Creating a vibrant community
After decades of change, a neighborhood was falling apart. Successive initiatives had failed to deliver lasting improvements, and local governors were at a loss for ways to cope with multiple intersecting problems that were tarnishing the lives of the community.
These problems had to be addressed at their roots, by finding solutions within the community itself. By engaging leaders, key stakeholders, and the public in open dialogue, studio––gf reconnected the neighborhood with its assets and enabled a vision for the future to emerge.
Where we began
The rapid expansion of the city's population had brought about unexpected shifts in the dynamics that underpinned people's quality of life. In the neighborhood we were focusing on, stores were closing, businesses were leaving, and public spaces were in decline.
There was mounting evidence of fractures in the community, with a marked increase in violence and environmental damage.
The local administration, after years spent exhausting its energy and resources on failed initiatives, was open to new ideas – and that openness was a vital ingredient in the success of our involvement.
Phase 1: Learning and strategizing
Every transformation must begin with a deep understanding of the history and context in which it will take place. To gain this understanding, members of the studio––gf team settled in the neighborhood to experience what it was like to live there. They were joined by local facilitators and social workers who helped them establish connections and gain direct insights into the area.
This research included first-hand experiences of the environment, including shops, schools, gathering places, travel routes, and natural spaces. The team met important civil actors and spoke with longstanding residents to learn of the neighborhood's history, its dynamics, and its challenges. They also worked with the local administration to understand the area's relationship with the city, and how previous policies and pressures had affected its fortunes.
This thorough exploration of the locality fed into the creation of a transformational strategy based on three central paradigms:
- self-leadership and agency: promoting internal leadership and individual agency, while avoiding and reducing external reliance.
- wholeness: blending disparate aspects into a single, self-fuelling, transformational dynamic.
- resilience: fostering local economic and ecological resilience, while addressing the challenges of climate change.
Phase 2: Planting the seeds
With the strategy in place, the next step was to embed its principles within the community through a series of initiatives.
First goal: create agency and ownership through experimentation
In a series of interventions and events throughout the community, we invited residents to reimagine local places, streets, and landmarks, and to design and create the changes they wanted to see. From planting new trees on a roadside or a playground, to changing the way traffic flows, to communal celebrations of important events, these changes invited people to take ownership of the place where they lived, and to shape their community.
Second goal: create a network of leaders
During these interventions and experiments, it became clear which members of the community were well suited to leadership. These natural figureheads were invited to gatherings to discuss their hopes, dreams, and ideas for the area, and as mutual goals and bonds of trust developed, a leadership group was established.
This group worked together to identify common interests, tensions, and opportunities, leading to the formation of the Community Leadership Council – a public forum that took the neighborhood's development into its own hands. The leadership coaching and facilitation skills of studio––gf provided a bedrock of support, but all strategic decisions were entirely the council's own, as self-reliance was established from the very beginning.
Third goal: define the role of the administration
With the emergence of new change agents in the community, it was vital that the existing administration played a complementary role as enablers and supporters of the Community Leadership Council, channelling its expertise and administrative power into the new engine of transformation.
At the same time, the administration had a stabilizing role to play, maintaining the neighborhood's infrastructure while remaining committed to the long-term goal of transformation and self-leadership by the community.
Phase 3: Creating lasting structures
The CLC represented the seed of a new structure, but by no means the sole driver of successful transformation. The neighborhood's transformational strategy was comprised of at least three key elements:
a) a commercial council, committed to creating business.
b) a civic council, committed to engaging people in the co-creation of the changes they wished to see.
c) a community development council, working across all different parts of the community.
Integral to studio––gf's approach is the creation of those elements by and for the community, because experience tells us that any top-down imposition of transformation is bound to fail.
In the case of this neighborhood, the CLC evolved into an overall developmental council, with sub-councils allocated to different areas of work. Over time, these sub-councils broke away and established themselves as independent entities, while the CLC continues to provide the overall strategy, serving as a seedbed from which leaders emerge.
The results
A transformation on this scale takes time, and it took a while for the results of this deep, wide-ranging work to become tangible. However, the neighborhood today is a prosperous, attractive, and inviting place inhabited by residents who take pride in living there. It is a thriving, self-organizing community, and a model for other city districts to learn from.
Key learnings
- Self-leadership and agency are essential for community turnarounds. Establishing the qualities from outside requires special efforts and strategies that avoid creating dependency on external leadership and consulting.
- Trusting the process is vital. Our experience tells us which elements make for a self-reliant community, and we trusted that these would manifest in their own way in this specific neighborhood.