Cultivating citizen creativity

Photo Credit: CLICK Productions

HALIFAX – My bookshelf is a graveyard for ideas. Pages covered in visions for the future from some community meeting, somewhere, sometime ago. One must wonder (maybe that one is just me, a design nerd) what the heck is the point? To pull ideas for the future from people’s minds, to start building momentum and hope – then to let it fizzle out leaving nothing more than text on a shelf.

Really though, who has time to read the masses of documents around us, let alone take action on their recommendations? This is a snag in the way we approach community planning – as a standard checklist. It lacks the creative edge we common people need to spark our imaginations, to see something differently, to motivate us to act.

Creativity has become something we think a select group of people ‘do’, not a seed within us that, if cultivated, can improve our daily lives. Forget the documents – what we really need is a forum to connect with each other over our common goals, to be creative, and move forward together. This actually becomes urgent when we think about peak oil, climate change, and the limited time we have to really set ourselves on a “right path.”

Many examples of this forward-thinking-and-actually-acting exist everywhere, but I am here in Halifax, so I will highlight a couple instances I have been involved with in my own ‘backyard.’

Photo Credit: Clara Stewart-Robertson

Planning & Design Centre :: Cardboard City

An initiative of young planners and designers in Halifax was to establish a Planning & Design Centre inspired by Chicago, Paris, NYC and Amsterdam. This would be a streetfront space with ongoing exhibitions on local and global planning/architecture. Their role in the planning process was to host unconventional activities to gather input, reactions, ideas and inspirations from the citizens of Halifax and relay it to municipal planning staff.

Though this project was eventually halted by those staff, the team of “plan-archists” did make a little splash including the construction of a Cardboard City (pre-cursor to this year’s cardboard city).

Over the course of six hours one evening, a 10m x 12m map of Halifax’s downtown and piles of discarded cardboard were at the disposal of 700 citizens that came through the doors. Participants were encouraged to build the city as it was, as it is, or as they want it to be. The result was an eclectic, imaginative model of Halifax that fused old with new (and some wacky) ideas. Common themes did emerge such as the desire for bike lanes and farmland in the city.

Photo Credit: Michelle Doucet

4 Days Thinking Forward Halifax :: Red Card / Gold Card

4 Days Thinking Forward Halifax was an ‘unconference’ that brought together citizens with inspirational problem-solver John Thackara. Activities over 4 Days showcased local people and projects that are examples of what life in a sustainable Halifax could look like and questioned what steps are needed to get us there.

At each event, participants were given a red card and gold card. On the red they wrote an idea or goal for the city. They were asked to focus on the positive, for example, one would not say: “Night life in Halifax sucks. I wish I were in Montreal.” Instead, one would say: “Wouldn’t it be great if Halifax had late night cafes with djs so we could have fun all night without necessarily drinking booze?” On the gold they wrote their offering, skills, or resources that could help make Halifax a better place to live.

So, what about documents?

Did either of these activities lead to direct, quantifiable, reportable action by policy makers or city planners? Not really.

What they did do is open a forum outside of the daily grind for people to imagine it, talk about it, think about their role in making it happen (it being your vision, from bikelanes to local fashion to a new regional economy). Inspired conversations are still ongoing about the complexity of our challenges and potential simplicity of our solutions. I think Cardboard City and 4 Days were steps in the right direction. Though their impact is hard to measure – and such forums really need to be ongoing – the creativity and motivation sparked in participants is something that cannot be put to rest on my shelf.