will be used as another avenue to promote community connections upon which to build new community paradigms. PPS was chosen to lead this particular perspective on new community paradigms because they see the community as a canvas on which to try new ideas, maybe clay would be a better analogy since the "Place" becomes an integral part of the community. 

Smart Growth America is an organization that advocates for people who want to live and work in great neighborhoods. We believe smart growth solutions support businesses and jobs, provide more options for how people get around and make it more affordable to live near work and the grocery store. Our coalition works with communities to fight sprawl and save money. We are making America’s neighborhoods great together.  

As creative as the ideas that can come from PPS and their like may be, they cannot be put into practice if there is not a strong movement to make them a reality.  Some communities may be able to create this movement on their own, but others will need some form of support. The creation of new community paradigms is not limited to within the boundaries of any community.  Smart Growth America is one organization that can offer support.  As with PPS, there is also a Smart Growth America Facebook page.  

One of the founding principles of this blog and of the accompanying wiki is that the economics of creating new community paradigms are of the utmost importance.  One Placemaking advocacy group that has this as a fundamental basis for their work is Strong Towns.  Here is the Strong Towns Facebook page.

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model for growth that allows America's towns to become financially strong and resilient. The American approach to growth is causing economic stagnation and decline along with land use practices that force a dependency on public subsidies. The inefficiencies of the current approach have left American towns financially insolvent, unable to pay even the maintenance costs of their basic infrastructure. A new approach that accounts for the full cost of growth is needed to make our towns strong again. 

It should be noted that this blog will not be agreeing with every view put out by the organizations that it features.  This is likely to be especially true of Strong Towns.  However, I do respect their basic approach to make communities economically sustainable as much as I respect those organizations that seek to make them environmentally sustainable.  The paradigm shift being sought is bringing those two concepts together into a viable whole.

I am going to leave this survey of Placemaking resources with another organization that is thinking outside of the box.  The Guggenheim is not a box in any sense of the word and their BMW Guggenheim Lab pushes the concept of Place and what it means to communities through onsite experimentation.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory that will travel to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is conceived to engage public discourse in cities around the world and through the BMW Guggenheim Lab website and online social communities.

While many communities will find it difficult and may not be willing to implement the ideas created during this ongoing placemaking experiment, the may also take inspiration in the creative endeavor to find new ways of making our communities more livable.  One readily available resource provided by the BMW Guggenheim Lab is Urbonology, an online survey to help determine the type of community one wants to build.