Qualities of Slow Communities

At the Slow Dialogue on Friday evening (21 Aug), the group unpacked some important issues critical to achieving Slow(er) communities. The difficult part isn't only to imagine projects, but also to ensure that these are appropriate and inspiring for the community at hand. Perhaps even more important is how to successfully engage members of that community as collaborators in any design idea?

Saskia Hoogendoorn provided great examples from the work of her organization, Stellig Communications, like Bakkie in de Buurt, a mobile coffee terrace that creates a temporary public space for neighbors to meet and share.

We decided to try to make a list of qualities that are vital to successful engagement in local communities. Here are three that we agreed on, and hopefully participants in the dialogue will add to the list!

1) LISTENING
Judith van den Boom says it's important to "Be quiet and then others will start talking!"

2) TAKING TIME
Designers should exercise mindfulness. People participate in different ways and at different rates.

3) GENEROSITY
Slow designing in the spirit of giving.

4) ??

5) ??


Please help us fill it in :)

Towards a NEW MUTUALISM

Slow repair for me is about designing new communications: in the words of John W. Gardner, the founder of the U.S. citizen's organization Common Cause, "cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community."

All across the world citizens and social entrepreneurs are answering a call to 'stewardship'. They are self-organizing, sharing information and finding new ways to resolve complex community problems.

This call has been accelerated by the collapse of land values, the capacity of the internet to encourage networking between people and the push towards mutuality and localization that is an emerging answer to the indebtedness of the western economies.

In the U.K., I've been involved in several initiatives that exemplify this new mutualism.

In the former coal-mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire, this beautiful bridge was created by exceptionally close working between the community as client and the project architect, Renato Benedetti.

In the former steel-making town of Middlesbrough, North East England, a $15m investment by the authorities in urban agriculture and other action supporting the improvement of healthy living in the town, was triggered by a thousand people deciding to grow their own food in public places of their own choice.

Just now in the former docklands area of Butetown, Cardiff Bay, Wales, I am working with local people to find ways and means in which social relations can be improved by networking existing online networks of local people and triggering the new production of digital content.

And in a project in Moscow later this year, we plan to bring communities together to start a process of improving their physical environment and a small army of digital enthusiasts will turn digital reporters, go out in to their city, find out what needs to be repaired in their city and feed their observations back online and in mobile applications.

Slow repair is about active involvement of citizens in the revival of the places in which they live and work; and especially useful to communities that are fragmented, disempowered but share an industrial heritage, inheritance or identity.

SLOW COMMUNITIES > Re-thinking social relationships

Please join slowLab on Friday, 21 August 2009 for the final Slow Repair Dialogue:

SLOW COMMUNITIES> Re-thinking Social Relationships
Re-imagining production, cross-cultural exchanges and collaborative creativity.

Featured presenters Judith van den Boom and Gunter Wehmeyer will present their current project 'RE-WIRE RELATION_China edition'

when: Friday 21 August 2009 from 18.30 to 20.30
location: Prinses Irenestraat 19, tucked into the Beatrix Park in Amsterdam Zuidas
for directions, look here

> meet at Platform21 (1e floor) at 18.00 to view the 'Repairing' exhibition
> dialogue begins at 18.30
> light refreshments will be served

Please email us to RESERVE a place!

Community Generative Urbanism

source: 00:/ zerozero architects


Indy Johar of 00:/ (zerozero) Architects in London (UK) sent over this image to illustrate how communities are enabling sustainability transition. 00:/ is focused on context-specific responses to existing local spaces to transform them into sustainable places. Learn more about their projects here >

Transition Network: "a social experiment on a massive scale"

Earlier this year, Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman of Transition Network published a structural document within which they state SEVEN KEY PRINCIPLES OF TRANSITION:
1) Positive Visioning (to generate new stories and myths)
2) Help People Access Good Information and Trust Them to Make Good Decisions (to enable truth and respect)
3) Inclusion and Openness (to reach the entire community)
4) Enable Sharing and Networking (to build a collective body of experience)
5) Build Resilience (to deal with the shock)
6) Inner and Outer Transition (to shift the dominant psychological framework and world view)
7) Subsidiarity: self-organization and decision making at the appropriate level (to layer local upon local empowerment)
[source: Transition Network Ltd, ‘Who we are and What we do’ (Hopkins and Lipman, 2009)]

"All living systems are networks..."

“All living systems are networks of smaller components, and the web
of life as a whole is a multi-layered structure of living systems nestling
within other living systems – networks within networks”.

- Fritjof Capra 'The Web of Life,' as quoted in Hopkins and Lipman, 'Transition Network Ltd: Who We Are and What We Do' (2009)

Transitioning > Foodprint symposium and exhibition

Above right, a sampling of culiblog Transition Tea to be served at the Slow Dialogue on 28 June

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The next Slow Repair Dialogue takes place this Friday evening 19 June 2009 from 18.30 to 20.30 at Platform21:

19 June: SLOW TRANSITIONS > Re-thinking Systems
Restoring sustainable practices... Envisioning new local landscapes... Systems level strategies for relocating human values and transitioning to sustainability... and more!

We've thought it wise to expand the SLOW TRANSITIONS conversation to be inclusive of a major project opening in Den Haag next week, 'FOODPRINT. Food for the City' at Stroom Den Haag. slowLab network member Debra Solomon of culiblog will present work alongside an esteemed international group in this project focusing on "crucial moments relating to food, food production and the city." An all-day symposium on Friday 26 June will take an indepth look at the roles food can play in the design of sustainable cities, while an exhibition running from 27 June to 23 August explores this topic through the work of artists and designers.

In addition to our 19 June Slow Dialogue, slowLab has added an extra SLOW TRANSITIONS session featuring FOODPRINT contributing artist Debra Solomon on Sunday afternoon 28 June 2009 at the culiblog Experimental Garden in Amsterdam Noord. Take the Buikslotermeer ferry from behind Centraal Station and walk on for 1 minute. The dialogue begins at 15.00. Transition Tea will be served :)

To participate, you must email to RESERVE a space: info[at]slowlab.net. Light refreshments served at both.

Engaging the public

How to get these ideas in front of the public to stimulate new ways of thinking, making and doing? Do installations like this one work? Is it too didactic? We'd like to hear your comments on how to engage and activate others in this and other Slow projects.

Ann Thorpe's 'Low Product' scenario

Ann Thorpe, author of 'The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability' has posted an interesting article on Core77 about design's role in shifting consumption behaviours.

She states, "The challenge may well be in overcoming the myth that economic growth represents some sort of natural order. In fact it arises not from natural order but rather from years of political and economic decision making that prioritize economic growth."

"Society has implicitly accepted the idea that continuous increases in consumption are equal to continuous increases in wellbeing. But evidence from across cultures, age groups and income groups shows that this equation does not compute. Rather, after a person reaches a relatively low level (by Western standards) of material wealth, as corny as it may sound, their happiness hinges on inner growth, through the quality of their personal relationships, sense of self, and participation in the community."

"If we're serious about finding alternatives to consumerism, to shopping and acquiring positional goods, then we need civic places that catalyze these alternatives."

Read the whole article here >

Why are we talking about 'Slow' Repairing?

At slowLab we found plenty of slow values inherent in the Repairing project initiated at Platform21, but we also felt the debate could be broader.

Hence our big, slow question: Why limit the idea only to products?
We think there are loads of things to repair, renew and regenerate in this world. That’s where Slow Repairing comes in.

We’re applying principles and practices of Slow Design to expand the parameters of the Repairing conversations initiated at Platform21. We want to open more radical conversations about RE-IMAGINING MATERIAL INTERACTIONS, including a re-think of the infrastructure and belief systems that got us to mass consumption in the first place. We’ll expose some of the ideas, proposals and real projects for SYSTEMS-LEVEL CHANGES that need to be adopted to renew our world and viably transition to a slower, more sustainable future. And we’ll explore several SLOW STRATEGIES for repairing human relationships, ways of communicating and collaborating, all with a view to COMMUNITY REGENERATION.

And the dialogues themselves are created in a Slow format, inviting small groups to discuss and debate.

Please join us for one of the next ones:

Friday 19 June: SLOW TRANSITIONS > Rethinking Systems
Restoring sustainable practices... Envisioning new local landscapes... Systems level strategies for relocating human values and transitioning to sustainability. Featured presenter: Debra Solomon of culiblog

Friday 21 August: SLOW COMMUNITIES > Renewing Social Relationships
Repairing/preparing people and societies for radical change… Re-imagining production, cross-cultural exchanges and collaborative creativity. Featured presenters: Bas Kools and Judith van den Boom

All gatherings take place at Platform21 in Amsterdam. For directions, look here>

Finding new ways and values

pictured here: Black Pudding project logo and the exhibition at Pantar social workshop

Stefanija Najdovska and Jolan van den Wiel of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie designLAB presented their project 'Black Pudding' at the Slow Repair Dialogue 'SLOW CONSUMPTION' on 29 May. Black Pudding is an upcycling project in collaboration with the Pantar social workshop, a clearinghouse for secondhand items the provides people who are out of work with a reason to stay busy, repairing and re-selling unwanted items. Students of the Rietveld designLAB, under the coordination of Sophie Krier, voted democratically to develop this project out of 20 core issues proposed by designLAB students. They worked alongside people at a Pantar recycling plant in Amsterdam, "looking for potential in not obvious items" and re-designing them as new products.

The result was a collection under the name Black Pudding, and the connection with the topic of Repairing is obvious: fixing and upgrading discarded items and thereby extending product life cycles. Less obvious is the impact of working alongside the people at Pantar, which revealed the productive potential of conversation and collaboration with people the students might otherwise never have considered working with.

At slowLab we believe that an important component of shifting toward more sustainable modes of production and consumption will be participatory models for including a broader community in the design process. Given that most design schools teach their students autonomy over collaboration, Black Pudding has given Rietveld students a positive taste of the reality that is to come.

"We forget the consequences of what we imagine"

"We forget the consequences of what we imagine." A striking and sobering statement by Ed van Hinte of Lightness Studios during the SLOW CONSUMPTION dialogue at Platform21. He also stated that being very very careful is the best way to make sure things don't go too wrong, he lamented the tendency for designers to patronize the rest of us, and he pointed out that "doing nothing" is probably the best way to slow down consumption (as long as you don't get depressed).

van Hinte's most recent book (and there are several that came before) called 'First Read This' is an inspiring while cautionary guide to systems engineering-- mapping dreams, failures and above all complexity in the implementation of large development projects.

SLOW CONSUMPTION > Re-imagining Material Interactions

pictured, clockwise from top left: Arlene Birt, 'Background Stories' sketch; Maria Blaisse, 'Bamboo moving meshes'; Monika Hoinkis, 'Living With Things'; Martin Ruiz de Azua, 'Human Chair.'


The weather was glorious and tempting on Friday evening, resulting in a more intimate group of 10 who gathered inside at Platform21 for the Slow Repair Dialogue, SLOW CONSUMPTION. The group represented a range countries (Netherlands, US, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Italy, and South Korea), bringing their diverse backgrounds to bear on the gathering.

After introductions and sips of wine, slowlab director Carolyn Strauss began with the assertion that SLOW CONSUMPTION looks beyond the everyday use of products to re-imagine material interactions. This includes addressing the larger flows that those products are part of, like consumption behaviors and motivations, imbedded cultural expectations, and local vs. global production models.

She showed the work of a handful of designers that challenge contemporary notions of consumption. Arlene Birt's ongoing project, 'Background Stories' upgrades product packaging to reveal the whole story behind the product. Judith van den Boom's social collaborations in China offer a slower approach to widely-accepted manufacturing practices by developing 'warm relationships' with the Chinese factories and workers who help make her products. Martin Ruiz de Azua's Human Chair questions whether material goods are always the best way to fulfill our needs.

Carolyn ended with the work of designer and materials innovator Maria Blaisse (NL), focusing on her most recent project Bamboo 'moving meshes' where flexible bamboo structures in intersection with human bodies enable us to envision more symbiotic relationships with the built environment. Blaisse contributed her poem, Vouwblad 5 (2008), for the consideration of our group:

"form forms forms
embedded in the material, the form reveals itself
to experience the freedom of not giving a name to things
to see what emerges from one form
inciting the flow of continuous creation "

Blaisse calls it a poem "to visualize that when one really takes care of all aspects of designing it will cause an energy that is connecting and creating coherence in architecture, fashion, products, music, dance... Repair will be natural and no one will every throw away the form." It's something like what slowLab network member Stuart Walker has coined 'evolving permanence,' and it's an idea that seems worthy of further reflection.

Slow Repair Dialogues > DATES AND TOPICS

Please join slowLab for one of our upcoming dialogues:

Friday 24 April: SLOW REPAIR > slowLab philosophy meets 'Repairing'
Slow perspectives on repairing through the lens of our six Slow Design Principles

Friday 29 May: SLOW CONSUMPTION > Re-imagining Material Interactions
Reflecting on consumption beliefs and experiences of materiality… Revealing alternative modes of designing for and interacting with the built environment... and more

Friday 19 June: SLOW TRANSITIONS > Rethinking Systems
Restoring sustainable practices... Envisioning new local landscapes... Systems level strategies for relocating human values and transitioning to sustainability.

Friday 21 August: SLOW COMMUNITIES > Renewing Social Relationships
Repairing/preparing people and societies for radical change… Re-imagining production, cross-cultural exchanges and collaborative creativity

All gatherings take place at Platform21 in Amsterdam. For directions, look here>

To participate, RSVP to info[at]slowlab.net
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