Revisiting Community Arts as Connector to New Community Paradigms

The last six months have been spent on Systems Practice, which was finally determined to be a potentially viable component of Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking and seen as lending credence to the Victor Havel quote:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out,”

through additional interactions with the And? It’s All Connected and the Ecology of Systems Thinking Facebook groups.

Systems Practice was also recognized as requiring substantially involved effort yet still only being one aspect of creating new community paradigms, important even essential but not sufficient.

This post returns to the initial purpose of this effort of discovering pathways to new community paradigms by updating the New Community Paradigms Wiki which has been neglected for some time. The first revision to the wiki is the inclusion of a disclaimer concerning intention. It is a learning site that is being shared, there is no claim to authority and regarding security, there isn’t any but then it doesn’t require anyone to provide information, private or otherwise. While a disclaimer to not having any definitive answers only shared explorations may be true that is not made as explicitly.

The work on the Systems Practice series was largely interiorly focused involving introspective contemplation. The change in direction now is to a more exteriorly focused perspective, for at least a while, resulting in more ideas being gathered and added to the pathways to new community paradigms. One of the goals of this effort being to demonstrate how ideas are connected to a far greater extent and far more extensively than may be commonly realized.

A number of new resources have been made available since the last update with new connections and pathways to be explored which means potentially that new insights are possible. This means looking more outward to determine how to apply these insights.

One new area of interest that will be explored is the currently rising idea of a #GreenNewDeal. Despite being popular in circles for which I have an affinity, it is still in the exploration stages. At this point, it seems hopefully aspirational and pragmatically problematic but a good deal of time has just been spent demonstrating through Systems Practice that the pragmatically problematic can begin to be overcome. Recognizing at the same time, other pathways need to be added.

The first of these pathways to be revisited is Community Arts. A number of changes have occurred since the last update with, Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms. One of the organizations, Cultural Strategies Initiative, is gone but a number of new resources have been discovered.

One of the more recent is Smoke Signals Studio, the subject of a TED Talk, who believe that “a practice for truth-telling and rooted in assembly is powerful”. Some notable quotes from their talk seemed particularly relevant in perhaps providing some of the depth required to bring about something like the #GreenNewDeal.

"See, laws never change culture, but culture always changes laws." 

"They understood what many of us are just now realizing -- that to get people to build the ship, you've got to get them to long for the sea; that data rarely moves people, but great art always does." 

Among other resources that have been added but not previously acknowledged are What's Happening - A Blade of Grass which provides resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change by fostering an inclusive, practical discourse about the aesthetics, function, ethics and meaning of socially engaged art that resonates within and outside the contemporary art dialogue. One of their projects was by Chinatown Art Brigade, who dealt with gentrification in New York.

The Laundromat Project believes art, culture, and engaged imaginations can change the way people see their world, open them up to new ideas, and connect them with their neighbors providing invaluable assets in furthering community wellbeing.

A number of the new resources have to do with storytelling seen from both sides, telling and listening. Storytelling and Social Change: A Strategy Guide | Working Narrative works with communities to tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy. Their work is located at the intersection of arts, technology, and social change. Hidden Voices seeks to empower underrepresented populations to effectively tell their stories by engaging communities in dialogue and positive action to strengthen community cohesion and provides pathways for increased communication, cooperation, and respect. 

A guide to Listening Matters | Community Organisers, while perhaps technically not arts-based organ, is by the Company of Community Organisers, the national body established to support the training and development of community organizing in England. It provides an important aspect to effectively completing a feedback loop in the creation of a community’s story about itself. 

“Listening to people is the foundation of community organising because it builds trust and relationships, uncovers issues and is an essential starting point for bringing people together to share stories, ideas and action.”

YOUNG LISTENERS SUPPORT PEERS WITH MENTAL WELLBEING

The site A S . I F | ART + SCIENCE IN THE FIELD works at rebuilding cross-disciplinary connections while keeping a balance between the two cultures of art and science, following their own creative paths while maintaining accuracy and critical thinking when conducting, and communicating about, science.

ArtsFwd.org has also been added, which though a creation of the EmcArts and featured in the last update, was not included in the NCP wiki through an oversight.

The mission of Imagining America | Artists & Scholars in Public Life is to publicly engage artists, designers, scholars, and community activists working toward the democratic transformation of higher education and civic life by creating democratic spaces to foster and advance publicly engaged scholarship that draws on arts, humanities, and design.

Animating Democracy places a high value on learning from and building capacity and visibility for practitioners’ work on the ground by bringing to bear Americans for the Arts’ strengths in research, policy, professional development, visibility, and advocacy specifically to advance and elevate arts for change work on field, cross-sector, and national levels. The group was also featured in the post The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3 as advancing the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change, along with Art VULUPS doing the same with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts.

Other added resources deal directly with finding and establishing artists for the community. Easle is supposed to make it easy to find and commission independent creators for a project. Street I Am - highlights street culture, street fest, busker street art, and graffiti street entertainment. Art Prof provides a unique opportunity for a global community to have equal access to a free visual arts education by removing barriers to art education that exist due to the high cost of higher education & private classes while providing easy-to-follow content for people of all ages and means. The site Dance/USA — The national service organization for professional dance looks to establishing legacy by the preservation of art form for future generations. Their Artist's Legacy Toolkit helps organize and preserve materials in ways that are practical but neither time-intensive nor expensive.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of resources, merely suggestions for possible ways to incorporate artistic thinking, along with design and systems thinking into the civic dialogue.

Community Arts is seen as a means of expressing what has been termed the Soul of a Community. The most significant change to the Community Arts wiki page is seeing it as being not only a component of Community Design but also more as a means of Advocacy By and For Community.

In regard to its place in the still being developed NCP Wiki Map on Kumu, Community Arts is a component of Places and a part of Art and Health Communities, which has been recently updated (read corrected) which in turn is related to Pathways to Healthy Communities.

Perhaps additional new pathways can be found incorporating Community Arts more deeply into Advocacy By and For Community and then extending into Community Ecology based on the concept that the community basis to address the health of the populace and community basis to address the health of the environment as in the #GreenNewDeal being the same.

Finding Pathways for Vehicles of Change

This blog post is going to break from the current Systems Practice focus (most recent post first) of the last two blog posts to update the newest resource additions to the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki. This time though it will also tie them to a location on the recently unveiled Kumu based NCP Wiki Map, that was rolled out over four blog posts and which now has a home on both the NCP blog and wiki. If this is the first time with the NCP Wiki Map then there is a tour which provides a general explanation. 

The NCP Wiki map seeks to develop connections or bridges across sectors. All of the updates in this post are part of or are in some way connected to the Places map but can be followed to Healthy Communities or to Community Ecology. 

It is the resources, available online, found in the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki that are the vehicles for change. The NCP Wiki Map connotes possible paths that could be taken. The posts of this blog are but one rationale or mental model for taken a particular path or using the suggested vehicles, one among many possible. 

The State of Placemaking 2016, brought more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners, and policymakers to chart the future of the placemaking movement structured around ten major issues that converge in public space,  referred to as “transformative agendas.” Placemaking, as a determining aspect of Places, can be seen as being most comprehensively defined by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS).  

In the NCP Wiki Places map, the circled Project for Public Spaces is seen as arising from Places and being related to the more general Community Places. (double clicking a circled element opens up wiki page, clicking “On Kumu Wiki Map” at top of a wiki page opens up the map). It is the wiki page Community Places that contains the blog posts, near the bottom of the page, seeking to define the developing NCP mental model for placemaking.

Place as Social and Economic Engine was one of the first wiki bridge pages and an early basis for developing a mental model for NCP as defined by blog posts listed at the bottom of the wiki page. It was so named, again as an extension of the correction to the same erroneous presumption underlying placemaking, that the strata of the geographic community below the businesses, city hall politics and those residents connected with city hall were of secondary value. While in truth, it is the created physical attributes of a place that are the dynamic foundation or engine of the community’s social and economic generation.

Place as Social and Economic Engine is the home for Strong Towns, who introduced the newest addition VERDUNITY, a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. They started VERDUNITY  because they realized that elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. This was a disruption in their way of thinking, of their mental models. They are now working on changing other people’s mental models of how they think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. More will be said about VERDUNITY in a future post.

Place as Social and Economic Engine on the NCP Wiki Map is seen as a bridge between Place and Economics (access between Places and Economics via a link is in the narrative section to the left). 

The newest addition to Planning the Urban Landscape is New Urban Mechanics, a network of civic innovation offices that explore how new technology, designs, and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all. It could have arguably been put under Community Change Agencies but personal choice and only personal was that these programs were more closely related to the existing underlying physical, placemaking, and political infrastructure of a community. The related blog posts, again listed at the bottom of the wiki page, provide some perspectives on a past effort in Los Angeles history to redefine the larger urban landscape. 

Planning the Urban Landscape approaches Places from a broader perspective looking not from the build up of smaller changes over time but the accumulation of those changes overall. It is seen as a bridge between Places and Community Ecology. 

Under the wiki page Healthy Cities is the recent addition of Bridging Health & Community, an extension of  the previously listed Creating Health Collaborative which aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond institutional healthcare and public health to include fostering community agency, strengthening the field of practice that bridges those in the health sector and those who foster community agency helping to establish the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health. Being able to measure differences in life expectancy by income across areas and then to identify strategies to improve health outcomes for low-income Americans would be a useful ability. Health Inequality Project uses big data to help accomplish this.

The bridge from Places to Healthy Cities, under the Healthy Communities map, is Planning for Healthy Communities. It could also be an element in the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and the Art and Healthy Communities map. Two specially constructed maps that put together a path that incorporated elements that are often placed in silos and considered distinct and separate. 

Taking a higher altitude perspective, the Wiki Bridges Map connects all the New Community Paradigm sectors, including Places, Healthy Communities, and Community Ecology, together. 

A closer look at the pathway for Places indicates that at under the current New Community Paradigm configuration, Healthy Communities and Places are well integrated together but Community Ecology is somewhat isolated. 

Could Bridging Health & Community and Creating Health Collaborative under Healthy Cities be integrated with New Urban Mechanics under Planning the Urban Landscape and extended from Places to Community Ecology integrating the two together more closely?

There are also other deeper pathways that could utilize the online resources found in the NCP Wiki. Under Project for Public Places (click the URL or double click the circled element to open the wiki page) is Agenda Spotlight: Placemaking and Health - Project for Public Spaces.

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people’s health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

It could be an important component of the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and naturally be expanded to be encompassed by Community Ecology. How it is used could be determined in a number of different ways depending upon the needs of a particular community. 

It is believed though it has not been adequately examined that finding specific potential pathways for the utilization of online resources will greatly help in the development of new community paradigms. 

Creative Discovery on New Community Paradigm Pathways

The last blog post continued to explore the new Kumu map of the New Community Paradigms (NCP) Wiki (the map is also contained within the wiki page). Here is a tour if this is the initial general introduction but this post does not depend upon it. The last blog post expressed the view that the NCP Wiki Map was not so important on its own but as a tool for creative discovery, an idea which will be explored further in this post.

Actually, it is not the NCP Wiki Map itself that is the basis for creative discovery; it is instead the Kumu program at its foundation and the application of systems thinking in the use of that tool. Still, the NCP Wiki Map is believed to be a pretty good example of what can be done with Kumu, especially when applied to complex community issues as is being attempted here. 

It should be made clear though that New Community Paradigms is not endeavoring to become a large organization or movement. It is intended to be designed as an expandable and evolvable template that a group within a community could use to leverage potential community resources. 

The last post also spoke of getting ahead of myself. In the post previous, I had jumped from dealing with planning and placemaking within complex systems (of greater community involvement) to contrasting complicated top-down management systems and complex community governance systems, as had been discussed in past posts, and then jumped back to planning in the context of creating healthy communities. The point and a rationale behind this effort are that not only is organizing information gathered over time challenging but disseminating that information in a coherent manner within complex social networks, especially when others are unfamiliar with the concepts, can be a daunting undertaking. While examining "complexity" and its relation to community building and development has been of interest since the early beginnings of this effort, it was wrong to jump back and forth without more context.

There are then three separate concepts about which people have to be persuaded to invest time into understanding, Kumu mapping, systems thinking, and community issues (actually a host of concepts filed under new community paradigms). This obviously is not going to be for everyone, to be truthful, not even most people. Most don’t need to be experts though in all three, actually not even particularly in any one of them but they would have to have some knowledge and more importantly would need to be able to collaborate. I believe though that, in the hands of even a small number of people working together, it could begin to make a difference. 

After the confession, it was a matter of discussing the resources to be found under the recent Planning for Healthy Communities wiki page and connecting to the mapped element for it (use the “On Kumu Map” link at the top), and other elements of the Places and Healthy Communities maps (also accessible from narrative sections to the left) and then clicking on the related Asset Based Community Development element moving next into its own map then back to the wiki (use the URL near bottom of the element’s narrative section or double click the element within the map). 

This continued in the next post with exploring  Community Design, and Community Arts (both under Places, mouse over the listed text) with Healthy Cities and began tying them together (needs to be repeated, clicking a map’s white space reveals underlying map).

The Places map may be the most complex appearing of these maps but is basically a collection of eight related issues (put the mouse over the center Places element within the map to highlight first degree connections) which bridge over into other sectors. The Healthy Communities and Asset Based Community Development maps aren't that complex on their own. Individual elements though within these maps can appear in other maps and all can be connected. Hopefully following element paths into different maps will generate new ideas, new connections could be developed. 

The last blog post also attempted to create a mental model of “Artistic Thinking” as pathways of connections, the first, being the Art and  Healthy  Communities Map. The mental models for the current configuration NCP Wiki Map were developed through the related blog posts found in their most closely related wiki page. Although blog posts are not always the defining basis of the mental models for all of the map elements, connections were not created unless what could be seen, and better yet delineated in writing, as establishing some meaningful relationship. These then helped to define the NCP Wiki Map’s structural level connections, especially the bridge elements connecting substantially different elements and sectors together. 

These new sets of pathways were then enhanced further after publishing the blog post introducing the ability to highlight or focus on certain element or groups of elements. As explained in the Art and  Healthy  Communities Map narrative, going through the different levels of focus new elements appear.

This is where this being a solitary endeavor, due to my introvert and introspective nature, runs into its limitations. Having everyone already learned Kumu mapping is the best solution but until that can be taken for granted it seems necessary to provide explicit instruction on issues such as white space or determining focus. 

This is being attempted, in different ways, with the two new pathway sets. Further directions are provided in the hope people will learn Kumu directly and figure out how to navigate on their own or the other way around, both work. The hope again is that the map can be designed so that groups of individuals with different interests and backgrounds could work together and create common collaborative maps but that's not happening here yet. Instead, this is more at the level of explorations, if things work, and experimentation, if they don’t.

Two other new sets of pathways, Pathways to Healthy Communities Map and the Collective Impact within NCP Map were also created for the post, as working at the mental model level of the Systems Thinking Iceberg Model. 

Because it involves the entire larger overall NCP Wiki Map, the initial Pathways to Healthy Communities Map is apparently complex. However, by clicking on “Focus on Pathway” the specific specialized map is focused upon or by moving further down to the second paragraph of the narrative section one can also choose to only highlight it.

Further down the narrative section, the narrative approach is integrated with the graphic elements of the map. Unlike maps such as Places, there is more than a collection of related objects underlying the map’s organization. The connections cross over different sectors influencing each other. One can follow these pathways by mousing over the text within the narrative. Additional directions can be found in the Pathways to Healthy Communities Map itself.

The Collective Impact map, on its own, is not seen as being directly subsumed or above other elements of the NCP Wiki Map. Rather, it is seen as being related to other elements. These particular displayed relationships, as configured within the map,  were based on my individual inquiries. Different relationships could be created, developed and evolved further by others. 

The Collective Impact within NCP Map, which is accessible through the main Collective Impact map, is of a different configuration. The map’s narrative provides access to greater focus or further down the ability to highlight within the map by passing over with the mouse. Selecting the Community Impact Focus Map allows one again to highlight or by following the directions select the specific map then proceed 1, 2 or 3 degrees out or clear the map to its original configuration. As the narrative for the map states, though, not all elements will be related meaningfully to but a number could be integrated into supporting Collective Impact efforts. 

It is still necessary though to visit each element of interest’s wiki page by double clicking on that element or clicking once to open up its narrative and then clicking on the displayed URL. There are then a variety of resources available though these are by no means exhaustive, undoubtedly more are out there. These are the building blocks for creating new community innovations by providing more in-depth information. There is not, however, any correct pathway or any right answers to be revealed.

The long term goal then is not to get people to use my map but to get people to build their own maps, using systems thinking approaches, preferably together with others in their community. The NCP Wiki Map is capable of being “copied”, what Kumu calls “Fork”ed (past tense?) and is licensed to fully authorize this (get to the NCP Wiki Map, three line icon top left corner, click, look for “Fork Project” left-hand column). 

Mapping Connections Between Healthy Communities, Planning, Placemaking and Asset Based Community Development

Now that New Community Paradigms (NCP) has a more effective map with which to find new pathways it is possible to go back and reconnect with some that may have been missed or left behind. In general, the trend has been away from institutions or more institutionally based systems and toward more complex systems of greater community involvement but this does not and should not mean abandoning institutions entirely. A greater emphasis on ground-up community placemaking should not mean an abandonment of a more traditional role of planning. It is the relationship between the two that should be redefined.  

This goes to a wider issue of the difference between complicated top-down management systems and complex community governance systems. Despite an obvious preference, at least if you have been following this blog, for the later, the need and benefit of the former are still recognized under the proper circumstances. It is the correct relationship between the two that needs to be defined. 

One area in which this could be seen as being helpful is Planning for Healthy Communities, a new page under the NCP wiki. We are using the term “planning” in the sense of the American Planning Association, the foundational, professional, educational oriented organization behind city hall planning departments across the USA. It is able to suggest policy on a national scale and in the case of the Planning and Community Health Center, focuses its efforts on projects and policies that prioritize active living, food systems, and health in all planning policies.

Many local governments have begun Planning for Public Health by including goals and objectives that promote healthy choices of where to live and how to get around, the ability to access healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity, which affect broader issues of social equity, clean air, and water, and more into their comprehensive plans. More specifically, Plan4Health Projects and Initiatives are launching across the United States in neighborhoods, cities, and counties. Plan4Health supports creative partnerships to build sustainable, cross-sector coalitions.

“Local coalitions consisting of American Planning Association (APA) chapters and American Public Health Association (APHA) affiliate members are committed to increasing health equity through nutrition or physical activity with each coalition seen as being dedicated to meeting the needs of residents where they live, work, or play.”

The American Planning Association’s Planning and Community Health Research Center has also partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy Community Design Initiative, on the CDC - Healthy Places - Healthy Community Design Checklist Toolkit. This toolkit, which can help planners, public health professionals, and the general public to include health in the community planning process, is composed of four elements that work together to achieve this goal:

1. Healthy Community Design Checklist.pdf
2. Healthy Community Design PowerPoint Presentation.ppt
3. Creating a Health Profile of Your Neighborhood.pdf
4. Planning for Health Resources Guide.pdf

It is still, however, a generally top-down application of policy and may never be initiated or fully realized without the intervention of grassroots efforts as well as, as suggested by Paul Born, grass-top organizational efforts.

“In the early days of a collective impact approach, we often find that one of two mistakes is made. One is that we gather only the grasstops. That is, we think somehow it’s about shifting power. So we bring the powerful players into the room. The other mistake, almost as common, is that we don’t engage any of the power players because we’re afraid that it will be perceived as a grass-tops initiative.”

There is underlying data that can be gathered and used to inform all perspectives, Health-Impact-Assessment-Can-Inform.pdf, the State-of-Health-Impact-Assessment-in-Planning.pdf, and the HIA-Toolkit.pdf. 

Additionally, Project for Public Spaces (PPS) recently released an extensive report of peer-reviewed research and case studies, sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, demonstrating the power of placemaking to improve health. 

"The Case for Healthy Places is already taking the public health world by storm, and we are confident that this is just the beginning of the Healthy Placemaking Movement!"

Before proceeding further, it should be advised that one could reach all of the following points on the Kumu maps and all others from within the New Community Paradigms Wiki Kumu map itself rather than open in multiple tabs or windows from here. Information on how to navigate through the map can be found through the New Community Paradigms Wiki Map Tour.

A new Planning for Healthy Communities wiki page means a new element on the New Community Paradigms Wiki Map. Wiki-pages are collections of resources related to that topic though are by no means exhaustive. In truth, they are merely gateways into essential, more in-depth studies of the area in question. Their corresponding map elements in conjunction with other elements graphically illustrate possible relationships. It will be noticed that some relationships are more explicit in feeding back to each other.  The idea underlying these mapped out relationships is to expand upon the concepts and avoid the siloing of policy thinking. 

More precisely the Kumu map Planning for Healthy Communities is within the Health Communities Kumu map. One can click on the map’s white space to reveal the fuller map underneath. Other Healthy Communities wiki page links are then displayed in the narrative section. 

Planning for Healthy Communities can be seen as a bridge between Healthy Communities and Community Places within the Places map. Clicking the map’s white space again reveals the numerous wiki pages, bridge pages and other related wiki pages from other wiki maps under the full Places map.

One returns to the collection of web links found on a particular wiki page using the URL within the narrative section of that map element, say Community Places, which focuses more on the community (as a geographic place) planning of building by the community (as social structure). 

Mousing over the highlighted Community Place element of the Places map or any map element shows those wiki pages most directly associated, other overlaying concepts of Place, the wiki focus page of Community Design, the closely related Project for Public Spaces, along with Soul of a Community, and the bridge to Healthy Communities through Planning for Healthy Communities. 

A similar set of relationships exists with the Healthy Communities element within the Healthy Communities map, including the bridge Planning for Healthy Communities and the related Asset Based Community Development or ABCD. It is the relationship of ABCD in this context that calls for the greatest need for future exploration. 

A short Twitter-talk with Cormac Russell on the CityLab article, The New Front Line of Public Health, on the growing number of community health workers taking a 360-degree view of the barriers that stand between their patients and better health, revealed an ABCD perspective.

“Relative to current malaise it's a quantum leap; relative to what's actually required, it's a mediocre shuffle in the right direction.”

According to Cormac, a significant shift requires seeing beyond healthcare and the proliferation of initiatives like Every Block A Village-Chicago Westside Health Authority.

All of these perspectives can be expanded structurally even further by going to the Wiki Bridges Map in which Planning for Health Communities can be found under *Places of the map’s narrative section. Again, click any white space to reveal the full map. 

More dynamic, complex relationships can be followed as pathways under the Wiki Bridges Pathways Map. Selecting Places Wiki Bridges, one can mouse over the narrative highlighting relevant pathways within the map connecting Places and its elements to other areas of the complete New Community Paradigms map. There isn’t any predetermined route, each group, organization or community determines its own course, preferably by making its own maps.