Simon Nielsen 5/30/22 Simon Nielsen 5/30/22

Building Inclusive Communities

“When we think of someone as being poor, homeless, disabled, non-English speaking, at-risk, addicted, mentally ill, unemployed or retired, we tend to focus on what that person is missing rather than on the contributions they could make. A truly inclusive neighborhood recognizes that everyone needs community and that community needs everyone.” Community activator, Jim Diers, examines the potential found in real inclusion.

By Jim Diers, community activator

I like to think of myself as a community builder, but I know that community isn’t necessarily a good. A community is simply a group of people who identify with and support one another. Most communities are one kind of people who share a particular interest or identity. Whether they are nazis, gangs, or gated, communities can exclude and even oppress people who are different than themselves.

Communities are at their best when they are inclusive, a quality that seems to be in short supply these days. There is so much stereotyping and polarization with people divided by politics, religion and culture. There is also an epidemic of loneliness as far too many people find themselves at the margins of community.

That is why I am particularly passionate about the potential of place-based communities. It is in our neighborhoods and small towns that people with a variety of identities reside. True, some places have become boringly homogeneous, but most places include people with differences whether those are defined by interest, age, politics, religion, income, race, culture, sexual orientation, abilities, employment, or housing status. Our towns and neighborhoods provide a context for a community with a common identity that can encompass many otherwise separate identities.

Just because diverse people may live in the same neighborhood, however, does not guarantee an inclusive community. Even in places that are quite diverse, I find that the community groups are less so. Neighborhood associations in Seattle, for example, tend to have a higher percentage of older, white homeowners than does the neighborhood as a whole. Local faith-based groups are typically segregated not only by religion but by race. Youth and seniors belong to different organizations. There is a myriad of interest-based groups, each with its own adherents.

While there are often good reasons for people to associate with others who are like themselves, such homogeneity will do little to address the challenges of social isolation, stereotyping and polarization. Moreover, a neighborhood will have negligible impact at City Hall if the activists can’t demonstrate that they represent the multiple interests and identities of their place. Here, then, are some of the lessons I’ve learned about how to build a more inclusive community.

Listen More

Most associations have a very narrow agenda and their community outreach generally involves promoting that agenda. Then, when people don’t join their campaign, they blame people for being apathetic. No one is apathetic. Everyone cares deeply about something. So, if associations really want to get more members, they should spend more time listening and less promoting.

Many neighborhood associations in the United States, for example, are focused on land use issues. Then, they complain about how difficult it is to engage tenants. If they listened to tenants, they would learn that tenants are often more concerned about issues such as housing affordability, access to transportation, public safety, and opportunities for their children.

In Canada, many of the neighborhood associations were initially organized to build and manage hockey and other facilities for community recreation. Some associations continue to have that focus but find it difficult to recruit new Canadians who may not share their passion for playing hockey or running a community center. The 157 Community Leagues in Edmonton are taking a different approach; they are co-sponsoring an Abundant Communities Initiative which is training volunteers to have conversations with their neighbors to learn what they care about.

Likewise, Sport New Zealand is concerned that fewer people are participating in organized sports and that significant portions of the population are underrepresented in its programs. So, sporting groups throughout the country are taking a community-led approach. In addition to promoting rugby, these groups are listening to community priorities and finding ways to support those initiatives.

Meet Less

Most associations rely on meetings as the primary vehicle for engaging their community. While some meetings are necessary, they are probably the least effective tool for engagement. Shy people don’t feel like their attendance makes any difference. Young people (and most others) feel bored. People seldom see results from their participation; one meeting just leads to another.

Projects are a great way to engage people. Everyone, including shy people, has something to contribute. Unlike with meetings, projects entail a short-term commitment and there’s always a result. When the Vancouver Foundation’s research revealed an alarming rate of social isolation, their solution wasn’t to fund discussion groups on the topic but rather to support more than 1000 community self-help projects in 17 communities across the lower mainland of British Columbia.

Social events can be an even more powerful way to build relationships, especially across differences. In Southeast Seattle, world dance parties attract hundreds of people from all ages and cultures as they teach one another their dance. Likewise, everyone relates to food. As Pam Wharton of Incredible Edibles in Todmorden, England puts it: “We’re a very inclusive movement. If you eat, you’re in.” Community gardens, farmers markets and community kitchens are wonderful tools for bringing diverse people together. Neighbors across Australia are welcoming refugees by inviting them over for dinner.

The power of going beyond meetings is evident in Westwood, a Cincinnati neighborhood of 35,000 residents. The Westwood Civic Association has been faithfully meeting for 150 years and advocating with City Hall around issues of crime, zoning and development. While the Civic Association has played a valuable role in a neighborhood with some very real and continuing problems, there were some other neighbors who believed that the primary challenge was to build local pride and participation across their diverse community. They described themselves as a drinking club with a civic problem when they first got together in 2010. Now known as Westwood Works, their pop-up beer gardens, street parties, art shows, movie nights, Saturday morning walks, holiday events and pop-up shops have engaged thousands of residents from all walks of life. In the process, the neighborhood and its business district are becoming revitalized.

Value Everyone

A recent survey sponsored by the Vancouver Foundation showed that half of the respondents found it difficult to make friends and that one-quarter experienced social isolation. Similar results are being reported in other cities around North America. What kind of community closes its door to so many of its neighbors?

There are many causes of social isolation, but one of the keys factors is that these neighbors are regarded as clients of a service system or as neighborhood problems rather than as fellow citizens. When we think of someone as being poor, homeless, disabled, non-English speaking, at-risk, addicted, mentally ill, unemployed or retired, we tend to focus on what that person is missing rather than on the contributions they could make. A truly inclusive neighborhood recognizes that everyone needs community and that community needs everyone.

I recently had the privilege of facilitating a workshop for graduates of the Opening Doors Community Leadership Program in Melbourne. The program is for people who are passionate about social inclusion including many individuals who enrolled because they were feeling excluded. Some of the 130 graduates are using their skills as artists, musicians, and thespians to help the community better understand and connect with people who have been labeled by their deficiencies. Others are leading and teaching in the University of the Third Age which recognizes that everyone has something to teach as well as something to learn whether that is a language, a craft, or how to be a better neighbor.

Network More

Many neighborhood associations recognize that they are insufficiently representative and try to recruit a more diverse membership. The individuals they recruit don’t always feel that welcome, however, because the leadership, agenda, language, culture and relationships have already been established. Moreover, those individuals may feel like tokens with no connection to people who share their perspective. It’s really difficult to get the full diversity of the community adequately represented in a single association.

It’s important to recognize that neighborhood associations are one among dozens of groups, both formal and informal, in every neighborhood. There are people organized around culture, sport, religion, labor, education, public safety, service, business, art, music, dance, history, politics, environment, gardening, youth, seniors, coffee, beer, addiction, cards, books, knitting, dogs, birds, and all sorts of other interests. No one group can adequately represent the neighborhood, but collectively, they can exercise real power.

Saul Alinsky understood this and worked to build neighborhood organizations comprised of local associations such as churches and unions. That’s the approach that we used in organizing the South End Seattle Community Organization (SESCO) in the late 1970s. Half of SESCO’s 26 member groups consisted of neighborhood associations and the other half were faith-based. There was a black Baptist church, a white Lutheran Church, a Japanese Methodist church, a Jewish synagogue, and so on. Each faith-based group, with the exception of the Catholic churches, tended to be pretty homogenous, but working together, SESCO reflected the full rainbow of the community.

It’s probably not possible to bring all of the community groups together, so you need to be strategic. Which groups have a lot of active members? Which groups include people who are currently underrepresented in your association? Meet the leaders of these groups and explore opportunities for collaboration.

Don’t limit yourself to working with groups that share your positions on issues. If you can develop consensus with groups that have been adversaries in the past, you can approach City Hall with a united front and be in a much more powerful position. Most important, if you want to be truly inclusive, look for opportunities to support the voices and initiatives of groups representing neighbors who have suffered from racism and injustice.

Of course, the power of collaboration goes beyond influencing City Hall. It’s also about building on the respective strengths of each group to accomplish those things best done by community. Perhaps the most important role of community is to find ways to better understand and care for one another.

Simon Nielsen 5/25/22 Simon Nielsen 5/25/22

Ninety Kilometres in Distance

“When the night's chill hit me through the iron window, I seemed to see a row of iron bars between us – the father and son, weeping towards each other; I seemed to see my boy who had lost his father’s guidance turning evil under gangsters’ control and fooling around on the streets all day...” Du Daobin, a government official, writer, and freelancer, was arrested in 2003 for internet writings and sentenced to imprisonment for “inciting subversion of state power”.

“When the night's chill hit me through the iron window, I seemed to see a row of iron bars between us – the father and son, weeping toward each other; I seemed to see my boy who had lost his father’s guidance turning evil under gangsters’ control and fooling around on the streets all days... ” Du Daobin, a government official, writer, and freelancer, was arrested in 2003 for Internet writings and sentenced to imprisonment for “inciting subversion of state power”.

By Du Daobin with Independent Chinese PEN Center

Between my child and me, there is just ninety kilometres. These mere ninety kilometres, however, appear to us to be insurmountable, like a natural moat.

The most uncomfortable part about jail was loneliness. To get rid of it, the inmates in the same cell often chatted. We talked about everything. Once talking about my behaviour when I was a newcomer, they said, “It was all right on the first two days, when you fell down snoring. After the third night, you slept much less. You went to bed late, turned over and over constantly, but also woke up early.”

What they told had been true! On the first two days, I had felt no weakness in myself, and my mind had been very strong. On the third day, remembering my child, I had suddenly realized a huge loophole in my presumption. What I had thought about before did not take him into account. The trial had proceeded to a sentence around ten years in prison: for inciting subversion of the State power, it would be five years; for a ringleader, over five years; for conspiracy with those abroad, more severe; for stealing the state secrets for a foreign institution, organization or element, an additional five years. All of these crimes, of course, are non-existent. However, I am aware that our Party has been well known as being capable to create any miracle. To make injustice, therefore, is a piece of cake. Since 1949, too many miscarriages of justice have been created, as small as the misfortune of my whole family during the Cultural Revolution, and as great as the aggrieved death of “President of the State”. When the night's chill hit me through the iron window, I seemed to see a row of iron bars between us – the father and son, weeping toward each other; I seemed to see my boy who had lost his father’s guidance turning evil under gangsters’ control and fooling around on the streets all days...

About the sixth day of my detention, when the interrogation was to end, my opponent asked: “Any thought in your mind?” “Missing my kid!” Before my detention, I had studied the interrogation psychology and thought that I could easily face the persecution. But at that time I could no longer suppress my yearning for my boy, so that the three words jumped out of my mouth before the secret policemen.

In my memory, there had never been so long a separation between my boy and me as a week. Every day when the wheeling sound of the food cart was heard from the corridor outside my cell, it was at the time in the past when I had waited for my boy to return home safely. The food had been ready on the table waiting for him. The sound of every step from the staircase, even on the first floor, would have automatically been identified for a while. “Thump, thump, thump!” – the sound of his rushing 2-3 stairs at a time. If there had been no such sound over half an hour, I would have put on my shoes, and gone to the courtyard gate to look around eagerly. If he had not appeared as expected, I would have to look for him along his way home. The return journey from his primary school is one kilometre through four streets in a way of ”W”, three of which were main trunk roads with heavy traffic.

The boy became my weak spot, my frailty. When I found my frailty, my opponent certainly realized it. The fellow suspects in my call were changed and replaced with juvenile offenders, aged 14 or 15, just similar to my kid, after my old inmates were sent away. It was said that I could look after them to avoid them getting injured in other cells. Getting along with these juvenile offenders day and night enhanced my worry for my own boy. One day, a guard took me out and in a friendly way handed me a rectangular paper packet.

“Knowing about your longing to see the kid,” he said, “I specially let your wife bring two photos. This is violating the regulation! So take good care of them, we don’t want to be found out.”

When I opened the packet, there were two photographs of my boy. In a flash, the tear glands did not follow my command but let tears break through the line of defence.

The photographs became a spring of tears. Each time they were uncovered, the tears would pour out. Eventually I realized that everything must have been arranged on purpose. Otherwise, nobody would have broken the regulation to give me the photos. After waking up, I tried hard not to look at them. The photos were inserted into a book placed on the floor in the corner, about a step away after getting down from our big common bed. When missing my boy, I tried not to get down from the bed but to cast a glance at that pile of books. Without my looking at a photograph, the boy could still emerge lively before my eyes. When he was born, the boy had looked very ugly, a clot of red flesh with a wrinkled face. Because an extractor had been used for his birth, his head had been particularly long. In the beginning, he had been almost a rubbish producer, into which the soups of carp or chicken had been fed at one end and soon the faeces or urine had come out at another. During the day, he had been all right as there had been someone to help with the care. The night had been hard on me. While sleeping well, I had suddenly got a kick on my waist. “Hurry up, hurry up, get him pissing!” After this, just closing my eyes, “wah…wah…wah…” His crying had again awakened me.

I do not know when that clot of flesh that knew nothing suddenly got my fondness. For something or nothing, we were going around together. First, he was held to my chest, and then riding on my shoulders, afterwards holding big hands with small hands, and finally walking shoulder to shoulder. First when wilfully crossing the street, he had been stopped by me. Then sometimes I would like to make a short cut but was pulled back, “Walk across the zebra lines! A good kid is always across the zebra lines!” I had become a no-good kid.

After June 4th, 1989, I could not see this world clearly and so simply concentrated my energies on my boy. The investment may naturally give its return. Unlike the relationship between my father and me who hardly spoke, my boy and I had a lot to talk about. The boy got good grades, and was pleasant looking. In his fourth grade, one early morning on our way to his school, we walked side by side, talking as usual.

“There is a girl classmate,” said the child to me. ”She asked me through another, ‘whether or not are you fond of someone or so?’ Dad, tell me how can I answer her? “

“Do you like her?”

“Yes, I do. She looks very pretty, and her grades are also good.”

“Is it not enough? Simply tell her that you like her!”

“It is ... rather embarrassing.”

“Liking her, and telling her about it, and she will surely be pleased. Something to make someone pleased, why not do it? Only if you do not like her, then do not tell her because she will be displeased. Something to make someone displeased, one should not do.”

The boy nodded and agreed with me. A few days later he told me, “I told her as you had said.”

"Good boy! You are brave! You both are the classmates, but just classmates. Between the classmates, whether boys or girls, mutual fondness is a good thing. This is capability to learn how to get along with people. At your age, a boy student feels for the girls, or a girl student for the boys, this mutual curiosity is normal. It shows that your psychological and physiological developments are sound. Generating no curiosity would not be normal. Your father has been your age, and experienced it. However, your major focus now is to study. Do you understand?” “Yes!”

The more the boy chatted to me, the more pleased I was. My boy was influenced by my spiritual power, and so was automatically drawn away from people and things that might mislead him.

My opponents have taken my weakness as my weak spot. On one hand, they have tried to persuade me: "Already so grown up. What is the point to keep worrying? The future will not be so bad if only the boy has been brought up." On the other hand, they have propagated to other people: "Only minding his wife and kid, what big deal can be made? If really a big fish, how come can be let out? "

When one has been fallen into the hands of a group of professional kidnappers and cheaters, one cannot get out unless you promise what they request. Particularly, those professional kidnappers have nothing to fear, and do not have to worry about any consequences. It is impossible to get away without paying a price. No matter what price it is, or how valuable the payment can be, one has to pay, by oneself. When the payment is very precious, there is naturally a great pain in one’s heart. Thinking about his healthy growth, I am clear that the boy is most important to me. To be a “Big Fish” is no part of my duty but a matter of fate, while taking the responsibility for the boy is a duty of mine as a father. For time being, what I have done are actually my duties, writing, criticizing the reality and “being the first to show concerns” are only what a citizen should do, but also are my duties. For our children will be no longer subjected to the hardship of our generation, and for the freedom, these things need to be done, while some others may have to be given up temporarily. “Refrain from doing something to be able for other things” – only if temporarily give up certain things, some of more essential things can be upheld. In a short, I came out.

I returned home after being away for seven and a half months. After a little cleaning up, it was nearly the time to be home from school. I hid behind the door and quietly waited for “thump, thump, thump…” the sound of rushing 2-3 stairs at a time from the first floor to the third. Time passed second by second, minute by minute. Finally, the sound came, straight to the third floor! At the door opened, he asked: "Has Daddy returned?" Father and son hugged tightly.

During childhood, one should not be left alone without a thoughtful guidance from a father. In the teenage years, a strongly spiritual support from one’s father is also indispensable. I told my boy: your father is different from your father's father; your father’s decision is solid like a piece of steel bar to reinforce your waist straight and keep your chin up and chest out to face anyone beyond our home. Soon after I got out from the detention centre, the boy entered a middle school. For three years, at noon and at the time to come home from school in the afternoon, I went to the courtyard gate to look around, just as when the boy had been at his primary school. Sometimes waiting is a kind of anxiety, but what I have experienced more has been happiness. In my view, the goodness between us, the father and son, is not my grace by raising him but his warmth and happiness offered to me!

The boy has not disappointed me. After middle school, he was admitted to one of the model high schools in Hubei Province. Although it was not so good as to get him into an ace class in his school, the result was enough to make me happy. A decade’s association between a father and his son appears to have not wasted. I am so pleased to have seen that some of what I have valued has taken the root in his internal world. Of course, whether the boy will grown up to become a successful man, it will be up to him to go forward on the path of life. I, as a father, was just his pathfinder in the beginning of his life. I have taken my responsibilities.

The provincial model high school is in Wuhan City, 90 km away from our home city of Yingcheng, and it has a system of full boarding. Since beginning of school term, I do not have to worry about his fussy taste, nor to look around at the courtyard gate, which has spared me a lot. For a few days, however, not seeing the movement of this fellow's figure at home has always made me feel empty. I would like to go and see him, but it is not up to me whether or not I am able to go to Wuhan. The “State” has taken a dissident like me as a potential enemy. The “State”, like the Monkey King in fiction, has drawn a circle around me so that the range of my movement has been strictly limited within an area of a little more than 1000 square kilometres, or a radii about 20 km. My friends outside cannot get in, and I cannot get out, even to see my own child.

Between my boy and me, there is just ninety kilometres. These mere ninety kilometres, however, appear to us to be insurmountable, like a natural moat.

Fortunately, there is the telephone. “Don’t worry about me. I am here, happy, joyful,” from another end of the line came the cheerful optimism, just the gene of our Du family! Du's Yes, I am optimistic. Although I am living in a miscarriage of justice, although my body is held under the control of power, although my freedom is limited within a tiny area drawn by the “State” with its Monkey King Bar, there is no fundamental damage to this optimism. We, the father and son, agreed that I would be responsible for giving him a happy childhood, and that he would have to return me as a responsible teenager and a capable youth. The boy has gone away to have an independent life. In the beginning, there was a bit worry. Would this kid who had done little housework leave a pile of dirty socks? Unexpectedly, a message was brought back that his white T-shirts, white socks and white shoes are washed even cleaner than at home. I relaxed a little bit.

Following the message that relaxed me, there comes also some news to make me worry. According to the class teacher, the boy’s spirit in the class has not been so good; sometimes he has even fallen asleep. It was also said that the boy got only a grade of 50+ out of 100 on his midterm examination for his English course. There must be something that has become an obstacle in the boy's study or his life. What is it? The problems of which a child has not become aware cannot be realized through telephone. Only the experiences of an adult to feel, to perceive and analyse can reach the crux. I should go and see him to learn more about what are the problems he has encountered. I would like to see him, my boy who has encountered the problems! The “State” does not let me go! Because it is said that if I would see my boy, the national security would be likely endangered.

(November 2007, in Yingcheng)

Original texts in Chinese can be found here.

(Translated by Yu Zhang)

Simon Nielsen 5/24/22 Simon Nielsen 5/24/22

We Gave Up Planning The Old Way

“This project has ended up looking nothing like a written plan would’ve looked. That stodgy plan would’ve tied our hands and not allowed for changes midstream. It would’ve died by committee.“ Deb Brown, small town advocate and community activator, tells the story of a community project taking off before planning could bring it down.

By Deb Brown and SaveYour.Town

My small town hosted an international photojournalist, Brendan Hoffman, in residency at the local paper.

A town of 8,000 people managed to take a 6 week free class on Using Photography to Tell Your Stories, view an exhibition of War In Ukraine, and personally visit with the photographer and share ideas for stories in the community.

The Old Way

I bet you believe we had a ton of meetings, had to fund raise to bring this man in from the Ukraine and host him for two months, and spend lots of money on exhibition space and marketing as well. It would be the same ten people who would write the plan, and there would be no room for change in the plan.

If we’d written a formal plan, that is exactly what would’ve happened. We would’ve had to reach out to the city officials to get permission to bring him to town. The meetings would’ve taken a year to figure how to fund raise, where to put him, what location could the exhibit be at, how would we help pay him to be in residency at the paper, and how to get the exhibit shipped here from another country. We would’ve needed committees: marketing, advertising, housing, fundraising, location and more.

That would’ve been the old way to plan for this kind of a big deal. By the time everything had been handled, many folks would’ve dropped out and been frustrated. Too much red tape.

The Idea Friendly Way

However, that’s not how we did it. We used the Idea Friendly Method.

Brendan Hoffman and I had stayed in touch via email since 2013. He visited once in 2015 and we had organized a photo walk that time. He told me he wanted to come back, and he’d like to have a residency at the paper.

I pulled my crowd together. The editor at the newspaper, the president of the adult education workshops group, and me. We knew this would be a great opportunity for our town. How could we make it happen? Grants, donations, marketing. The ideas began to flow.

We needed Brendan to help us Build Connections. He had applied for two grants that he received, and he shared another one we could apply to. He also wanted to teach a 6 week course on using photography to tell your story. These conversations happened mostly online via email, Facebook messenger and texting. He lives in Ukraine and he can’t just stop over! It was a bit chaotic, but we figured it out.

Then we took small steps. We didn’t need to get permission from the city. Often you think you do, but just as often you really don’t. The Freeman Journal newspaper wrote the Facebook Journalism Grant request and they got it! We added an Embedded Community Experience to the project to do more outreach to minorities and youth. Legacy Learning Boone River Valley (adult education) created the photography workshop. They spread the word and over 30 people showed up for that.

Once Brendan was here, our crowd thought it would be nice to add an exhibition of his work. There was grant money, and several of us chipped in to get his work shipped here. A friend of ours had an empty storefront he let us use for one week. All we had to do was ask him. We’re a small town! Asking often works.

The exhibition was well attended by locals, and out of towners. The week before the exhibition was scheduled to open, we decided we should have an Opening Reception. Volunteers were called and cookies were made! A local church gave us chairs to use. Hy-Vee donated wine. Mornin’ Glory donated coffee. It was a nice addition to the first night of the exhibit. In fact it was a lot of fun and people learned about Ukraine and war with Russia in a manner better than any lecture.

The last week, we decided to do a closing reception too! Again, folks had ideas, and just donated their time, gifts and products. All of us used local ways to get the word out, and social media and the newspaper. Because the first reception was talked about, the ending reception was great too.

This project has ended up looking nothing like a written plan would’ve looked. That stodgy plan would’ve tied our hands and not allowed for changes midstream. It would’ve died by committee.

The biggest takeaway is we did write a plan. AFTER the event was over.

We shared the steps we all took, we were able to talk about what worked well and what didn’t work at all. It was no longer a wish that we could do this. It was a fact we completed it. This is a plan that others can look at, learn from and try something on their own knowing that it will involve more people taking small meaningful steps. It will be chaotic, and that’s ok. And it’s more fun to create good things on the fly!

Simon Nielsen 5/20/22 Simon Nielsen 5/20/22

From Me In Rain & Other Poems

“Put out the lamp/ Let only the cigarette burn the night’s coldness/ Spill the wine out the window to the night/ Let the darkness get drunk/ To vomit out another dawn/ A daybreak when perhaps there will be news.” Dr. Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, husband and wife, writers and activists, were imprisoned, put under house arrest, and separated by the Chinese authorities as a consequence of their struggle for human rights. Deprived of social contact and community interaction, the couple had nothing left to do but imagine a life beyond confinement.

By Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia with Independent Chinese PEN Center

Liu Xiaobo’s Poetry:

From Me in Rain

- To Xia

It rains

A drop passes through the sun

I was pushed to the edge of the world

I have to be in shock incessantly

And in obedience reluctantly

The raindrop is not cruel

But its gentleness is full of danger

Alone in nudity

I am the only one naked in the rain

The tints in rain are puzzling

All the umbrellas seem to weakly scream

Disappearing in the rain-soaked time

What I hope for

Is to collapse in rain

And that my thin body

Will leave before the rising sun

I am afraid of every kind of quiet change

And even less capable of bearing

Any feat as a hero

Trying to arouse God's attention

Is self-maltreatment through wishful thinking

I who have no wisdom to commit blasphemy

Can only light a cigarette

1991.7.30

Aloneness in Winter

- To Xia

Aloneness during a winter night

Like the blue background on the screen

Simple as everything at a glance but nothing at all

You may consider me as a cigarette, then,

To light and put out at any time

Smoking and smoking, but never ending

A pair of bare feet is stepping on the snow

Like a piece of ice falling into a wine bowl

Drunkenness and madness

Are the drooping wings of a crow

Beneath the endless shroud of earth

Black flame cries out involuntarily

The pen in my hand has suddenly snapped

Sharp wind is piercing the sky

Stars are fragmented into an adventure, my dream

The incantation drips blood into verse

The tenderness of skin still remains

A kind of brightness returns to you

Aloneness, clear

Is standing, weeping on a cold night

And touching the marrow of snow

While I

Am not a cigarette nor wine nor pen

But an old book

Similar to

"Wuthering Heights" where poisoned teeth grow

1995.1.1

Night and Dawn

- To Little Xia

When falling asleep alone the night

Is extremely cold

The lonely star before dawn looks even more ruthless

Despite the orange bedside light

The cold darkness still

Mercilessly

Swallows all of you

Facing the lamp, you are talking to yourself

And shedding tears while stroking shadows on the wall

At this moment, you should light a cigarette

Or pour yourself a glass of wine

To drunkenly pursue that

Missing person whose whereabouts are unknown

Or who may have been engulfed by deeper darkness

Put out the lamp

Let only the cigarette burn the night’s coldness

Spill the wine out the window to the night

Let the darkness get drunk

To vomit out another dawn

A daybreak when perhaps there will be news

1996.11.11

The Cliff

- To my wife

I was forced to mount a cliff somewhere

While a sharp rock embedded into my skin

An order commanding me to stand and shout

And issue an ultimatum to the world

I could stand but not shout

Or I could shout but not stand

My straight body could only be rigid

While my crazy shout could only be bent

The steepness and sharpness of the abyss

Did not allow straightness to challenge them

The limits of the body could only choose between two ways

But the absolute order demanded both

To choose is a hopeless struggle

Either to stand straight shouting and being crushed to pieces

Or to bend my knees to the abyss

While the huge sky has pressed down

1996.12.15

To My Wife

As if the cold and indifferent moon

Is hanging high over my head

The flashing arrogance is looking down

To suffocate me

Its background is as deep and mysterious

As ghosts vomited from a grave

I am presenting holiness and purity

In exchange for being close to you in a dream

Not seeking for burning skin

But dyeing my eyes with a layer of cold ice

To see the sky-fire dying in its paleness

The sky’s grief is too vast and bare

For the eyes of my soul to see through

Give me a drop of rain

To polish the concrete floor

Give me a ray of light

To show the lightning’s question

One word from you

Can open this door

To let the night go home

1997.1.31

Liu Xia’s Poem

Untitled

- To Xiaobo

You speak you speak you speak the truth

You are talking day and night as long as you are awake

You talk and talk

You are in a closed room while your voice breaks out to spread

The death from twenty years ago has come back again

Come and gone as the time

You are short of many things but with you are the souls of the dead

You have lost daily life to join the outcry of the dead

There is no response and none

You speak you speak you speak the truth

You are talking day and night as long as you are awake

You talk and talk

You are in a closed room while your voice breaks out to spread

The wound from twenty years ago has been bleeding

Fresh and red as the life

You are fond of many things but more passionate accompanying the souls of the dead

You have made a promise to seek the truth with them

On the way there is no light and none

You speak you speak you speak the truth

You are talking day and night as long as you are awake

You talk and talk

You are in a closed room while your voice breaks out to spread

The gunfire of twenty years ago has decided your life

Always living in death

You are in love with your wife but more proud of the dark time with her you spent

You let her be but are more insistent that she continues to write you poems after her death

In the verses there is no sound and none

2009.9.4

(Translated by Yu ZHANG)

Simon Nielsen 5/20/22 Simon Nielsen 5/20/22

A Dream Of Sitopa - A Conversation With Carolyn Steel

If we really want to understand cities, we need to look at them through food. If we mean to create sustainable cities, we need to begin with food culture and production. The potential is vast, and it can be done. It’s not Utopia; it’s Sitopia.
Carolyn Steel, British architect, scholar, and author, has written two seminal books on the relationship between food and cities in which she explains the ways we can restore lost connections. The Empty Square met Steel for a talk on Sitopia, and why we need to put food at the front of all future urban development.

Carolyn Steel, British architect, scholar, and author, has written two seminal books on the relationship between food and cities in which she explains the ways we can restore lost connections. The Empty Square met Steel for a talk on Sitopia, and why we need to put food at the front of all future urban development.

By The Empty Square with Carolyn Steel & Copenhagen Architecture Festival

The Empty Square: We spoke to a Danish philosopher who defines culture as ‘an ethically binding understanding of everything’s connectedness’. If that is culture, do we have a Western food culture today?

Steel: I love that definition, because I agree that culture connects everything in society – and the same goes for food. In that sense, every society has a food culture, even if it is a very industrialised one – as ours generally is in the West – since that in itself says something powerful about our society. Food culture and culture and inseparable, so if we eat badly in the West and in ways that are making us ill and destroying the planet, then that goes for our culture too. As the most inherently valuable thing in our lives, food is a great bell-weather for understanding our social values as a whole; so the fact that we have come to expect food to be cheap in the West tells you everything you need to know. Our values are upside down.

In Hungry City, you write: ”The feeding of cities has been arguably the greatest force shaping civilization, and it still is. In order to understand cities properly, we need to look at them through food.” What kind of civilization does the current feeding of cities create? What is it we understand better when we look at cities through food? What do you see through your food-glasses?

Well, this question follows on directly from the last one. Unfortunately, what I see through my food-lens is that we’ve forgotten what really matters in life, and what is truly valuable. We’ve forgotten that in order to flourish, we need to balance our lives with nature and with one another. We’ve created an idea of a good life based on the idea that food can be cheap, which, when you stop to consider that food consists of living things that we kill in order to live, is clearly to debase life itself. We’ve also forgotten that, in order to live well, we don’t need very much. One of the things many people discovered under lockdown is that the things that really matter to us in life are basic – health, security, family and friends, supportive communities, contact with nature, a sense of meaning, freedom. If we were to base our lives around such goals rather than being on the capitalist consumerist treadmill, we’d not only be far happier but could bring our lives back in balance with nature into the bargain.

What defines a balanced city?

One that is in balance with its rural hinterland – wherever that is – and one whose citizens can all flourish. No city can survive without a productive hinterland in the countryside (we tend to forget that cities can’t feed themselves), but unfortunately for much of history the relationship has been imbalanced, with all the power and money concentrated in the city, and the countryside exploited and poor. Of course there have been exceptions to this, and I am very interested in periods of history when some sort of balance was achieved, for example in the medieval Italian city-state. There is good reason why utopianism is obsessed with the question of how to feed cities and what the ideal relationship between city and country should be: it is fundamental to a well-ordered society that the relationship should be fair and positive for both sides. That is why I invented the word sitopia (food-place, from the Greek sitos, food and topos, place). My idea was that we could use food as a lens to ask all the big questions about how to live, since, unlike utopia, we already live in a sitopia, albeit a bad one, since we don’t value its key constituent, food.

There are so many aspects of the current food situation that is crazy, even absurd. What would the three most absurd things on your list be? And can we turn them upside-down?

Wow, that’s a hard one! Because you’re right, almost everything about the modern industrialised food system is nuts. If I had to choose the three most absurd aspects of the way we feed ourselves now, they would be a) that it is destroying the planet, b) that it is killing us, and c) that it creates the illusion that we have ‘solved’ the problem of how to eat, when we absolutely haven’t. Of course all these absurdities have multiple subplots that there isn’t space to elaborate on here, but in summary, modern agri-food is a major contributor to climate change, mass extinction, soil erosion, deforestation, pollution, water depletion and diet-related disease (to name but a few ‘externalities’), and hence my rather bald statement that it is the single most destructive activity in which we collectively engage. The last bit of the conundrum – that it also creates the illusion that everything is OK – is part of the danger. In answer to your second question, yes, we can indeed turn it upside down, but to do so will require a broad-based social movement demanding change and concerted political will across the spectrum – I see the first starting to happen, which gives me hope, but I am still waiting for politicians to wake up to the fact that they can no longer ignore food as a problem – or expect it to be cheap. It’s a terrible thing to say, but the war in Ukraine may be the thing that forces politicians to get serious about food again, which we desperately need.

What has scale got to do with Sitopias? Is it possible to make megalopolises into Sitopias or is down-sizing and going local defining qualities of a possible beautiful, sustainable future?

That is a very interesting question, because twenty years ago, when I was wondering what to write about, scale was the other ‘big’ idea that I had apart from food! And yes, of course scale has everything to do with sitopia, as it does with the rest of life. I think we can all feel when objects, systems, communities, political structures, buildings, settlements and landscapes have a scale that feels good to us and makes us feel at home. Until around 200 years ago, everything around us was made by hand, and I think we can still feel that when we are in the presence of a building or artefact made by craftsmen and women, and we appreciate that sense of connection with them. Of course this is something that industrialisation has swept away, but I think we miss it, and working with our hands is very much part of what I think we need to bring back into our lives. In the case of food, this is obviously to do with the way we farm, since in order to farm organically (as I believe we must) we need to move to a less oil-dependent, more human way of farming, that is once again at a scale that allows farmers to have direct involvement with their land, plants and animals. The farmers I know who farm in this way (which they are able to do because they feed people who value food) are some of the most contented as well as hardworking people I know, and they naturally create beautiful landscapes of the kind that many city-dwellers like to visit when they go to the country. They also form part of a food network that is much more local, regional and seasonal, and city-dwellers who buy from them get a sense of connection that means much more than a ready meal from a supermarket ever could. My dream is to create a society in which everyone can afford to farm and eat like this, which is why I propose what I call a sitopian economy.

What does it take to make the necessary changes? How can we ‘get home’ – i.e. create balanced, resilient, attractive, unique circuits that reconnect us to the land, each other and ourselves? Is it a question of reinventing economic and educational systems? Reinventing cultures? Organizing things in new ways?

As I just said above, I think the most direct way of getting to the sort of balanced, resilient society you speak of is to value food – which means building a sitopian economy. In essence, this involves internalising the true cost of food, which would have the effect of making some (industrial) food more expensive, but would also level the playing field, since as we’ve seen, industrial food is artificially subsidised in any case; we are paying its hidden costs at a rate that we can’t afford. Indeed, if we were to internalise the true cost of industrially reared meat, for example, including nominal costs for climate change, water depletion, deforestation and antibiotic use, we would see how unaffordable it really is. Local, seasonal organic food would then appear as the wonderful bargain that it already is. Of course, in order for everyone to be able to afford such food, we would need to adjust our tax systems to suit, but in rich countries where industrial food is predominantly eaten there is plenty of wealth to go around, it’s just very unevenly distributed! I say all this because it strikes me that anywhere in the world where people eat well, they live well too. Ultimately, by using the food lens to ask the question of what is a good life, I hope we can get our values back the right way up, and get to a point where people start to see the benefits of leading simpler, more active lives, closer to nature and more engaged in their local communities, both in city and country. I do realise that this is rather a utopian vision, but I think by approaching it through food – not just as a lens, but as an active shaper of our world – we have a chance of waking people up to the possibilities of another kind of good life – which, incidentally, lockdown already seems to have done for many of those able to work from home in the West!

According to Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town Movement, the solution lies on the community level. If we act as communities, we can make the necessary changes. Do you agree?

I actually think we need to act at all levels, but Rob is probably right, it probably needs to start as a community-level, or ground-up movement (which the Food Movement already is) and grow to the point where governments start to, or are forced to, take notice. I think Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement is very interesting in this respect: it’s not a ‘community’ in the sense of a local village or neighbourhood taking action, but rather young people all over the world who have the same goals (having a liveable planet to grow up in!) coming together to protest and demand action. But governments won’t act unless a) they think they are more likely to win votes than lose them by doing so and b) until they can see what the alternatives are that they can sell to voters, which is why building workable models is so important. I think we still have some way to go in persuading governments that we need a Plan B, but as I said, I think combined global crises such as climate change and the war in Ukraine may be getting us close to that point. I see my job as that of answering condition b, which is to say building scenarios and plausible alternatives so that, when politicians start looking for a Plan B, the ideas are already laid out for them. It would make me very happy if I could see Western leaders taking food seriously again, because in my view, everything else will stem from that.

Simon Nielsen 5/17/22 Simon Nielsen 5/17/22

Candies

“Several days after that, on the way to school or at home, Droma would quietly take out the half candy to lick it gently. Sometimes when there were no others around at school, she would quietly take it out and lick it a few times. Sometimes at home she would take it out to let her brother lick it a few times and put it back. The sheep dog often stared at Drolma's hands with its big and black eyes, sitting still with an expectant look.” Yang Tongyan (April 12, 1961 - November 5, 2017), a famous dissident writer and social activist better known as Yang Tianshui, was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for “subverting state power” because of his critical essays on overseas websites, as well as his political activism.

By Yang Tianshui with Independent Chinese PEN Center

"These are a few pieces of candies, rock candy, milk candy, and fruit candy."

Pointing to the blackboard, a female teacher read aloud, followed by a burst of childish voices echoed among the hills – “These are a few pieces of candies,,,"

Magnificent but patient dawn slowly brightened the Songpan Grasslands; also brightened the southwestern mountains, a village primary school hut halfway up the mountain, the fine chalk handwriting on the blackboard, the nice mild round face of the teacher and a dozen untidy boys and girls.

The female teacher, eighteen or nineteen, was holding a wooden stick to lead the reading again:

"This is a piece of candy."

The sunlight traveled through the door and windows to caress her dark black double pigtails.

The school kids were fully concentrating and reading in slow but sweet childish voices:

"This is a piece of candy."

It was a little bit chilly in the mountains in the autumn; spells of chilly winds eddied around the cottage, and some kids were rubbing their small reddish hands while reading.

The teacher had a look at the southern row of children and said:

"Dear girls and boys, if Drolma has two candies and Sangzhi has one, how many pieces of candies do they have in total? Please hands up to answer," the teacher said.

Some small hands were raised high in the southern row. The teacher said:

"Drolma, please."

A girl in Tibetan robe stood up. Her black little eyes blinked and said:

"A total of three."

The teacher motioned Drolma to sit down while saying “Drolma is right.” She then added:

"Those in Year Two, please be attentive! If Drolma gets nine pieces of candy, but Basang takes four away, how many pieces will be left? “

Some of the children sitting in the mid-row of the classroom began to raise their hands, some turned their fingers to count, and some heads lowered as if they were afraid of being found. With a smile the teacher said to a boy:

"Gelang, do you know the answer?"

A dark, timid boy stood up and said:

"Five."

The teacher smiled happily and said:

"Gelang is right. Sit down, please! Next, those in Year Three, please be attentive! If Drolma, Basang or Jielang was assigned five each, then what is the total number assigned to them? Please use the multiplication to make it out! "

Only one kid among the children sitting in the back of the classroom put up a hand. The teacher gave him a gesture, he stood up and said:

"Three fives is fifteen, the total is fifteen."

Very satisfied, the teacher went up to the back of the classroom and led the kids at back to read the multiplication table. She then went to a boy of fourteen or fifteen and asked:

"Moocuo, now we have fifteen candies, if they are divided equally among Zoma, Basan, Gelang and you, how many does each get then? How many will be left? What will you do with the remainder?"

Moocuo, in a Tibetan robe with dirty sleeves, stood up tamely, looking at the ceiling and said slowly:

"Each could get 3, and two will be left, and to whom should the remaining two be given?"

After thinking for a while, he resumed:

"The remaining two should be given to Drolma who is the youngest among us."

The teacher asked:

"Why do you want the rest candy going to the youngest?"

Moocuo said:

"The elder should take care of the younger. That is what teacher always teaches us"

The teacher said:

"Dear boys and girls, the elder kids should take care of the younger ones, understood?"

The children answered immediately in chorus: "Understood!"

Outside was a sheep dog, standing under a tree and casting his curious eyes into the classroom. On the hill-slope not far away cattle and sheep were moving leisurely: some were chewing grass, some looking at the sky. The teacher opened the green canvas bag on her desk, took out a paper bag, and said:

"Dear boys and girls, let me hand out the candy, okay?"

The girls and boys were excited and active. Some whispered, some twittered. Their tender voices sounded like many little birds singing. Some asked:

"What does candy look like?"

Some asked:

"Really very very sweet?"

Some asked:

"What is rock candy and what is fruit candy?"

The teacher waved to the children and said:

"Please be seated on your seats, I'll distribute the candies among you."

The students kept quiet at once, with joy and an expectant look on each face. The teacher started the distribution from the Year-One kids in the southern row, with each kid having two: one fruit candy and one milk candy. When the teacher walked to Moocuo of the Year Four, only one fruit candy left. "Moocuo, sorry, I will give you another one next time."

"It’s all right, Teacher. I'm older than them. One is enough."

Petting his head gently, the teacher said:

"You are a virtuous good boy!"

Now all kids began eating the candies. Some were chewing noisily, and some were smacking their lips to enjoy the sweet taste. There were also several kids playing with the sweets in their hands. Drolma, who was in the first grade, put one piece of candy into her bag, and then opened the other one, licked it several times, covered it again and carefully put it into the inner pocket. As the teacher intended to resume her lesson, she asked Drolma after seeing what she did:

"Little Drolma, why didn’t you eat your candy?"

Drolma’s deskmate answered:

"Teacher, she ate nothing. That piece of milk candy ... was placed in her bag."

The teacher: "Why don’t you eat them? Are you going to enjoy them later slowly?"

Drolma: "No, teacher. The milk candy is for my brother. I will take it back to him after school."

Teacher: "Little Drolma, you can eat it. I will bring some for you when I return to the city next month."

Drolma: "No, teacher. I don’t like to eat it. I will leave it to my brother. He is very cute."

The teacher approached Drolma, patting her braids and said:

"How old is your brother? What a lovely boy!"

"Four," Little Droma inclined her head with a smile, exposing a mouth of white little teeth.

The teacher went back to the teaching platform, and said:

"Dear boys and girls, lots of plants, crops and fruits contain sugar; canes from the south are sweet; apple, orange, pear, jujube, hawthorns, rock melons and watermelons are all sweet." All the kids listened intently.

She continued:

"These sweet stuffs already existed hundreds and thousands of years ago. However, it was not until Tang Dynasty that people began to make sugar out of the sweet stuffs."

One student asked:

"Tang Dynasty?"

The teacher went on:

"Tang was a dynasty 1200 or 1300 years ago. At that time, Indian people introduced sugar refining methods to China, and our Chinese people started to have sugar to eat."

Then the teacher wrote on the blackboard: "During Tang dynasty, the Indians brought sugar refining skills to China."

She then led the students to read it over and over again. Outside were the clear blue sky and the quiet autumn mountains. The cattle and sheep were still lingering on the grass slope. Probably tired, the sheep dog sat down under the trees and curiously looked into the classroom.

When school was over, Drolma pulled the skirts of her teacher quietly, and asked:

"Teacher, what is rock candy like?"

Teacher answered:

"Rock candy? Just like small broken pieces of smashed ice."

"Sweet?"

"Of course. That’s why we call it candy!"

The sheep dog strode to Drolma, whining and spinning around her with its tail waving. Drolma bent over, pulled out the fruit sugar, bit it into two halves, and put it near the dog’s mouth. That dog reached out its tongue and licked the fruit sugar repeatedly. Later on, it appeared to be eager to swallow the sugar, waving its head and tail violently to show its coquetry. Droma touched its ears and put the half candy into its mouth.

The teacher said: "This dog is as dear to you as your brother."

Drolma said:

“So said my parents."

She added with a mysterious look: "Teacher, next time if you come with rock candies, please give me one more for my younger brother, okay?”

Teacher smiled: "Little Drolma, next time I will bring you some more. Well, hurry home for lunch now. Your mum and dad must be waiting for you."

Getting close to her home, little Droma saw mum and brother standing before their felt tent. She ran to them and took out the piece of candy in the bag, shouted:

"Mum, brother, milk candy."

The dog ran after her eagerly. Drolma went to her brother, bent over, peeled the paper off the milk candy and put it into his mouth, and said:

"Brother, candy."

Her mother asked: "Where did you get it?"

Drolma answered: "Our teacher brought it from the city. Everybody got two except that Moocuo got one."

Mom said: "Teacher Ah-chin is so good. As an 18 or 19-year-old city girl, she put aside all the benefits to come to this remote mountain village to teach you to read and write. What a Buddha!"

Drolma: "Teacher Ah-chin told me she would bring us rock candies when she goes home next time. She said that rock candies are just like broken pieces of smashed ice, bright and clear as crystals."

Mother: "She has only 20-30 yuan per month for her salary. It will cost all that to buy candies for you, won’t it?"

Drolma said: "We can send a goat to her in the future, okay?"

Mother added: "And a scarf as well."

Drolma dropped her bag, and went to help Mum to carry straw to feed the mare about to give birth. Busy for a while, she suddenly realized something. She took out the half candy which she had carried with her, carefully opened the paper, and lifted it to her mother's lips:

"Mum, taste it to see if it is sweet or not?"

Mum said with a smile: "Mum does not like to taste. Candy is always sweet, just like Buddhas always save people, while a wolf licks a lamb.”

Little Droma had to withdraw her hand. She licked it several times, wrapped the candy and then put it back in her inside pocket.

Several days after that, on the way to school or at home, Droma would quietly take out the half candy to lick it gently. Sometimes when there were no others around at school, she would quietly take it out and lick it a few times. Sometimes at home she would take it out to let her brother lick it a few times and put it back. The sheep dog often stared at Drolma's hands with its big and black eyes, sitting still with an expectant look. Every time this happened, Drolma did not like to ignore the dog. She would take some cooked mutton from her pocket to feed it.

Over three months passed. The prairie and the mountain village had been covered with heavy snow. The village school seemed completely isolated except for some wild geese flying southbound in the blue sky occasionally. Only when the female teacher took all the children out of the classroom to bask in the sun, did there emerge some energy halfway up the mountain. At that moment, the sheep dog always stayed near Drolma. The dog was getting more friendly to the teacher. It often ran to kiss her feet and rub her trouser legs. One day near noon, the teacher found Drolma standing before a pile of forage grass. She walked and over talked to her:

"Little Drolma, I'm so sorry. I promised you to bring some rock candies. A few months passed, but I couldn’t get any. It was a palm-sized town, and not enough supplies for everything."

Drolma replied with a grin:

"Teacher, we still had candies."

She took out the half candy to smell and then gently licked it. The dog was beside, listening to their talk. It turned its head toward the teacher when the teacher was talking, and then turned to Drolma when she was talking.

School was over, and she walked home alone with her dog after a short shared journey with some of other students, as her house was far away. The wind rose from humming at first to roaring. The huge cold air was quickly spreading all over the whole grassland and mountains. It made Little Drolma shiver. She put her hands into her sleeves, pulled in her neck and ran to a cliff for shelter. When the dog heard the huge wind, it hesitated for a while at first, and then followed its little master to trot to the shelter under the cliff.

That cliff was dozens of meters high, like a tall black tower. The winding path, on which little Drolma often walked, was to the south of the cliff. Beyond the path was a dozens-of-meter deep valley. In spring or summer, the valley would be full of grass, flowers and trees; in autumn a clear stream would be running down there and many birds would be singing. But it was winter now, the whole valley was covered in silence. Luckily there were some rays of sunshine, shining and bright, opposing the gloomy sternness so as not to turn the chilly silence into dead silence. The cold cliff was too steep. Even the dog dared not go close. The dog shrank back as close as possible to the shelter cliff.

Little Drolma sat beside a huge rock, hugged the dog in her arms, pulled out some broken pieces of mutton to feed the dog. She kissed the dog. Lifting its bright and gentle eyes, it looked at Drolma, whined for a while and turned to the west-side of Drolma. Drolma suddenly felt a bit warmer. She did not want to go home until the wind became weaker. Taking out the text book, she read aloud:

Under the pines I questioned the boy.

“My master’s off gathering herbs.

All I know is he’s here on the mountain----

Clouds are so deep, I don’t know where…”

She read it several times, then she took out the half candy, opened the paper, and licked it a few times.

Suddenly there came a burst of tiger and leopard roars in the distance. The sheep dog made several barks. Little Drolma was so surprised that her candy dropped onto the ground from her hands. The candy rolled away a few feet and landed onto the slope of the cliff, which was just a few feet away.

Little Droma searched for the candy and finally found it lying in a stone nest on the slope. The dark red candy paper was very obvious in the noon-time sunlight. Drolma slowly moved to the cliff top, knelt down, stretched out one arm to reach the candy, but she failed several times. The dog also followed her closely. That dog cowered, lying there with anxious looks.

After a while, sweat came out on her head. With her second try, she finally got it in her hand. Smiles came back to her reddish face. She hastily straightened up to lift her knees to move toward the cliff. Probably with a leg numbed, she swayed and fell down into the valley. The sheep dog was totally shocked. It wanted to go down to the bottom of the valley, but it only pawed the ground anxiously with fear. It made up its mind several times to rush down, but it stopped at last. The dog wandered for a while on the windy path, and ran a dozen of metres in both directions to the east and west. Finding a place with a gentle slope, it went down the valley, trampling on the cracked pieces of ice. It finally sniffed in the right direction and quickly ran to little Drolma.

Drolma was lying on a pile of pebbles. Her dog shoved at her hand and her face worriedly. It waved its tail and barked affectionately at Drolma. Although it waited for a long time, the dog didn’t get any response from little Drolma. It began to head back to the winding path and hurried back to the village school.

In the school kitchen, the teacher had just finished her lunch and was putting the remaining noodles and pickled vegetables back into a very old dark cupboard. When the dog ran over, it kissed her feet and trouser legs, shoved its head into her knees, raised its begging eyes accompanied with its barks and whines, and looked up at the teacher. The teacher smiled:

"Little Droma came to school so early today. Why not going home for lunch? Come here, all the leftover noodles are for you."

Upon saying this, she served a bowl of noodles from the cupboard, and poured it into a pot in the corner. But the dog had no interest in it. It kept making low whines with an anxious and restless look on its face. When it tugged her outside by her pants, the teacher shouted outside:

"Drolma, little Drolma, does your sheep dog want me to teach it to read?"

Just then, a student came in: "Teacher, Drolma is not here, only her dog."

The teacher felt something wrong. They walked out of the door with the dog. The dog ran in front of her and looked back from time to time to check if the teacher was following or not. They hurried to the cliff. The dog looked back at the teacher, and ran along the gentle slope into the valley bottom. The teacher followed. Seeing Drolma lying on a pile of pebbles, she called out: “Little Drolma”. The dog got there one step earlier than the teacher. It shoved up her with its mouth, and looked up at the teacher. The teacher kneeled down, only to find that the blood running from her nose had been frozen into ice. Her small face was purple with freezing. Her eyes were closed. Tightly clutched in her left hand was the half fruit candy.

Simon Nielsen 5/10/22 Simon Nielsen 5/10/22

Placemaking For Higher Impact

“To my mind, and many others, every dollar a community invests in infrastructure should be spent with multiple outcomes in mind. Any other way of spending is not only too expensive, but will likely create the kinds of problems that were created when we paid exclusive attention to solving traffic problems simply by building new roads. Or solving flooding by building dams. These approaches didn’t solve the problems – they only made them worse.” Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader, examines the high impact of placemaking.

By Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader

I always believed in getting the most bang for the buck (doesn’t everyone?). But if you look at how cities and towns spend money on infrastructure, it’s like money is no object.

I’m thinking of traditional infrastructure spending – the kind which is under much debate currently in Washington. The kind that gets divided up into buckets like public transit, ports and waterways, flood projects, and the perennial favorite “roads and bridges,” the mantra that is said over and over whenever an infrastructure bill is being considered.

It seems like such a dated concept – shouldn’t we be way beyond this one-dimensional approach to investing public money? As my friend Gary Toth often says about roads and highways, “The era of single-purpose public investment is over.” Well, it should be anyway.

To my mind, and many others, every dollar a community invests in infrastructure should be spent with multiple outcomes in mind. Any other way of spending is not only too expensive, but will likely create the kinds of problems that were created when we paid exclusive attention to solving traffic problems simply by building new roads. Or solving flooding by building dams. These approaches didn’t solve the problems – they only made them worse.

Those infrastructure dollars are some of the biggest investments many towns ever see. Why would we spend them with only a single outcome in mind? That money can be spent for multiple outcomes, and not only with greater efficiency, but creating more value in the process.

Case in point: the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, which was conceived as a way to connect and promote the city’s cultural assets downtown. With that core mission in mind, the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) then worked through how it could achieve that, while also achieving (drumroll…):

Six Outcomes, One Project:

1. A vastly safer, more accessible bike and pedestrian environment, in a downtown that had always prioritized cars.

2. Visual beautification through landscaping, public art, and paving treatments that made an aesthetic transformation and drew private investment.

3. Five acres of new linear park space connecting destinations and natural areas with permeable landscape.

4. Stormwater management, through 25,000 square feet of beautiful stormwater planters built into the trail, which minimized the need for sewers.

5. Overall the creation of a distinctive attraction for downtown that would attract visitors and investment, in addition to serving all those frequenting downtown.

6. And….you guessed it, a massive return on investment! Downtown boomed all around the Cultural Trail with increases in retail activity, retail employment, and new development worth an additional $1 billion in property values by 2015, the most recent study I could find.

Check out this short video that gives you a good sense of what Indy accomplished here:

The missing piece here of course was an equity framework, which could have made this an even better project, and which the Trail’s creators have widely acknowledged. In fact, the CICF has since turned its funding almost wholly to working with neighborhoods, somewhat in reaction to the fact that the trail created so much value in downtown, but brought fewer direct benefits to working people in the rest of the city. According to Pamela Ross, vice president of opportunity, equity and inclusion at CICF, “As a community foundation, it’s really important for us to make sure that neighborhoods all across Marion County have an opportunity to have sidewalks, to have safety, to have beautification in their neighborhoods that really represent the faces and the people in those neighborhoods.”

How we spend our next millions, billions, or trillions on infrastructure should be a pressing question that revolves around community outcomes:

Are we improving our sense of place?
Are we improving health outcomes?
Does it improve the environment and address climate change?
Does it support our local economy?
Overall, are we bringing inclusive benefits to all our citizens?
Are we building relationships with residents and allowing them to influence our decisions?

One hundred years after Tulsa, and facing imminent threats from climate change, this kind of multiple-outcome planning is mandatory.

One thing is worth remembering though: a central tenet of placemaking is critical mass around sites that have catalytic potential. How we define catalytic constantly changes with our deepening understanding of our culture, the effects of structural racism, economics, and many other factors, but we don’t want to dilute our impact by spreading investments too thin.

Simon Nielsen 5/3/22 Simon Nielsen 5/3/22

The Rural Renaissance

“We have all learned lessons this past year about simplifying and improving our lives by staying at home more and deepening our roots in our communities. And these lessons, I would argue, will incentivize more of us to participate in urban-based businesses by living in rural settings.” Michael H. Shuman, leading visionary on community economics, sees a bright future for rural communities and local economies.

By Michael H. Shuman, attorney, economist, author, and entrepreneur

If you believe the portrait of rural America depicted in the Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy, you might conclude that its residents are hopelessly impoverished, addicted, and depressed. That’s also the view of Eduardo Porter in “The Hard Truth of Trying to ‘Save’ Rural America,” whose much-discussed piece in the New York Times argues that the economic decline of rural America is so severe and irreversible that it may be better just to write it off and encourage its residents to move into nearby cities.

Yet as Mark Sappenfield writes in the Christian Science Monitor, a far better representative of rural America is Cassie Chambers Armstrong:

“Ms. Armstrong is author of Hill Women, which chronicles the generations of strong, resourceful Appalachian women who helped her on her way to three Ivy League degrees. ‘The impression is that it is so broken that it can only be saved if outsiders swoop in to rescue it,’ she tells me. But Appalachia ‘has all the skills it needs to solve its own problems.’”

I met another incredible rural woman about six weeks ago in rural North Carolina. Judy Carpenter, an award-winning trap and field shooter, is now investing her life savings into creating a model sustainable agriculture destination called Lucky Clays Farm. She invited me to lead a workshop on “Healing the Urban-Rural Divide.” I suggested to a room full of socially-distanced state and local economic developers that Stanly County, the rural locale we were in, should pursue a bunch of mutually beneficial projects with the fast-growing city of Charlotte, an hour’s drive west. Among them:

Diversify the food-growing capacity of Stanly County, where land is plentiful, to ease food insecurity in Charlotte. Lucky Clays Farm itself is prototyping hydroponic and aquaponic growing methods with urban sales in mind.
Upgrade the internet infrastructure in Stanly, so that entrepreneurs from Charlotte can take advantage of Stanly’s more affordable commercial rents to launch a range of innovative businesses serving regional needs.
Create a rural tourist destination in Stanly where rat-race-weary Charlotte residents can catch a weekend break. Again, Lucky Clays Farm has anticipated this by building getaway homes and a Wellness Center and by developing a modest hotel and foody restaurant.
Deploy a regional online platform for financing these businesses and projects through investment crowdfunding.

These kinds of projects, I suggested, not only would increase regional prosperity but also much-needed social harmony and understanding. The Cook Political Report recently published a provocative piece entitled “Density as Destiny,” noting that Bloomberg/CityLab has performed a preliminary analysis of the November election and found a political tipping point at 700 people per square mile. Rural counties with fewer than 500 residents per square mile were reliably Republican, while urban counties with over 1,500 residents per square mile were reliably Democrat. Those in between, suburban and exurban counties, were purplish and up for grabs politically. Regional efforts to bring together urban and rural neighbors can thus begin to heal the gaping political wounds in our country.

Honestly, I’ve long been pretty skeptical of regionalism. Most regional bodies promote the worst kinds of economic development, like heavily subsiding corporate attractions, and lack the democratic checks and balances that characterize local and county governments. But regional projects that involve localities working together on focused and transparent initiatives are more promising.

Not a few progressive urbanites think this is a fool’s errand. But they are ignoring clear signs of vitality in rural America. Internet connectivity is reaching more households and businesses. The average age of farmers is finally declining as more young people choose to become local-food farmers. Water quality is improving. Recent immigrants, unable to find affordable housing in cities, now diversify once all-white rural communities. According to the 2016 Census, rural households had higher rates of home ownership, more stable families, and lower rates of poverty than their urban counterparts. Little wonder that many rural counties (not all, of course) are experiencing a significant growth in population.

In preparing for my Lucky Clays talk, I read several books by North Carolina’s celebrated demographer, Michael L. Walden, a professor at North Carolina State University. His work documents the transformation of North Carolina from a mostly rural state to an increasingly urban one. In his 2008 book, North Carolina in the Connected Age, he ends a chapter on the state’s future with a series of questions:

“Will retail outlets become obsolete as online shopping becomes more sophisticated? Will shopping malls become ghost towns, and if so, could this change improve traffic congestion but decimate local governments’ property tax revenues? Will further breakthroughs in communications and virtualization turn the home into the workplace, thereby dramatically reducing commuting costs for millions of workers? Could improvements in online education replace lecture halls as the way millions of college students learn and thereby save the state government billions of dollars in spending to construct and maintain college buildings?”

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But the driving force is not just technology, as Walden predicted, but COVID-19. The pandemic has fundamentally turned upside down the way we organize our buying behavior, our work lives, and our educational institutions. Don’t expect things to return to “normal” once vaccines are distributed. We have all learned lessons this past year about simplifying and improving our lives by staying at home more and deepening our roots in our communities. And these lessons, I would argue, will incentivize more of us to participate in urban-based businesses by living in rural settings.

Fifty years ago, rural communities were strictly defined by industries based on their natural resources—farms, fisheries, forestry, mining, and tourism. A few support services grew around the workers and companies in these industries, but if the big mining company or paper processor that anchored the industry shut down, usually the entire economy collapsed. These communities were fragile, undiversified, and impoverished. Even Jane Jacobs insisted in her Economy of Cities that these communities were little more than “supply regions” for cities.

Today, many of these same communities are experiencing a renaissance, as is apparent in Norwood, North Carolina, where Lucky Clays Farm is located. Rural regions now can provide early-stage entrepreneurs with low-cost housing, commercial space, and internet connectivity. They can offer a lower cost of living to retirees, who then bring their substantial pension, Social Security, and Medicare payments into the local economy. For urbanites who have had it with crime, failing schools, and dirty air, resettling in these communities is a chance to reset their lives. A growing number of us will embrace rural as places we love where we can reshape our professional and work lives to serve our quality of life.

None of this is meant to diminish the many challenges rural America faces. Compared to urban areas, for example, rural communities struggle for decent access to health care and in-person education. But the biggest challenge rural communities face, I would argue, is contempt and condescension from snooty urbanites. Whether you are a city mouse (as I am) or a country mouse, please consider reaching out to the other side of America. Our future as a nation depends on it.

Simon Nielsen 5/3/22 Simon Nielsen 5/3/22

There Is A Wall Outside the Window - Essays from Prison

“The spring arrived and the earth became light green. At the foot of the high wall, there emerged a patch of tiny grass in light green. Without sunshine, the grass grew thin and yellow. Every day, I concentrated on this patch of light green.” Kang Yuchun, a doctor and writer, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for political issues in 1992.

By Kang Yuchun with Independent Chinese PEN Center

1. A Sunflower in the Shade

Outside the glass window of my cell, less than two meters away, there stands a high wall, blocking the wind, blocking the rain, but also blocking my endless longing for the complex noisy world beyond it.

The spring arrived and the earth became light green. At the foot of the high wall, there emerged a patch of tiny grass in light green. Without sunshine, the grass grew thin and yellow. Every day, I concentrated on this patch of light green. One day, I discovered suddenly that, in this patch of tiny grass, one blade of grass grew especially fast and especially tall, with a thin stalk and large leaves. Oh! That was not an ordinary grass but a sunflower in the shady place under the wall. Although tender and tiny, she staunchly and rigidly grew up. She had been blown down by the storm time after time, but stubbornly raised her head again and again, upward...

I looked at her every day, expected for her every day, and also worried about her every day. I did not dare to hope that she would blossom and bear fruit. One day, however, a tender yellow sunflower blossomed on her fragile head. What was strange is that she was not facing toward the sun, but flashing a smile at me, toward the glass window to express her gorgeous charms. Please, do you know why?

(August 22, 2002)

2. Little Birds Unfearful of Electricity

Not far away outside the window, there stands a wall. On top of the wall, there is an electric fence. The electric wires are exposed and appear to be stainless due to their electrification. I often stand at the window, looking at the big wall and electric fence to dream a daydream. Having lost freedom, I am very familiar with this wall and its fence outside the window. On one brick in the 38th row above the ground, there is a knot, resulting from the brick-baking, which displays its extremely unusual colour under the reflection of the window glass...

Several times, we placed some of food scraps on the windowsill outside the window. By chance there came several little birds. They were unattractive and belonged to a kind of house sparrow, most commonly seen in the north. The people at my hometown called them “old house-thief” to describe their quick reactions. It is very difficult to catch them. Whenever a little bird came, some of us at the window tried to make a surprise attack to catch it. Those fellows were really very crafty. Whatever means we used, whenever we stretched a hand or another tool out of the window to catch it, it would be rapidly flying up, passing between the iron bars outside the window and swaggering away. However, it seemed to care nothing about us. Soon it flew back and squatted on the electric fence not far away. It appeared to be very spirited, twittering to provoke us, as if saying “Chase, chase!” It made us so angry inside the window. Once a prisoner asked suddenly, “How is this bird unfearful of the electricity? There is electricity in the electric fence, isn’t there?”

This question made me feel awkward and think deeply. Yes, the electric fence is so powerful as to electrocute people who are intelligent and wise, but also so reluctant to injure a little house sparrow. Although little and weak, a house sparrow may fly through the iron bars and take up the station on the electric fence. The stronger may be violently powerful over the world, but it still has weaknesses. The weaker is powerless, but also has its opportunity to survive. This is a heavenly principle, but also the highest truth in man’s world.

(November 30, 2002)

(Translated by Yu ZHANG)

Original texts in Chinese can be found here

Simon Nielsen 4/28/22 Simon Nielsen 4/28/22

A Beauty Condemned To Death

“Living in the dormitory without any privacy will inevitably create contradiction and hostility, which constrain human nature and twist human character. Anyone who has ever lived in a dormitory has an intimate knowledge about this. Half a dozen people living together in a room less than 10 square meters over the years is incredible to those who live in a free world. However, in China, you have to bear this for a long time.” Zhang Lin, a dissident writer and social activist, was arrested in 1994 and then sentenced to three years of Reeducation-Through-Labor after contacting foreign journalists about human rights violations near his home village.

By Zhang Lin with Independent Chinese PEN Center

Wang Guocui was a beauty who attracted people at first sight. People often talked about her in Bengbu Detention Centre. She was detained in our neighbouring cell. Those who met her once often talked about her with sparkles in their eyes. Every time the neighbouring iron door clicked, following the tinkling of the leg-irons, prisoners would madly rush to the door. The luckiest guy might catch a glance of her through the peephole. Guocui always brushed her hair with fingers when looking around with a coquettish smile, and then followed the guard toward the interrogation room. Many of those who had seen her highly praised her beauty, especially for her slender figure and tender eyes.

Unfortunately, I’ve never seen her. However, I’ve heard her singing beyond the partition wall during exercise time every day. There were wire fence above the dividing wall, but we could toss crumpled paper over it. We asked her to sing songs for us, and her singing had never been interrupted. Her voice sounded a bit like Cheng Lin, a famous singer, and Guocui especially liked to sing Lin’s songs like Any Empty Wine Bottles to Sell and Travelling through Wind and Rain.

Sometimes, she would dance while singing, using leg-irons as her accompaniment. The tinkles were supposed to be made by a pair of leg-irons weighing 3 kilograms. They sounded pleasant. Sometimes when the jail guard on duty got drunk, he would sigh pitifully for such a beautiful beauty. Every night, the armed policemen on guard leaned over the skylight watching Guocui, talking and flirting with her.

Guocui had been a student of Foodstuff Workers Training School at Bengbu. She was only 19 at that time. She was good at singing and dancing, and was regarded as a campus star. She was chased by many boy students. Finally, her heart was taken by one of them. One day, they hugged together wildly when alone in the dormitory where 10 girls usually lived.

All beauties seem to have unfortunate destiny. A pair of cold eyes belonging to one of Guocui’s roommates had watched them sneaking into the domitory. A long time living together in such an over-crowded place had inevitably brought lots of resentments among the girls. Now it was the roommate’s chance to get revenge.

While Guocui and her boyfriend were carried away in love, the door was kicked open roughly. No knocking or the sound of unlocking was heard when more than a dozen people rushed into the room. They were the principal, vice-principal, chief and vice-chief of the security section, a bunch of security workers, and, last, the informer. These people were staring at Guocui’s body wolfishly. They had finally caught the couple red-handed. The general office immediately decided to expel them from school.

Guocui’s parents were both farmers who had suffered hunger and cold during their several decades of hard working in the fields. Their only wish was that their pretty and smart daughter would not live such a life as theirs, but get rid of the rural household registration and live in the city. Guocui did not let them down. She was admitted into the Foodstuff Workers Training School, and would be regarded as a government official after graduation. When that happened, she would get her own salary every month.

However, after being expelled, the only path for her was to return to the rural area and lead the same life as her parents. She would struggle her whole life under the brutal rule of the rural party members and cadres in her exceptionally poor village, with face down to the earth and back up to the sky, and nobody would ever answer her appeal. The moment she heard the bad news of expulsion, she burst out crying and fell in a fit. After waking up, she became a totally different person with totally dull eyes. She had no appetite for food or drink, and kept talking to herself.

She fell to her knees in front of the principal’s office, crying and begging them not to expel her. She also lay on the floor of the security section, swearing to God that they had no sexual relationship but had only been hugging each other without clothes on, and begged them to check of her body. Still, everybody ignored her. The school only sent a telegram to her parents, urging them to take her away immediately.

It appeared as if Guocui had understood that her fate had been settled with no hope. Her parents would come the next day without knowing what exactly happened. This would be the last day in this school, and the last night sleeping in this dormitory.

Her tears ran dry. Guocui was too ashamed to face her wretched parents who would be heartbroken after knowing the whole story. She gazed at the informer who had fallen asleep soundly. Brandishing a small axe that she had stolen from the carpentry yard, she cried within her heart, “Why did you set me up like this? How did I offend you that made you ruin my whole life like this?”

“Since we are already enemies, let us go to hell together!” Guocui lift the axe and chopped down hysterically. With one hack after another, she altogether chopped 19 times.

Guocui was sentenced to death not long after. On the morning of the execution, Shi Dalai woke me up quietly. He thought there would be 6 people being executed on that day. All the jail guards had a kind of special capability: they were able to open the iron-lock without a sound and pull the door suddenly. Two armed policemen would jump into the cell and pull the prisoner backwards by catching his or her arms. At the same time, two armed policemen with guns would suddenly show up above the skylight, with their guns pointing down. The yard would be filled with armed policemen as well.

After the prisoner was dragged out, the armed policemen would smash the leg-irons after stepping on the prisoner’s body, and then bind their hands and feet until the prisoner could barely breathe or shout. Two buns, put beside the prisoner’s mouth, are the so-called the last dinner.

While being dragged outside the door, Guocui reproached the policemen with a smile, “My high heels, my high heels fell off when you dragged me.” We all knew that her last request to her family and the whole world was to buy her a pair of high heels that she had been wanting for years, at the cheapest price.

She had been worrying being looked down on as a countrywoman, so she hoped that she could go to another world with high heels. She wore the pair of shoes for the whole night before execution. The armed policemen knew about this. They put her down violently, and went back for her shoes.

It was said that she died peacefully, but not like the other condemned prisoners with pale faces and shaking bodies. Several days before her death, she tossed us a piece of crumpled paper, saying:

“I would rather die than live my whole life as my parents, suffering as a peasant, living in hunger and cold. I never had my stomach full until the age of 10. It is extremely horrible living in the countryside. I don't think the hell would be that miserable and awful. I’m leaving. Hope you lucky city residents obtain your freedom very soon, and lead a happy life ever after. Wang Guocui.”

We felt sorry for her for a long time. She was forced to death. The informer was responsible for this, so were those seemingly respectable school leaders, so were the education ministry officials who set so many people in such a tiny dormitory, and so were the Party and government leaders who converted peasants into serfs and brought them poverty and hardship.

Living in the dormitory without any privacy will inevitably create contradiction and hostility, which constrain human nature and twist human character. Anyone who has ever lived in a dormitory has an intimate knowledge about this. Half a dozen people living together in a room less than 10 square meters over the years is incredible to those who live in a free world. However, in China, you have to bear this for a long time.

In Mao Zedong’s time, the cadres in the government and the Party had the power to order the females working for them, because their power was unbounded. They could even control their time of going to the toilet. Every detail of life, including eating, sleeping, seeing a doctor or having a rest, had to be arranged by the leaders. That cannot be counted as violation. However, dating had to be approved by the leaders, or it would be considered as having “bourgeois ideas” and liable for punishment.

After reform and opening up, the cadres in the government and the Party gradually have plenty of money to burn. Ninety per cent of the guests going to the exclusive clubs, restaurants, bathing centres, luxury estates, and hotel penthouses are cadres from the government, the Party and the army. General civilians have been hard-up with no spare money for such entertainments. Even the businessmen who always have strict budgets would not spend money like this, unless they have to socialize with the cadres.

The cadres have been eating the Chinese young women’s youth, but not allowing the young couples to date, otherwise the couple’s whole life of happiness will be ruined, like Wang Guocui. This is the same as the way magistrates are allowed to burn down houses while the common people are forbidden even to light lamps.

It reminds me of the related policy in past dynasties: singles, soldiers and businessmen who were away from home were allowed to seek fun from prostitutes. However, it was strictly forbidden for the officials, because the imperial understood that this would be a bottomless pit as there were so many beauties in the world. Indulging in the beauties would inevitably rapidly lead to corruption.

Even if in the United States, ordinary people’s sex life earns respect. Earvin Johnson (Magic Johnson) admits in his autobiography that he has had sexual relationship with more than 3000 women, but American people still like him even though he suffered with AIDS from it. However, this didn’t work for President Clinton.

The Community Party goes to the opposite extreme. Everything goes contrary to normal society.

Wang Guocui was dead. Another delicate and charming flower was smashed by the giant wheel of Communism.

Original texts in Chinese can be found here

(Translated by Angela Hu)

Simon Nielsen 4/27/22 Simon Nielsen 4/27/22

A Travel Report

“ (…) in my days there are beetles/a dream of stardom, the city of Nanjing/and a pair of hands to bury the ruins.” Shi Tao, a journalist, writer and poet, was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years in 2005 for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal details to the Chinese government. How does the imprisoned travel? What’s his community? Tao reports from a half-buried landscape.

By Shi Tao with Independent Chinese PEN Center

Taiyuan

the city of sunset, the city of Tang poetry

carrying a ticket

issued by Chang An Station of the Empire

I stepped into another dark castle

the sunset is not yesterday’s

sunset, though the Tang poetry is still recited

but you have to take a lift

rocketing up to the top of a fake ancient tower

to the vast groups of people

shouting a loud “Good”

otherwise…

there would be a piece of brick coating

spilling off from the ancient city walls

smashing grey imprints onto your body

to make you remember lifelong

the taste of cultural violence

Yinchuan

sunflower, the fruit of autumn

you introduced one line of a poem

into the tomb of poet Hai Zi

just as within the church of a fairytale

among the groups of people, one pair of eyes

is making pilgrimage to another pair of eyes

tonight, the silent sky

will be with me, together

to mourn a deceased, beloved person

Shanghai

from the eyes of a clown, I

entered a palace of human bodies

withered grass in silence, salt of the desires

the streets cooled down

from the fever of the season

from a thick art magazine, I

reached long-dreamed-of Shanghai

where graffiti in dreams

had turned into landscapes in everyone’s booklet

I used poems to write a six-year-long

travel report. several years later

I forced myself into

a stock house of memories,

“private, repeated and lengthy”

just like a bee yenning to share the happiness of an elephant

Nanjing

worn-out days are like the fallen ancient city

the fragrance of withered weeds on the city walls

also envies my fully soaked nostalgia

my story

once touched a lengthy dark night

silent passion disheartened by the cap of an opened wine bottle

in my days there are beetles

a dream of stardom, the city of Nanjing

and a pair of hands to bury the ruins

Original texts in Chinese can be found here

(Translated by Chen Biao)

Simon Nielsen 4/25/22 Simon Nielsen 4/25/22

A Testimony to the Final Beauty - An Eyewitness’ Diary on TAM Square in 1989

“Roadblock! Roadblock! Roadblock! The students shouted and rushed to the Square West Road and Chang'an Avenue, chasing the tank – actually a light armored vehicle – and throwing soda-water bottles, bricks, and even the pens and books. The vehicle seemed confused for a moment, and then made a sudden U-turn, running away along its previous route towards West Qianmen Street.” Environmentalist, writer, and editor, Tan Zuoren, reimagines a turning point in the life of a Chinese square.

By Tan Zuoren and Independent Chinese PEN Center

As the tanks were approaching, the college students were sitting in a circle on the center of the Square where the Square University of Democracy had started its opening ceremony.

At 11 pm, the night sky in the Capital was still bright, and the gunfire in the distance was making noises from time to time. The people, sitting on the ground, were calm and quiet. Mr. Yan Jiaqi, the first President of the Square University of Democracy, was giving his lecture on the history of democracy, its current situation, democracy and the rule of law, democracy in China ... Breeze was blowing while Mr. Yan was tirelessly talking: Democracy is the majority role, with a respect for minority rights; Democracy is for the people to restrict the government, instead of the government to dominate the people; Democracy must rely on the rule of law and oppose the rule of man; Democracy is a good thing that the Chinese people have struggled hard for 70 years and still relentlessly pursued.

The humming noises suddenly came upon us, seemingly from the sky. Some of the people were standing up and raising their heads to look around. If you were sitting, you felt the earth begin to shudder. Soon, you heard the sounds that you would never forget – the roaring of a tank and the chugging of its high-speed running tracks.

"Roadblocks!" shouted someone. Roadblock, roadblock, roadblock! People jumped up into the air, calling out and rushing toward the tank running fast at the west plaza of the Square, as they were the roadblocks.

That was at 11:10 pm on June 3, 1989, in front of the People’s Great Hall.

The Highest Principle of Peace is Sacrifice

That Democracy had a chance to encounter the tanks had gone beyond many people's expectations. All of the students had been familiar with the history of the Square. From the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the April Fifth Movement in 1976, the Square had been the venue of public demonstrations. For 70 years, people had been pursuing the footsteps of Mr. De(mocracy) and Mr. Sci(ence) and campaigning here time and again. They had seen the sticks, swords and guns, high-pressure water hoses, and the lethal weapons as well, but never happened to see a minimum of military common sense: the tanks could deal with the crowd, even driving to your home. Perhaps this spirit of insufficient preparation inspired the fears and fierce reactions.

Roadblock! Roadblock! Roadblock! The students shouted and rushed to the Square West Road and Chang'an Avenue, chasing the tank – actually a light armored vehicle – and throwing soda-water bottles, bricks, and even the pens and books. The vehicle seemed confused for a moment, and then made a sudden U-turn, running away along its previous route towards West Qianmen Street.

With neither mobilization nor command by anyone, the Square that had not been fortified instinctively reacted in fear. The traffic-dividing blocks, iron railings, trashcans, and even garbage and debris were moved to the roads to look like obstacles. You, moving the dividing blocks together with other people, thought that at seven o'clock when swearing the oath on the Square, the outcome that you could have imaged was to be beaten black and blue followed by Qincheng Prison. You were willing. Holding fast on the Square for 15 days, you were willing to wait for that outcome. It was because the revolutionary education over 30 years had characterized you, eroded you, and made you believe that you were the Gadfly, Rudin, Che Guevara, Alekos, or Pavel Korchagin, a piece of the flesh doomed to the destruction, disruption, and devotion to the sacrificial altar. Maybe at that time, you did not really know yourself.

Not knowing oneself did not mean not knowing the society, or not knowing the history, or not knowing the nation and people. Forty years ago, somebody loudly declared here that the Chinese people had stood up at that time. However, the Chinese people who had stood up did not know where they were "standing" but became even shorter after "standing up". In 1989, Chinese intellectuals and people gathered together at an unprecedented scale, and finally shouted out their own wishes and determinations to take the world by surprise!

The tank approaching suggested the arrival of the last moment. The students were sitting around the Monument and quietly waiting. They opposed the violence, ready to sacrifice. One and a half hours ago, a quiet soft voice at the broadcast station of the Hunger Strike Group had presented the common will of all: Student Colleagues, Colleagues, the last moment of our peaceful demonstration has come. We must remain rational, remain calm, and maintain the idea of peaceful petition, not to use violence to deal with violence. For two months, what we have insisted is the non-violent peaceful struggle, and the highest principle of peace is sacrifice.

The people on the Square were familiar with this voice, from Chai Ling, who at that time, in one sense, was another Goddess of Democracy on the Square.

Good-bye, Comrades!

The Square calmed down again while the gunfire around started making noise again. First in the distance, the sounds burst like the firecrackers on New Year's Eve, more and more intensively. Then, from the Museum and the People’s Great Hall, the rifle tracer came in fixed or repeated bursts of fire, like the fireworks drawing the sky.

You were at the northwest corner of the Square. In front of a broadcasting bus of the Independent Labor Union, you were counting the shots from the dark windows of the Museum and the Great Hall – after a flash, a shot must be heard. In the mind flashed the idea of observing the firing points. It seemed that you were Huang Jiguang or Dong Cunrui, ready to go for destroying a firing point at any time. In no time, there were too many to count – too many intensive shots, and too many "firing points".

The broadcasting bus was broadcasting the "Militia Training Textbook" to teach people how to fight a tank: blinding its eyes, digging its ears, cutting its belly open, chopping its legs ... ... It really came so quickly. Just thinking of them, a tank came.

At 0:30 am, from the east to the Jinshui Bridge, came the roaring of a tank, bursting more and more intensively. The people on the Square were running there. At the same time, from the crowds running frantically, you heard the news that the tank crushed to death a girl student, one from the Beijing Normal University, some said.

The loud speakers produced a harsh noise. Suddenly, "Militia Training Textbook" was changed to a high-pitched singing of "The Internationale". Then, the broadcasting bus that had been modified temporarily from a public bus did a u-turn. Watching the bus turning and turning around and dragging the speakers on the ground, you understood what it meant – to block the tank, die together! You were chasing it and finally grasping its door. But the door was shut in a sound of thundering, and a cry of farewell came from its cab: "Good-bye, comrades!"

Later, you would see this very bus on TV screen several times. The tank only tens of meters away in front of it would disappear. The bus would be no longer on the Chang'an Avenue, but was changed to have its mission to attack a building instead of intercepting a tank as an evidence of crime.

Strange? No. Greatness and absurdness are relatives, just as the beauty, to other’s eyes, is always ugly.

The most important reason for choosing to remain on the Square and wait for the final outcome was that the Square had been the place where the students dominated the organization, but also where they had been expressing their collective will. The collective will had been to uphold peaceful demonstration: non-violence, disobedience, bloodless, and not to surrender. You agreed with this idea, even though you knew it "inappropriate" at that time. At the same time, however, compared to the street barricade battle with high confrontation and high destructivity, this road of failure might lead to another kind of victory, instead of leading from the disorder to the greater disorder.

Violence came from fear, and excessive violence from excessive fear. At that time, however, not many people understood this point of view. Even understanding it, it was impossible to control the situation, nor to change it, and so it was of no use.

No Beating!

The broadcasting bus rushed to Chang'an Avenue, and stopped tens of meters away from the armored vehicle, because it had been immobilized by the piled trashcans, roaring in vain and then died. Instantly, the armored vehicle 003 became an item for the people to siege and give vent to. Bricks and sticks were pounding this iron turtle, and lit clothing and quilts were immediately piled upon the "Turtle." The people were angry, excited and crowded, as if surrounding a giant baked potato and waiting to divide and eat it.

Holding a bamboo stick, you touched the hot backdoor of the iron turtle. Before the stick hit down, "bang", the door sprang open. In the billowing smoke, two soldiers rushed out. They had been driven out by the heat and smoke in the vehicle; too drowsy to defend themselves, and so immediately stumbled onto the ground by the crowd. In the crowd there were heard only the deep sounds like ramming the earth, without a cry for mercy or help.

You desperately squeezed in, and wanted to beat, or to kill. Perhaps, you did not or need not think anything, but followed the crowd to do what they were doing. It was unexpected – what you did was the opposite. For eighteen years, whenever you have recalled that moment, you have always been confused . Then you have become increasingly convinced that, at that moment, there was a miracle that saved you.

You squeezed into a circle to the left of the armored vehicle, saw the soldier lying on the ground, no longer moving. Someone kicked him on the head, and someone jumped up and stepped on his body, as playing the Kung-fu roles in a movie. The soldier showed no response. You heard yourself shouting: no beating, no beating, the man won’t pull through! Then you pulled up his left hand on your shoulder, bent to carry him on your back with all your strength, and moved toward a first-aid station.

The assault did not stop. Some people began to hit you, and you staggered a step, nearly falling to the ground. Before you knelt down, a pair of hands from your right stretched out to hold you, and then both hands put up the soldier’s right arm to let you straighten the body. "No beating!" shouted someone. No beating! No beating! No beating! People began shouting, more and more loudly, more and more regularly. In such rhythmic cries , and as rich characteristics of the Square at that time, protected by a circle of more than 10 pairs of arms, you were running to deliver the soldier to the first-aid station outside the Museum a few hundreds meters away.

It was heard later that no soldier died on the Square that day, including that big man of more than 180 cm who was bloodied but not sacrificed. It was good luck for all of us.

To Remain Or To Withdraw?

"Tomorrow" arrived in a very strange way: turning off the lights.

At 4:00 am, when the Emergency Notice was rebroadcast, all of the lights on the Square went out. Fear fell as the darkness came. In the east of the Monument, someone lit the garbage. As the soldiers would always have smashed their weapons before they might die, some people collected the sticks and bars together and threw them into the fire and burned them. 3,000-4,000 students were sitting around the base of the Monument, horribly quiet. All were waiting, and waiting for the last moment to come. "The Internationale" was voicing, "This is the final struggle..."

In front of the People’s Great Hall, the spotlight turned on brightly, shining on the infantry phalanxes outside its gates. Near the phalanxes, a detachment hunched, held their rifles and rushed to the Monument. In an instant, a skirmish line surrounded the Monument. Someone called out: all of the city residents get out, out of here! At the same time, gunfire was heard. The soldiers started to act, picking out and shoving away those who did not look like students.. In a short while, someone held your collar, and pulled you out of the encirclement. Those citizens pulled out did not go away but stood outside the encirclement, chanting: Students are innocent! Students are innocent!

Someone was shooting the Monument, which made a shower of sparks. Soon, the big loudspeakers were silenced. After a moment of commotion, however, the students sitting on the steps of its base were still in silence. You admired those children for they had overcome their fear. Then, someone on the base of the Monument loudly suggested deciding to stay or leave based on a vote: which voice would be louder.

In fact, such voting on the Square had been previewed as early as on the first day of the "Martial Law". On May 22, the rumor of "the Square will be assaulted by an air bomb" spread like wildfire, shaking the students’ determination to remain on the square. At that time, the broadcast station of the Hunger Strike Group was broadcasting a public debate. As it was hard to determine which side of “Remaining” and “Withdrawing” was to win, in the southwest corner of the Square there appeared a quiet procession with the banners, rolling up the sleeves and standing in silence in the cold wind at midnight. As one came closer to have a look, my goodness, there were all the national teams of news media: the Central People's Broadcasting Station, China Central Television, Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily, Beijing Daily ... ... Applause! The students burst into tears! The motorcycle team of the Beijing residents stuck in flags, lined up in ranks and patrolled around the Square to encourage the students. Since then you had started to believe that China's bright future would rely on the intellectuals.

At that time, the intellectuals could indeed impress the heaven and earth, but not the Government.

No Enemy, No Hatred

The students’ commitment to a selection of “staying” to uphold stimulated the soldiers of “cleansing”. In the darkness, they began rifle-shooting intensively at the Monument to increase the pressure. You seemed to see the relief sculpture of the May Fourth’s Youths on the Monument staring with their confused eyes. Thus you crossed the skirmish warning line and returned to the Monument again – to die, together with everyone.

The decision to return to the encirclement and to take the risk actively might not be considered somewhat as heroic but significant. At that time, a large number of Chinese intellectual elite did not hesitate to jump into the fire, purifying their souls and restoring their humanity. On June 2, when staying on the Square had already been very difficult, and when the authorities’ intention of crackdown had already been very obvious, Liu Xiaobo, a doctorate in literature who had returned from the United States, together with Hou Dejian, Zhou Duo and Gao Xin, launched a new round of hunger strike protests. These "Four Gentlemen of the Square" issued a "Declaration on Hunger Strike", saying "China’s history of several thousand years had been fully filled by replacing violence with violence and mutual hatred. To this end, we make a hunger strike to call on the Chinese people for the gradual renunciation and elimination of the enemy consciousness and the hatred sentiment from now on, and for a complete abandonment of the political culture such as the class struggle, because the hatred can only produce violence and tyranny! We must have the spirit of tolerance and consciousness of cooperation in a democratic way to start building democracy in China. Democracy is a politics without an enemy and without hatred. " The 1989 generation of the intellectuals were not only ready to stand for justice, with the courage to feed tigers with their lives, but also profound and far-sighted, fully capable of undertaking the mission of promoting the progress of China's history. In fact, what any of the historians cannot avoid is that the June Fourth Movement in China, by turning over stones caused an avalanche effect, closing the door of Cold War and opening a new era of globalization. Its historical significance is no less than the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The bullets ricocheting from shooting at the Monument were making new casualties from time to time. Within a short while, four men carried a student with a hemorrhaging neck and ran down from the top of the Monument base. With a doctor's instinct, you went to clear the way ahead and guided them to the first-aid station outside the Museum. Arriving there, you were dumbfounded: several ambulances that had parked there for a long time had gone! Ambulance! Ambulance! Ambulance! You were desperately shouting and looking.

During that night, the busiest place on the Square had been the temporary first-aid station in front of the Museum. For the whole night, as the alarms had been ringing and the wheels were rolling, they had been constantly transferring the wounded on the Square as well as those from the neighboring junctions. And now, they had quietly disappeared. You looked at the north of the Square, but could not see an ambulance, only tanks and armored vehicles. In the reflection of approaching daylight, about 40 armored vehicles were lined up, moving like a flock of crouched monsters.

Suddenly, the monsters roared and their engines shot out smoke, instantly obscuring the gray dawn sky that was just appearing.

Kill Li Peng!

An orderly withdrawal from the Square began. When you were directly faced with the tanks' canons at your nose, heavily encircled, and left with a sole passage at the southeast corner, your only way to survive was to leave. Hence at the last minute, it was really peaceful and orderly.

The soldiers adopted push tactics. The students withdrew from one level, and the soldiers took it over. Within a short time, the Monument was full of soldiers. In order to clarify the situation, you even climbed an armored vehicle and saw the leading rank of the withdrawing students had arrived at Qianmen Avenue but its tail just exiting the encirclement. The number was estimated as over 1,000 persons. The time was 5:10 am, in the early morning of June 4.

You jumped down from the armored vehicle to chase the ranks. The residents who got up early were pouring toward the Square. They had heavy faces, but applauding in lines to give you a good farewell – no, a sad one. You caught up with the ranks and asked, “are there any behind?” Some students answered that there were some on the Monument who firmly refused to leave! At this time, a plump girl wearing glasses rushed out of the ranks, squatting on the ground crying. Two or three girls went to pull her, but she hugged the tree and would not get up! Two boys came to persuade her but in vain. Several of them squatted on the ground, crying!

Then you heard yourself shouting a roar that did not belong to you: Kill Li Peng! Kill Li Peng! Kill Li Peng! The students followed and cried three times. The ranks continued to march toward the Qianmen.

Then you believed that, at that moment, if there was something to represent Li Peng standing in front of you, whether it was a soldier or a tank, you would not hesitate to tear it. If there was a machine gun in your hands, you would not hesitate to pull its trigger. At that moment, you had completed the transformation from an intellectual to a spiritual mob, and then across half a step, you would be a street thug, the mob produced by the tyranny. Of course, this result would only prove that you had lost, while those holding the power and weapons would have won.

……

Epilogue

On June 10, on the train home, you took out a notebook. It was noted that, on May 21, the first day of your arrival in Beijing, you copied a poem "Dialogue" on the Monument. The pro-democracy movement in 1989, which went from the original purpose of the dialogue to the outcome of confrontation, has of course got far too many problems to reflect. However, the spirit of "Dialogue" is forever so beautiful!

Therefore, on the train running to the west, you read for all this small piece of the poem to express the deep gratitude to the final beauty of an era.

Dialogue

Child: Mom, these little aunts and little uncles, why not to eat?

Mother: They want to get a gift.

What gift

Freedom.

Who will give them this beautiful gift.

Themselves.

Mom, why so many, so many people on the Square.

This is a festival.

What festival?

Lighting festival.

Where is the light?

In everyone's heart.

Mama, Mama, who is in the ambulance?

Hero.

Why does a hero want to lie down?

To let children on the back row see.

What to see?

A flower of seven colors.

May 22, 2007 in Chengdu

Original texts in Chinese can be found here

++++

Extracts from the Criminal Verdict issued by the Chengdu Municipal Intermediate People's Court on February 9, 2010

The facts are clear, on which the Chengdu Municipal People's Procuratorate, Sichuan Province, have accused the defendant Tan Zuoren, that he cooked up “The Square Diary” and published it at the overseas media, and that he publicized the so-called the "spirit of June 4th" in a way of blood donation; and their evidences are definitely sufficient and so have been confirmed in accordance with the law. Other accusations shall not be affirmed. The evidences submitted by the defense hold no relevance to the confirmed facts, thus inadmissible.

This court found that the defendant Tan Zuoren, in a way of disinformation and defamation, incited subversion of the PRC State power and overthrowing of the socialist system, and that his conducts constituted a crime of inciting subversion of the State power. …… According to the provisions of Item 2 of Article 105, the Item 1 of Article 56, Item 1 of Article 55, Articles 47 and 58 of the PRC Criminal Law, the verdict is made as follows: The defendant Tan Zuoren is found guilty of the offence of inciting subversion of the State power and sentenced to five years imprisonment and three years deprivation of political rights.

Tan Zuoren is an environmentalist, writer, former editor of Literati magazine and honorary member of Independent Chinese PEN center, has been serving 5 years imprisonment on “inciting subversion of state power” since 28 March 2009. He was honored the ICPC’s Liu Xiaobo Courage to Write Award in 2013, and released on completion of his sentence on March 27, 2014.

(Translated by Yu ZHANG)

Simon Nielsen 4/25/22 Simon Nielsen 4/25/22

Building 21st Century Community

“Most of our neighborhoods were designed by outside professionals – planners, architects and developers. Increasingly, though, residents are working together to create a unique identity for their neighborhood and to shape places where they can bump into one another on a regular basis.” Community activator, Jim Diers, explores the many ways of building communities fit for the 21st century.

By Jim Diers, community activator

At the turn of this century, Robert Putnam wrote the most depressing book for those of us who believe that there is no substitute for community. Putnam cited all sorts of indicators of the breakdown of social capital over the previous fifty years – closed pubs, fewer voters, less families eating together, and declining membership in Rotary, League of Women Voters, NAACP and other associations. The book was titled Bowling Alone because Putnam documented a dramatic loss in bowling leagues over the years.

I talked about Putnam’s research in a presentation I made to the City Council of Port Phillip, Australia, and they encouraged me to visit the local St. Kilda Bowling Club. Sure enough, when I arrived at the large site next to Luna Park, I saw that the club had closed. In fact, there was a tombstone marking its demise. The inscription read: “Old bowlers never die. They just get composted.” The former bowling club had been converted into a spectacular community garden!

Known as Veg Out, there are dozens of raised beds including one that looks like a pirate ship, another that resembles a ranch, and a garden planted in bathroom fixtures. There’s a food forest, a cactus garden and abundant flowers. But there’s also art everywhere. The old clubhouse is covered in murals and there’s a large yellow submarine on its roof. Inside, artists are working with their neighbors to create more installations for the garden. Already, there are wrought iron gates, mosaic sculptures, a large sundial, a horse built out of garden tools, and a cow whose udders water the plants.

Veg Out is so much more than a garden. There’s a café complete with a wood fired oven and a pub. For the children, there’s a playground with a large sandbox. Children also enjoy the fairy garden with its gigantic toadstools and metal sculptures that move when cranked.

I visited on an especially active Saturday in spring. Children were playing hopscotch, getting their faces painted and visiting a petting zoo. People were eating fresh pizza and salads in the café. Dozens of families were seated on the lawn below a stage featuring local musicians. I’m sure that this was much more activity than the former bowling club had ever seen.

What I have come to realize is that people are finding new ways to build community. Robert Putnam was tracking the old ways. Yes, there may be fewer pubs than there were 50 years ago, but for every pub that has closed, there are many new coffee shops where people connect. Barn raising parties are less needed these days, but neighbors are coming together to build playgrounds. While there may be fewer bowling leagues, there are many more soccer leagues. Following are some of the new forms of community building.

Local Food Movement

Perhaps nowhere illustrates the power of food to build community better than the village of Todmorden, England. Through an initiative called Incredible Edibles, people from all walks of life are working together to raise vegetables everywhere – in the boulevards, the schools, and even the police station. Pamela Wharton who sparked the initiative says: “We are a very inclusive movement. Our motto is, ‘If you eat, you’re in.”

There’s another saying that “Flowers grow in flower gardens, but community grows in community gardens.” Seattle has 95 organic community gardens with 10,000 people participating. Gardeners work together to build and maintain the gardens and to grow and deliver produce to local food banks. Instead of fences to keep people out, every garden has a gathering place to bring neighbors in. These are key bumping places where neighbors can connect on a regular basis and build relationships with one another.

Everywhere in the world I go, I see community gardens. In the small town of Corowa, Australia, retired men were recruited to build the gazebo, frog pond and rain catchment system for the community garden; in the process, they regained a sense of purpose and made good friends. Young people in a Nairobi slum have converted a dump into a garden. Havana has 1700 community gardens and even Singapore, where space is at a premium, boasts more than 1000.

In the Lower Hutt, New Zealand, community members converted an underutilized soccer field at Epuni Primary School into an urban farm. Neighbors worked together to build raised beds, a rain catchment system, a greenhouse from the panels of former slot machines, and even a library designed to look like a hobbit house complete with a green roof. This Common Unity project includes extensive vegetable plots, a food forest, beehives, and chickens. Neighbors assist students in preparing lunches from the farm’s produce so that formerly malnourished children are eating fresh organic meals. A sign at the farm summarizes what community is all about: “We have two hands – one for giving and one for receiving.”

Food forests, urban farms and community kitchens are now common throughout the world. On seven acres of land in the center of Seattle, neighbors are creating the Beacon Food Forest by planting and caring for fruit and nut trees and berry bushes that are available to everyone for picking. Seattle’s Rainier Beach Urban Farm involves East Africans, local high school students, elders with dementia and many more in cultivating ten acres, harvesting 20,000 pounds of produce and preparing 6000 meals in the farm’s community kitchen each year. One of my favorite community kitchens is the Free Cafe in Groningen, Netherlands which serves meals from salvaged food; young people built and operate the facility that includes an artistic kitchen, dining room, living room, library and composting toilets.

Seattle is famous for its historic Pike Place Market where the motto is: “Meet the Producer.” Now, there are farmers markets throughout the city where, in addition to meeting the growers, neighbors can meet and hang out with one another. Similar local markets can be found in cities and villages everywhere. Yes, there may be fewer families eating dinner together than there were 50 years ago, but the local food movement has created so many new opportunities to build social capital.

Environmental Restoration

Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, communities have organized to safeguard the environment. The water protectors’ courageous actions at Standing Rock are a recent example of the many attempts to hold corporations and government accountable. Increasingly, people are also coming together to undertake their own environmental restoration projects.

In 1994, Ballard was the Seattle neighborhood with the fewest number of street trees and the least park land outside of downtown. Dervilla Gowan responded by organizing her neighbors to plant 1080 street trees in one day. Other neighbors went on to build 20 park projects in as many years – pocket parks, playgrounds, community gardens, ballfields, green streets, a skate park, reforestation of natural areas and restoration of a salmon estuary. Their growing concern with climate change caused them to organize an annual Sustainable Ballardfest and issue undrivers licences which entitle the bearers to ride a foot-powered shufflebus. All of this has sparked a movement. There are now 67 neighborhoods and suburban towns that have joined Ballard to form SCALLOPS - Sustainable Communities All Over Puget Sound.

Taomi, a poor farming community in the mountains of central Taiwan, was at the epicenter of the 1999 earthquake. Amidst all of the devastation, the villagers took stock of their remaining assets and realized that they had abundant birds, butterflies and frogs. They worked together to build ponds and to reforest the land. Fifty famers got trained and certified as eco-tour guides. Young people created art with an environmental theme. For the first time, tourists began to visit. The locals started gardens, restaurants and bed and breakfasts. Now, Taomi is a beautiful eco-village that gets half a million visitors each year and boasts a much healthier economy.

The creeks flowing out of the Waitakere Ranges in west Auckland had become heavily polluted over time and the native bush on the banks had succumbed to all sorts of invasive vegetation. Through Project Twin Streams, neighbors organized to care for their respective sections of the creeks. Thousands of volunteers worked to remove tons of junk from the water. They weeded out the invasives and planted more than 800,000 trees and shrubs since the project began in 2003. Artists worked with children to create murals and sculptures all along the creeks to educate the public and to celebrate the clean water and the return of the native fish, bush and birds.

Such environmental projects usually aren’t one-time affairs. Participants typically meet frequently to maintain and enjoy their contribution to the environment. In the process, they build community.

Community-Created Art

Many cities have long had commissions of experts who select individuals to create public art. There can certainly be value in this top-down approach, but taxpayers often question what the art means and how much it costs. A new approach to public art is on the ascendency. Just as planners, architects, police, public health workers and other professionals are learning how to use their knowledge and skills to empower communities, so are many artists. They are helping neighbors to use art as a way of expressing what is important to them – their history, culture, identity, values, environment or vision for the future. Through working together to conceive and create art, the participants also develop a stronger sense of community. The completed art often is a source of pride for the observers as well and helps them to identify with their community.

There are hundreds of examples of community-created art in Seattle thanks in large part to a Neighborhood Matching Fund that will be described later. One of the early projects was a gigantic troll that resulted from a community vote in the Fremont neighborhood and is now one of Seattle’s most popular landmarks. Residents of Chinatown, Japantown, Manillatown and Little Saigon came together to design 17 dragons climbing utility poles defining a common International District. Gardeners at Bradner Park used mosaic tiles and broken dishes to create spectacular murals on the inside walls of their restroom as a successful strategy to combat vandalism. Neighborhood business districts were revitalized when the West Seattle community developed 15 historical murals for their storefronts and when Columbia City residents painted boarded up doors and windows to depict the businesses that they wanted to attract. Through Urban ArtWorks, artists have mentored over 5000 young people to create more than 1500 murals on walls previously covered with graffiti.

I see similar community creativity everywhere. When I visited an art center in Auckland’s former Corban Estate Winery, young offenders were passionately painting a mural they had designed for a police station and there was a building where homeless Maori were proudly creating art and crafts. In Gosford, Australia, residents handcrafted 40,000 poppies that were installed around Memorial Fountain to commemorate the centenary of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli. Maple Ridge, British Columbia has an Artists in Residency program through which the city makes houses available to artists who work with their neighbors to create installations or stage events such as the River Festival I enjoyed complete with salmon lanterns lighting the way. Nothing good was happening in Tacoma’s Frink Park until someone saw the potential of that concrete-covered space as a canvas; now there is free chalk available every Friday and dozens of people from all walks of life can be seen creating art that visitors enjoy until the next rain.

Placemaking

Most of our neighborhoods were designed by outside professionals – planners, architects and developers. Increasingly, though, residents are working together to create a unique identity for their neighborhood and to shape places where they can bump into one another on a regular basis. Community-created art typically plays a large role in this process of placemaking.

There’s a good example of placemaking in the Newton neighborhood of Surrey, British Columbia. In the center of the business district is a lot covered by very tall trees. Many neighbors complained about the drug dealing, encampments and other public safety concerns hidden in the trees. The police suggested that the sight lines could be improved by clearcutting this mini-forest, but other neighbors had a better idea. They decided to turn the problem space into a community place, and they gave it a name - The Grove. Creative ways were found to use the trees: frames were installed on each tree so that neighbors could display their art; a tightrope was extended between two of the trees; a large stump was painted to serve as a chessboard; word cards were placed on a trunk so that they could be rearranged on what is known as the Poet Tree (three volumes of poetry have now emerged from The Grove). Strings of lights were hung to brighten the environment at night. Neighbors built Encyclopedia House from outdated editions discarded by the library. Local musicians were invited to perform in The Grove. Every major holiday and some minor ones like Groundhog Day are celebrated there. Workshops on everything from poetry writing to seed bombing are accommodated. Welcome signs in every language of that very diverse neighborhood invite people in. And it works! Not only do people feel safe, but The Grove has helped very different people, some of whom had been seen as a problem, to meet one another and build a sense of community.

With the budget cuts in Rotterdam, a neighborhood association was gearing up to fight the closure of their public library. But someone argued that the library wasn’t all that great and that the association’s energy could be better used to create their own place. Community members got excited about this vision and developed the Reading Room in a vacant storefront. It includes a library, café, pub, children’s play area, boxing rink and stage for regular performances. It attracts many more people than the former library and gets them to interact with one another – something that most libraries aren’t programmed to do. Everything in the space was donated and the staff are all volunteers.

Placemaking ideas are spreading rapidly. The Sellwood Neighborhood in Portland, Oregon painted a mural in their intersection in order to slow traffic and create a local identity. They didn’t ask permission from local government, because they knew they wouldn’t get it. The project was so successful, however, that Portland is now one of many cities around the world that permits such murals.

Activists in San Francisco started feeding the parking meters so that they could create gathering places in parking spaces for a day. Now, International PARKing Day is observed in cities everywhere. And, many of those temporary parklets are now permanent. Palmerston North, New Zealand is one city that has many parklets. The local government gives community activists a Placemaking Toolkit which includes a Get Out of Jail Free card “if you unwittingly contravene a regulation in your effort to make your city a better place.”

Culture of Sharing

There’s a lot of talk about the sharing economy these days with the popularity of businesses like Airbnb, Uber and Zipcar. Less heralded but a much greater force in community building is the growing culture of sharing. Unlike the sharing economy, it is tied to relationships rather than money.

One of the simplest expressions of the culture of sharing is the little free library. The first one was built in a small town in Wisconsin in 2009 when Todd Bol wanted to memorialize his mother who had been a schoolteacher and book lover. He built a library shelf designed to look like a schoolhouse, filled it with paperbacks, erected it in his front yard, and invited his neighbors to take and leave books. It proved to be an effective way not only to share reading materials but to help neighbors engage with one another. There are now tens of thousands of such libraries in at least 70 countries and the concept continues to evolve. Red Deer, Alberta even has little free libraries in its public buses.

Although the concept of formal time exchanges is nearly 200 years old, the modern version has really taken off in recent decades. The name and the process differ somewhat from place to place, but they generally operate as time banks. A time bank is a network of neighbors who share their skills to meet one another’s needs. Everyone’s time is valued the same. So, for every hour of service that someone provides, they are entitled to an hour of service that they need from someone else in the network. Not only is it a great way for people get their needs met outside of the monetary system, but it is an effective tool for connecting neighbors who might otherwise be isolated. Time banks are the most prevalent in the United States and United Kingdom, but variations can be found in at least three dozen countries.

The recent proliferation of co-working spaces has also been a major contributor to community building, especially among young people. While most such spaces do require a fee to join, members typically share their expertise freely with one another. I visited such a space in Sioux Falls, South Dakota that was located in a former bakery. The Bakery has plenty of formal and informal working spaces, but it also hosts food trucks, yoga classes, and free workshops offered by the members. The more than 500 young people who belong have formed such a tight community that housing is now being designed for vacant lots around The Bakery so that members can live, learn, work, play and eat all in the same neighborhood.

Similarly, in Columbus, Ohio’s old industrial neighborhood of Frankenton, young people have renovated a former factory as the Idea Foundry. A membership fee gives them access to shared space and equipment such as pottery kilns, welding supplies, and a 3D printer. A nearby warehouse has been turned into 200 artist studios accompanied by a pub, restaurant and performance spaces. Other former industrial buildings now house a glass studio and a brewery. This young entrepreneurial community comes together each year to host Independents’ Days – three days of independent film, music and art.

Social Media

An argument can be made that electronic screens contribute to the breakdown of social capital as face-to-face relationships give way to virtual friends, but social media can also play a role in building community. I’ve done some work in Wyndham, a quickly growing suburb far outside of Melbourne where the community infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the housing development. Lacking physical bumping places, neighbors turned to Facebook as a way of connecting. A high percentage of the population now belongs to the various neighborhood pages. I heard several powerful stories of neighbors helping one another in times of need even though they had not previously met one another physically.

A key requirement in my community organizing class at the University of Washington is that the students organize around something they are passionate about. One of my students, Megan, said that she had two passions – eating cookies and losing weight. She proceeded to use the Nextdoor social media platform to offer free cookies to residents in her Leschi neighborhood. Megan walked six miles each Sunday delivering the cookies and meeting her neighbors. It turned out that most of them were more interested in the company than in the cookies, and several offered to help with her project. They quickly outgrew Megan’s tiny kitchen, so she put out another message on Nextdoor seeking commercial kitchens. Three churches offered theirs.

Participatory Democracy

The decline in voter participation that Putnam noted has continued, but government officials are starting to wake up and realize that they share much of the blame. A focus on good business practices and customer service over the years has left many people feeling like taxpayers rather than citizens. Tokenistic citizen engagement techniques such as public hearings and task forces have only appealed to the “usual suspects.” Even voting is viewed by many as an exercise in abdicating power. A true democracy requires much more robust and inclusive engagement. Especially at the local level, public officials are realizing the importance of building community and empowering people to make their own decisions and to initiate their own projects.

One of the first cities that devolved power to the people was Porto Alegre, Brazil which initiated an ambitious process of participatory budgeting in 1989. The process starts at the neighborhood level, involves about 50,000 citizens, and determines which projects and services will be supported with the City’s $200 million budget. Cities throughout Brazil replicated this process and now participatory budgeting has taken hold on every continent. In most cities, however, citizens are given a relatively small portion of the budget within which they can propose and prioritize projects.

Many other local governments are empowering citizens to develop their own neighborhood plans. The City of Seattle even made money available so that neighborhoods could hire a planner accountable to them. Rather than start with the City’s budget, this process starts with diverse interests coming together to develop a shared vision for the future of their neighborhood and developing recommendations for actions that will move in that direction. Unlike traditional planning, these bottom-up plans tend to be more holistic, get many more people involved (30,000 in Seattle) and leverage the community’s resources as well as local government’s.

Another tool for leveraging community participation and other resources is the Neighborhood Matching Fund which was developed by the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods in 1989. The program supports informal groups of neighbors to undertake one-time projects by providing a cash match in exchange for the community’s match of volunteer labor. Through this program, more than 5000 community self-help projects have resulted – new parks, playgrounds, community gardens, public art, cultural centers, renovated facilities, oral histories, etc. The City’s $70 million investment over the years has leveraged $100 million in community contributions that otherwise never would have been tapped. But, the best benefit is that it has involved tens of thousands of citizens with one another and with their government, often for the first time. Now, there are hundreds of such programs around the world but none on the scale of Seattle’s.

Participatory democracy is catching on in many parts of the world. In the Netherlands, where there are numerous examples of community-driven planning and participatory budgeting, the movement is called Burgerkracht (Citizen Power). Machizukuri is the term for community building in Japan; first codified by Kobe City and utilized in recovering from the 1995 earthquake, a similar approach to citizen engagement in the development process has been adopted in other east Asian countries. In New Zealand, the movement is called Community-Led Development and builds on Maori concepts. Australia’s Municipal Association of Victoria sponsors an annual Power to the People conference; there are now many examples of community-led plans and matching fund projects throughout the State of Victoria. In Iceland, Better Reykjavik involved 40% of the population in submitting and voting on ideas via the internet; that success led to an effort to crowdsource a new constitution for the country.

In Canada, there is a focus on building community at the neighborhood level. The Ontario Cities of Burlington, Hamilton, Kitchener, London and Toronto have engaged in widespread consultation to develop comprehensive Neighborhood Strengthening Strategies. The City of Edmonton and smaller jurisdictions throughout Alberta are training block connectors to bring neighbors together around shared interests and for mutual support. In British Columbia, the Vancouver Foundation is working with local governments to make small matching grants available in 17 communities.

Other

Although I have tried to categorize the new forms of community building, I should note that community ways defy categorization. It’s in community that everything comes together, so the approach is typically holistic. For example, Veg Out community garden could be categorized as a local food, environmental or placemaking project or as an example of community-created art or the culture of sharing. Every case cited above could also be described as a public safety or health promotion project because both benefit from stronger social capital. At the same time, there are many new forms of community building that don’t fit in any of the categories I have listed. Here are a few examples.

The increasing frequency and ferocity of floods, droughts, fires, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters throughout the world is prompting communities to take the initiative in preparing for disaster. Neighbors are meeting one another, sharing their contact information, and making plans to combine their skills, equipment and other resources so that they can be as resilient as possible. Vashon Island, Washington, where I live, has 200 Neighborhood Emergency Response Organizations. Volunteers also created and operate a network of ham radios, a Facebook page, and radio and television stations for emergency communication; in the meantime, these media play a significant role in further building the community connections that are key to resiliency.

Neighbors are finding new ways to support their elders so that they can age in place. In a small village outside of Hoogeveen in the Netherlands, neighbors renovated a former restaurant to serve as an assisted-living facility staffed largely by volunteers. The other elders are supported to stay in their homes by neighbors who serve as “Buddies” – making regular visits, providing rides, and helping to maintain the house and yard. Neighbors are playing a similar role in cities throughout the United States where Virtual Villages have been organized. Started in Boston, this model also helps isolated seniors to connect with community and offers concierge-like referrals for those services that can’t be provided by volunteers.

Collective knitting may seem like a frivolous activity by comparison, but it is also playing a role in rebuilding community. Knitting groups are popping up everywhere whether their purpose is to knit apparel for newborns, pussy hats for the Women’s March, or blankets for homeless encampments or to create street art through yarn bombing. In the Voorstad neighborhood of Deventer in the Netherlands, eight women came together to socialize while they knitted scarves in the yellow and red of their beloved football team, the Go Ahead Eagles. The movement grew and soon there were knitting groups everywhere, even in the football stadium. Several months ago, they sewed the scarves together and completely covered a house to show the warmth they have for the Syrian refugees who live inside. Their current goal is to make a scarf so long that it can surround the entire neighborhood; the 185 men and women participating in this project are three kilometers of the way towards knitting their community together.

I hope that you are as heartened by all of this as I am. Community isn’t an old-fashioned concept. We need it now more than ever. But, if we are going to build stronger communities, we can’t hark back to the old ways. We’re living in a different world, and we need to adapt our approaches accordingly. Fortunately, people are stepping up everywhere and continually finding new ways to connect with others. I can’t imagine a more exciting time than this for building community.

Simon Nielsen 4/21/22 Simon Nielsen 4/21/22

Putting Soul Into Planning And Design

“Places need to be the armature of planning and design. And we can’t just concentrate on filling those places. We must put people first in planning and design instead of building cities that erase all that is meaningful about the places in which they exist and the people who call those places home.” Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader, wonders why new development often treat humans as an inconvenience.

By Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader

When we move into a new home, what’s the first thing we do?

We make it our own.

Whether it’s furniture, paint, art, or lawn ornaments, humans are hardwired to personalize the places in which we live. To differentiate them from those of our neighbors. To create a place in which we feel good. To make them a home.

The question then is why does this so rarely translate to the design of our cities and neighborhoods? Why do we have to fight for ourselves as humans for the public places in which we can feel alive? Why is the city building process so normalized to scraping clean every artifact that makes us feel good and replacing it with big, boring, uniform rectangles?

We wouldn’t tolerate it in our homes. Why has it become the default for our cities?

Places first, boxes second

Humans are creatures and like every other creature they look for habitats in which they feel comfort and nourishment. In our cities, that often translates to public spaces in which they can feel good.

And studies have shown how, when we feel more attached to our neighborhoods, we’re more likely to invest our time and money there.

Too often, though, the creation of places seems to be approached from the wrong direction. Instead of prioritizing places that foster life and engage our senses, urban development proceeds relentlessly in favor of building nothing but boxes, maximized on every block, as if humans were an inconvenience that should make their way around them.

The process is more about filling space than creating place. You and I become the last priority.

Places need to be the armature of planning and design. And we can’t just concentrate on filling those places. We must put people first in planning and design instead of building cities that erase all that is meaningful about the places in which they exist and the people who call those places home.

Case in Point

You can see evidence of how not to do it all over our cities.

I was in Austin recently and was appalled at how streets that have been surrendered to soulless rectangles - domineering buildings that erase all comfort for the human being. The building of boxes had taken over all other considerations. Yet, nearby, on the University of Texas campus, you see people socializing and lounging in beautiful, comfortable spaces.

Why do we have to scramble our way through cities searching, often in vain, to find these vibrant places instead of using them as a central armature and planning around that armature?

Or look at Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, an “innovation district” that has been built up over the last 30 years, one of the world’s greatest concentrations of smart people. Approximately 100 acres of Cambridge, one of the most livable cities on earth, has been removed from human circulation and turned over to impersonal rectangles. I honestly don’t get it - can’t we do urban economic development and build places where people feel human all at the same time?

People move to attractive, vibrant places where people are welcoming and friendly. Put simply, high-performing habitats = high-performing cities.

So, how do we achieve those high-performing habitats as opposed to just talking about them?

Turn the development process around. Start by defining a framework of high quality places where people will spend their time in public – for recreation, shopping, dining, relaxing, socializing. Connect those places to each other through walkable environments, and then plan and design buildings that integrate into these community hubs. Put another way, start by creating a placemaking framework plan.

You’ve got to build a place that speaks to people - a place that builds the soul of a community as opposed to erasing it.

Simon Nielsen 4/20/22 Simon Nielsen 4/20/22

Profound Play - Why Play, Not Hard Work, Is The Key To Creating A Better World

“This essay attempts to debunk a common myth: creating a better world requires hard work. It argues that the most effective way to change our world is through play. Not just any kind of play – profound play. As you are about to discover, the great tragedy in our culture is that we have lost sight of the enormous, creative, transformative power of play. We have trivialized it as something we outgrow as we transition from childhood into adulthood.” David Engwicht, CEO of Creative Communities International.

By David Engwicht, CEO of Creative Communities International

The evolutionary drive to play

Brian La Doone watched in horror as a very hungry polar bear lumbered towards Hudson, his sled dog chained to a post. It was November and the polar bear had not eaten for months. Hudson was an instant dinner served on a platter.

But Hudson did not panic or try to escape. Instead he behaved as if he wanted to play by bowing and wagging his tail. The bear responded to the invite, and the pair had a playful romp in the snow. After fifteen minutes the bear lumbered off.

The next day the bear returned about the same time for another frolic with his new friend. On the third day, Brian La Doone’s workmates gathered to watch the play-date. The play dates continued for a week, by which time the ice had thickened enough for the bear to go hunting for a seal.

Stuart Brown, in his book Play (Scribe 2010), asks the question, why was play more important to this bear than a meal?

Scientists have become intrigued about play in the animal kingdom, and the role it plays in the evolutionary process. Adult ravens have been seen sliding down a snowy slope on their backs, hopping up, flying to the top, then sliding down again. Bison have been observed running onto a frozen lake, and skating along on all fours while trumpeting wildly. Octopuses play. It even appears that ants play. If play is just ‘for fun’ and serves no useful purpose why is it so widespread in nature? If it is a non-productive activity (a waste of energy), why has it not been eliminated by the evolutionary process that only rewards characteristics that give an organism a competitive advantage? Surely animals that are playing are an easier target for a predator than those giving serious attention to their environment? Wouldn’t polar bears that eat sled dogs have a better chance of survival than those that choose to play with them?

To find an answer to this question, Dr. Stuart Brown spent some time with Bob Fagen, an expert in animal play. For fifteen years Bob Fagen had been studying the behaviour of grizzly bears in Alaska. Dr. Brown found himself thirty feet up an old cypress tree with Fagen watching grizzly bears at play. Fagen explained that what he had documented after years of observation was that ‘the bears that played the most were the ones that survived best’. He explained why, ‘In a world continuously presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares these bears for an evolving planet.’ In other words, play is not just for fun. It builds resilience and increases the chances of survivability. So evolution rewards the animals that play the hardest.

In fact, play does more than merely improve the chances of surviving. It builds bigger brains. Scientists now understand that when we play, we create new networks in our brain. Rats in a play-rich environment grow bigger brains than rats deprived of opportunities to play. Play makes us smarter. Dr. Brown says that when kittens stage mock battles with each other they ‘are learning what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence – the ability to perceive others’ emotional state and to adopt an appropriate response’. Play stimulates the development of the brain’s frontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for cognition – which entails sorting relevant information from irrelevant information, monitoring our thoughts and feelings and planning for the future.

Play allows us to experiment with the future, to test out potential scenarios in a non-threatening, non-critical environment. Which is why in nature the strongest players are the strongest survivors. In his book, Deep Survival (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), Laurence Gonzales, looks at why some people survive while others perish in a life and death situation. One of his surprising findings is that the adults who have forgotten how to play are the first to perish.

They have lost the flexibility to play with potential scenarios and solutions in their head. Their thinking has become rigid, and they die.

At the most fundamental level, without play we have no capacity to imagine and plan for a future that is different to today. It is literally how the child we once were built the adult that we are now. In play we created thousands of potential futures, then stepped into those that most appealed to us. Play, not hard work, is how our whole civilization was built. Without the ability to create potential futures in our brain, there would be nothing to build. Changing our destiny, or the destiny of our culture, requires that we relearn how to play again. Hard work will simply not do it.

The great demise of play

It is a biological fact that the brain of a child is different to the brain of an adult. In fact the human brain is still building itself up till our late teens. This period of ‘biological immaturity’ is universal. But the underlying story we tell about this period changes dramatically from one era to another, from one culture to another, and even between different classes in society.

However, the scientific and industrial revolutions dramatically changed the underlying story we tell about the meaning of childhood, because they altered the underlying story we tell about the meaning of adulthood. For thousands of years people had defined their identity by their relationships - the tribe to which they belonged, their family of origin, and the location where they lived. The first question you would ask a person in order to establish their identity was, ‘What tribe do you belong to?’ But the scientific and industrial revolution changed this. We began viewing the universe, including ourselves, in machine terms. People began to define their identity in terms of what they produced as a productive ‘machine’ in society. The first question to establish a person’s identity became, ‘What work do you do?’ Or decoded, ‘As a productive machine, what products roll off the end of your production line?’

This change in conception of identity for adults had significant impacts on how adults viewed the identity of children. When identity was tied to a person’s relationship to place and people, children were able to share this adult sense of identity. Children were ‘little adults growing into big adults’ sharing the same tribe and the same connection to locality as the big adults. But when adult identity became tied to what the adult produced as a productive machine, children were unable to share this new adult identity (well certainly not after child labour laws banned children from the workforce). A new way of conceiving of childhood needed to be found. There are many writers who argue that there was no concept of childhood prior to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Whether this is correct or not is immaterial. What is important is that after the industrial revolution, the concept of childhood carried within it the notion that this is a period which is very distinct and of an entirely different nature to adulthood. Childhood was now conceived as an apprenticeship for adulthood. To be grown up meant to shed our childhood as one sheds clothes that are outgrown. This journey to adulthood is a linear journey. Children work their way through grades at school, learning the skills needed to be a productive ‘machine’. Along the way adults tell the children to ‘grow up’ and ‘stop playing around’. And the adults ask the children over and over, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up (become a productive ‘machine’)?’

This viewing of our identity through the machine-model prism not only changed the way we view childhood, it created an artificial distinction between work and play. The high value we place on work – based in the good old Protestant work ethic – means that we view the real work in our society as being done by adults. Yet children are perhaps doing the most serious and creative work of anyone. They are in the process of inventing and creating a sophisticated, mature, rational adult – and they are doing this important work through dream, play and fantasy. The distinction between work and play is therefore totally arbitrary. In fact, (as I will explain later) what is play for one person is work for another and what is work for one person is play for another.

Because our culture values ‘serious work’ over play and sees serious work as belonging to adulthood, we have totally undervalued ‘serious play’ and therefore downgraded the importance of childhood.

If a society values the work of adults over the play of children, and sees these as separate worlds, then this will manifest itself in the way space is arranged in our towns and cities. Segregated and specialized areas will be created for children’s play. Play and the activity of children will not be integrated into adult space and therefore child’s play will not intersect with the serious activities of the adult world. Traditionally, the space where children’s play and the adult world intersected was the street. But in our culture the street has become the exclusive province of ‘productive adults’ in machines that improve the adult’s efficiency. Instead of the street being the premier play space for children, we have created segregated and specialised play grounds. This segregation of the child’s world from the adult world in our urban form is no accident. It is a reflection of our deep-seated stories about childhood, and the trivialising of play.

What is work and what is play?

What is work for one person can be play for another. For a child, washing up may be a game while for an adult it is work. So whether an activity is play or work is determined by our mental attitude, not by the nature of the activity. At any moment each of us has the power to transform play into work… or work into play. Even the most serious work, like making a better world, can be turned into play. As we shall see, ultimately play is the only way to make a better world.

Play is transformed into work when we take a game, or our role in that game, too seriously. Work is play stripped of its playfulness. Play can also become work if we are forced into playing a game we do not want to play. (Technically this is slavery, not work.) But as we shall explore shortly, even slavery can be transformed into a game. Many a slave feigned acceptance of their humiliations, playing a role so the master could live under the illusion that it was he that was in charge. A favorite proverb of the Jamaican slaves was, ‘Play fool, to catch wise’.

It is the contention of this short book that creating a better world, in fact all of life, is meant to be a playful game. Activities only become work (or in many cases slavery) when we strip them of their playful element. A common element of both work and slavery is a feeling of entrapment and loss of freedom. In play you can be whatever you want to be, but in work or slavery you are locked into a single role and you feel forced to play out this role.

Most social activism is a revolt against ‘the system’ that demands the game be played according to certain rules – rules that we find unjust or unfair. Ironically, these social activists take on a stereo-typical role as people ‘working for change’. They often become just as trapped in their particular role of ‘social activist’ as those playing roles in the ‘establishment game’. These social activists allow themselves to become enslaved to the rules of the working-for-change game. They lose sight of the fact that the very essence of freedom is the ability to transcend the rules of the game simply by starting to play a different game. The entire universe would be enslaved to blind determinism if it were not for play.

Real change happens automatically when we change the rules of the game, our role in that game, or simply invent a new game.

Now many people will have great difficulty with this notion that all of life is really a game. But being a ‘rational adult’ is just a role we have invented, and that we inhabit from time to time (or for some, a majority of the time). It is a game that is governed by a different set of rules than when we play other roles, such as jester, or wise old elder, or lover, or playful child. Even though our role as ‘rational adult’ seems more serious than some of our other roles, at its core it is still just a role in a game.

Whether you are wrestling with difficulties in a relationship, or a problem in the workplace, or a thorny social issue, if it has become ‘hard work’, the most transformative thing you can do is change your relationship to the situation by ceasing to see it as ‘work’ and viewing it as a ‘game’.

We are now going to look at six types of play: ritual play, role play, recreational play, letting-off-steam play, freedom play, and escapist play. These categories overlap, blur and merge and are not an exhaustive list. But what we are going to look at is how each of these types of play can be tapped into by the adult who wants to develop their skills in ‘profound play’ – the ability to combine play with wisdom.

Ritual play

One of the earliest types of play that we humans engage in is ritual play, for example the game of peek-a-boo where the adults pretends to hide behind their hands then reveal their face and says ‘boo’. Part of the nature of this game is repetition. It won’t work if you only do it once. The game is an early form of ritual play.

Why does the child laugh the longer this game goes on? In the first few months of life, this child endured a recurring painful experience: the mother they depended on for their very life would periodically disappear. This terror would subside when their mother returned, only to be rekindled when the mother left yet again. But through the game of peek-a-boo the child learns a very valuable lesson: my mother is always there, even when I can’t see her. This brings a certain comfort to the child to know that the person they depend on for life will always return. The ‘disappearing’ and ‘returning’ is ritualized into a game, and through the game the child learns to control their fears. When the parent puts their face behind their hands, tension rises in the child, for this part of the ritual reminds them of the fear the feel each time the parent disappears in reality. The pulling away of the hands brings the parent back, and releases the tension. This release of tension is reinforced by the parent pretending to give the child a fright by going ‘boo’. This ritual raising and releasing of tension is pleasurable and results in laughter. Part of the pleasure is also the paradox in this game: in play, the parent is not there; in reality, they are. The other paradox is that the parent pretends to frighten the child even though the child knows full well what happens next.

The entire rise of human culture is built on ritual. Even before we humans had a language to express our emotions and fears, we had rituals. Rituals to celebrate the changing of seasons, rituals to deal with life and death. Haunted by our dreams and the seeming chaos of the world around us, we were driven to create meaning as a way of allaying our fears. Like the game of peek-a-boo, these rituals gave meaning to the universe and provided a sense of comfort. The meaning-making inherent in rituals eventually gave rise to religion, the arts, civilization, and the sciences.

One of the endearing features of children is their ability to invent rituals, then let go of them once they have outlived their purpose. There is a time we stop playing peek-a-boo and move onto some other form of ritualized play. When I talk of ‘rituals’ I am not just talking about religious or spiritual rituals. Almost all of life is ritualized play. Meeting your family for lunch every Sunday is a form of ritual play. So is watching the footy every Saturday night, or buying the latest tech gadget. These rituals, and the rules related to these rituals, form the ‘culture’ of a civilization, community, workplace or household. Often these culturally-specific rituals have evolved over a long time, and those who want to get ahead ‘play by the rules’ inherent in the ritual.

However, much of the ritual in our culture has outgrown its usefulness. Yet as a culture and society we find it much more difficult to give up rituals that have outgrown their usefulness than we did as children. One reason ‘rational’ adults find it much harder to let go of their rituals is because the adult builds a rational reason for why they play the game. (As an adult it is compulsory to have a reason for your rituals.) The adult legitimizes their rituals with intellectual constructs which continue supporting the ritual long after it has served its useful purpose. Kids are therefore much more ‘rational’ about their rituals than adults. Or to put it another way, adult ritual is marked by a high degree of irrationality.

In the past, social change agents have thought that the only way you get a society to change its outdated ritual games is to first dismantle the intellectual constructs that support the ritual.

What these change agents failed to recognize is that the rituals are first and foremost an act of ‘meaning making’. Rituals are invented to give meaning to a chaotic universe, to anchor the soul. The attachment to the ritual game (such as owning a gun in the USA) is not intellectual but emotional. It is therefore virtually impossible to convince people to change their rituals by attacking the intellectual constructs used to justify the ritual. If we do not offer them a more meaningful ritual to replace the old, we are simply cutting them loose on a dark and turbulent sea.

Deep social change can only take place if change agents understand the role of ritual in imparting a sense of meaning. The job of the social-change agent is to give people the confidence to let go of their outdated rituals and to invent more meaningful rituals. This is not an intellectual process. The child lets go of their outdated rituals because they have an implicit belief in their creative abilities to invent new games and rituals.

Profound play understands that one way to produce significant social and cultural change is to introduce new rituals that paradoxically both anchor the soul yet at the same time set it free on a new voyage of discovery. Profound play does not overtly attack the rationality of current rituals nor the intellectual constructs that supports them. It simply offers the child in all of us a ‘new toy’. (Being ‘rational’ adults, we will always find a post hoc rationalization as to why we decided to play the new game!)

Role play

When most people think of role play they think of a theatre technique often used in small group work and therapy. However, this is a formalized version of role-play. Role-play is common across much of the animal kingdom. Baby cubs stage mock battles, honing their hunting skills for when they become independent and need these skills in the ‘real’ world. For children, playing shop, fire chief or baker is a way of trying on potential future roles like play clothes and seeing which ones fit best. Through role-play, children invent the rational adult they are yet to become.

There is no reason why tapping the creative power of role-play should stop when we reach adulthood. Through role-play we can experiment with roles we would like to play in the tomorrow we are creating together. In fact, role-play is the only way we have of visiting the future.

Role play has incredible creative power, and is a major tool in what I call profound play. Role play delivers at least four major benefits.

Benefit 1: Return of Innocence

When we play a role, we forget for a moment who we are and we are ‘born anew’ as someone different. This is the state of innocence which is fundamental to the creative abilities of children. Their mind is not cluttered with ready-made answers. They don’t need to learn how to ‘think outside the box’.

There is no ‘box’ to think outside – not yet anyway.

In 1987 I attended a public meeting to discuss plans to ‘upgrade’ a major road through my neighbourhood in Brisbane, Australia. I left the meeting a committee member of Citizens Against Route Twenty (CART). A week later I found myself media spokesperson, with no previous experience in community activism; no formal education; totally ignorant about traffic and urban planning; and utterly politically naive.

Full of incredible optimism, I started my new job with a six-hour door-knock along the proposed route. Every door I knocked on I got the same message: ‘Once they (the Bjelke Peterson Government) have decided to do something, there is nothing you are going to do to change it.’ I was stunned by this sense of resignation and powerlessness. Even our committee didn’t believe we could win. ‘We will give them a good fight,’ I was told, ‘but we can’t win.’ I was probably the only one in our entire community naive enough to believe we could win.

The reason for this pessimism was that the Bjelke Peterson Government had been in power for over 20 years and ruled via a giant gerrymander. They could do what they liked in the big cities because they only relied on the country vote to stay in power.

I had no idea what to do. Out of sheer desperation I suggested to the committee that we spend a half-day pretending we had won. I suggested we make up stories about how we won. That day we invented a whole lot of stories. One seemed more pregnant with possibilities than the others, so we decided to build our campaign strategy on this story.

Three years later we won, and it happened largely according to the plot framework of the story that we had created three years earlier when we played ‘lets pretend’.

Prior to playing ‘lets pretend’, our minds were shackled by the perceived wisdom that our community was powerless to change any decision made by the Bjelke Peterson government. By pretending we were victors, and seriously playing the role, we cleared the dominant story from the slate of our minds.

Part of ‘profound play’ is a robust intellectual understanding of issues. Paradoxically, it is impossible to gain this robust intellectual understanding without first ‘forgetting’ everything you know and returning to a state of innocence. For example, my second book revolutionized thinking on transport by asking the kinds of questions a kid would ask: ‘But why do we build cities?’ ‘But why do we have a transport system?’ It is only by asking these child-like questions that we can step outside the bounds of current knowledge. By putting ourselves in our child persona, or by putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, we are able to recapture this sense of innocence, but innocence that is informed by reason and wisdom.

Benefit 2: Experiencing of multiple-worlds simultaneously

The most productive regions in nature, from an evolutionary perspective, is ‘marginal t territory’ – the space where eco-systems meet and overlap, for example, tidal mud flats which are neither land or sea, but both. It is here that new life-forms evolve.

I was once asked to chair a meeting in Calgary, Canada, in which a group of residents were in conflict with their city council. So I asked the residents to play the role of city engineer and for the city engineer to play the role of residents. Before starting this role play, I asked the residents to train the city engineer on how to be good residents and I asked the city engineer to train the residents on how to be a good city engineer (Council bureaucrat). We then launched into the role play and the city engineer (now playing the role of resident) got in the face of the residents (now playing the role of city engineer) wagged his finger and yelled, ‘I first approached the city 14 years ago about this problem, and what have you done? Nothing! A big fat nothing…” The whole room erupted in laughter. Within two hours we had an agreed solution to a problem that had festered for fourteen years.

The reason we found a solution so quickly is rather simple. Every resident in Calgary has the potential to become a bureaucrat working for a Council. In a sense they already have a bureaucrat living in their head. And every Council bureaucrat is already a resident. The problem between the residents and bureaucrats had arisen because both had taken their adopted role too seriously. But through the role-play I got them to play two roles simultaneously – in ‘real life’ they may be a resident, but in the role play they were a bureaucrat. This meant that they were experiencing two worlds simultaneously and where these two worlds met was marginal territory, rich in possibilities. The collision of two worlds in a person’s brain always causes a new synthesis – a creative way to handle the tension between the competing worlds. While the world’s are kept separate, there is no chance for this new synthesis.

I often wonder if international peace negotiators take their work too seriously. What would happen in the Israel/Palestine conflict if all those at the table had to role play their ‘enemy’? What about the conflict between Councilors in local government. Imagine this. Prior to a Council meeting beginning, all the little wooden plaques, that sit in front of each Councilor and bear their names, are put in a sack. At the start of the meeting each Councilor has a lucky dip. They place the name they draw out in front of them. Then for the rest of the meeting they must argue from that person’s perspective (including adopting their mannerisms). Imagine how much more productive this would be than each arguing from their entrenched position.

The only way to experience multiple worlds like this is through role play, whether enacted in physical space or in our imagination. Profound play allows multiple worlds to co-exist and overlap, even if this results in conflict.

Benefit 3: Self reflection

Playing roles is not just a method of getting inside other people’s skins. It is a method of getting inside your own skin (or more correctly ‘skins’). Some years ago I went to a counselor deeply perplexed about why, under certain circumstances, I acted ‘out of character’. It was if I could watch myself changing from being warm and charming to acting like a cold rock. The counselor took two empty chairs and told me to imagine that in one sat Charming Charlie (the nice guy) and in the other sat Stonewall (the not so nice guy that seemed to like sabotaging the nice guy). I had to sit on the chairs in turn and conduct a conversation between these two characters. It was only a game. But through this role play I was able to get inside the skin of these two characters who lived inside my head and find out what made each of them tick. I was able to negotiate a ‘peace deal’ that allowed them to coexist in my head without them constantly sabotaging each other.

In a similar way, the culture of any society is driven by deep ‘subterranean psycho dramas’. Just as individuals have a cast of hundreds in their heads, many with contradictory needs and desires, so society has a cast of hundreds in their collective psyche. You cannot understand something like the gun culture in the USA (or any other seemingly irrational behaviour by a whole group of people) without understanding this hidden drama. Often the only way of understanding this is to get inside the skin of the cast members. Until you do, you are dealing only with the surface issues. Through profound play, we can bring these characters out of the murky underworld and get them to play in broad daylight. Through play we can explore new ways for them to relate to each other.

Through profound play, we can bring these characters out of the murky underworld and get them to play in broad daylight.

Benefit 4: Ability to reinvent ourselves

Children can reinvent themselves a hundred times in a single day. One moment they are a stuntman flying a biplane, the next a doctor, the next a cowgirl riding a bucking bull, the next a kangaroo. Yet there comes a point where we feel compelled as emerging adults to choose a very well defined ‘role’. (We are allowed more than one role, but we must project a consistent, singular role to each of the social grouping that we are a part of.) We begin to live under the illusion that these ‘roles’ are ‘the real us’. Worse still, we begin to judge others by the external roles they have chosen. But we are not our roles. We are still the infinitely creative child we once were, now playing a protracted role invented by that child.

Given half a chance, that child would still like to experiment with some new roles.

Recreational play

Recreational play is what most people think of when I talk of adults playing. The concept of recreational play is built on a notion of a clear divide between ‘work’ and ‘play’. Work wears you out, and recreational play ‘recharges the batteries’. Only those who have worked really hard deserve recreational play. Recreational play is where you ‘enjoy the fruits of your labor’.

However, also embedded in this concept of recreational play is the notion that there is an underlying purpose for being refreshed and re-created. It is so you can get back to the serious business of life with renewed vigor. Play is really a maintenance break for the work machine.

This view of play is deeply ingrained in much of Western culture as a result of the Protestant Work Ethic (or Puritan Work Ethic). Luther and the other reformers (particularly Calvin) argued that hard work and frugality were the fruits of godliness – how God judged whether you were a white sheep or a black sheep. Max Weber argued in 1904 that this doctrine laid the foundations for the entire capitalist system. People’s sense of self-worth is tied up in the work they do, and how hard they work.

The split between work and play – and the privileging of work over play – results in a trivializing of play. We have been indoctrinated with the belief that creating a better world is ‘work’ and play is something we are allowed to do when we have earned a rest. ‘Work’, by its very nature, is rational and structured. Yet as we saw when looking at ritual play, the things we must change to create a better world are not rational or based in intellectual constructs. You cannot change something like gun culture in the USA through hard work.

Profound play views work as ‘creative play’. It rejects the notion, implicit in recreational play, that play and work should be separate identities. However, profound play keeps a balance.

Creative play does wear the player out, which means we do need to ‘recreate’ so we can regain our strength to go back to playing hard.

Adventure play

Our first experiences of adventure play were as babies – exploring our bodies and discovering our toes. Then we tried walking. We then graduated to bigger adventures when we walked home from school for the first time. Our childhood play adventures probably included trying to fly by jumping off the roof. Failing at the attempt and ending up in hospital with a broken ankle increased the size of the adventure. We couldn’t wait to tell our friends about the nurses in starched uniforms or the mushy food we were forced to eat. Later in life we climbed mountains, flew in biplanes, fought in wars, or drove fast cars.

There are four elements that distinguish adventure play from other forms of play: experimentation, risk, surprise and outcomes that etch themselves into our memory. An adventure is not an adventure unless it contains some experimentation and risk. Risk is dancing with danger and even death. It is a way of confronting our deepest fears and our eventual mortality and feeling mastery over them. It is paradoxical that those who play with death in their adventures probably take life more seriously that those who think life is too serious for play.

Adventure play can therefore be deadly serious. Ironically, this ‘dancing with death’ in play fills the player with a greater passion for life. It clarifies their vision. What seemed so necessary and essential in the serious work-a-day world suddenly appears as a trivial game. Confronting death and danger in the game moves the player from minor league to playing in the biggest game of all, the game of life.

In adventure play we are not necessarily looking for a successful outcome. The child who tries to fly by jumping off the roof and ends up in hospital is not disappointed because they failed to fly. In fact the pain and suffering they endure becomes an essential part of what constitutes the adventure. The outcome of the attempt to fly is a total surprise, and the nature of the surprise is what becomes etched into their memory as an adventure. In adulthood, this failed experiment will become a story which will be told at dinner parties and passed on to children and grandchildren. It will become a source of enjoyment and pleasure.

Serious world-changers are risk-takers who flirt with ‘failure’.

Profound play sees all of life as an adventure in which one must dance with death. Robert Neale suggests that it is possible for our entire life to become a ‘mature adventure which encompasses our entire existence’. This is the essence of profound play. It is a life-stance which defies ‘reality’. It is totally spontaneous in the way it responds to what unfolds during the journey. Failure or success are not the issue. Playing the game with flair and pizzazz is what matters. And by dancing with death there is an elevated feeling of walking with the divine.

Letting-off-steam play

This is closely related, but not the same as recreational play. In many cultures, festivals and carnivals were used as a way of giving expression to the ‘underbelly’ of the culture. For example, the Venice Carnival ran for over 2 months each year and was a city institution from the 13th century right through to the end of the 18th century. By wearing masks, participants were able to step outside social conventions and express different parts of themselves. At this time homosexuality was punishable by death. Yet during the festival a man wearing a Gnaga mask (a female face) was free to engage in flirting and sexual relations with men because he was only ‘playacting’. Kings, queens and important people from all over the world came to Venice to become anonymous and play out a range of repressed roles, from prostitute to fool.

In modern, Western culture this playing out of repressed roles has been largely limited to us passively and vicariously living out the roles through theatre, film and literature. Letting-off-steam play is essential to the overall well being of both individuals and a society, because it gives expression to those characters living in our head which we have suppressed.

In our culture we have a greater tendency to lock up parts of ourselves than in some other cultures. People who hold contradictory desires are considered to be mentally unwell. They are counseled to make up their mind about what they really want. However, the reality is that all of us have a whole lot of different ‘people’ living in our head, and many of these have conflicting needs and desires, and this is perfectly normal. Some days our introvert is in control and we don’t want to talk to anyone, while other days our extravert is in control and we want to talk to everyone. If we accept the notion that we must have a ‘single, unified identity’ then we are forced to lock-up the parts of ourselves that hold contradictory desires. Now something interesting happens when we do this. The part of ourselves that we lock up becomes increasingly frustrated and angry. It is inevitable that they will eventually erupt – often in an unhealthy way. This can lead to a Jackal and Hyde situation where we flip-flop between unhealthy extremes.

Choosing particular roles to play in ‘real life’ automatically means that other legitimate parts of ourselves can become neglected. In letting-off-steam play, we give expression to these suppressed parts of ourselves. By giving these parts of ourselves and our culture a space in which to express themselves, we stop them from festering in the basement and becoming destructive rogue elements. By making them our friends we draw their sting. And in celebrating them we suddenly find that we have freed ourselves of their negative power.

Profound play uses letting-off-steam play to make friends with the dark underbelly of culture and in making friends, draw the sting of these hidden elements. It also recognizes that our hidden demons come bearing wonderful gifts. In play, all demons are less scary than they are in ‘real’ life.

Freedom play

This kind of play is epitomized by the Black American slaves in the cotton fields singing to ease the burden of their oppression. But this kind of play was more than just ‘pain relief’. It was an expression of inner freedom. They were saying, ‘You can chain my body but not my mind’. All meaningful play contains a deep paradox. The deeper the paradox, the greater the creative potential of that play. In freedom play we see this principle at work. In the real world they were slaves. In their play they were free. This bought to their play something deeply spiritual and creative. In fact their play was a reflection of ‘divine play’; the act of turning chaos into meaning, death into life, garbage into gold. This divine transformation could only happen in play.

In place making I often say to clients or communities, ‘your greatest deficit is potentially your greatest asset’. The worse something is, the more I rejoice, because it has the greatest potential for transformation. An example of this was the Maiki Hill toilets in Paihia. They were so bad some tourist had scrawled on the wall, “Worst toilets I have seen in NZ”. The community could only imagine bulldozing them and starting again. But for just $15,000 we transformed them into a tourist attraction. This approach to ‘deficits’ comes from an inner stance in my mind, rooted in freedom play. It is why I count my lack of education and the beatings I endured as a child as my greatest assets.

This kind of freedom play can liberate us from anything that oppresses us. If our past oppresses us, we can transform our past from something that oppresses us into something that enriches us. If our fear of death and non-being oppresses us, we can transform it something that gives our life color, vibrancy and depth. Profound play is the Jester in the universe who laughs in the face of death because she knows something death does not know. In an ironic twist she will conjure from the darkness something of substance. The joke is on death itself. Death cannot be reasoned with. So the Jester does not try. She simply plays, and laughs. And by laughing in the face of oppression she becomes master of the oppression. Freedom play enlists the ‘enemy’ as the agent of change.

Escapist play

When I talk about play most people think I am talking about either recreational play or what we may call ‘escapist play’ – play that is used to escape responsibilities or as a way of putting-off dealing with some issue or situation. Escapist play can sometimes have a self-destructive element, particularly when it is used as a pain analgesic – a means of escaping one’s internal demons. This kind of escapist play sometimes involves the use of drugs to further dull the pain.

However, not all escapist play is bad. We adults have a tendency to take ourselves, and the roles we play, far too seriously. When seriousness becomes our master, escapist play can restore the balance, and help us realize that even if the game we are playing has serious consequences, at the end of the day, it is still a game.

For the profound player, escapist play can be a time when the mind becomes a blank slate, much like when we go to sleep, and the dreaming part of our brain wanders where it wills. In these moments we may stumble on new cracks in reality which turn out to be doorways into worlds not yet dreamed of. Escapist play can suggest new games that can be taken back into the profound play state. Escapist play can unwittingly unmask inner demons we don’t even know exist.

There is also a great temptation for those involved in profound play (‘serious play’) to start taking themselves as seriously as those involved in ‘serious work’. In all of life there is a temptation to fundamentalism. For some people, ‘profound play’ will become the new religion, replete with new rituals that must be kept unadulterated. To the shallow profound player, escapist play will be condemned as a form of sacrilege. To the deep, profound player, it will be a sacrament. The issue here is balance.

When change become ‘Child’s Play’

The thing about children’s play is that for the most part it does not have a predetermined objective. We said that the miracle of life is that the child we once were invented the rational adult we now are. But when kid’s play shopkeeper or fireman they are not saying to each other: ‘Lets play shopkeepers so I can see if that is what I want to be when I grow up’. In fact the exact opposite is true. In play the child is usually captivated by the eternal now. Past and future are no consideration. This allows their play to unfold in a totally spontaneous fashion.

The play is not constrained by past failures or dictated by fears of the future. And yet out of this seemingly directionless activity they create whole new worlds.

This raises an interesting question: ‘Should play ever have an objective?’ There are some that argue that play that has an objective ceases to be play and becomes work. I disagree. All play has an objective, even if this is simply to have fun or embark on an adventure. However, the objective remains fluid and not static as it is in ‘work’. It responds instantly to the game itself, and can morph into directions that were not dreamed of.

Profound play can also have an objective, such as improving a relationship, or addressing a social issue. However, the objective remains eternally fluid. This requires an incredible faith in our own creative abilities. It is to look the universe in the eye and say: ‘Throw at me what you will, and I will weave it into my story. Throw at me disaster and I will not only weave it into my story, but I will use it to make the story even richer.’ What we adults call work is often an attempt to second-guess the future and to build defences against all possibilities. But this ‘rational’ approach to the future is highly ‘irrational’. We can no more second-guess the future than King Canute could hold back the tide. It is far more rational to reclaim the blind faith we had as children that we could ‘make up the game as we go’. As kids we did not sit in a corner, paralyzed by fear, because we didn’t know if we were capable of playing. We had an implicit trust that as events unfolded, we would be able to fold them into the game as it emerged.

However, reclaiming this child-like quality to play is not a case of just role-playing yourself as a child. It must not be viewed as some mental trick we use when we need to be more creative. ‘Oh, I need to be creative so I’ll slip down into the basement and drag my kid out.’ The child in our head must be integrated seamlessly into the very essence of our adult persona. You and the child must become one. That is profound play.

Some years ago, while I was travelling in Europe, I watched an old lady sitting on the side of her street shelling peas while her grandchild rode a trike in the street. Every now and then the child would come over and shell a few peas. I watched the child playing, and wondered what kind of adult they were in the process of creating through their play. I looked at the old lady. I imagined that being in the presence of the child helped her recall her own childhood, and the road she had travelled. By remembering, she was distilling wisdom from her life’s journey – wisdom she could pass to the child who was just starting their journey. The street is where these two worlds met and merged.

Profound play is where wisdom and play are allowed to share the same neural pathways in our mind. It is the child we once were in the presence of the wise elder we are becoming. This can be a partnership of immense and profound creative power.

Simon Nielsen 4/19/22 Simon Nielsen 4/19/22

Every Community Needs A Neighborhood Exchange

“The Maryland Neighborhood Exchange offers a model of what every community in the United States—including yours—should do. For very little cost, you can create a listing of local companies looking for investment dollars on the national crowdfunding portals and provide your neighbors an easy place to review opportunities to invest locally.” Michael H. Shuman, leading visionary on community economics, shows the value of local crowdfunding.

By Michael H. Shuman, attorney, economist, author, and entrepreneur

Three years ago, the Maryland Neighborhood Exchange was just a dream. We envisioned creating a website listing great local investment opportunities in Baltimore and mobilizing residents to invest in them.

Here’s what’s happened since: The Exchange has helped 44 Baltimore businesses successfully raise $3.3 million from nearly 6,000 investors. And these numbers will significantly grow in the years ahead. Thanks to the Exchange, the future of Baltimore’s economy lies, not just with bankers, hedge fund operators, or VCs, but in the wisdom of its 600,000 residents.

The “we” has been a partnership of Neighborhood Associates Corporation, run by Dr. Bobby Austin, and Community Wealth Builders, led by Stephanie Geller. The partners also have included several dozen community leaders we tapped for advice—fund managers, foundation program officers, incubator coordinators, entrepreneurship specialists, and policymakers.

To understand the importance of the Exchange, it’s useful to go back to the origins of investment crowdfunding. During the 2008 financial crisis, I wrote an article for the Federal Reserve proposing a $100 exemption in securities law to jumpstart struggling small businesses. At a time of economic turmoil, I argued, every American should be able to invest as much as $100 in any local business with no legal paperwork whatsoever. Up until that point, a local business often had to spend $25,000 or more in legal disclosures before it could accept even a penny from grassroots investors. One attorney ran with the idea and submitted a proposed rule change allowing the $100 exemption to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). A petition drive then delivered hundreds of letters to the SEC supporting the change.

The SEC duly ignored our advice, but all was not lost.

Congress picked up the ball and passed the JOBS Act in 2012, creating a framework for investment crowdfunding. Any business could raise up to $1 million, any grassroots investor could invest up to $2,200, but the transaction had to be done on a regulated federally licensed portal. (The SEC recently raised the offering ceiling to $5 million.) My concern then was that moving local investment relationships onto national electronic platforms would weaken the relationship between a small business and its investors. Why not just permit local fans to talk freely with their favorite businesses, face to face, and allow them to invest modestly as they wish without lawyers?

Fast forward nine years, and I must concede that investment crowdfunding has worked better than I predicted. More than a million Americans have now participated, investing $1.1 billion in over 4,000 companies. The average successful crowdfunding raise is $376,000, with the average investor putting in about $800. The entrepreneurs who have been most successful are women and people of color, precisely those individuals whom the conventional capital markets historically redlined out. Crowdfund Capital Advisors estimates these raises have created 124,120 jobs. And all of this occurred with remarkably little fraud.

Despite these successes, my initial reservation about the JOBS Act remains. How can we strengthen the local relationships between small businesses and their fans? The national crowdfunding portals all claim to love community business, but in fact (with a few exceptions) their connection with any given community is shallow.

Weirdly, this pattern may be replicating the tragic history of stock markets in the United States. In the nineteenth century, stock markets popped up in regions across the country to make risk capital more available to promising local businesses. Over the last generation, however, all these regional exchanges were gobbled up by two national exchanges—the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. This centralization meant that tools that once capitalized regional businesses now focus exclusively on global corporations.

That critique is what inspired the Maryland Neighborhood Exchange.

In practical terms, here’s what the Exchange does: If you’re a business in Baltimore looking for capital—especially if you’re a BiPOC entrepreneur—we can help you prepare for successful crowdfunding. We recently helped SoFusion Cafe raise nearly $30,000. If you’re an investor in Baltimore looking for local opportunities, you can easily review our updated listing of local offerings (from the national crowdfunding portals). And if you’re a neighborhood looking to revitalize, we can work with you to help launch local investment events.

The Maryland Neighborhood Exchange offers a model of what every community in the United States—including yours—should do. For very little cost, you can create a listing of local companies looking for investment dollars on the national crowdfunding portals and provide your neighbors an easy place to review opportunities to invest locally.

Allow me to toast everyone who made this possible: Thanks to NAC’s President Bobby Austin and its Board Chair, Marilyn Melkonian, President of Telesis, for giving me the company time to develop the Exchange; to the Abell and T Rowe Price Foundations for supporting our expansion over the past year; to the Market Center and Southwest Baltimore neighborhood associations who were partners in local experimentation; and to Stephanie Geller for helping dozens of businesses in Baltimore take advantage of the Exchange.

If you’re interested in starting an Exchange like this in your own community, let me know. We can help!

Simon Nielsen 4/7/22 Simon Nielsen 4/7/22

The Monoculture Of Midtown Manhattan

“Office districts are a monoculture, and just like nature abhors monocultures, people hate office districts. People want to be in environments that are true to our human nature – interesting and comfortable environments that reflect the complexity and diversity of our world. Yes, humans crave complexity – we evolved to use all our senses to explore our environment, and we come alive when we enter places that offer that rich experience.” Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader, calls for a rethinking of the places where we work.

By Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader

Let’s face it, Midtown Manhattan was never cool, and it was always dead after 5 pm, but walking through it today it is dead at all hours. More than that, it’s a dead idea – a dinosaur, and a sign that the concept of living and working in entirely different places is done. If you’ve been to New York, Midtown is that high-rise office district you have to slog through on your way downtown or uptown to meet your friends, get dinner, or do your window shopping. Or if you work there, it’s that place that embodies what we mean by the “rat race,” where more than a million workers squeeze themselves through the turnstiles of area subway stations and Grand Central Station. In one of the world’s great 24-hour cities, it is a place that only functions for about 12. If you live in any large city, you also have one of these districts: it’s your central business district (CBD).

COVID-19 has revealed that these are places are obsolete, they don’t meet the needs of people, and they are not sustainable. In 2021, there is a new calculus for anyone who has had to work in one of these districts. These workers are the people who easily adapted to working from home, with hardly missing a beat. And in survey after survey they are saying that they never liked their commute, it was a forced march they will gladly give up, and they won’t go back, at least not full time. With high-speed internet connections at home, they’ve found their exit ramp. And once released from the commute to their CBD, people are also released from living within commuting distance. As a result, certain large expensive cities are seeing a significant outmigration.

Office Districts are a Monoculture

Office districts are a monoculture, and just like nature abhors monocultures, people hate office districts. People want to be in environments that are true to our human nature – interesting and comfortable environments that reflect the complexity and diversity of our world. Yes, humans crave complexity – we evolved to use all our senses to explore our environment, and we come alive when we enter places that offer that rich experience. Monocultures don’t exist in nature – they are artificially created through agriculture practices that enforce their continuance through the use of herbicides and other controls. Monocultures are extremely vulnerable to devastation by blight and changes in the environment that affect the entire plant culture all at once.

Contrast this to the complementary plant communities that make up natural landscapes. Every plant species has a niche and supports its surrounding plant community in complex ways that we barely understand, and together they make an interlocking mosaic – an ecosystem. Other than major disturbances like wildfire, they are incredibly resilient – and even these disturbances create healthy openings for new species as part of the succession process.
In office districts, the interlocking layers that support other urban districts are almost totally lacking. That has made them incredibly vulnerable to external factors – which can come in the form of economic recession, bank crises, and of course global pandemics.

Particularly problematic are newer districts that lack the diversity of buildings found in older districts. So, the City of London financial district, with its mix of historic buildings, may fare better than the much newer Canary Wharf or than Paris’ La Defense; and the eclectic Chicago Loop may do better than Midtown Manhattan.

CBDs Need to Become Mixed-Use

An underlying fallacy of the CBD has been the notion that living and working should be functionally and geographically separated – often with great distances in between. This zoning of our lives is incredibly resource-intensive and the result has been immense use of carbon-based fuels and an equally immense human toll in terms of time and misery.

Our future lies in ways of living that are better for the planet, and better for us. For office districts, this means being more efficient – instead of having office districts that only function during weekdays, these places will serve every audience at all times. And with people commuting less because of technology or because we start to co-locate office and residential, we can take a significant step toward carbon neutrality.

Simply put, CBDs need to become mixed-use. One fashionable idea that’s out there is the 15-minute city. It’s not a new idea but has new energy thanks to the commitment from the City of Paris. So how do we apply this thinking to a CBD, and is it even possible to retrofit a district like Midtown? Here are some basic framing ideas: Two trends will force office districts toward more mixed-use environments: vacant space in office buildings will demand that owners think of new types of tenants; and many people will want more housing options close to where they work, as long commutes become less tolerated.

Office buildings will have to diversify – the idea of one corporation occupying a whole building will become a rarity, and they will need to adapt to smaller tenants. Co-working will become more desirable. Collaboration will become the primary reason to be in the office, so it will become a centrepiece of how they are designed. Office buildings may develop central collaboration spaces open to all tenants, opening up elements of co-working to the whole building, in a kind of innovation hub. Conversions to residential and hotel use will not only make for a better work-life balance for those who live there, but it will mean that the district can now support the services and retail as is the norm in other urban districts.

Public amenities and services of all kinds can start to move into spaces on lower floors, such as library branches, cultural centres, fitness centres, community meeting rooms, even art live/maker spaces. The large floor plates of an office building permit great flexibility in use. Grocery stores will start to populate larger retail spaces, replacing some of the ubiquitous bank branches that are endemic to Midtown. Schools, health and wellness, non-profit tenants are also always looking for spaces; in some cases, they can receive underwriting from the owner corporation.

One thing that is always lacking in the modern office district is smaller format retail shops and restaurants. Demising large spaces into smaller ones will not only support smaller businesses, but may help landlords fill vacant spaces more quickly. Some tall buildings are hopelessly difficult to retrofit for such retail types, and a full “retail wrap” (a one-story addition for retail in front of the building) may be necessary. As these high-density districts develop a more well-rounded population, they will support a wide variety of other uses and activities that will make them more and more desirable. Outdoor retailing, including markets of all kinds and street food environments, should become standard practice.

The outdoor public realm likewise needs quite a significant retrofit to humanise these districts and integrate them into the way people live. The pandemic proved the value of having a wide variety of outdoor uses, and CBDs should plan for outdoor places to work and have meetings. Along with more pocket parks and green spaces, there can be more green roofs. Parking spaces can be converted to outdoor work lounges and pop-up retail environments; streetscapes can be humanised and naturalised with bike lanes and street trees.

For some, the best argument for this diversification of office districts may be an economic one. The fact that a CBD goes dark after 6 pm every day in the middle of the world’s most populous cities should tell us that something is amiss. To me, it comes down to a sustainable way of living: the pandemic restored to many of us the experience of living more locally, at a slower pace where commuting was no longer central to our daily life. We never wanted the rat race, and we are now recognising that we have an option for a more humane way of living, which is also far better for the planet.

First published on Urbanet.

Simon Nielsen 3/25/22 Simon Nielsen 3/25/22

The Pith And Marrow Of A Trip To Italy

Mohamed Magani, author and president of Algerian PEN, wrote a novel and suddenly found himself the center of a tightly knit community of butchers. Magani explores the power of stories and finds a world of wonder and surprises.

“Something surreal, a special and atypical manifestation of the author-readers encounter was beyond reason going to evolve from morning to evening, and my role as a participant observer in the event had clearly some logical relevance that day. The street was closed to traffic, and a row of tables had been set up, heavy with dishes in various sauces and without, bottles of Chianti and large pieces of traditional bread. Among the row of tables, in the middle, one had been set apart for dozens of copies of the novel The Butcher’s Aesthetics translated into Italian.” Mohamed Magani, author and president of Algerian PEN, wrote a novel and suddenly found himself the center of a tightly knit community of butchers. Magani explores the power of stories and finds a world of wonder and surprises.

By Mohamed Magani, author

The 1960’s, Algeria’s sky in the first decade of independence was filled with both bright sunny promises and dark clouds looming large in the country's young history. Lacking interest and motivation for any other subject in the 1980s, I embarked on the writing of the novel Esthétique de boucher, (The Butcher’s aesthetics) with the settled ambition of drawing up the profile and portrait of a generation, my own, carried away by the high winds of freedom, but already confronted with the rules and authoritarianism, the violence and prohibitions of the new authorities. I needed a divergent voice, preferably unfamiliar in literature, in view to convey, from a distance and in perspective, the time, space and mindset of individual emancipation at grips with opposing forces, socially and traditionally dominant, more powerful, while highlighting the uncertainties and anxieties of the present, factors of confusion and disarray.

I did not have to search long. I decided quickly for a butcher who was just out of adolescence, who hardly had time to experience the rebellion crisis of his age, since, as an only child, he was immediately promoted to head of the family and owner of a butcher's shop following his father’s death.

And it was this same young butcher, the narrator in Esthétique de boucher, who dragged me behind him in a unique experience, which no writer will probably ever manage to invent and put down on paper. Although he was the most imaginary of the whole gallery of young characters in the novel.

The translation of Esthétique de boucher into Italian took me one day, in 2002, to the side of Florence, to a charming little town called Panzano, perched on a hill in the Tuscan wine region. In fact, Panzano is located exactly halfway between Florence and Siena in the province of Florence.

From the outset, the welcome in Panzano was nothing like my previous experiences of readings, conferences, book signings and other encounters between authors and readers. Instead of a meeting in a closed place, a conference room or a bookshop, I found myself shaking hands with a host of people at the bottom of a winding street invaded by a tight crowd, brandishing Estetica di macellaio in joy and contagious good mood. Then I realized that we were standing in front of a butcher's shop, under the sign of Antica Macelleria Cecchini. The translator of Estetica di macellaio introduced me to its owner, who dressed me there and then in a white smock with the logo of his butchery on the chest, a smock worn by many more people around.

Something surreal, a special and atypical manifestation of the author-readers encounter was beyond reason going to evolve from morning to evening, and my role as a participant observer in the event had clearly some logical relevance that day. The street was closed to traffic, and a row of tables had been set up, heavy with dishes in various sauces and without, bottles of Chianti and large pieces of traditional bread. Among the row of tables, in the middle, one had been set apart for dozens of copies of the novel Esthétique de boucher translated into Italian. A crowd gathered in front of the improvised literature stand, men and women of the same butchers' guild all wanted their Estetica di macellaio. Naturally, everyone wanted to know if I was a butcher by trade in my country.

In fact, at the same time every year, an international event involving butchers from all over Europe is held in Panzano to celebrate Sant'Antonio Abate, the patron saint of butchers. My invitation to the event was therefore not really a matter of chance. The publisher of the novel and Dario Cecchini, the owner of the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, had agreed that I should attend the gathering, on the grounds that the narrator of the novel regarded butchers with sympathy, and presented a vision and representation far removed from the widespread clichés about them. It is true that the young butcher narrator in the novel is out of the ordinary, he develops a more than a little intellectual inclination, which does not fit in with the practices of the meat trade. The greatest frustration in his life is that he was taken out of school at an early age, at a time when he was nurturing a keen interest in history and literature, and his close friends were constantly bringing him bits of knowledge of the two fields in his very butchery. A butcher who is, moreover, almost a vegetarian, he floats in the absolute dream of living among the Hunzas, a mountain people in Pakistan, adepts of total vegetarianism, assumed since the dawn of time.

Dario Cecchini can’t stop hugging me all the time, and introducing me to the crowd. He disappears one minute, then returns to warmly wrap his arms around my shoulders the next minute, without tiring. Moving through the crowd like a fish in water, time and again he stands still and begins to recite Dante's poems, learned by heart. Crowds of butchers, guests and passers-by listen. An exuberant character, communicative and generous like no other, I soon learn that he is a well-known personality in Italy; he enjoys a great and respectable reputation thanks to his television programs on meat and its countless recipes, and the training he gives, around the world, on the techniques of meat cutting.

With his copy of Estetica di macellaio constantly in his hand, he is more than proud of the book cover, the outcome of his design and collaboration with the publisher. I refrained from telling him that I almost fell in a swoon on the floor the moment I saw it for the very first time, infuriated and speechless. Outrageous, unsightly to the last degree, such was its appearance; in its entirety almost, a photo of a young, athletic man, shirtless, muscles bulging, head bent forward on his chest, so that the face was unrecognizable. The heap of human meat on the cover of the book stood before me in real life, escorted by Dario Cecchini and surrounded by a merry band. Dario told him to take off his shirt, and the young man transformed himself into a butcher's model, embodying his corporation, on the cover of a novel, in the most extreme way; I signed his copy of Estetica di macellaio. Then, invited to follow Dario, we all headed for a wall.

In two rows, a good thirty butchers, dressed in white work smocks bearing the effigy of the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, posed for a group photo session. Somehow, the idea of myself as a writer began to crack and to accommodate a certain sense of belongingness to a professional body foreign to literature a priori. Back in Algeria, I received the group portrait, and for years remained undecided as whether to hang it on the wall or to put it forever out of sight. The writer's permanent expectation of expanding his/her readership branched off without any warning, in my case into a kind of dead end haunted by a party of men whose occupation centered on animal flesh and bones.

At one point, on the threshold of his butcher's shop, Dario began haranguing his colleagues, who gathered in front of him, then followed him inside. He opened his Estetica di macellaio, I opened Esthétique de boucher, on the pages of the first chapter he pointed out to me, in perfect French. Behind the glass meat display, facing an assembly of silent butchers, I read passages in French; Dario took them up in Italian. "This is my life", he said, after reading a couple of minutes. On the verge of tears, he read on, in a moving atmosphere, intensely shared in the butchery.

Once the reading over, Dario took my arm and led me to the first floor of his house, where the butchery takes up the entire ground floor. He opened the door of a room, then the window overlooking the street, and began to recite once more Dante’s poetry. All heads rose, butchers, butchers' wives, guests and passers-by turned their backs on the meat dishes on the tables, on the bottles of Chianti, yielding to the exalted tone of the most famous butcher in Italy.

Back on the street, a surprise awaited us. Journalists from the RAI television came to make a report on the international butchers' meeting in Panzano. I was interviewed, and without thinking I answered a question about the reason of my interest in butchers with a hackneyed cliché. "I wanted to show the man in the butcher, not the other way round!" I said. Applause erupted on the street, mingled with a lot of laughter and joyful assenting commentaries. Soon after, the RAI broadcasted the report, and I had the opportunity to dine, one evening in an Algiers restaurant, with the Italian ambassador. He was so puzzled and burning with curiosity that he sacrificed hours of his precious time to my incredible journey to his country. I showed him a series of photos, supporting the words and images of the RAI report.

Adjacent to the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, a modest room with no animal flesh was full of books and documents shelved against the walls. I was told that this was a meat research center. This is where a distinguished gentleman chose to approach me. He introduced himself as the director of the National Library of Luxembourg, and said: "Two years ago, the Library organized a symposium on bread. Next October, we plan to organize a symposium on meat. Could you come?" I looked at him, bewildered, "Who do you want to invite, me or the butcher in the novel? The director assured me that he would be delighted to welcome both of us!

Before Luxembourg, it was another country that opened its arms to the butcher narrator. Translated into German, Esthétique de boucher (The Butcher's aesthetics) took me to Austria, to Salzburg, where a reading session was arranged in a large hall. I read substantial passages from the novel, alternating with their translation into German. I could tell there were butchers in the audience. At the end of the reading, a woman asked to speak, and became just as if she was their spokesperson. She urged me to go to Chicago where, she added, butchers have serious psychological problems. Reading Die Ästhetik des Metzgers might be the beginning of a therapy for them, in her opinion.

In the course of a short trip to Italy, my vocation as an aspiring writer staggered. From the second novel, Esthétique de boucher, it found itself seriously compromised by taking a constrained direction: I became at best a spokesman for butchers or an analyst of fellow creatures in crisis among them. In Algeria, after a while of frowning and questioning the veracity of the barely believable event in Panzano, the visit of a fictitious Algerian butcher to real Italian butchers turned into a farcical, and pressing request. Newspapers seized on the weird and unique travel case, dismissing all ideas of literature and its world, fiction, formal inventions, writing, reading and reception. Given the high cost of red meat, well-meaning people urged me to intercede with the Italian butchers' guild to import sufficient quantities from their country, and inject them into the commercial circuit at affordable prices.

Upon my return to Algiers, I realized the enormity of the novel reception, the extent to which Esthétique de boucher, now the object of a destiny beyond its author's control, was perceived, due to its intrinsic content, to the Italian butchers, to the book's publisher, to the patron saint of butchers, to their combined effects, or to the confusing mistake of seeing me, resolutely, as a butcher by trade; it was unclear to me. The ambition of Esthétique de boucher was to biographing a generation, of enlightened passion and daring vision of society, aimed at representing a decisive period in the life of the people of a country at the end of colonization. The young men who populate it were all people whom I had close friendly ties with in real life, and for whom I had the greatest admiration. We all belonged to the same circle, bathed in a concrete reality. With the exception of the butcher narrator, who is in his own way an unusual character, the product of a long process of investigation and imagination. To a significant extent, the novel depicts a parallel and oppositional consciousness at odds with the actual world. Right after Panzano, what become central in its content seems to lie in the meeting of two worlds that one could hardly imagine interacting: the world of books and that of the butcher’s shop. The immediate proximity of the library shelves and the meat displays. The intimate association of the passionate reader and the gluttonous meat-eater.

And beyond that, the apprehension of seeing butchers take over bookshops and libraries in droves would not be ruled out. Just as the unwelcome idea of having to deal with a category of readers, stereotypically deemed boorish and uncultured, would diminish the symbolic prestige of reading. A slogan like “Butchers of the world, unite for reading!” would undoubtedly impact, upend the business of book publishing.

The not-so-appealing prospect of seeing my vocation as a writer plummet into the alien universe of the butchery, there was a good reason to be concerned about that fateful turning point, as self-definition and self-representation were at stake. I had begun getting used to the idea of never talking about it again, and of refusing any hint, or discussion of the Panzano event. I managed to hold my tongue, until another meeting provided me the opportunity to talk out of the hard to figure out experience. In 2014, in The Hague, the Netherlands, the Winter Nights Literary Festival was held, an annual meeting that brings together many writers from different countries. This festival has the particular feature of devoting two mornings to debates, behind closed doors, between invited writers on a theme defined in advance by the organizers of the meeting. In 2014, “shame” was the choice. The opportunity then arose to look back in detail at Esthétique de boucher in Italy, as described in these lines, before a score of writers indiscriminately seized with unfathomable amazement, mute questioning and irrepressible hilarity. Yet, as a young man, the butcher narrator in the novel makes it a rule to skip the games and distractions, hobbies and deviances of his age group, and builds a world for himself in honor of school and education, and a future dedicated to history and literature.

Algiers, Marsh 2022

Simon Nielsen 3/22/22 Simon Nielsen 3/22/22

How One Piece Of Code Empowered Hundreds Of Thousands Voters In The South African Local Government Elections 2021

Open Cities Lab is using code to create social capital and civic engagement. “My one concern was that it was too simple to be useful,” said founder Richard Gevers. “Clearly it wasn’t and clearly this is something people wanted. If you create an enabling environment, people can and will participate.” This is how hundreds of thousands of voters were empowered in the South African 2021 local government elections.

By Open Cities Lab

The founder of Open Cities Lab (OCL), Richard Gevers, was all over the South African press recently talking about mycandidate.opencitieslab.org — the tool that tells you who you can vote for in the Local Government Elections (LGE). It was only possible because the open data community made it happen. The portal is a collaboration between Richard Gevers (Open Cities Lab leader), Matthew Adendorff (head of Data Science at Open Cities Lab), Adi Eyal and JD Bothma (from OpenUp), Paul Berkowitz (who wrangled data from the IEC), Wasim Moosa (Open Cities Lab Lead developer) and Jodi Allemeier.

At the time of publishing, 118 000 people had used the tool, and we can assume that most of them were registered voters. And possibly more exciting than the site analytics are the stories about people who used the tool and as a result started engaging in conversations with their friends and peers about who their ward candidates were.

How it works: Type in your address and it will identify your ward as well as all the candidates contesting in your ward, as listed by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC). Each candidate’s name, age and political party appear in the search results including all the other wards in which the candidate is contesting. When you click the name of the candidate, you will be redirected to the google search results for that name. You can also view more information about your ward by clicking the link to Wazimap.

It’s a really simple tool. “I really wasn’t sure if it would be successful,” said Richard Gevers. However the positive reception and media attention mycandidate.opencitieslab.org received proved that at least some people do want to have an active role in society. He said, “If you remove barriers, they can get involved. My one concern was that it was too simple to be useful. Clearly it wasn’t and clearly this is something people wanted. If you create an enabling environment, people can and will participate.” This is how hundreds of thousands of voters were empowered in the 2021 LGE.

How it all started: Just over 2 weeks before the LGE on 1 November 2021, Richard and a few colleagues were having dinner together, when one of OCL’s data scientists, expressed frustration with not knowing who to vote for. Th information about candidates was not easily accessible, even for our tech savvy team.

Amidst the end of the year rush to meet deadlines, Richard had asked Matthew Adendorff (Open Cities Lab lead data scientist), what it would take to get the MyCandidate tool up and running. Knowing that the data on each candidate was published by the IEC in pdf format, Matt was not sure if it was possible within such a short time frame to scrape all the candidate information into a spreadsheet and cross check it for accuracy. The data needed to be available in an open format.

It just so happened that Paul Berkowitz had just done this. With much effort, he had taken all the candidate information in the pdf and made it openly available on this google spreadsheet. So that night, Matt plugged in the now open data and resurrected the mycandidate.opencitieslab.org

It was far from perfect. There was no styling or even any branding but it worked. A few days later at 18:58 on 19 October 2021, Richard tweeted a message asking the twitter community for some user testing feedback. The responses were invaluable, and the retweets and media attention catapulted this simple tool into stardom.

The first version of the MyCandidate tool had been conceived and published just days before the 2016 LGE. The use case then was the same: Who are the candidates running in my ward? Some of us know about the parties contesting in our ward, but who are the candidates, and who are the independent candidates. Five years later, the tool went live in just enough time to reach a wider audience and have a significant impact.

All the hallmarks of Open Data:

The success and impact that the MyCandidate tool has had and will have in the future are testament to the Open Data Mission and the mission of Open Cities Lab: We work to build inclusion and participatory democracy in cities and urban spaces through empowering citizens, building trust and accountability in civic space, and capacitating government. When we can use technology and open data to do this, we do.

The MyCandidate tool is licensed under the Attribution 4.0 International. Leading up to the elections, we encouraged media organisations and even the IEC to embed the tool on their site. The embed code is available on the tool itself. We invite you to find, use, test, improve and share the code, which can be found on Github here.

Change Log:
Since the MyCandidate tool went live on 19 October 2021, some changes and improvements were made. Wasim Moosa (Open Cities Lab Lead developer), worked late on Friday night before the Monday election day, to solve the geocoding “problem” we had. It’s a wonderful problem to have so many users that the search functionality needs upgrading. When the number of users exceeded a certain threshold, Wasim needed to switch the geocoding query to google places API.

Thanks to the community of user testing that shaped the tool into what it became, we made the following changes after launch:

1. Added an embed link for others to embed the tool on their sites and in their news articles
2. Added a Favicon for the app
3. Added missing candidate data that was not found in the original dataset
4. Switched the Geocoding query to google places API
5. Updated the ward boundaries using the Open Up Mapit tool

6. Added privacy note on the application stating “The My Candidate tool does not store any user information, including your address.”

7. Added a link to Jodi Allemier’s informative blog piece about how local elections work and what each ballot you receive at the voting stations means.

8. Added the ward number to the search results, making it easier for users to see which ward their street address belongs too.

Future plans for the MyCandidate tool

Open Cities Lab is open to all opportunities to develop the MyCandidate tool further and replicate it in other countries. We are particularly interested in the potential for use in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and other countries in the continent. Whatsapp integration is also on the cards. This would make it possible for users to initiate a request via Whatsapp. And there is also an opportunity More work to potentially create a MyCounsellor type intervention, where we can build a track record for local representatives. We look forward to exploring these ideas and encourage others to contact us about the MyCandidate tool for more information.

Simon Nielsen 3/22/22 Simon Nielsen 3/22/22

If You Want To Build Community, Start Where The People Are

“Police departments typically fail to understand that the safest blocks are the ones that focus not on safety but on building community. Rather than simply teach people how to be secure in their homes and watch for strangers, residents should be encouraged to get out of their homes and connect with neighbors on a regular basis.” Community activator, Jim Diers, lets us in on a shortcut to healthier, happier, more caring and wiser neighborhoods.

By Jim Diers, community activator

A fundamental principle of community organizing is to start where the people are. The closer you engage people to where they live, the more likely they are to get involved. You should be able to get successively larger turnouts for gatherings at the neighborhood, city, state and national levels, but the percentage of the population engaged will most likely be the highest at the street, block, building or floor level.

Why? Because the farther the action is from where someone lives, the more likely they are to expect others to take responsibility. If it’s on their street, however, who will step up if they don’t? Logistics like transportation and child care are so much easier. And, their participation will generate peer pressure for the rest of the neighbors to join in. Most importantly, neighbors are likely to enjoy immediate and ongoing benefits from their participation due to the small scale and the relationships that are built with people who are so accessible. There’s no need to expend energy on bylaws, minutes, treasurer’s reports, nominating committees, and Roberts Rules of Order; the focus is on community.

The Opzoomeren Movement

I recently witnessed the potential of block organizing in Rotterdam where the Opzoomeren movement has taken hold. It started in 1994 when the residents of Opzoomer Street got fed up waiting for local government to address problems of crime and blight. They came to realize that there was much that the neighbors themselves could do, and they decided to take action.

Today, about 1600 streets are following their example. Neighbors come together to do whatever is most important to them whether that is caring for latchkey children and housebound elders, planting trees and gardens, or organizing street parties. Because half of Rotterdam’s population is immigrants, neighbors are often engaged in teaching one another Dutch.

On many of the streets, neighbors have gathered to discuss how they can best support one another. They develop a code of conduct that is prominently displayed on a large sign. No two signs are the same although there are some frequent themes. A typical sign reads:

1. We say hello and welcome new neighbors.

2. We take part in all kinds of street activities.

3. We help each other with childcare.

4. We keep our neighborhood clean and safe.

Each May, all of the streets celebrate Opzoomeren Day. In order to be recognized as part of the movement, a street must undertake at least four events or projects each year. An Opzoomeren bus is available for neighbors to use as a pop up café, gallery, workshop site, or whatever.

The Limitation of Block/Neighborhood Watch Programs

Of course, street level organizing is not a new idea. Practically everywhere I go, there are long standing crime prevention groups known as block or neighborhood watch.

Seattle has had one of the most successful block watch programs. First organized in 1972, the Police Department now claims that approximately 3000 blocks, or 30% of the city, is participating. In August of each year, about 1400 block parties are held in observance of National Night Out Against Crime.

The shortcoming of the program, however, is its singular focus on crime. Neighbors typically get engaged when it is too late – after there have been house break-ins or other safety issues. They call the Police Department for support and are taught how to install security systems and watch out for strangers. After that initial meeting, the group often becomes dormant until there is another crime wave.

Police departments typically fail to understand that the safest blocks are the ones that focus not on safety but on building community. Rather than simply teach people how to be secure in their homes and watch for strangers, residents should be encouraged to get out of their homes and connect with neighbors on a regular basis. It is much more sustainable for people to engage with one another around their wide range of interests rather than the police department’s narrow public safety agenda. That’s another key aspect of starting where the people are. In recognition of this, New Zealand’s program has morphed from neighborhood watch to Neighborhood Support.

Neighbors Provide Mutual Support

There is so much that neighbors can do to connect with one another and provide mutual support. Emergency planning is one such activity. Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel told me that one of the most important lessons from their devastating earthquakes was the importance of neighbors knowing one another. With limited emergency workers and many impassable roads, most Christchurch residents were totally dependent on the skills, resources, and care of their neighbors in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes.

I now live on Vashon Island, Washington which is highly susceptible to earthquakes. Over 200 groups of five to fifteen households each have self-organized in this rural community in order to develop and implement emergency plans. Frequent power outages and other winter storm damage provide ample opportunity to practice mutual support. On our street, for example, some neighbors used their chainsaws to remove downed trees while others prepared a kind of stone soup; the ingredients came from everyone’s thawing freezers and the stew was prepared and served in a warm house equipped with a generator. Fortunately, we didn’t need the skills and knowledge of the physician who is also part of our group.

There are so many other ways in which neighbors can support one another on a daily basis. On some streets, elders have buddies who check on them each day and provide the transportation and maintenance that enables them to stay in their homes. And, for young parents, there are babysitting cooperatives. Neighbors share their expertise with one another whether that involves technology, recycling, gardening, auto mechanics, or whatever.

I visited a street in Garland, Texas where many of the neighbors worked in the construction trades – there was at least one carpenter, plumber, electrician, bricklayer, and roofer. They conducted regular work parties to help one another with their house projects. Those who lacked skills to help with construction prepared lunch or supervised the children. A couple of the neighbors had built bars in their back yards so that everyone could socialize after a day of work.

The Value of Bumping Places

Gathering spaces are essential to building community. I like to call them bumping places because the best way to build relationships is to have places where neighbors can bump into one another on a regular basis. The closer those bumping places are to where you live, the more likely it is that you will continually bump into the same people.

There are many opportunities to create bumping places on a street. A vacant lot or underutilized yard can be converted into a community garden or pocket park. A little free library combined with a bench becomes an instant bumping place. In the Taiwan village of Tugo, residents have turned their front yards into small parks with tables that are shared with their neighbors. I met a man in Matsudo, Japan who had given up his valuable private parking place in order to redevelop it as a community gathering place complete with seating, fountain and artwork created by the children of the neighborhood.

In the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, neighbors converted their intersection into what they call Share-It Square, a most unusual bumping place. They painted a large mural in the intersection in order to slow traffic and provide a sense of place. Then, at each corner, they built a cob structure including a bench, a community bulletin board, a children’s playhouse, and a place where people can deposit and retrieve all sorts of free items. There is also a stand for a thermos of hot tea that entices neighbors to sip and talk together.

The Share-It Square neighbors didn’t seek the city’s permission before they painted the intersection, because they knew they wouldn’t get it. The project has been so successful, though, that the City of Portland now permits similar projects in other neighborhoods. And, the idea of painting intersections has spread around the world from the Cathedral neighborhood in Sioux Falls to the Riccarton neighborhood of Christchurch.

Connecting Neighbors through Events

Events are another way to connect neighbors at the street level. On the Fourth of July in Tacoma, Washington, residents are encouraged to barbeque in their front yards as a way of welcoming neighbors to join them. In other places, neighbors are invited to watch movies projected onto the side of someone’s house. Several rural communities in Australia have festivals in which all of the households along the road are encouraged to create unique scarecrows out of straw; neighbors walk the road together enjoying one another’s creativity.

In Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario, there are several neighborhoods in which the houses have large front porches. They hold annual concerts featuring a band on each porch. Neighbors are invited to sit on the lawn and enjoy the music. I attended one such event that featured 44 bands with very different styles of music playing on 22 porches over the course of an afternoon.

Building Blocks for Larger Civic Action

Street-level organizing can produce the building blocks needed for larger civic action. Some neighborhood associations develop a broad base of participation by having their board members elected from each street. The street representative’s job is to ensure good two-way communication and to mobilize their constituency as needed.

The City of Redmond, Washington used this decentralized approach to maximize public input into policy decisions. Rather than rely solely on the testimony of the “usual suspects” who attend public hearings, they produced videos on key issues under consideration. Those videos were made available for house meetings at the block level and the ensuing discussions engaged people who would never think of speaking in the city council chambers. Feedback from the house meetings helped inform decision making by elected officials.

Oftentimes, the best way to build a campaign is house by house and block by block. For example, on the issue of climate change, neighbors can be given a menu of actions for reducing their family’s carbon footprint. Each action is worth a certain number of points. If the family can demonstrate sufficient points, they are given a yard sign identifying them as a green household. When green signs start spreading up and down the street, everyone is more likely to want to get on board. Similar approaches have been utilized in creating drug free, nuclear free and hate free zones.

One of the best things about block organizing and one of the greatest challenges is that the neighbors often have more differences (e.g. race, culture, age, religion, politics, career) than are likely to be found in other types of community that are organized around a common identity or interest. Some local places celebrate the unity of their diversity through common signage. The residents of the Croft Place apartments in Seattle’s Delridge neighborhood did that as each family painted a placard hung above their door featuring their name and representing their culture. Similarly, on a street in Taiwan’s Taoyuan City, each household has a placard depicting the kind of work that their family does. In Roombeek, a suburb of Enschede in the Netherlands, houses on one street each have a display case showcasing what is special about the family that lives there.

Agencies as Facilitators of Local Connections

Street organizing works best when it starts with the interests of the residents themselves, but there is a role that outside agencies can play in helping to foster connections. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, for example, a community development corporation trained interested residents on how to build a block organization. Upon completion of the training, the participants were given vouchers to acquire the ingredients for three dinners that they hosted for their neighbors. Over dinner, they discussed their dreams, challenges and gifts and developed plans for supporting one another. The resulting block organizations also proved to be a good vehicle for voter registration and turnout.

In Portland, Oregon, a non-profit called City Repair provides a mobile bumping place known as the T-Horse. When the converted van arrives on a street, gigantic wings are installed on either side of the T-Horse to provide protection from sun or rain. Inside the van, they make tea and serve it to the neighbors who sit on cushions under the wings and get to know one another.

Many cities make it very difficult to organize street parties due to the time and expense involved in acquiring the required food handling and street closure permits. But some local governments, like Airdrie and Grande Prairie, Alberta and Burlington, Ontario, realize that they have an interest in building community. They make the regulatory process as simple as possible and even supply block party toolkits that include equipment and/or money to help with the event.

The City of Seattle has a Small Sparks fund which facilitates residents who feel isolated to connect with their neighbors. For example, one mother and her child with disabilities used the money to purchase a wagon that they pulled door to door as a magazine exchange. Another individual noticed that all of the falling apples on her street were attracting rats, so she purchased a press and invited her neighbors to help make cider. A lonely senior in a high rise apartment invited the neighbors in the surrounding houses to the community room on the top floor where they had a great time folding paper airplanes and tossing them out the window.

Many cities throughout the world sponsor a Neighbor Day as a way to encourage and celebrate caring neighbors. Among other things, the City of Seattle organizes a contest for students to depict pictures of caring neighbors. The winning entry gets printed on the cover of a greeting card and the inside message simply says, “Thank you, neighbor!” Thousands of people utilize these cards as an excuse to visit their neighbors and let them know that they are appreciated.

Building community in dense, high-rise housing can be challenging, but again, agencies can play a role in facilitating connections. Over 80 percent of Singapore’s population lives in multi-story buildings constructed and managed by the Housing Development Board (HDB). HDB has made community building a priority. They include community gathering spaces in their developments and make funds available to support community-driven place-making projects. An annual Buildathon trains practitioners on how to work in ways that are community-led, and a Community Week recognizes good neighbors and exemplary community projects.

A promising, relatively new tool for block organizing is the Abundant Community Initiative being implemented by the City of Edmonton and other municipalities. Utilizing a strengths-based approach, Block Connectors are recruited and trained to have conversations that uncover the gifts, needs, passions and dreams of their neighbors. The information and relationships that emerge through this process lead to the formation of interest and activity groups, skills exchanges, and a vision for the neighborhood. The work is done under the auspices of the local community leagues and helps them to be more deeply rooted in each of their neighborhoods.

Thus, neighborhood associations and agencies alike are learning that a top-down approach to citizen engagement doesn’t work. If you really want to get broad and inclusive participation, you need to start where people are – as close to their home and their heart as possible. Of course, starting where people are also entails starting with their language and culture and with their pre-existing networks, but those are topics for future blogs.