Urban & community development after the crisis

Inspiring Cities, Stipo, and Wonderful World organized a jam-packed 3-day international exchange in East London. Our group of over 50 professionals from various backgrounds, disciplines and cultures joined together with prominent urban thinkers to search for ways to bring new energy into cities and find new, bottom-up strategies for urban and community development after the crisis. Our final product that we created as a team, is a newspaper—Cities Un/Planned: The London Edition—full of articles about our collaborative findings of the exchange…and then some.

Last year Dublin, this year London

Last spring we organized our first exchange in Dublin. Because of its successful outcomes, our energetic participants and leaders wanted more. We chose London as our next stop on this series of urban anthropological quests. With our partners we sought out London-based grass-root organizations that are quietly leading a social and economic revolution and finding success—despite the economic crisis.  Who is leading this crusade? What is the secret to their success? How can we take these lessons back to our home countries? How is the community engaged in changing the landscape of the social, economic, and built environment?
 
East London was our answer. We focused our programme on the radically changing East London neighborhoods because this is where things are happening. It’s a diverse area where immigrants, low-income families, and fashionista “hipsters” live side-by-side, and where in the same block you see up-scale Michelin-star restaurants, degenerate factory buildings, and major Olympics-related urban regeneration. This is where the ‘lived’ and ‘planned’ city are colliding—and with success. Because of its diverse and active community and bottom-up initiatives, an urban anthropology investigative approach works best: people talking to people, exchanging ideas, and learning from each other.

So much to do, so little time

All the hard work and cross-country coordination for these busy days really did pay off. Within the first 8 hours not only did we visit an energy-producing theater, experience an 8am rush-hour Tube ride, and nosh on delicious organic quiches we also set individual intentions, came up with 52 Dutch ‘trailblazers,’ and got out first insights on developments in London in the ‘planned’ and ‘lived’ city.
 
The organizations and companies we met with are taking the local economy to the next level by using community engagement, social-entrepreneur principles, and unconventional partnership to change their surrounding social, economic, and built environment. They are creating a new economy: a civic economy. But what is the “civic economy,” how does it work, and who is being left out of the movement? Some people think it’s necessary for the survival of small-scale initiatives, while others are not convinced of its benevolence. Is the civic economy only a trendy approach to sidestep government budget cuts?

Parallel sessions offered participants a chance to explore a few of the innovators of the civic economy: Meanwhile Space, a very inspiring company who finds temporary use for empty buildings; St. Paul's Church, a renovated and transformed church into an important cultural and community center; the School of Life, a bookstore and ‘school’ that offers courses about living life; and Hackney Co-operative Development Trust, an economic development organization with strong ties to the local community and civic economy. Not only did we visit these initiatives, we also met with the people at the forefront, heard about their projects, and exchanged ideas about the goals, impact, and future of their projects.
 
But it was hardy only listening. Learning and sharing also came from our evening ‘Open Space’ consortium. This session gave us a chance to deepen the knowledge we gained from our parallel meetings by discussing and debating—in a converted factory, no less!—topics that came up during the previous 24 hours. We deliberated tough questions about the benefits and detriments of urban regeneration, gentrification, and the roles of groups, communities, and organizations in the evolution of the ‘planned city’ versus the ‘lived city.’

Results

Our last day was dedicated to taking it all in: a long urban walking exploration of two East London areas, combined with smaller group discussion and anthropological research. We divided in to two groups and either walked through the Olympic area via the Fat Walk, a walking and cycling riverside parkland leading from the Olympic Park to the Thames River, following the Lea River; or another walk, which guided us through the ‘sub-culture’ nodes of East London, exploring Columbia Street, the very hip Redchurch and Shoreditch High Streets, down Brick Lane, along the canal belt, and finally ending at the Broadway Market in Hackney, near London Fields. The walks were yet another opportunity to research and discover differences and similarities of the ‘planned’ and ‘lived’ city, and investigate the ways in which East Londoners manage to join both worlds.