Translator: Bingruo (Betty) Liu Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
I am a person who works in verbs: "engage," "catalyze," "design."
My work is about process.
I've spent the last 10 years testing hypotheses of all sizes
to discover if adults would play together
by setting up hopscotch courts in New York City,
to explore what happens when we repair infrastructure with Lego,
to see what kids do when supported to plan and design buildings.
I call myself a city builder.
City building is this unusual occupation.
Each of us is some cocktail of architect, planner, designer,
social worker, policy geek, consultant, community organizer, and advocate.
While some of us hold institutional credentials,
many city builders do not.
That's the beauty of it.
Credentials alone do not a city builder make.
What unites us, we city builders,
is that we are the ones who let cities break.
We let cities break.
When a city builder sees something that isn't working,
we don't ask, How do we fix it?
We ask, What else is possible?
As a society, we have a tendency to want to fix things,
to put things back to how they were.
But city builders recognize that if something is breaking,
it means the last attempt to fix it didn't work.
We're not attached to the status quo.
We look beyond how things are supposed to be.
And we work with how things actually are,
looking to people in communities
to help us understand how to best shape them.
Cities break in many ways.
Sometimes it's the roads or the buildings,
sometimes it's the institutions and processes that created them.
Let me give you an example.
Eight years ago, I found myself in Kingston-Galloway-Orton Park,
standing in front of a place called East Scarborough Storefront.
The Storefront was a social service hub located in the neighborhood,
and a grant I received from the City of Toronto had led me there.
My task from the City was to lead a public art project
in this "priority" neighborhood
with a group of youth who had been described as disengaged.
When I got there,
the Storefront's director helped me see
that the local youth had little need for the public art I'd come to build
and instead needed a safe place where they could meet after school.
These youth were among the 75,000 people using a repurposed 1960s police station
as their community center,
where homework clubs shared space with old jail cells.
They were making use of a facility
that did little to serve the community's actual need.
So was it possible to serve the actual need?
We decided to explore.
Every Thursday night for almost seven years,
we convened kids and youth in the community
to plan, design, fundraise for,
and build a new East Scarborough Storefront.
We let the kids know that if they didn't show up,
a building wouldn't get built.
We started with the $30,000 public art grant,
and then we kept going to discover what else was possible.
Seven years later, these kids have shown us what is possible.
They are doing it. They are building a building.
And they've raised two million dollars to pay for its construction.
And they keep going.
Last year, they patented a green building innovation.
This community wasn't broken,
the process that brought me there was.
But the fixing I was sent there to do,
the art project,
was giving the community something they didn't want or need.
They knew what they needed.
We just helped them through a process to reframe the problem
and make their vision happen on their terms.
People love stories with outcomes like the Storefront,
but we resist the process it takes to get us there;
instead, we default to fixing things
because we're comfortable with what we already know.
As children,
we're introduced to the concept of solving problems the right way.
And over time, our "what if" muscle falls into atrophy.
This became clear to me recently
when I started teaching at the University of Toronto
in the City Studies program.
We created a new innovative course called "Workshop"
for policy and urban planning students
to develop skills they hadn't learned in their textbooks.
On the first day of the course, I invited students to convene in a circle
to talk about the experience of the course,
not the content or the grading,
the experience.
It was to be creative, emergent, and collaborative.
And it was clear these students were uncomfortable.
And it was hard for me to be the person delivering something
I wasn't sure they wanted.
It made me wonder if this course was for my own interest
or for those of my students
because these students have figured out how to thrive
in a conventional learning system:
read the readings, show up to class, do the assignments, hand it in on time.
Instead, we invited them to co-create
and participate in the design of the course as it unfolded.
Most unsettling of all, they would be marked on the following:
empathy, insight, and effort.
Students later reflected
that this first class was a terrifying educational moment.
(Laughter)
How would they know if they had the right answer?
In our 12-week course, students learned
that you don't need to be an expert to make change happen,
just a willing collaborator.
They had gone their entire education never attending a public meeting,
and when they did,
learned that public consultation
is about a million experienced design considerations:
from the arrangement of chairs to the timing of food,
to creating processes that inspire dialogue
rather than communicate decisions.
Essentially, the students lost their minds.
And then they discovered their brains.
They were awakened by the possibility of focusing on process.
["Ninety percent of my brain's capacity has been dormant."]
In a subsequent conversation with the program chair,
it occurred to us that we have been trying to teach our students
how to be city builders.
Yet we continue to build cities in this established right-answer way
that my students are so used to.
And the cities we have are amazing in so many ways.
And they're on life support in so many others.
Our cities are failing the interests of many citizens,
especially those who moved to the urban fringe for affordable housing,
only to find communities underserved
by the transit system on which they depend.
And when natural disaster strikes, they are the first places to get hit.
And they can't adapt,
because there's been little investment in helping them to do so.
When our cities can adapt, it means they are resilient.
Resilience comes from distributing pressure points across the system.
It's not just about infrastructure,
diversifying pressure off of roads and transit.
It's about broadening the spectrum of voices and power to make decisions.
So in times of crisis,
lots of people recognize their agency to improve the city.
Cities have not yet diversified this ownership of decision making,
and therefore we are not yet resilient.
This is top of mind for me because Canada has become an urban nation.
More than 80% of Canadians live in cities.
And I've shared examples of what the challenges might look like
when you're dealing with 30 students or 100 residents.
But what happens when the challenge occurs at scale,
when crisis hits across the nation?
The same need that was showing up at the Storefront
for more community involvement and decision making
is the same challenge showing up across Canadian cities.
Our cities are stressed,
and people living in them
have the best knowledge about how to help them adapt.
But our citizens have yet to be trusted to lead the way.
So we decided to try.
We wanted to see what happens when any interested Canadian
can help create national urban policy
because Canada needs one right now.
We need a plan for our urban areas.
We called our effort "We Are Cities."
And we started by going to people first.
Our engagement process required markers, paper, copy of a tool kit,
and in three hours,
anyone across the country could contribute their voice to a national conversation.
In six months,
thousands of Canadians across the country engaged at the local level,
convening round tables in their communities,
posting ideas online,
and giving feedback on the initiative itself.
And their comments were not always glowing.
The consistent feedback shows that people weren't just wagging their fingers.
They wanted to help make the process better.
And the thing is, if you enable people to lead, they will, and they are.
Many groups submitted their idea for the national agenda.
Others just used We Are Cities
as a reason to convene around some important local conversations.
The policy document, not unlike the essays my students were so used to writing,
became the less important output.
More valuable was the experience for a broad cross section of citizens
to feel permission to be part of a conversation
they're usually left out of.
The permission didn't come from our team.
We were simply a catalyst.
The approach to making policy for our cities is broken,
and instead of creating more expert-like documents,
we created an opportunity for people to shape their own.
When we're asked to share the We Are Cities model, that's it.
We let the people do it.
When we let go of expert control, people step up at scale.
When we let go of established outcomes, we get more interesting outputs.
City building is this imperfect science, and it's hard some days.
It's unfinished, it's messy, it's scary,
and it can be dismissed by those looking for reasons not to do it.
Several months into the We Are Cities project,
I was in the faculty office at U of T, and I dusted this book off the shelf -
"Canada: an urban agenda," 1979.
And the first thing I thought was, Is it better than ours?
I was scared to open it because I was worried
that this 35-year-old document was actually going be good,
and our work would be relegated to a meaningless duplication.
It also worried me that 35 years from now our We Are Cities output
would become just another dusty book on the shelf.
I noticed my impulse to want to control the outcome,
to make sure We Are Cities was really, really good.
The same impulse I rally so hard against in others.
Because this work is hard,
convincing people, even sometimes convincing myself,
that process is more important than outcomes is hard.
But it was lying on the shelf for a reason.
Experts had created this book
without involving the public in the process.
And here we are in 2015 with the same challenges as 1979.
And why?
Because we need to let go of the idea that the best solutions come from experts.
Because it's a social fabric that's created
when more Canadians hold agencies for the decisions
that impact their local communities, that will actually change our cities.
At the East Scarborough Storefront, the strong social fabric
enables residents to improve the community center and beyond.
Social infrastructure helps us become resilient.
It makes me think of cycles in nature:
a seed is planted, a sapling emerges,
a tree grows, and that tree eventually breaks and falls.
When it falls, it's not a tragedy
but an opportunity for new trees to emerge in its place.
We do the opposite in the way we build cities.
We try and keep the tree up, we put braces on it,
we bring all the energy and resources towards keeping it as is,
rather than accepting it's a tree that's ready to fall,
whose passing will seed opportunities for new and unknown things.
I recently met urbanist Jan Gehl, who shared a lovely anecdote in this vein.
He told the story of the Embarcadero Freeway
in San Francisco,
that fell as a result of an earthquake.
Instead of fixing it, the city decided to test what would happen if they didn't.
Citizens still found their way from point A to point B.
And the Embarcadero
has since become a beautiful waterfront promenade for pedestrians.
In this spirit, Jan Gehl wished Toronto a little earthquake.
(Laughter)
I believe he was inviting us to let our city break,
to collar cities of outdated solutions
and recognize opportunities for what's next.
Allowing our cities to break
requires that we let go of our fixed ideas of outcomes
as well as our role in those outcomes.
Those roles need permission to break too.
So the next time you're running late for work,
and a full streetcar passes you by as you wait at the stop,
instead of cursing and asking, Why don't they fix it?
challenge yourself to ask, What else is possible?
because you might be surprised to discover that you too are a city builder.
Thank you.
(Applause)