30th April 2012

The Social Life of Cities in Chicago

Nicola Bacon & Saffron Woodcraft

The Social Life of Cities is a new collaboration between Cisco, the Young Foundation and Social Life, to work with city leaders to drive urban innovation and to think differently about creating thriving and sustainable places. The Social Life of Cities project will work at the intersection of urban design, social design and technology design to develop and test new policy, investment, and urban design models that can make cities more successful.

Social Life is the Young Foundation’s newest venture. It has been established as a centre of expertise in social sustainability. It takes forwards the Young Foundation’s 50 year heritage of work on community dynamics, including the 2011 report “Design for Social Sustainability”.

The Young Foundation brings together insights, innovation and entrepreneurship to meet social needs. The Young Foundation works across the UK and internationally – through research, influencing policy, and creating new organisations, often with imaginative uses of new technology.

Cisco has shaped the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners to become the worldwide leader in networking - transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate.

This presentation 1.  The starting point 2.  The Social Life of Cities overview 3.  Our previous work 4.  The Social Life of Cities Chicago:

initial thoughts

1 The starting point

We continue to build neighbourhoods that fail to thrive as flourishing communities

This is a global issue. And one of increasing importance.

We believe we can learn from both the mistakes, and the hopes, of the past.

Our tools: a framework for social sustainability

The Young Foundation/Social Life Social Sustainability Framework, 2011

Our tools: understanding how places innovate

1  Prompts

2  Proposals

3  Prototypes

4  Sustaining5  Scaling

6  Systemic  change

The Young Foundation social innovation spiral

A focus on lived experience: using ethnography and service design techniques; understanding and measuring wellbeing and resilience; building on and boosting community assets.

2 The Social Life of Cities: overview

The Social Life of Cities Our aspiration is to accelerate urban innovation and reshape the way that city leaders and urban planners think about creating and shaping thriving and sustainable places. Co-design and co-produce new ideas and approaches to urban innovation with city partners, connecting social design to larger questions of sustainability and viability of cities. Our aim is to change thinking and practice about the potential of social design.

Objectives

The urban innovators network

Creating a new body of thought and

practice

Tailored local projects with

individual cities

Structure of the programme

The urban innovators network

Creating a new body of thought and

practice

Tailored local projects with

individual cities

Engagement with global experts (on urbanism, innovation and sustainability) and other cities through virtual networking, TelePresences, and events Profile, by association with a leading network and through the production of outputs showcasing the work.

Aim to create opportunities for stakeholders to think differently about tackling urban problems. Stimulate ‘creative disruption’ Combining advisory and project development support, aim to co-creative practical local innovation projects and pilots.

Capturing the lessons from our work with individual cities and the urban innovators network, we will develop and document our experience. This will give individual city partners the offer to shape new research and policy directions.

The offer to cities An opportunity to build a practical understanding of how macro city-wide strategies for economic, cultural, technological and social development connect to the experience of local communities. A testing ground for new ways of working which will generate valuable lessons for the wider area. The opportunity to make a step change in their practice and policies.

Higher international profile as leaders in urban innovation.

Engagement with global experts and other cities, and association with a leading network that will showcase the work of the collaborative and of individual city partners, shaping future urban policy.

2 Our previous work

Hands on innovation: practitioners workshops in in Malmö, Sweden

Framing Malmö’s innovation story

1  Prompts

2  Proposals

3  Prototypes

4  Sustaining5  Scaling

6  Systemic  change

Disengaged communities, poor education, high levels of disadvantage

Consensus about need for new approach

Data/studies on social need

External inspiration, social design principles, co-design solutions with participants

Learn from success of environmental sustainability programmes

Malmö is widely known for its green tech innovation, in Scandanavia the city is also renowned for its social problems that have sometimes flared into violence.

Future communities: our work in Barking, East London

Great Fleete •  Private development built

in 80’s

Barking Riverside

•  Location of the new school and community centre

Our question: when new residents and existing residents start living together, how can a strong, cohesive community be designed so that all the residents feel they belong?

Barking Reach

•  Private development built in 80’s

Thames View

•  Predominantly low -rise council houses built in 50s & 60s

•  Roughly 50% white & 50% BME residents

Eco Bicester: working with council and developer of exemplar stage to build social sustainability into the ambitious new development, planned to be 20,000 homes over 20 years.

Community resilience

•  Resilience is the ability of a person, group or community to adapt and ‘bounce back’ in the face of adversity.

•  A key component of wellbeing, how we feel about the quality of our lives.

•  The Young Foundation has developed WARM, the wellbeing and resilience measurement tool.

•  Measuring wellbeing and resilience gives insights and produce a picture of a local area that complements deprivation indicators.

•  It also helps identify interventions to increase individual and/ or community wellbeing and resilience, to track impact of interventions and set realistic limitations.

•  A focus on wellbeing and resilience reveals a more detailed understanding of the local and city wide situation that conventional statistics can provide.

Wellbeing and resilience in Poplar, East London

Prototyping and testing

Using methods more often used in the private sector to take apart, test, manipulate and refine new ideas. Traditionally used in product design – now increasingly applied to meeting social needs. Not about designers taking over, instead a shared process with other disciplines and with communities. Allows initiatives to be tested cheaply and relatively quickly, an alternative to conventional piloting.

4. The Social Life of Cities in Chicago: initial thoughts

Chicago has a proud and flourishing tradition of community engagement and community organising. We welcome the opportunity to work in the city, complementing strong existing work with our expertise and experience of urban innovation and social sustainability

The Lakeside development is an ambitious project that has many of the same objectives and challenges as new towns internationally, one of the next generation of new towns that has the potential for social innovation and social sustainability to be built into the thinking from the earliest stage.

A challenge is how to spread the benefits of the investment and development to the wider neighbourhoods around the development site, supporting local communities to be able to take advantage of new opportunities and innovation thinking, and to create an area where everyone feels that they belong.

The site in 1970 and in 1996

For more information contact nicola.bacon@social-life.co or saffron.woodcraft@social-life.co www.social-life.co