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!