Permission to dream together, about towns

Your Town Jam: Eight strangers coming together to kick off a place based collective imagination learning journey

On a hot summer’s day last year, 8 strangers met for the first time in Shipley, a town in West Yorkshire to begin a collective imagination practice journey with an invitation from myself, stewarded by Huddlecraft, Canopy & Centre for Public Impact. The aim? To get curious about our towns and what their future could hold.

I put the call out to host a learning journey focussed on place-based collective imagination practice. Not having used this term to describe the work we do at Street Space (being rather anti the use of any label), I was nervous. Is what we do really enabling collective imagination? Do people realise they’re doing it? Does that matter? Is dreaming up how things could be different in terms of our public spaces and shared streets, and ushering some of these ideas in to the real world collective imagination practice? I decided it might be and put the callout to see who might like to join Your Town Jam.

We came together from Hartlepool to Salisbury, Camberwell to Morecambe to design a shared curriculum of 10 online sessions and began the journey of uncovering the person behind each question. We listened to the sounds of Shipley and created a curriculum bursting with nature connection, shit life syndrome, rhythm-analysis, creative foresight techniques, creating the conditions for change and how to understand the most significant change. Monday nights were filled with life, buzz, connection and threads being woven across the country between people at different life stages all with an itch to scratch and desire to re-imagine their towns.

Learning and listening, rhythm-analysis at our Power Up day in Sheffield

Six months on saw our Huddle close with a December showcase event in Hartlepool, you can have a look at what we got up to here. It felt fitting to close the journey of online sessions, a power up in Sheffield with an in person event hosted by Darren in Hartlepool. He invited some of his local network to celebrate in the power of peer learning, alongside us as we navigated our own reflections on how we might inspire and anchor trust in collective imagination practice more widely, by sharing experiences, creating and holding space.

From the seed planting in Shipley to capturing the growth, learning and reflection that’s followed I’ve tried to summarise some of the key themes that have emerged so far:

• understanding the importance of slowing down, allowing time to get to know the human and more than human qualities of a place

• listening to your own wisdom, when things feel uncomfortable there’s usually a reason why

• the power of a third space — not friends & family or work — the Huddle peer experience is a unique and wonderful space to support growth

• encouragement to go beyond ‘creative interventions’ and explore the essence of imagination processes and communal ideation

• that collective imagination practice is a practice, it is never finished and is as much about a reflective way of working/seeing that a specific output

• stepping back to allow new perspectives to take up space

For a more in depth look at each participant and their learning journey please take a look at our Showcase booklet, put together by the wonderful Purvisha here.

What if we put toddlers are the heart of Shipley?

My own learning question has been focussed on exploring my town through my toddler’s eyes. Interrogating our built environment from her current 85cm perspective. The public space she encounters on her first waddles over short distances. Together we’ve shouted over traffic noise, brushed against the railings leaving dusty grey traces on our finger tips, tripped over uneven paving stones and bent double (me) to notice a leaf shoot’s first growth.

Adding little people scenes to evoke joy & curiosity in surprising public spots & corners

I’ve tried to suspend my work frame of mind creeping in to solutions and projects and let myself feel or sense first. It’s led to some important leaps forward and we’re planning to bring to life some of the imagined hacks and edits to our well traversed local spaces over the next few months as shown below with funding from the Collective Imagination Practice Fund. We’re bringing together a local group of parents (and their toddlers), play practitioners, highways professionals and public health to enter into some collective imagination practice as a way of widening understanding and enriching conversation on who are we designing for?

Imagined edits & tweaks to our local public realm to enhance opportunities for play, curiosity and exploration

I’ve felt the power (and fear) of not knowing where I’m going when I started out with my question. It’s unfamiliar. People ask, ‘What’s the goal? What will that achieve?’ I panic, I’m not sure... it feels indulgent. Heavy with unfamiliar language. Is it indulgent?

All this language can feel exclusionary, despite it being probably the most human thing we do and have done for all of history. Imagining things, together. I’m not sure what has made us so focussed on having to know what the outcome will be… the desire to control things and fit them in boxes. Capitalism? Grant funding? Individualism? But it isn’t a privilege to be gathering with people in meaningful ways to imagine things together, it’s very much a necessity. Our times require this of us, I’m sure of it.

We may not yet know where these journeys will take us, but there’s power in exploring. Opening up the space for new conversations, widening perspectives out with connecting people who don’t often connect. Listening to each other, empathising. It might not always lead to a concrete outcome — the full power of collective imagination yet to be revealed, perhaps small shifts over time add up to something more profound and transformative? But in these times, as uncertain and as volatile as they are it feels right that we try some other ways of being and doing together that feel disruptive or even radical to the status quo. We’ll continue, at the edges, blurring the boundaries of what’s important, meeting each other as humans (with all their mess) and seeing where this leads us.

If you’re interested in exploring JRF’s work on Emerging Futures, of which the collective imagination Huddles are a small part of, take a look at Sophia Parker’s excellent blog here.