Returning to Fulfill Good Intentions with Community Change Agencies

An original intention of New Community Paradigms was providing resources for community change and building upon that change. New arenas were discovered and explored. Resources were found and placed in the New Community Paradigms wiki with the idea that others could use the resources as they saw fit.

That is still the intention, however, a large part of this journey has been involved in learning new perspectives that required going extensively and deeply into them to attain a fuller understanding. Systems Thinking is the primary example, Design Thinking is another and Collective Impact being the most recent.

The new ideas being generated were changing the landscape fueling the perspective that paradigm level changes are in need of being sought within communities. The ‘good’ intention though to feature the discovered resources in future blog posts putting them into some context that could prove helpful has not been realized.

Some of the newly discovered resources have played a major role in forming new pathways. The Harwood Institute, introduced in CommunityMatters knows Harwood and Harwood knows what Matters for the Communities to Change was prominently featured in the Collective Impact series as a community change agency. Not every community though is ready to take on a Collective Impact effort, needing to work on other aspects to reach that level.

A number of other Community Change Agencies have also been discovered. These types of resources have been divided into two types, Organizational, Online and Technology Based and Geographic Based. The later, Geographic Based is admittedly lacking, especially local examples, as far more effort up to this point has been expended upon learning new perspectives and underlying systems. An advantage of Organizational, Online and Technology Based change agencies is that they can often be more readily transferred and applied to other communities. Harwood belongs in the Organizational, Online and Technology Based but an on-the-ground foundation is still seen as important in creating New Community Paradigms.

CommunityMatters was also cited as having hosted conference calls with a number of organizations featured in this effort, such as Project for Public Spaces, NCDD (National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation), Strong Towns, Everyday Democracy, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, and the Harwood Institute. It also has its own Facebook page.

CommunityMatters Facebook

“CommunityMatters® aims to equip cities, towns and all community members to strengthen their places and inspire change. This group champions the notion that people have the power to solve their community's problems and shape its future. The alliance facilitates connections, provides education and infuses inspiration at the local level.”

Some of the new resources listed in Organizational, Online and Technology Based wiki-page have never been mentioned in any blog post.

The Community Change Agency Orton Family Foundation coined the term “Heart & Soul Community Planning,” describing an approach for engaging citizens in land use planning as a pathway to vibrant, enduring communities.

“Our approach helps diverse citizens identify and enhance a town’s most valued attributes: those special places, characteristics and customs that residents treasure and that connect them to one another. If lost, these attributes would be widely missed and alter the character of the town.”

Another group similar to CommunityMatters is Community Builders, a project of the Sonoran Institute, which aims to help local leaders build successful communities in the American West and that has also provided a number of informative webinars, at no cost, in the past.

One, PlaceSpeak, is a location-based consultation utility helping to bridge between governance and place by transforming the way people interact with local decision-makers. It has its own Facebook app page.

Other featured organizations focus more on process, emphasizing collaboration even more than place. IOTC Hub Institute of the Commons, which is a USA based organization with a global outreach can help in finding common ground and innovating together by helping large, multi-stakeholder groups discover agreement and unite to accomplish shared goals. An essential undertaking in endeavoring to implement a Collective Impact effort.

Some like Innovation in Collaboration don't even originate in this country. They still provide excellent examples of what could be possible here. Often times it seems that we must look outside the United States to find some of the most viable ideas for supporting democracy and the empowerment of communities.

The Interaction Institute for Social Change, headquartered in Ireland, has had global outreach but with local impact including many in the United States. Good ideas should not require visas.

Future Search Network is a collaboration of hundreds of dedicated volunteers worldwide providing Future Search conferences as a public service.

"We serve communities, NGO's, and other non-profits for whatever people can afford. Our mission is to help communities everywhere become more open, supportive, equitable and sustainable. We also work with for-profit organizations who share these values, charging standard fees. We are a cross-cultural network, speaking many languages. Our members live in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America."

The last of the ‘newer’ Community Change Agencies to be featured is the Intersector Project, a non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the business, government, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. A good definition for Collective Impact. They conduct research in intersector collaboration and convey findings to leaders in every sector to help them design and implement their own effective collaborative initiatives.

There are no doubt numerous similar organizations out there. The point though is that they are out there. Those looking to make meaningful changes in their community do not have to work alone. Even advice over the phone can be of tremendous assistance. Not every community, as the Harwood Institute points out, is in a position to make transformations at a Collective Impact level. There are though others with the same struggles who have tried ideas that have worked. It can be simply a matter of discovering them and reaching out.

Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms

One source of the material for this blog’s posts is LinkedIn group discussions in which I participate or follow. A common theme across two different types of LinkedIn groups, the Community Engagement group and the Economic Development Professionals group, regarding the role of the arts in communities was recently noted. The perspectives and approaches are different but can be tied together under new community paradigms.

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.

Perceiving these connections was not mere chance, though. The unrealized contribution that art could make to creating new paradigms for our communities has become more credible over time and is not a solitary perspective. Paul Nagle, Executive Director of Cultural Strategies Initiative left a comment regarding this blog's post The Problem with the Future is Getting There and It will need Disruptive Innovation, "We totally agree with your thesis and we are working to put it into practice.” Cultural Strategies Initiative or CSI sees art being key to not only human expression and human thought but also to education, economies, community development, and innovation in technology. All factors of importance to the creation of new community paradigms.

"At CSI, we create project partnerships to demonstrate and measure how arts operate in promoting sustainability and resiliency. Our projects always target the same outcome: empower the arts and humanity.”

This suggests that art has the potential of establishing a path for sustainable disruption while at the same time going beyond sustaining innovation. Art could help communities face wicked challenges by moving towards being entities of complex collaboration and away from being ensnared by entrenched city halls through bureaucratic-like institutions of complicatedness.

It was interactions with other LinkedIn colleagues that led to EmcArts, a social enterprise for learning and innovation in the arts. Although they primarily serve as a nonprofit intermediary for many arts funders, and as a service organization for the arts field around innovation, from my perspective, they could also offer insights that would strengthen the capacities and effectiveness of all types of community nonprofits and other change agents, not just arts and cultural organizations. They could provide lessons in the design and management of innovative change, and assist communities in building their adaptive capacity.

One potentially useful resource for communities is ArtsFwd.org, a creation of the EmcArts Activating Innovation Initiative. Their latest accomplishments include a National Innovation Summit for Arts & Culture from October of last year that featured powerful thematically linked 12-minute Talks by bold leaders from across the country that highlighted the remarkable and mostly untold stories of innovative projects unfolding in arts and culture organizations. These included - Taking Collective Action, Co-Creating with the Public, Artists as Agents of Change, Animating Neighborhoods, Citizenship and the Arts and Transforming Organizational Structure. The creation of Fueling Adaptive Capacity: A Mosaic of Learning from the 2013 National Innovation Summit was an outcome of the summit, which you can download and read. As well as this report that describes their accomplishments over the last two years.

The contribution of meaningful real-world solutions that art can make towards community challenges, such as gentrification by exploring complex challenges around themes of scope, capacity, and constituency, was demonstrated by Fourth Arts Block, an organization supporting a rich arts community on the Lower East Side of New York and beyond.

Since its founding in 2001, FABnyc has made huge strides in the East 4th Street Cultural District by securing property ownership rights for arts groups in eight buildings on the block between the Bowery and Second Avenue, by providing free and low-cost rehearsal space and training programs for artists, and by serving as a centralized resource for its several arts, cultural, community member organizations.

This cannot be a one-way contribution or one-sided conversation, though. Communities seeking to create new community paradigms need to make a place at the table for this type of thinking. Artistic thinking should be added to design thinking and systems thinking as means of generating public and community innovation. Design thinking can help ensure that artistically inspired endeavors properly focus on important community needs and systems thinking can help in understanding the impact on the larger environment. Artistic thinking though 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. Richard Evans, President, EMCARTS INC contributes insights with the Debunking 10 Myths of Innovation that could be of great benefit to communities.

An artistic perspective should not be left to the end but made foundational in community design through design thinking, systems thinking, and other approaches. A number of other organizations are able to tie an artistic mindset to community-related concerns, Art VULUPS does so with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts. Animating Democracy, a project of Americans for the Arts helps to identify, develop, and advocate for public and private sector policies, practices, funding, and initiatives that advance the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change. They work to better integrate the talents of artists and cultural organizations toward helping people engage in civic and community life.

By establishing a trend away from massively subsidized development projects to broader-based efforts such as economic gardening, communities open up opportunities for a more community based and artistic approach to building, landscaping and public space related to Community Placemaking. These efforts could be enhanced through what the National Endowment for the Arts terms Community Placemaking. Our Town NEA works to improve America’s communities by engaging design and leveraging the arts to create livable, sustainable neighborhoods with enhanced quality of life, increased creative activity, distinct identities, a sense of place, and vibrant local economies that capitalize on existing local assets.

Another Community Engagement group LinkedIn discussion provides more empirical evidence that the Arts make a real difference to communities through the report, The value of arts and culture to people and society – an evidence review from the Arts Council (England).

Another discussion under the Economic Professionals group provides a more definitive assertion of the economic impact of art based on an article Arts and culture contribute more to the US economy than tourism, and with added insight from the Preliminary Report on Impact of Arts and Culture on U.S. Economy | NEA released by the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts. These are only preliminary assessments of the impact of an economy produced by a creative community but now that we are measuring it instead of ignoring it more of the same can be expected in the future.

A revolution has already started but it won't only be an economic one, it will be creative in multiple ways. People are already working to make a difference. They may not always realize that they are fighting the same battle as people from other sectors of the community and are therefore not alone. We need to start learning from each other, community planners, entrepreneurs whether business or social, community activists and artists all need to learn from each other. Our communities need to engage in more than one type of thinking to meet the wicked challenges ahead and no one person or group of persons alone will be able to create the new community paradigms that are needed without extensive within-the-community collaboration.

CommunityMatters knows Harwood and Harwood knows what Matters for the Communities to Change

This blog post is going to take a closer look at the recently updated Organizational, Online and Technology Based Community Change Agencies wiki-bridge. Wiki-bridge pages address topics that cross over more than one area of concern. Change agent organizations for communities and change agent efforts by communities were seen as involving Governance and Place respectively.

Yet, despite the focus of this blog being paradigm changes by communities, little has been done directly on these pages dealing with any community change strategies. New means of community governance, different ways of looking at the local economy, inquiries into complexity, design thinking, systems thinking and democratic directed disruptive design have helped frame the issues but not anything on the actual means of change or the available resources that would help bring it about. How do you go about transforming something that has been in existence for decades, if not centuries and that is such a fundamental part of the fabric of our lives? Why is it that so often when we do try, we fail?

There has though been interaction outside of these pages with activity among different LinkedIn groups and the accumulation of a number of different organizations, the later of which have now been added to the Community Change Agencies Organizational, Online and Technology Based wiki-page. 

One of particular interest is the Harwood Institute introduced to members of the NCDD Linkedin Group by Sandy Heierbacher, the Director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) to through a webinar that NCDD (wiki-page) hosted.

The webinar provides an overview of the Harwood Institute’s key framework for assisting in exploring the means and accelerating efforts to engage the community by ‘turning outwards’.

The approach Harwood Institute has developed in helping cities, organizations, and individuals speaks to the stages a community must go through before it is ready to be empowered based on community conversations, constant innovation, and nationwide research and is built on public aspirations to get things done for the common good.

The Harwood Institute's approach to change and community building is dependent upon "community rhythms" as President and Founder Rich Harwood explains in this video. 


A report (pdf) on the approach, Community Rhythms, Five Stages of Community Life, is available through NCDD.

Communities have rhythms to them that we must come to understand so that our approaches, programs and initiatives — and the building of public capital — work with those rhythms, take advantage of them, even accelerate them. This 1999 report from the Harwood Institute describes five stages of community life: The Waiting Place, Impasse, Catalytic, Growth, and Sustain and Renew. 

                                                                                                        Sandy Heierbacher 

The Waiting Place

In the Waiting Place, people in the community often hold a deep sense that things are not working right but cannot quite put their finger on exactly what it is or what to do about it; it is a kind of “felt unknown.” The situation has not reached an impasse, a breakpoint, at which people say, “enough is enough!”

Impasse

Here a community hits rock bottom. When you visit such a community, you can hear people saying such things as, “it can’t go on like this anymore,” or “enough is enough!” While in the Waiting Place there is a sense of simply “waiting”... in Impasse there is a noticeable sense of urgency in people’s voices. Things have crystallized for people and the need for action is clear. Often people are afraid that they are losing their future; they are tired of “waiting.”

Catalytic

During this stage, a small group of people and organizations emerge to take risks and experiment in ways that challenge existing norms of how the community works. In addition, people within their community begin to discover that they share common aspirations for their community and that they can, in small ways, start to make a difference.

Growth

Over the course of this stage, Centers of Strength will be expanding; networks growing and spreading; a sense of common purpose and direction taking deep root. People within the community now see clear and unmistakable signs of how the community is moving forward and can see and feel and experience much greater leadership at all levels of the community — from the official level, to neighborhoods, within civic organizations and non-profits.

Sustain and Renew

A community in the Sustain and Renew stage must find ways to bring along new Centers of Strength, new leaders and a new cadre of citizens to be the spark plugs. Without them, the community will stagnate and possibly enter a new stage of decline.

This is in contrast to “The Organization-First Approach” more likely to be adopted by intermediary civic organizations, including city halls, that by pulling inward toward their own organizational structure raise the danger of allowing programs and professionalization to crowd out the community. The report was developed by the Harwood Institute for the Kettering Foundation (which is featured in the Governance through Community wiki-page). The report, among a number of other key reports and books, is also available here.

The Harwood Institute also makes available for download a simple set of tools called “Harwood in a Half Hour” that can be used in working with a community to start to help shift the approach to community building. The LinkedIn Harwood Public Innovators Resource Group provides an opportunity for like minded individuals to share tips, tools and information on turning outward, all to help motivated individuals become Public Innovators.

The Harwood Institute has worked in economically distressed and struggling communities such as Newark, Detroit, and Flint, Michigan. They have enhanced their relevance and impact in the communities they serve by creating a group of “Beacon Communities” to develop a critical mass of public innovators and partnering with influential organizations like United Way Worldwide, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the American Library Association.

Last year, Rich Harwood, facilitated a series of meetings in the grieving city of Newtown, Connecticut to help decide what to do with Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of the horrific mass murder of children and school personnel the previous December. The philosophy which guided the work in Newtown and brought about an emotional, yet harmonious, decision was based on a guiding principle, found in Rich Harwood’s latest book The Work of Hope, that fixing our politics shouldn’t be our top priority.  According to Rich Harwood, “The central task in our society is to restore belief in ourselves and one another that we can get things done, together.”

Another private organization taking a similar bottom-up, inside out approach to community building from perhaps a more technical perspective with its own take on Social Ecology through The Science of Community is the JKA Group, which also has its own LinkedIn group, Social Ecology: The Science of Community.  The concept of Social Ecology meshes with concepts introduced earlier in Seeing Economy and Community as Ecosystem Another Way of Shifting the Paradigm concerning rebuilding local economies,  So how do we start building Wise Economies?  Economies = Communities = Ecosystems.

Finally, at least for this post, is CommunityMatters, also with its own LinkedIn group has hosted a number of conference calls of interest to this effort.  One of the primary objectives of this effort was to gather resources to assist in the creation of new community paradigms and CommunityMatters offers a treasure chest full. More will be done on CommunityMatters in the future in exploring the partnerships they have formed, many of which are already featured in the New Community Paradigms wiki such as Project for Public Spaces, NCDD (National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation), Strong Towns, AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, and the Harwood Institute, other relevant organizations agencies such as Connecting Communities Learning Exchange, Orton Family Foundation, Grassroots Grantmakers, New America Foundation, The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking, Heart & Soul Community Planning, The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, Harvard - ASH Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and their Project on Social Innovation will also be explored and added in future posts.  

Reimagining and Reclaiming a Place for Us: Olmsted 1930 LA Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches Plan, Lessons from the Past

This last Sunday afternoon was spent in attendance at the Rancho Los Alamitos, Long Beach, CA, to listen to presentations and a panel on the 1930 Los Angeles “Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches” Plan as a basis for a discussion of “A Place for Us: Reimagining and Reclaiming”, which was written about in advance of the event by this blog a couple of posts ago. 

The participants presenting and serving on the panel included from an academic perspective, William Deverell, Chairman of the USC History Department and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, who co-authored Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region, and Stephanie Pincetl, Director of the Urban Center for People and the Environment at the UCLA Institute of the Environment.   

From a media perspective, Frances Anderton, radio host of DnA: Design and Architecture on KCRW and KCRW.com, and Jon Christensen, an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Department of History, as well as nationally published freelance environmental journalist.  

From the brick and mortar development perspective, Alan Pullman, AIA, founder of Studio One Eleven, a division of the international firm Perkowitz+Ruth Architects, who also serves on the Urban Land Institute’s Inner City Council, and Tom Gilmore of Gilmore Associates, who began in 1998 to acquire and rehabilitate underutilized historic properties in the Historic Core of downtown Los Angeles. Noted by the event’s promotional material as a risk-taker and animating force behind Los Angeles adaptive reuse development, his revitalization of the Old Bank District has served as a model for other developers.  

The moderators were Claudia Jurmain, Director of Special Projects and Publications and founder of Conversations in Place at Rancho Los Alamitos and D.J. Waldie, historian, cultural commentator and author of Holy Land — A Suburban Memoir, who also served as a presenter and panel member.

Saying who presented the ideas is important because there weren’t any Powerpoint presentations and the exchange of ideas was plentiful and very fluid.  As usual, this was a new venture with little previous knowledge, even more so relative to the deep knowledge that the panelists brought to the discussion. The issues that were dealt with, whether from the past or today were also more concrete than some of the issues that have been dealt with recently by this blog.  There was both new knowledge acquired and the checking of previous ‘knowledge’ wrongly acquired providing enough to create two posts, one looking to lessons for the future and one, this one, looking to lessons taken from the past. 

The presentation and panel discussion provided more substance to the the 1930 LA Playgrounds, Parks, and Beaches Plan story. The Olmsted Brothers were asked a number of times before they agreed to create the Plan and they warned the good people of Los Angeles Olmsted that it was essential that the political work needed to be done before hand to avoid, what W. Deverell termed, a naive environmental idealism versus politics.  

The actual process of bringing the 1930 LA Plan to realization was not that different from today.  The Hollywood big star of the day, Mary Pickford, wooed the LA Chamber of Commerce resulting in a large number of paid prescriptions from private wealth to fund what was to be conceptually similar to the Emerald Necklace of Boston.  The Olmsted Plan focused around Elysian Park combining landscape planning with traffic planning with the underlying premise that nature or the environment was endless. That myth is now gone. 

The Olmsted Brothers had local input into the creation of the Plan but from local experts familiar with the fauna and territory, not so much from the public it would seem. The Plan was to be paid for by bonded debt and governed by a newly created government entity.

The best intentioned outcome of the Plan was that the LA Chamber was to accept the report and then send out thousands of copies but instead they sent out only 150 copies. The inner Board killed the project creating a power shift by a small group.  Demonstrating as a past example of what has been termed entrenched power by this blog, one LA Chamber member was quoted as having said, “Los Angeles has enough parks.” 

It may have been the realization that the newly proposed government institution would seriously diminish the influence of the LA Chamber’s inner circle of power that was the motivation to kill the Plan. In the tradition of Greek tragedy, that happened anyway with the coming of the Great Depression, making the squandering of a potential resource all the more ironic. S. Pincetl of UCLA spoke of ‘foiled desire’. 

This brings us to two erroneous assumptions that were made the previous Paradigms Lost - Olmsted Brothers and the 1930 L.A. Plan post.  First that the Olmsted Brothers foresaw the problems that would arise from automobiles because they recognized at the time that Los Angeles “has a far wider and thinner spread of population than any other metropolis, and a far greater use of automobiles.” W. Deverell explained that the Olmsted Brothers had a far different perspective of the automobile and its relationship to nature to what we have today. 

They envisioned what has become the rush hour packed freeway system as a series of parkways to which one could escape.  The second assumption, arising from the first, was seeing the past as a far too idyllic reality.  It was pointed out that in the early part of the twentieth century cities, particularly large cities, were still seen as being insalubrious. The automobile, rather than being the source of greenhouse gases was seen in the early twentieth century as a means of escaping the infectious diseases lurking in the cities.  Many of the urban issues we face today would arise a few decades later when the federal highway system would be created and expanded by Eisenhower, starting the Growth Ponzi Scheme that Strong Towns rails against today. 

The negative effects of past acts of either omission or commission cannot be ignored but we need to be careful with putting ourselves or our favorite aspects of the past into too favorable of a light. Cities have faced various system challenges over the years and have come up with a variety of solutions. However, the vast majority of man-made solutions created have been based on mechanistic, usually top down, complicated management structures as opposed to more complex oriented systems, and all at some point in time begin to fail if for no other reason than changes in the environment (total environment not just natural). This includes any that we make today; trouble is that they will likely fail faster. 

S. Pincetl pointed out that the older cities of Europe were built by beasts of burden rather than by machines powered by fossil fuels as were the American cities of the Twentieth century.  Early ages were not only in a different relationship with nature, they also saw their cities as serving different functions from today.  While we work to develop sustainable cities, they sought to built sanitary cities which had an essential function of evacuating waste even if that meant using waterways to do so. 

Water was also seen in a very different light in the earlier history of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles River was once a principal source of water. The Olmsted Brothers seem to have basically ignored it or, as some asserted during the panel discussion, realized that it wasn’t much of a river.  LA River would later though become a source of flooding in 1938 providing the rationale for the building of the Los Angeles Flood Control System.  At the same time Los Angeles was looking for new sources of water to meet growing demands.  The city has celebrated the 100 Anniversary of Los Angeles Aqueduct. Today, our perspective on water has changed and our primary concerns are scarcity and pollution. 

The event at Rancho Los Alamitos began to come to a close when the opportunity to ask one question from the audience was offered.  I was chosen, and though I had at least a dozen, asked a what if question which has no real answer but can still provide a good deal of insight.  What if questions provide a hindsight perspective of what went wrong.  This can be useful when trying something similar and applying it to an unknown future. 

What would have happened if the inner board of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce had not stopped the distribution of the Plan?  W. Deverell believed that because of the paid prescriptions and public support of notables such as Mary Pickford that the Plan had a good chance of being implemented. So one lesson that could be taken is to find ways to break up instances of entrenched power that serve as bottlenecks to beneficial change within the overall system in which we live.  That, however, is a longer term or at least more difficult endeavor.  Leaving the question for a future post, what other lessons can we take from this particular piece of Los Angeles history to use in creating our future. 

Paradigms Lost - Olmsted Brothers and the 1930 L.A. Plan

Up to this point, the endeavor to discover new knowledge and resources with which to create new community paradigms has taken place online. On November 10, 2013, starting at 1:00 p.m., I will be listening to an unconventional conversation regarding “A Place for Us, Reimagining and Reclaiming” with a distinguished (and live) panel of experts at the Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, CA. 

The reimagining of place, whether as community place or social and economic engine, has been occurring since the inception of this effort by exploring for myself previously little or unknown bodies of knowledge such as Placemaking. It is the reclaiming or the discovery that there is something to reclaim from Los Angeles history that is new. 

The telling story of the preeminent landscape design firm Olmsted Brothers, who co-authored the groundbreaking 1930 “Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches,” plan, and their attempt, “to enhance Los Angeles County’s natural beauty and to also, protect its cultural assets and fragile ecologies, by linking the mountains to the beaches through scenic parkways and a necklace of open space across the region.”, and how it was thwarted will be the centerpiece of this unconventional conversation.  

The story of the Olmsted Brothers and the 1930 L.A. Plan were not known to me or I suspect to many others outside the brothers' and related arenas of expertise.  Christopher Hawthorne, architect critic for the Los Angeles Times, started in 2011 writing Reading L.A., which featured 27 nonfiction books about Los Angeles’ past and future built environment. One of those books was “Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region” edited by historians Greg Hise and William Deverell, the later who is one of the participants at the upcoming unconventional conversation.  In his article, Reading L.A.: The Olmsted Brothers plan and what might have been, Hawthorne provides a useful summary of the Olmsted Brothers’ vision unrealized.

Los Angeles has then attempted paradigm changes before our time during L.A. b.c., ‘before congestion’. Can’t say, ‘before cars’ because, according to Hawthorne’s article, even in 1927 it was noted that Los Angeles “has a far wider and thinner spread of population than any other metropolis, and a far greater use of automobiles.” The die had already been cast then. The use of the word paradigm can be defended because the landscape of Los Angeles would have been far different if the Olmsted plan had been followed and the reality that we took another path has had a defining affect upon us. 

This was one of the points were we stopped, as Chuck L. Marohn, Executive Director of Strong Towns has explained before, following the wisdom of our past and began an immense Growth Ponzi Scheme as a runaway experiment.  Is it possible to underestimate the difference that this has made between then and now?  Today, placemaking can be an act of rebellion and one wonders what the reaction of the Olmsted Brothers would have been if someone asked them to build a ‘livable community’ as if there were any other kind that one takes responsibility for designing. 

Christopher Hawthorne informs us, with knowledge undoubtedly garnered from William Deverell’s book, that: 

“What the Olmsted and Bartholomew firms ultimately produced for the Citizens’ Committee was a report –- “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region” -- of astonishing sophistication and farsightedness. Not only did the plan chart the ways in which the region was lacking in open space, it laid out a remarkably detailed plan for creating new parks, parkways and untouchable "reservations." It was careful to tailor the plan to match the singular character of the region, which it noted “has a far wider and thinner spread of population than any other metropolis, and a far greater use of automobiles.” It also proposed mechanisms for getting its various ideas approved and paid for.”

So why did it fail to be realized? According to Hawthorne’s article, “This fate,” the editors note, “was not due to some intrinsic flaw in the plan, nor was it due to a lack of public will, and it certainly was not happenstance. No, what happened in this case was more deliberate, more planned. The Chamber of Commerce and its allies effectively limited circulation of the report and discouraged public discourse.” This suppression succeeded so well that “it garnered almost no public attention. The response, in truth, was a resounding silence.” Okay, somethings do not change. 

What was the motivation of those who had originally given birth to the idea? Again, according to Hawthorne’s article, “It’s not entirely clear. In the end, Deverell and Hise conclude, the chamber’s leaders likely began to worry that the report was a more powerful, persuasive and explosive document than they’d bargained for, and that it might turn into something they wouldn’t be able to control, politically or otherwise.” Does this suggest that a bold and comprehensive vision could inspire the larger community to work together for their own common good?

There is still though a legacy that can be taken from the report according to its two editors, Hise and Deverell.  “It is first of all “a textbook example of the distance that separates a plan, a vision of the future, from its realization.” Second is, “how it reveals the form and meaning, the very definition, of urban space as the product of an ongoing contest.”

I suspect that there was a great deal of aggregated innovation through the Olmsted creative history in the 1930 Plan.  There was not, however, any disruptive force or organizing principle that could change the inertia of the then existing system of economic and political power. 

We are living with the results today. 

“All of these cities -– Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle –- now sprawl all over those once-fabulously beautiful settings. Nature has been pushed to the horizon. Each city has serious traffic congestion, terrible air pollution, a great deficit of parks and open space, and swollen populations. They’re all deficient in profound ways, because they happened so fast. People thought, ‘Well, we’ll do that next year.’ They never did.”

Today, things are moving faster and have become so exceedingly complex that we have to describe the challenges facing our communities as ‘wicked’. 

During the upcoming unconventional conversation on “A Place for Us, Reimagining and Reclaiming”, I am going to be listening for voices from the past.  The Olmsted Brothers again warning, ‘This is going to happen, and this is your moment to do something about it or you’ll miss your chance.’ This time, I hope we pay more attention. 

Innovation Through Community; Innovation By Community

One of the underlying concepts running through this endeavor to create New Community Paradigms has been the concept of innovation. It has been alluded to a number of times and it has been an implicit component of this effort. It has not been dealt with explicitly or directly though. This blog began by exploring newly discovered arenas for understanding how we build communities, such as placemaking, community ecology, economic gardening, and radical community engagement to obtain a better understanding of them. Especially with community, considerable time was spent considering different means of community governance, whether by city hall through community, by community without city hall, or community in opposition to city hall. It also began exploring different approaches to these areas of concern including systems thinking and design thinking.

Innovation has recently been connected with community engagement and community empowerment. Innovation has also been connected with complexity. The focus has been on the hurdles to innovation, one being complexity, but made far worse by being entangled in an entrenched system of politically controlled bureaucratic institutions. The focus has also been on seeking avenues for community innovation by embracing complexity through the community itself. There is a proposed dynamic relationship between complexity, community and innovation.

The original intent of this effort remains to establish a foothold in society and especially in local communities for the creation of something new, original and important in community governance. It is to come up with a process of creating and bringing together novel ideas in such a manner that they have a meaningful affect on community and on society. It goes beyond seeking to improve what is already existing by doing them better. Instead it looks for ways of doing things differently by rethinking how we use our community resources, all resources available to the community not just those provided by government. This is an approach tailored to fit the definition of innovation put forth by Wikipedia.

There have been though a number of examples of those striving for innovation in diverse and multiple arenas provided through the New Community Paradigms wiki. Innovation in Governance features the HBR Insight Center: Knock Down Barriers to Innovation to help identify innovation obstacles that have been hiding in plain sight and show surprising ways to overcome them. Examples of innovation also include those involved through community governance, including the Kettering Foundation: What Does It Take for Democracy to Work as It Should? and the Involve Foundation. Community change agencies seek to embrace innovation, such as Innovation in the UK - Nesta and the Centre for Civil Society which through social innovation seeks the empowerment of ordinary people and strengthening of civil society. (This effort often goes beyond our own shores to find new ideas)

Communities working to establish livable and healthy communities may do so through efforts such as Philips – Looking beyond solutions to create meaningful innovation, or can work to create environmentally sustainable communities in cooperation with organizations like the HUD Sustainable Communities Resource Center which assists in fostering local innovation.

In the economic development arena KnowYourRegion.org through the U.S. Economic Development Administration, explores regional and local approaches to business innovation and competitiveness across the United States. Also enhancing economic and business development are Small Business Innovation Research, and Innovation in American Regions: Tools for Economic Development.

Through the idea that communities manifest place as both economic and social engines, organizations such as Strong Towns can seek to take innovative approaches. CEOs for Cities provides “a civic lab of today's urban leaders catalyzing a movement to advance the next generation of great American cities to excel in the areas most critical to urban success: talent, connections, innovation and distinctiveness.”

Innovation sought in the social realm and public sector can occur at different levels with for example the APTA (American Public Transportation Association) working to strengthen and improve public transportation through advocacy, innovation and information sharing at a national level, while organizations such as the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation can contribute to the creation of the Model Design Manual for Living Streets for local implementation.

Even community arts can seek to embrace innovation through organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports “artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities”, or BGL Architecture, which through the BGL Team was involved in “expanding beyond art and using design public programs, experiments, and installation to explore how the interventions and innovations that decentralize, decelerate, localize, and democratize communities can reinvent urbanity...”.

Undoubtedly, many of these claims of innovation could be questioned even attacked or discounted as lacking or self-serving marketing, particularly those made by government institutions. These are still though available resources and innovation calls for the better use of resources to generate and utilize any resulting novel ideas in beneficial ways.

The objective is still to provide these as potential resources that are not to be seen as the exclusive property of government institutions but rather redefined as being for the benefit of anyone seeking to remake their community, whether that be as a source of information, or of advocacy or of direct action. Now begins the additional task of determining how to use them in a comprehensive manner.

There is still something missing though. The ability to be innovative in concept is not enough if it cannot be implemented because of the structural problems with our current form of local institutional governments. This means not only implementing the change being sought but also disrupting the system working to stop that change. Most attempts have been to first innovate and then hope the disruption will be far reaching having a substantial affect on our system of community governance. Unfortunately, the innovations in community governance or community building and development implemented so far have been what are termed sustaining innovations, so that while beneficial have had little to no affect on redefining the larger system. It only makes sense to work within the system if the system is working for you. If it is not or is only ostensibly doing so then deeper changes at a paradigm level may be needed. It is not a viable option, however, to first attempt to impose disruption and then implement innovation afterwards. A way needs to be found by which the innovation and disruption occur simultaneously, that shifts the balance of influence through a process of innovation that entrenched institutions of government have minimal means to stop.

Learning more about What is Design Thinking?

A couple of posts ago in New Community Paradigms Design Team at Design Thinking Action Lab more was written about the online course on Design Thinking Action Lab taught by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro that I started to participate in through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (aka dschool). That post focused on the Learning Squad that I was endeavoring to create. The New Community Paradigms Learning Squad ended up with five total members, all from California. We have been at it for some time now and have begun working as individuals in terms of class credit but in support of each other on the first phase of the class project.

First though, what is design thinking? Design thinking is a creative means or methodology used in defining and solving problems, particularly complex or wicked problems from the perspective of human-centered design, also called user-centered design.

Design thinking is different from what we may normally think of as design, which is a matter of using a specific set of skills, such as graphic design, in the crafting of products and services.

Design thinkers, do not have to be designers in the usual sense, but instead can come from a broad range of disciplines and through training acquire a 'design mindset'. Then bringing together their different experiences and perspectives, they collaborate in learning to apply a process of design that combines both creative and analytical thinking to defining and solving significant, complex and wicked problems.

I thought that there might be some possible relationship to systems thinking which I am also learning more about. Both have a collaborative basis. Systems thinking arguably works on a more macro level which is understandable since systems thinking looks at systems as a whole. A more micro-focused means of collaboration has also been seen as being needed and a possible choice that has been considered is design thinking.

Now though, having learned more, I would say that design thinking goes beyond being micro-focused to drilling down into the community at a subatomic level of design by focusing on a specific individual. Design Thinking demonstrates that there is an important difference between designing for individuals as the average of a class or for a group of individuals and instead designing for one specific individual. The later is more aligned with a human-centered design or user-centered design perspective by emphasizing a deeper understanding of problems from the perspective of different stakeholders, not as a member of a class or a category, but as a unique individual. It can be applied in this way to the creation of innovative products, services and processes.

Design thinking is also more concrete in its application than I perceive systems thinking, which can be pretty conceptual. While design Thinking can make extensive use of prototyping, which can be done through virtual modeling, this is always only a step in the process taking a secondary role to empathizing with the stakeholder. Overall, design thinking is a far more in the field, hands-on approach.

What New Community Paradigms wants to strive for is to go beyond bringing individuals to serve as members of a design team and incorporate design thinking into a communal setting so that it could be used as needed by a community.

However, no matter how viable design thinking is as a means of addressing challenges, it makes no matter at a community level if we cannot get enough of the right members of the community into the same room. So learning about design thinking is only a first step. There is also a need to determine a way to incorporate into a community-based setting.

Design thinking can help even with this particular challenge by assisting with the designing of flexible workspace, connecting different people and devising a common process of creative and innovative problem-solving.

There will undoubtedly be challenges in creating a platform for meaningful, self-directed community engagement that is inclusive of a variety of perspectives and even different agendas. Usually, we get engaged at the behest of someone else for a specific project, cause or event like an election. This new path would not only require a ‘design mindset’ but a different type of ‘community mindset’. Connections would not only have to be based only on past shared history or similar experiences but on a shared community outlook or common purpose as well.

New Community Paradigms not only seeks to change what we are doing in local community governance but also how we are doing it. Networking is likely going to be an essential component with small groups networking into increasingly larger ones but still keeping their own identity based on a social trust different from the political quid pro quo of current local government politics.

At this early point in the class, another working premise is that design thinking could help communities navigate the maze inherent with complex ‘wicked’ challenges. One related question raised by the class forum is ‘How comfortable are you with uncertainty?’ Will consider examining that question in light of the complexity question in a future post.

New Community Paradigms Design Team at Design Thinking Action Lab

Just started, as was mentioned yesterday, an online course through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (aka dschool), Design Thinking Action Lab taught by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro.

While past posts have followed and commented on Design Thinking, this is the first course attempted on the subject.  This then is another new area of exploration. Though, if one does decide to immerse one’s self in the concepts and methodologies of Design Thinking then Stanford is the place to do it.  

The ongoing New Community Paradigms effort not only supplied the name for the newly formed class team but also the rationale behind it.  This was also included as a part of the more personal introductory ‘Reflect on Your Mindset’ assignment. 

Design Thinking is interesting and relevant to New Community Paradigms because it is both solution oriented and inclusive, intentionally bringing in a variety of perspectives to face a challenge.  Just as important, those perspectives are not limited to only those with a particular area of expertise.  This means it could prove useful to a diverse group of community members coming together to discuss problems, say with traffic and school crossings or other community challenges.  

The New Community Paradigms Team now has two other members, both from California, with two additional Californians expected soon as well as another team member from Vellore, India. I sent out an additional seven other invitations. Teams are allowed to have up to six active members.  I read somewhere on the course site that there are 20,000 plus people taking the class.  The class is available to anyone on the globe but one could imagine 20,000 in a common geographical location.  There are hundreds of groups of learning teams being formed.  The New Community Paradigms team started forming later than a number of other teams.  There was no connection with any of the other team members before this. One was contacted through a random search of California students who weren’t on a team yet. The rest requested to be on the team. The point is that the connections were not based on past shared history or similar experiences but a shared outlook or common purpose, perhaps. 

This illustrates some of the challenges of creating a platform for meaningful, self-directed community engagement that was inclusive of a variety of perspectives and even different agendas.  Usually we get engaged at the behest of someone else for a specific project, cause or event like an election. New Community Paradigms not only seeks to change what we are doing but also how we are doing it. Networking is going to likely be essential with small groups networking into increasingly larger ones but still keeping their own identity.  No matter how viable Design Thinking is as a means of addressing challenges, it makes no matter if we cannot first get enough of the right members of the community into the same room so learning about Design Thinking is only a first step.  Also need to determine a way to incorporated into a community based setting.  

It is expected though that Design Thinking can help with that challenge by assisting with designing flexible workspace, connecting different people and devising a common process of creative and innovative problem solving.  

Another area with which Design Thinking can have an impact is with the concept of complexity.  At this early point in the class a working premise is that Design Thinking could help navigate the maze inherent with complex challenges.  One related question raised by the forum for the class is ‘How comfortable are you with uncertainty?’  Will look to examining these questions in future posts.

Community Engagement versus Engaged Community

The issue considered In the last post was that, “We need to stop sucking at community engagement.”  A fairly easy accusation to make but more should be done in diagnosing the reasons and coming up with alternatives.  First, who is the ‘we’ we are talking about?  Taking this from a new community paradigms perspective it can’t only be those working in government and especially not City Hall.  These can be used as avenues of engagement but not as the foundations for engagement. Instead we have to look more closely at the nature of communities and how they engage, as referred to in the last post, with other external or separate organizations, institutions, and other communities as well as how they engage internally between members to members or members to the larger community.  

To better understand the workings of community engagement will mean listening and learning again from the many voices participating in the LinkedIn Community Engagement Group. Stuart Graeme, who hails from Australia, was introduced on these pages in the last post. He raised the question, “Can anyone help with a definition of community engagement relating to people being involved in their local community not in terms of organisations engaging the community?” to which a number of Community Engagement professionals contributed a response.  So it seems that one can learn lessons in community engagement from across both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. 

Once one starts looking closely at community engagement, it becomes easy to understand why its hard to come up with a definitive understanding because of the number of different terms used to define it with the definition of those terms often being amorphous.  

A more workable definition of the first half of the term under consideration, ‘community’ will wait for a later post. The definition of community will be more of a matter of understanding as a system so will likely be more abstract and involve systems thinking in some aspect. This means taking a few steps back to understand ‘community’ and its ‘engagement’ within an environment as a system.  Less passion and more analysis but for the purpose of better understanding where the passion needs to be directed.  The focus for this post is on the second half ‘engagement’ considered as more of a verb expressing action, state, or a relation between two things as in the act of being engaged.

What is commonly labeled community engagement usually involves some external organization or institution that is seen as being the subject responsible for the engagement.  How engagement, as a verb, is implemented depends upon the planned objective of the subject institution. The institution has its own motivation to engage the community. “City Hall will host a legally mandated meeting, on Thursday at 7 pm, on a new project to get comments from the public.” The community then becomes the passive object.  The last post referred to local governments needing buy in from residents for certain projects.  It is therefore reasonable to suspect that what is called community engagement is, as one CE professional put it, often more about governing and controlling and not really about the community.  

Community engagement can be realized in two basic ways or a combination of the two, either by the assistance of some external development services, including local government, religious or other nongovernmental organizations or instead by communities themselves through the use of self-administrative and social structures.  Currently, most energy and resources are allocated by and toward the first category with either meager support to active opposition for the second.  Under new community paradigms, resources and energy are allocated by both approaches to supporting the second path to be taken by the community itself. 

The idea of restricting “community engagement by formal organizations" conveys something one-directional.  As one CE professional pointed out, engagement should be a mutual two way process and not only a one way process. 

Another CE professional participating in the discussion proposed that instead of talking about community engagement what should be talked about is an engaged community.  One active citizen made it known, according to one story, that as far as he was concerned the community was already very engaged with each other, and that the project should really be about the government institution in question learning to engage with an already engaged community.  

Others cited lessons learned from Results Based Community Planning by the Australian Local Community Services Association through which they discovered that when the local councils (similar I suspect to city councils or planning commissions here) presented an idea as a plan, what it conveyed to the community was an excessively top down management approach.  The community preferred instead to talk about community action.  

How successful such efforts are depends upon the make up of the community as illustrated by another story involving Steve Johnson of Organ’s Portland University, who when participating in a number of community discussions of a planning matter observed that in some cases, “People just turned up and before anyone announced the process they just started working together. They grabbed markers, flip chart paper, and started talking, writing, drawing and came up with some ideas, documents concerns and aspirations, etc.”  At others, even though he made the same workshop resources available when people arrived they instead just sat down, looking awkward, waiting for someone to lead them. The lesson to be learned is that the extend to which communities can be engaged needs to take into account the extent to which the members of those communities are engaged with each other. 

Communities are in reality organic and complex rather than mechanical and complicated entities. Seeing communities as complex allows one to understand community engagement from an organic perspective by which the engagement is initiated and led by the community through a grassroots, bottom up approach.   Community engagement from an organic bottoms up perspective involves grassroots social structures participating in the improvement of their community from the identification of communal challenges to the realization, and management of projects identified to address those challenges.  Involving the community as a whole in a participatory manner becomes what defines community engagement. 

Engagement, when not coupled with community from a top down perspective, then is more likely to refer to activism, advocacy, networking, representing, connecting or other appropriately descriptive verbs.

Grassroots community engagement, however, rarely occurs spontaneously without some organizing focus or energy and that often comes from a formally constituted organization, whether internal or external. 

Community engagement then, according to one CE professional, becomes about planning the process to build both the 'Bonding' and 'Bridging' of 'Social Capital' within a  community.  One metric whether community engagement has been successful or not is the extent to which the process has helped the community to build social capital, making the community stronger and more connected.  "Social Capital" was seen though by some as being part of a technical discourse with which the majority of people are not engaged, making it a more useful term when examining community engagement from a more systems perspective.

Governmental institutions, however, often do not take kindly to the organic development of communities. The trouble is that government institutions treat community problems and community engagement as complicated issues, which they can at least in part control, as compared to a complex problem with which they have a great deal of difficulty.  

The organic based direction a community takes can be diverted by institutions attempting to fulfill what they see as their institutional mission.  Even when well intentioned, professionals whether directly involved in community engagement or more likely indirectly as part of some other function, say economic development, often lack a true understanding or appreciation of what community engagement as a means of building real community capacity is about. 

Even if one starts with the right motivations and frame of reference, it is still difficult to work with a community that is disengaged or disenfranchised or with a group that lacks sufficient social capital in the larger community.  This can arguably be widely applicable as many if not most people in any large community feel disengaged, as social capital is only generated where people are actively engaged.  The individual then rather than the organization becomes the most basic component of community engagement.

Those individuals engaged in their communities at an organizational level are often known as ‘community volunteers’, while those working in the community without the backing of any organization are likely to be known simply as ‘good neighbors’.  This goes back to some of the ideas discussed in the last post. 

Stuart Graeme examines ideas of individual community engagement by citing an article by Colin Williams, "Fostering community engagement and tackling undeclared work" which asserted that community engagement involves "spending time, engaged in unpaid activity, doing something that aims to benefit someone (individuals or groups) other than or in addition to close relatives, or to benefit the environment."  

In Stuart’s view this does not necessarily have to happen through an organization but could arise more like the "good neighbor" concept.  It would be based, in my view upon the existence of what has been labeled ‘Civil Society, particularly when thinking of community paradigms as a set of community relations.  Stuart also seems to suggest that these 'good neighbors' could be the ones to start in engaging with the community to build the connectedness comprising the 'Bonding' and 'Bridging' of of 'Social Capital.'  

They are also the ones who initiate the creation of new community paradigms by ‘Building Better Blocks’ or encouraging direct deliberative democracy in their communities.  The idea of volunteering becomes not only a matter of community engagement, it is also a matter of community building especially in a period of often unavoidable austerity as we find ourselves.  It can have an economic impact as well as a social or political impact on a community as was first raised by this endeavor under  A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics and "Liveanomics" EIU Livable Cities Studies wiki page.