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Je roule pour ma planète (jeux-pdf)

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collectif - mesure qualité de l'air

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retour sur le site principal.

Ce wiki a pour vocation d'être un espace de documentation collaboratif pour la communauté AirCitizen. Vous y trouverez ici les actualités, les dernières versions de la documentation, des réflexions, des résultats... Vous pouvez aussi consulter notre github (en anglais) pour les aspects plus techniques.

Le samedi 14 décembre, Airparif, les citoyen·ne·s relais et AirCitizen ont restitué l'expérimentation de la séquence 4 de ' Respirons mieux dans le 20e', à la Maison de la vie associative et citoyenne - Paris 20. AirCitizen a présenté quelques résultats concernant les mesures réalisées avec les microcapteurs intérieurs et extérieurs, comme pour les trois premières séquences. A suivre...
Retrouvez la présentation d'AirCitizen

Le prochain atelier de construction de stations fixes de qualité de l'air aura lieu au fablab de Sorbonne Université à Jussieu le samedi 7/12 de 15h à 17h. Les participants pourront apprendre à construire la station et repartir avec en acceptant de partager leurs mesures pendant quelques mois. Inscription par mail à aircitizen@gmail.com.

Le samedi 5 octobre, Airparif, les citoyen·ne·s relais et AirCitizen ont restitué l'expérimentation de la séquence 3 de 'Respirons mieux dans le 20e', à la Maison de la vie associative et citoyenne - Paris 20. AirCitizen a présenté quelques résultats concernant les mesures réalisées avec les microcapteurs intérieurs et extérieurs, comme pour les deux premières séquences. A suivre...
Retrouvez la présentation d'AirCitizen

AirCitizen sera les vendredi 27 et samedi 28 septembre 2019 au Living Lab de la Cité des sciences et de l'instrustrie pour le rendu de la résidence Muséocamp 2019 avec le projet Captothèque. Un moment d'échange autour des ateliers conçus et expérimentés au cours de l'année. Pour en savoir plus sur ces ateliers, la documentation du projet Captothèque est ICI.

Après l'atelier de construction de capteurs mobiles de juillet dernier, AirCitizen revient à la Maison des Acteurs du Paris durable ce vendredi 20 septembre pour lancer le démarrage du projet "Mesurons la qualité de l'air à Paris", lauréat de l'appel à projet "partage de la culture scientifique" 2019 de la Ville de Paris.

Atelier de construction de capteurs de qualité de l'air
Venez fabriquer un capteur de qualité de l'air au cours d'un atelier organisé à la Maison des Acteurs du Paris durable !
Venez participer à un atelier de fabrication de capteurs de qualité de l'air, vendredi 20 septembre, de 9h30 à 12h à la Maison des Acteurs du Paris durable.
Cet atelier est organisé par le collectif AirCitizen, qui a pour objectif de permettre aux citoyens d'évaluer de manière active la qualité de leur environnement proche, et en particulier de l'air qu'ils respirent.
Il s'inscrit dans le projet "Mesurons la qualité de l'air à Paris !", porté par le collectif AirCitizen et l'association Labo Citoyen, lauréat de l'appel à projet Partage de la culture scientifique 2019 de la Ville de Paris.
Les participants pourront apprendre à fabriquer une station fixe mesurant les concentrations en particules fines (PM10 et PM2.5) et transmettant les données en wifi à une plateforme de visualisation. Celles et ceux qui souhaiteraient participer plus activement au projet de science participatives AirCitizen pourront repartir avec leur station mise à disposition, pour qq mois, dans le cadre du projet.
Inscription par mail : aircitizen@gmail.com

AirCitizen a lancé mardi 10 septembre le déploiement d'un réseau de stations fixes de mesures de la qualité de l'air (particules fines) et du bruit. Ce projet participatif en collaboration avec le comité local de santé environnement (CLSE) et les habitant·e·s va permettre de mesurer la qualité de l'air en 20 points sur le territoire dyonisien. Les stations ont été construites lors d'un atelier, avec les explications des lycéens de l'ENNA de SaintDenis.

AirCitizen animera également un stand avec Vivacités IDF et le CLSE lors de l'événement Saint Denis enlève tes bretelles ! du dimanche 22 septembre 2019. Des démonstration de capteurs de qualité de l'air, des balades exploratoires et des discussions en perspective !

Nous avons animé un atelier montage de capteurs et mesures le mercredi 24 juillet matin à la maison des acteurs du Paris durable. Une dizaine de participant·e·s sont venu·e·s (malgré une chaleur accablante !) apprendre à monter une station mobile AirCitizen permettant de mesurer les concentrations en particules fines PM2.5 et PM10 sur un itinéraire donné. Après une brève discussion sur les motivations de chacun·e, quelques rappels sur les polluants atmosphériques, les outils de surveillance, le principe de fonctionnement des capteurs, les participant·e·s (par binôme) ont assemblé la station brique par brique. D'abord le capteur de température/humidité pour se familiariser avec l'environnement arduino puis le GPS, l'écran et enfin le lecteur/enregistreur SD. Muni·e·s de stations fonctionnelles, ils·elles sont ensuite parti·e·s en balade faire des mesures autour de la Maison des Acteurs du Paris durable pour revenir ensuite utiliser la plateforme de visualisation des données mise à disposition par AirCitizen. Vous pouvez retrouvez la présentation diffusée lors de l'atelier ici.
Quelques questions des participant·e·s pendant l'atelier :
- pour avoir de l'ozone, est-ce qu'on a besoin des COV ? est-ce que l'agriculture contribue à la pollution de Paris ? sur la mesure des PM1
- est-ce que des mesures participatives ont été mises en place dans d'autres villes ?
- des personnes sont-elles plus exposées que d'autres ?
- les mesures de pollution sont-elles centralisées et comparées à d'autres ? les liens avec température et humidité ?
- sur l'usure, sur la réparation des capteurs
...

Le samedi 15 juin, Airparif, les citoyen·ne·s relais et AirCitizen ont restitué l'expérimentation de la séquence 2 de 'Respirons mieux dans le 20e', à la mairie du 20e. AirCitizen a présenté quelques résultats concernant les mesures réalisées avec les microcapteurs intérieurs et extérieurs, comme pour la première séquence. A suivre...
Retrouvez la présentation d'AirCitizen

Le lundi 8 avril 2019 se déroulera un atelier de construction de capteurs de qualité de l'air avec des lycéens dans le cadre du programme EcoCity2030. Les participants de retrouver le lien vers la plateforme de visualisation (link to dataviz platform) ici(here).

Le samedi 23 mars a eu lieu la restitution de la première séquence du projet 'Respirons mieux dans le 20e'. AirCitizen a présenté quelques premiers résultats concernant les mesures réalisées avec les microcapteurs intérieurs et extérieurs. Les analyses sont encore en cours et les résultats seront diffusés progressivement alors n'hésitez pas à revenir ! En attendant, retrouvez la présentation d'AirCitizen ce jour-là et celle d' Airparif

En collaboration avec Airparif, la Mairie de Paris et les habitants du 20e (conseils de quartiers et associations Respirons mieux), AirCitizen participera à l'animation de campagnes de mesures participatives de la qualité de l'air dans le 20ème arrondissement de Paris (projet "Respirons Mieux dans le 20e" financé par le Budget Participatif). A l'aide de métadonnées récoltées dans un carnet d'observation, AirCitizen proposera une analyse des données mesurées par les micro-capteurs air intérieur/extérieur.

Suite aux ateliers du fabcity cet été, nous avons rencontré l'équipe d' aerocene. Une belle rencontre et le début de quelque chose...

En juin et juillet 2018, nous avons organisé des ateliers carto-balade et fabrication de capteurs avec le carrefour numérique dans le cadre de la résidence au Living Lab de CommUn'Jeu et du FabCity summit. Pour ces ateliers nous avons développées des stations simples à assembler en utilisant la connectique 'grove'.

Déroulé et restitution des ateliers

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retour sur le site principal. Ce wiki a pour vocation d'être un espace de documentation collaboratif pour la communauté AirCitizen. Vous y trouverez ici les actualités, les dernières versions de la documentation, des réflexions, des résultats... Vous pouvez aussi consulter notre github (en anglais) pour les aspects plus techniques.

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(livre - pdf)

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(ATD Quart Monde)

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ATD (Agir Tous pour la Dignité) Quart Monde

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" Quand je dessine, quand je peins, c'est comme une tendresse qui sort de moi."

Valoriser les talents de chacun avec les Festival des savoirs et des arts

La culture est un droit pour tous. Elle est essentielle à chaque personne et à chaque peuple. Parce qu'elle transcende le quotidien lorsqu'elle valorise les savoirs et les connaissances de chacun, elle est un élément majeur pour sortir de l'exclusion. En les partageant, l'art et la création permettent de lutter contre la misère : ils relient les êtres et ouvrent au monde. C'est pourquoi, à ATD Quart Monde, l'été rime avec Festivals des savoirs et des arts. Ils se vivent dans la rue afin que chacun s'y sente invité, dans de nombreuses villes de France, dans les quartiers où les conditions de vie sont difficile. Ils sont l'occasion d'une rencontre autour d'ateliers culturels et créatifs de rue qui ont lieu plusieurs jours dans un quartier, durant lesquels chacun vient avec ses propres compétences. Cirque, écriture, slam, théâtre, danse, lecture, peinture, cuisine, réalisations collectives... Chaque quartier est libre de mettre en place des ateliers selon les envies et les savoirs-faire de chacun.

Organisez ou participer à un Festival des savoirs et des arts

Les Festivals des savoirs et des arts sont l'occasion de rencontres autour d'ateliers culturels et créatifs de rue. En encourageant la mobilisation de tout un quartier, ils permettent à chacun de réaliser de nouvelles rencontres, s'investir dans un projet commun, partager autour de savoirs et de créations.

Ces activités artistiques et culturelles visent à mettre en lien l'ensemble des participants. Tous sont invités à échanger leur savoir-faire, les ateliers étant animés par les habitants eux-mêmes, les partenaires associatifs et institutionnels, les intervenants divers ou les membres d'ATD Quart Monde.

Nous sommes toujours à la recherche de nouveaux talents, contactez-nous !

chargement de la carte - veuillez patienter...

La carte ne peut être chargée - s'il vous plaît activer Javascript !
→ plus d'informations
Infos et contact : festival.des.savoirs@atd-quartmonde.org

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Les Festivals des Savoirs et des Arts - ATD (Agir Tous pour la Dignité) Quart Monde

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" Quand je dessine, quand je peins, c'est comme une tendresse qui sort de moi." La culture est un droit pour tous. Elle est essentielle à chaque personne et à chaque peuple. Parce qu'elle transcende le quotidien lorsqu'elle valorise les savoirs et les connaissances de chacun, elle est un élément majeur pour sortir de l'exclusion.

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(méthodo - pdf)

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Nine Meals from Anarchy      Oil dependence, climate change and the transition to resilience

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Nine Meals from Anarchy      Oil dependence, climate change and the transition to resilience

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(essai - pdf)

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This website was produced as part of the the UK REconomy Project Pilot generously supported by the Friends Provident Foundation and the Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation until June 2017. REconomy work continues throughout the UK - for current information and events follow Facebook and Twitter If you are from outside the UK take a look at the Transition Network website

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This website was produced as part of the the UK REconomy Project Pilot generously supported by the Friends Provident Foundation and the Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation until June 2017.

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Looking for a quiet, friendly place to set up your laptop for some quality work time? Or develop your great new enterprise? Or just escape the distractions of your kitchen table, aka 'home office'?

The REconomy Centre offers practical, affordable space and a chance to meet, share and hang out with people who are working on interesting projects, just like you. Think of the REconomy Centre as a drop-in workspace and a supportive, nurturing incubator for start-up enterprises and community projects.

We're also the home of the Totnes REconomy Project, the Local Entrepreneur Forum, and a host of other programmes aiming to support a strong, resilient and equitable local economy. We also have a report detailing some of the impacts of these projects which you can download, here:
http://bit.ly/TRP_Impact_Report_2017

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Looking for a quiet, friendly place to set up your laptop for some quality work time? Or develop your great new enterprise? Or just escape the distractions of your kitchen table, aka 'home office'? The REconomy Centre offers practical, affordable space and a chance to meet, share and hang out with people who are working on...

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(collectif)

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Working together to do what we can about the Climate Emergency, one street at a time.
Transition Streets is a tried-and-tested, award-winning behaviour-change project to This site tells you all you need to know to start up your own Transition Streets group. cut energy use, reduce carbon emissions, save money and strengthen your neighbourhood.
Transition Streets in a nutshell

Ashden Awards film about Transition Streets

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Transition Streets | strengthen your neighbourhood

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Transition Streets is a tried-and-tested, award-winning behaviour-change project to This site tells you all you need to know to start up your own Transition Streets group. cut energy use, reduce carbon emissions, save money and strengthen your neighbourhood.

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A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT

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A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT

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(dico)

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Welcome to LeanLogic.online!

This project emerged from a 2017 Schumacher College course on David Fleming's work.

One of the attendees was Matthew Taylor, drawn by parallels between and his own project, and he has since given his time and skills freely to developing this new presentation of Fleming's legacy, just as I gave mine to seeing the original books through to posthumous publication.

Since the format of Lean Logic in many ways foreshadowed the later invention of Wikipedia, it feels so appropriate to see it brought into the hyperlinked internet age to which it is so well suited!

And appropriate too that it now provides a venue for the discussions David hoped to start. He saw each entry in his Dictionary for the Future not as the final word, but as a jumping-off point for... well, in his own words, "do nothing that matters without consulting a conversation".

So leave comments under the dictionary entries to open those conversations, or to let us know where you find value in the new format, or how it could be improved! And enjoy the new facility of easily scanning the whole dictionary via the search that you'll find at the top-right of every page; something every Lean Logic fan has longed for.

We very much hope this new format for Fleming's great work will extend the reach of what of what has already proved an influential and entertaining read for thinkers and doers across the world!

Hopefully helped along too by the new film The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?, for which see just below...

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LEAN LOGIC - A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT

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Welcome to LeanLogic.online! This project emerged from a 2017 Schumacher College course on David Fleming's work. One of the attendees was Matthew Taylor, drawn by parallels between and his own project , and he has since given his time and skills freely to developing this new presentation of Fleming's legacy, just as I gave mine to seeing the original books through to posthumous publication.

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Aesthetic education and social imagination

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Aesthetic education and social imagination

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(institution)

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Welcome to the Institute!

We are educators, artists, scholars, advocates and practitioners of aesthetic education and social imagination. Become a subscriber and participate in our many events including seminars, workshops, conferences, and opportunities for discourse and exchange.
Learn more.

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Welcome to the Institute! We are educators, artists, scholars, advocates and practitioners of aesthetic education and social imagination. Become a subscriber and participate in our many events including seminars, workshops, conferences, and opportunities for discourse and exchange. Learn more.

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Make your street                        a place to play 

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Make your street                        a place to play 

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Playing Out is a resident led movement restoring children’s freedom to play out in the streets and spaces where they live.

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Playday is the national day for play in the UK, traditionally held on the first Wednesday in August. Playday 2020 will be celebrated on Wednesday 5 August.

The theme for 2020 is ... Everyday Freedoms Everyday Adventures.

The Playday 2020 theme aims to highlight the importance of giving children and teenagers the freedom to play and have everyday adventures. As well as celebrating children's right to play, the Playday 2020 campaign recognises the impact of government restrictions and physical distancing on children's mental health and opportunities to play freely with friends and in their community.

This year, we want to focus on the unique characteristics of play that we know help children make sense of the world around them and can alleviate their stress and anxiety, particularly during challenging and uncertain times.

Playing is fun and is central to children's happiness

Playing helps children's physical, mental and emotional health and well-being

Playing boosts children's resilience, enabling them to cope with stress, anxiety and challenges

Playing supports children to develop confidence, creativity and problem-solving skills

Playing contributes to children's learning and development.

As in previous years we are calling on families and carers to support children to play in carefree ways, on Playday and every day! Children will play wherever they are and whenever they can - as adults we can support this by making play a part of our daily life.

Playday is an annual day to recognise children's right to play. Although it will be very different to previous Playdays, it's important that we go ahead with this year's celebration, as recognising the importance of children's play is more important than ever.

Due to current government guidance about social gatherings and physical distancing, we are not asking you to organise public Playday events but we are looking forward to hearing about the creative ways in which you plan to celebrate Playday in your area. This year, we are encouraging families to celebrate children's right to play at home. In response to the unusual circumstances, the Playday events section of this website will not be available this year.

We are calling on families, carers, and communities across the UK to join the celebration of play from their doorsteps and clap, cheer, bang pots and pans, and generally Make a Big Noise for Playday at 2:00pm on Wednesday 5 August.

Download a postcard to share with your neighbours to help spread the word so everyone can get involved in Make a Big Noise for Playday.

We are also encouraging everyone to colour in and display the Playday logo in their windows, to show their support for every child's right to play. Download your copy.

For the latest updates on this year's campaign follow us on Facebook and Twitter - and share your plans with us using the #Playday2020 hashtag.

Find out more about Playday.
Playday is coordinated by Play England, Play Wales, Play Scotland and PlayBoard Northern Ireland.

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Playday is the national day for play in the UK, traditionally held on the first Wednesday in August. Playday 2020 will be celebrated on Wednesday 5 August. The theme for 2020 is ... Everyday Freedoms Everyday Adventures. The Playday 2020 theme aims to highlight the importance of giving children and teenagers the freedom to play and have everyday adventures.

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(conférence)

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Professor Hugh Cunningham

What I want to tell you this evening is a story of two narratives about childhood, one progressive and positive, the other negative and depressing.

In 1942 the poet and essayist Sylvia Lynd admitted that we have 'our temporary misfortunes', 'but the story of English children ... is a story that moves towards a happy ending'. Try saying that in 2014 - no one now imagines that the story of English children is moving towards a happy ending.

News reporting of the state of childhood is almost uniformly negative.

*Children suffer high rates of self-harming and mental illness

*Children are 'couch-potatoes', slumped in front of screens

*Children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

*Children are materialistic, hooked on consumerism

*An alarming number of children seem to be autistic or to suffer from dyslexia

*Since the 1970s the world which children explore on their own has shrunk by a factor of nine.

This is not a purely British phenomenon but according to what we read, it's worse in Britain than anywhere else:

*In the 2007 UNICEF survey of children in 21 advanced economies the UK came 21st

*In a report in 2013, 76% of German junior school children were allowed to travel home from school alone, only 25% of British children

In 2006 Sue Palmer published Toxic Childhood - our children are being poisoned, she argued, not only by the food they eat, the drinks they drink, but also by the messages they receive that invite them into a world of consumption and of sexualisation.

So here are the two narratives. I want to show how and why Sylvia Lynd was so optimistic in 1942, how that optimism survived for another thirty years, but then collapsed in the early 1970s to be succeeded by the negative narrative. And I want to suggest that the power of these narratives is such that they form a framework within which we fit everything we hear about children and childhood - further, that we go out to look for 'facts' which will reinforce the narratives.
The progressive narrative
The progressive narrative is shaped as a romance, that most basic of human stories. It starts in 'the olden times', 'once upon a time', when children, like adults, lived in the countryside, helped their parents around the house, in the garden and on the farm, gradually taking on more responsible roles as they grew older. There was no great sentimentality about children - life was too hard and demanding for that. They were treated, so the story claimed, as 'little adults' - though that phrase is an imposition on earlier centuries by the nineteenth century. Neither families nor society were child-oriented. The life course was pictured as a triangle - you started at the base as a baby, rose by stages to reach the peak in middle age, and then began the slide down towards old age and death. Childhood as Shakespeare described it consisted of the infant mewling and puking and of the whining boy going unwillingly to school. The childhood years were not, as they were to become, the best years of life.

This world, depicted as stable and hardly changing, was, according to the narrative, disrupted by two forces that came to prominence in the late eighteenth century. The first was Romanticism, the second the industrial revolution.

Until the late eighteenth century there were two main modes of child-rearing. The first, strongest amongst Puritans, saw the baby as born in sin. The task of parenting was to bring the child to a consciousness of sin and to the means of salvation. This was not something that could be left to chance or time; children's lives were fragile. Isaac Watts in 1715, in his Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, taught children to sing:

There is an hour when I must die,

Nor do I know how soon 'twill come.

A thousand children, young as I,

Are call'd by death to hear their doom.

The second mode of child-rearing, strongly influenced by John Locke's 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, placed the emphasis on instilling into children habits and thoughts that would conduce to the emergence of rational adults. Education, as far as possible, was to be made enjoyable, but all to the end of producing the desired adult.

Romanticism was revolutionary. The child moved centre stage, and was far from being tainted with original sin or a mere blank slate. Blake had a two-day-old tell his mother, 'I happy am; Joy is my name'. Wordsworth in his enormously influential Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood claimed that babies came 'trailing clouds of glory ... from God who is our home'. Children were messengers from God, imbued with a sensitivity to nature and an inborn morality. They could teach adults how to live. A good childhood became the foundation block for later life, but growing up was a process of loss. Childhood was now seen as the best time of life, the life course thereafter downhill. Childhood should be happy. It is an indication of how pervasive the influence of Romanticism was that in the 1840s Thomas Guthrie, a Scottish evangelical minister, forgetting about original sin, could proclaim that 'God made childhood to be happy'.
The industrial revolution
The heyday of Romanticism coincided with the industrial revolution which itself became associated with the exploitation of child labour in factories and mines. As J. L. and Barbara Hammond put it in The Town Labourer (1917), 'during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, the employment of children on a vast scale became the most important social feature of English life'. Child labour was a denial of childhood as the Romantics imagined it. Coleridge took a leading role in trying to end it. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries John Locke had wanted all children above three whose families sought relief from the parish to be sent to a working school, and Daniel Defoe had rejoiced in reports of children of four or five earning their own keep in the textile trades. Romanticism in combination with evidence of children's working conditions in the industrial revolution killed such notions. By the 1830s Samuel Roberts, a leading campaigner against the use of boys to clean chimneys, was describing how 'Ever a toiling Child doth make us sad'. Such children were, it was said, 'children without childhood', childhood now painted in romantic colours. For Sylvia Lynd in 1942 'The story of the Industrial Age ... is the story of the martyrdom of childhood'. If the progressive story of childhood is a romance, the industrial revolution was the crisis.

But fortunately, for both nation and children, rescue was at hand. In the story as it was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century, philanthropists, Lord Ashley most prominent, took up the cause of the children in mines and factories. He was, as a biography of 1926 put it, 'our British Abraham Lincoln - the Emancipator of Industrial England', 'the Moses who led the children of bondage into their Promised Land'. The 'Promised Land' was in one sense 'childhood'; more mundanely it was school.

Ashley's concern stretched beyond working children. He took up the cause of street children who were at the forefront of public attention in the mid-nineteenth century. Here, too, school was seen as the remedy, first in the Ragged Schools pioneered in the 1840s, and then in the spread of compulsory schooling in the later nineteenth century.

In the story of rescue there was one further element, the rescue of children from neglect, mistreatment and abuse by adults. Here the NSPCC, founded in 1889 out of an earlier London Society, was seen as playing the crucial role. The NSPCC was supremely successful in constructing a version of history in which children enjoyed no protection under law until it itself provided such protection. The NSPCC version of the past took root - and still predominates.

Government, in harness with philanthropists, played a crucial role in the rescue of children. It passed Factory Acts and Education Acts and what were called Children's Charters, it set up inspectorates. Arnold Toynbee, vitally important in establishing the industrial revolution as a social crisis, 'tremble[d] to think what this country would have been but for the Factory Acts'.

Romanticism's impact and resonance left three lasting legacies. First, childhood, as the best time of life, should be prolonged. The raising of the school-leaving age was the most influential way of doing this. Second, children and adults should as far as possible inhabit separate realms, the adult world defined as dangerous for children. Special spaces should be created for children - schools, playgrounds - and adult spaces, such as the pub, denied them. And third, romanticism provided a story, a narrative of things getting better.

We can see that narrative in place with the reflections on childhood offered on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the end of the century and then the Queen's death. The romance was now completed. Children had gone through the crisis of the industrial revolution and been rescued for childhood. The nation could congratulate itself. In 1897 W. Clarke Hall, a barrister who worked with the NSPCC, described how when Victoria came to the throne,

the great Juggernaut car of unscrupulous commercialism, private greed, and domestic inhumanity rolled upon its way with none to hinder. Tracing our way back down the dim avenues of the years, we see the white and mouldering bones of the child victims which its cruel wheels have crushed'. But the juggernaut had now, in 1897, been halted: year by year, 'the number of its victims becomes more few, the shout of the happy, rescued children more loud and more glad.

Happy children themselves learnt the story. In the elementary schools they sang a song entitled 'Oh Happy English Children'. And here is how the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's City Sparrows, the magazine of its junior branch, the League of Pity, told the story:

Sixty years ago, when [Victoria] came to the throne...the children of the nation were, in thousands of instances, being done to death, morally and physically, in wretched homes, in which they slowly pined and starved to death; in factories closely confined, and set to watch the droning, turning wheels, until released sick and faint at night, they crept wearily home with no heart to rejoice in their childhood - no thought but to rest. And worse still, down in the dark mines underground, little, helpless, naked children toiled in the coal-pits. Think what that must have been, you children who love the bright sunshine and the green fields.

But the rescue happened and was on-going: since the Queen's accession '107 Acts of Parliament have been passed relating to child-life and child-suffering...And now, you happy children throughout the length and breadth of Scotland, we would appeal to you to commemorate the glorious sixty years' reign of our Queen by joining the League of Pity, and so helping to carry on the work for suffering children she has done so much to further.'

There was no significant challenge to this narrative in the first half of the twentieth century; rather it became embedded. In 1903 the author of a standard text-book, H. de B. Gibbins, summarised his account in the words: 'Only think of the triumphs that have been won in this generation for the children of England'. Move forward a century and imagine yourself saying that in 2003. In the inter-war years the journalist and suffragist Evelyn Sharp described how as a young girl in the 1880s she 'had no idea that she stood at the dawn of a new age that was going to revolutionise all childhood' - and for the better. In 1930 Sir George Newman, Chief Medical Officer at the Ministry of Health, lecturing to the Shaftesbury Society, could rejoice that 'one of the darkest chapters of our social history' was over, 'the long and shameful story of cruelty and oppression is ended'. Children, it was frequently said, had a right to health and happiness, and increasingly they enjoyed both. Sylvia Lynd celebrated that achievement in 1942.

Progress was not confined to Britain. The principle behind factory legislation, claimed Sidney Webb in 1910, 'has spread to every industrial community in the Old World and the New'. If in the 1830s Britain had an unenviable notoriety for its use of child workers, by the early twentieth century it was priding itself on setting the path of progress.

This narrative kept going into the 1970s at both national and international level. Let me give you three markers.

*1973 Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt published the second of two volumes on Children in English Society. They open with a chapter on 'Childhood without Rights and Protection', children in the eighteenth century. seen as 'little adults'. They end the volume with the Children Act of 1948. It's a story of progress.

*Lloyd de Mause's The History of Childhood (1974). Parent-child relations, he argued, have proceeded through 6 stages: the infanticidal, the abandonment, the ambivalent, the intrusive, the socialisation, and finally from the mid 20th c, the helping. The further back in history you go, 'the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused'.

*The optimism was worldwide. In 1973 the ILO passed its Minimum Age Convention, setting 15 as the age below which no child should work.

1974 saw the first sustained attack on the story and what it implied for children, John Holt's Escape from Childhood. Childhood was portrayed as an 'institution', a kind of prison with powers to 'lock the young into eighteen years or more of subserviency and dependence, and make of them...a mixture of expensive nuisance, fragile treasure, slave and super-pet'. Childhood, he announced, 'goes on far too long'. 'What is both new and bad about modern childhood is that children are so cut off from the adult world'. This was the first frontal assault on the image of childhood that had been built up in the nineteenth and first three-quarters of the twentieth century.

But it would be naïve to place too much emphasis on Holt and the short-lived movements for child liberation. Larger factors were involved in the dismantling of the progressive narrative and its replacement by the one we know today - and at root they had little directly to do with childhood. The oil crisis of 1973 seems to me the great turning point in the history of the post-war world in the west, the moment when optimism about the future shrivelled. It opened the way for Reaganomics or what has come to be called neo-liberalism, the belief in the justice and virtue of the market and the demonization of welfare states as a drag on economic progress.

The impact of these developments on children was dramatic:

*In Britain in the 1980s and 1990s the proportion of children in poverty rose from 1 in 10 to 1 in 3, a statistic that fed easily into a negative narrative.

*In the developing (and also in the developed) world child labour began to increase. The facts began to impinge on world consciousness through the pamphlets published by the Anti-Slavery Society between 1978 and 1988.

*In the developed world the transition from childhood to adulthood which in the late 1960s and early 1970s had become concentrated in a few short years in the late teens and early 20s, now stretched out over a decade or more. This was largely due to youth unemployment which has dogged the western world ever since.

We can see the collapse of the old confidence about what constituted a proper childhood and about the direction in which society was moving, taking root from the early 1980s. The keynote was now not optimism but anxiety.

*Within ten years of John Holt's demand for an escape from childhood, Neil Postman, in 1982, was lamenting The Disappearance of Childhood. His was one of a number of books arguing that the barriers that properly existed between childhood and adulthood were being dangerously lowered. Children were ceasing to be children. Postman had many successors in laments about the undermining of childhood and in campaigns to hold on to it or bring it back.

*In 1983 Linda Pollock's Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 marked the change in the view of the past. The story of progress was ruthlessly dismantled. Far from being a hell, the past was now a country where parents had always done the best for their children. Pollock rigorously avoided nostalgia, but readers might well wonder whether 20th c. parents were doing as well as their forebears.

*At the same time economic historians were dismantling and questioning the industrial revolution, stressing evolution, and quietly dropping child labour from its previous central position both in academic history and in the progressive narrative. Without child labour the progressive narrative was undermined from within.
The emergence of a new narrative
In face of all this a new narrative began to emerge, and it's one which people of my generation love to tell. We were taught the progressive narrative, and we've seen it disintegrate. Our story begins with our own childhoods in the middle years of the twentieth century and ends in the present. In our childhoods, we say, we had freedom to explore our world without constant adult supervision. Depending on our social background and where we lived, our mothers might turn us out of doors after breakfast and tell us not to come back until teatime, or we might have the freedom to roam in the countryside - an Arthur Ransome childhood. No one talked about 'health and safety' or about 'risk assessment'. Autism, dyslexia, self-harming, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, eating disorders, the things parents and children worry about now, none of these featured in our lives or so far as we knew in those of our parents. In these childhoods it's always summertime. We had scrapes and knocks, probably some sad old man in a mac exposed himself to us, but we took this in our stride. I sometimes think we ought to factor in boredom into these stories of our childhoods, but even that wouldn't alter the overall conclusion: our childhoods were happy, they were proper childhoods.

I've come to associate this pessimistic narrative with the Daily Mail. In 2006 I was asked to write something for the Daily Mail on the history of childhood. At about £1 a word, and 2,000 words to play with, it was an offer that was difficult to refuse. But, I was told, Paul Dacre would take a particular interest in what I wrote and unless I could show that childhood had got worse since the 1950s, he wouldn't publish it. I did my best, but not enough - it remains in the archives. It could be said that the narrative has such a hold on us that it's difficult to find any space in which to challenge it. Few of us probably would wish to be thought to have a Daily Mail version of childhood, but that is in essence what we have got.

The pessimistic narrative gains much of its potency from names, the names of children who have died through neglect, or been murdered, or abducted: Maria Colwell, killed by her stepfather in 1973, despite, in the last nine months of her life, thirty complaints about the way her mother and stepfather treated her. Jasmine Beckford, starved and battered to death in 1984; James Bulger, murdered by two other children in 1993; Sarah Payne murdered by a paedophile in 2000; Victoria Climbie, dying of hypothermia in 2000, after months of neglect and abuse; Madeleine McCann, abducted in 2007; Peter Connelly, Baby P, dying in 2007 after neglect by his mother and her boyfriend; you can continue the ghastly roll-call. In the negative narrative the world is far from being a safe place for children. In home, street, school, in the institutions ('homes') where some children have lived, many of them church-run, in the BBC or in hospital, there is, the story tells us, danger for children.

So there are the two narratives. The most obvious question to ask of them is, are they true? I will make some attempt to answer that. But I want also to consider the implications of narratives of the kind we have had both for childhood and for children.

If we ask if they're true, the answer has to be yes and no. Take the progressive narrative. It is difficult to deny that on key measurements like life expectancy, health, standard of living, level of education it was indeed a story of progress. Even on these issues, however, there was a degree of over-egging. Sir George Newman, whom we encountered earlier, went to great lengths to deny evidence of children's poor health in the north-east of England in the inter-war years. Similarly the Home Office constantly downplayed the existence of child labour in the first half of the century.

It's when we widen the focus to look at some of the policies set in place for the rescue of children that the progressive story begins seriously to fray. The NSPCC version of history was, it has to be said, false. The Times between 1785 and 1860 reported 385 cases of child neglect and sexual abuse, only 7% resulting in a 'not guilty' verdict. There is considerable evidence of neighbourhood sanctions against parents who were perceived to be cruel. But all of this was forgotten as the NSPCC version of history took root. There were further problems with the rescue narrative. For many children it meant living in an institution and we have become aware of the inhumanity that could be embedded in them. Other rescue policies were more far-reaching, especially the emigration of children overseas, to Canada and then to Australia. There might be good intentions behind some of these policies but that does not defend them against accusations that they seriously infringed the rights of those children who were emigrated. In short, the invocation to children to be happy, to acquire, as Evelyn Sharp urged, 'the habit of happiness', was asking a lot of children who experienced nothing that might make them happy.

As to the negative narrative, there is again much truth in it. But the negative narrative, too, has been built on some shaky foundations. The thing that strikes me about much of the so-called evidence is a very basic confusion between a correlation and a cause. For example, children who watch a lot of television are rated more materialistic than those who watch less - but you can't jump from that correlation to say that it's watching too much television that makes children materialistic. It might equally well be the other way round, or there might be other factors altogether that intrude. And how interesting that 'materialism' - at the heart of politicians' appeal to the adult public - is thought unacceptable for children.

Are there any reasons to be cheerful? When UNICEF in 2013 published a further study of children's well-being in the richer countries, the headlines and articles had in some sense been written before the report emerged: we knew it would be bad news, the negative narrative demanded that. It was in fact even on the most cursory look better news than in 2007 - Britain had climbed out of bottom place to being 16th out of 29 countries. But, while grudgingly accepting this, most reporting highlighted the negative. You wouldn't have known that the report showed improvement on the following indices: infant mortality and poverty and, amongst 11, 13, and 15-year-olds, being bullied, fighting, drunkenness, cannabis use, being overweight. There was also for 11-15-year-olds a significant rise in self-reported life satisfaction which now stands at 86 per cent. The 2006 Youth Survey of the British Household Panel Survey showed that 87% of 11-16 year-olds rated their life as a whole as happy rather than unhappy, 9% were neutral, leaving only 4% unhappy.

Moving beyond the question of the truth or otherwise of the narratives, what are the implications of having narratives of this kind at all? In essence the new narrative is as infected by Romanticism as the old. At its heart lies a belief in the desirability of the separation and distinctiveness of adulthood and childhood. This suggests to me that the power of the narratives has as much, if not more, to do with adulthood as it does with childhood.

A few years ago I spent some time on an assessment panel set up by the DCSF to look at the impact of the commercial world on children's wellbeing. We were asked to compare the present with the past (well, with the past fifty years) which was why I was there, and we were urged to look for positive benefits of the commercial world as well as negative ones. But of course the panel had been set up precisely because of concerns about the negative impact. The commercial world (and what part of our world, I kept asking myself, is not now commercial?) is conceived as an adult world, adults buying and selling as equals. But pose the commercial world against children, and you are likely to think of advertisers and marketers manipulating children's innocent and naïve minds. Children need to be protected against it. If we think of children as obese, if we think of them constantly searching inappropriate parts of the internet, if we think of them as prematurely sexualized, if we're bothered by pester power, the commercial world surely has much to answer. Children, we might say, have a right to a life without any of these things. Children, and I think it's a very telling word, are seen as 'vulnerable'. Adults, by contrast, also obese, also searching inappropriate parts of the internet, their whole world sexualized and eroticized, their insatiable desire for material goods what makes the world go round, adults can survive without protection. We don't like this adult life, we're perhaps rather ashamed of it, but at least we can spare children from it: life is downhill.

We often say that childhood has been shortened, that children grow up too quickly. To a historian this looks nonsense. On the contrary it has been extended. It lasts up to eighteen. One sign of the lengthening is the shift in the cash flow. Until roughly the mid-twentieth century, children typically tipped up their earnings to their mothers who gave them back something for spends: cash flowed from children to parents. Would that that were still the case, you may be saying. As many of us know to our cost, cash now flows the other way, from parents to children, and there seems no age at which it will or should end. If one sign of being an adult is to be financially independent, then children in their 20s and 30s have yet to attain that status.

But if childhood has been extended, it has also been, and this will sound a contradiction, shortened. We constantly hear of children doing things at an age much younger than adults now in their middle age ever did them. Children today may not be able to cross a road on their own, but they are integrated into a world of social media, fashion and celebrity in ways older people were not. What has happened is that the boundary fences between childhood and adulthood have broken down, so-called adults behave like children, and children behave like adults.

If we ask why this has happened, one answer is that the prospect of adulthood is pretty bleak. Adulthood means work, and work means stress. For many it means paid work plus childcare, a recipe for even more stress. I've heard many people say that they had 'an idyllic childhood', never anyone claiming to be enjoying an idyllic adulthood. Of course the idyllic childhoods are constructions made by adults; they are pointers to how adults see the life course.

Narratives make sense of the world but they do not necessarily reflect the world as it is. The narratives I've considered are extremely powerful, in effect mind-sets that can incorporate into the story anything that is thrown at them. Huge numbers of adults in twenty-first century Britain have bought into the negative narrative and internalised it, clinging onto a Romantic and idealised view of childhood.

If there are lessons we might learn I think they come from the Scandinavian countries which, to no one's surprise, do well in the UNICEF surveys. Why? First, it has something to do with greater equality. If we ask why Britain came bottom of the 2007 UNICEF report, there may be a clue in the country that came second bottom - it was the United States. The United States and Britain on almost every count are among the two most unequal societies in the developed world, and I think that has much to do with children being discontented. Inequality feeds social exclusion and damages children's sense of their well-being. And it's not only the poor who suffer from this. Parents are all too aware of how their children's future is dependent on school success, and of course convey this to their children. We want our children to be happy, but perhaps even more we want them to achieve.

But, second, besides being less unequal, Scandinavia also has a rather different view of children than in Britain. In Britain they're seen as vulnerable, and basically deficient in the qualities and aptitudes that would enable them to survive in the world without adult supervision and helicoptering parents. In Scandinavia the attitude is more that children are basically competent and can be trusted to be sensible.

Encouraging competence sounds a rather unexciting aim for childhood. It is at the opposite pole to the romantic conception of childhood. I think that would be all to the good. It might even mean that the issue of childhood became less fraught, discussions of it less emotional. We might be able to change the narrative or even do without one.

© Professor Hugh Cunningham, 2014

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Professor Hugh Cunningham What I want to tell you this evening is a story of two narratives about childhood, one progressive and positive, the other negative and depressing. In 1942 the poet and essayist Sylvia Lynd admitted that we have 'our temporary misfortunes', 'but the story of English children ...

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Bogotá Improving Civic Behavior Cities on Speed

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Bogotá Improving Civic Behavior Cities on Speed

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Op-Ed Contributor

Credit... Jacob Stead

BOGOTÁ, Colombia - Between 1995 and 2003, I served two terms as mayor of Bogotá. Like most cities in the world, Colombia's capital had a great many problems that needed fixing and few people believed they could be fixed.

As a professor of philosophy, I had little patience with conventional wisdom. When I was threatened by the leftist guerrilla group known as FARC, as hundreds of Colombian mayors were, I decided to wear a bulletproof vest. But mine had a hole cut in the shape of a heart over my chest. I wore that symbol of confidence, or defiance, for nine months.

Here's what I learned: People respond to humor and playfulness from politicians. It's the most powerful tool for change we have.

Bogotá's traffic was chaotic and dangerous when I came to office. We decided the city needed a radical new approach to traffic safety. Among various strategies, we printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of "citizens' cards," which had a thumbs-up image on one side to flash at courteous drivers, and a thumbs-down on the other to express disapproval. Within a decade, traffic fatalities fell by more than half.

Another initiative in a small area of the city was to replace corrupt traffic police officers with mime artists. The idea was that instead of cops handing out tickets and pocketing fines, these performers would "police" drivers' behavior by communicating with mime - for instance, pretending to be hurt or offended when a vehicle ignored the pedestrian right of way in a crosswalk. Could this system, which boiled down to publicly signaled approval or disapproval, really work?

We had plenty of skeptics. At a news conference, a journalist asked, "Can the mimes serve traffic fines?" That is legally impermissible, I answered. "Then it won't work," he declared.

But change is possible. People began to obey traffic signals and, for the first time, they respected crosswalks. Within months, I was able to dissolve the old, corrupt transit police force of about 1,800 officers, arranging with the national police service to replace them.

I also learned as mayor that it is valuable to speak always as if your worst enemies are listening to you. New uses of old words are always ready to dance with you. If you can, play a little: Announce new taxes, and smile gently.

I was elected twice, in fact, on a platform to increase taxes. During my second term, the City Council refused to approve the increase, so I invited citizens to pay "voluntary taxes" - in Spanish, "impuestos voluntarios," or voluntary impositions, which is a lovely contradiction. Sixty-three thousand households went along with the joke and paid 10 percent more than they owed, mostly in real estate tax.

I won't claim that we succeeded in everything, but we did bring change where change seemed impossible. Things worked because people cooperated, and they did so because they were astonished at their own power. Hope that delivered results generated more hope. Show me a city with a thousand problems, and I'll show you 10,000 people who can solve them.

When the city faced a critical water shortage, I made a public commitment: There would be no traditional rationing to manage the crisis, no cutting of supply. Instead, we set a goal of voluntary conservation of 12 to 20 percent; ultimately we achieved savings of 8 to 16 percent. To inform people of this policy, we replaced the busy signal on people's telephones with a public message, either in my voice or that of the Colombian pop star Shakira, saying, "Thank you for saving water."

We published information about how to save water, and many families discussed and devised their own options for reducing consumption. Even as we increased the provision of water and sanitation to nearly all households in Bogotá, water consumption went down. It remains lower today than before the crisis, thanks to the good practices that we stimulated.

This illustrates another lesson we learned. It helps to develop short, pleasing experiences for people that generate stories of delightful surprise, moments of mutual admiration among citizens and the welcome challenge of understanding something new. But then you need to consolidate those stories with good statistical results obtained through cold, rational measurement. That creates a virtuous cycle, so that congenial new experiences lead to statistically documented improvements, and the documentation raises expectations for more welcome change.

The art of politics is a curious business. It combines, as no other profession or occupation does, rigorous reasoning, sincere emotions and extroverted body language, with what are sometimes painfully cold, slow and planned strategic interactions. It is about leading, but not directing: What people love most is when you write on the blackboard a risky first half of a sentence and then recognize their freedom to write the other half.

My main theoretical and practical concern has been how to use the force of social and moral regulation to obtain the rule of law. This entailed a fundamental respect for human lives, expressed in the dictum "Life is sacred." My purpose was to create a cosmopolitan culture of citizenship in which expressions like "crimes against humanity" would find a precise operational meaning.

Perhaps it's time to look again at the law and its fraying fabric. My experience suggests that humanity is learning three ways of reducing the gap between the formal field of law and the informal realm of culture: a more creative enforcement of the law, the careful reform of the law itself, and the aesthetic exploration of the possibility of forms of empathy that can transcend national boundaries.

Changing a city is not the greatest political challenge; sustaining that change is. I used to have a Darwinian attitude toward politics: Just let ideas that are not sufficiently strong perish. Today, I realize that strong ideas can perish, too.

As quickly as a city can progress, it can also fail. But never forget that huge changes can be achieved through surprisingly small steps.

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Op-Ed Contributor BOGOTÁ, Colombia - Between 1995 and 2003, I served two terms as mayor of Bogotá. Like most cities in the world, Colombia's capital had a great many problems that needed fixing and few people believed they could be fixed. As a professor of philosophy, I had little patience with conventional wisdom.

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Searching for Neverland: A theatre of impossible futures

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How can play be used as a political instrument in facilitating the reimagining of and transition to future habitats? And, what is the role of the designer in facilitating the collective action and authorship of future habitats?
I'm seeking to answer these questions.
A voyage through design.
I'm a design futuring and experimentation protagonist creating at the intersection of complex problem spaces, driving transdisciplinary practices in futuring, experimentation and participatory design. In a nutshell, I'm looking for people to collaborate with, who are looking to help push - or redefine - the boundaries of design for reimagined futures.

While I've practised design in varying capacities over the last decade, I've spent most of my career as a strategic designer. The previous three years I've worked in management consulting with Deloitte Digital as an Experience Design Manager, where I developed an experimental research practice centred on futuring, play and participation. I played the role of an agitator - extending transdisciplinary design and futuring methods while working with economists, anthropologists, government advisory and with communities, to develop strategies for things like experiences, services, products and systems, with anticipated, transformational outcomes.

Recently I moved to Today to take on the role of their Lead Service Designer in Sydney, where I continued my endeavours to embed futuring and play in into Service Design (whatever that means to you).

At present, I'm exploring the future on my own, nomadic, actively seeking out like-minded collaborators, particularly those who identify - or have been identified - as provocateurs or even misfits.
A curious Neverland.
As a design consultant, my capacity for impact exists mostly within a liminal frame - this is where I choose to play. This is my version of Neverland, a place that exists outside ordinary time and space, ungoverned and curious. My self-assigned mission has been to redefine the role of design in facilitating structural progress by challenging governing belief systems and creating space for imagination as a temporary outsider.

Play is powerful. I use it to create a safe space, to engage the imagination of actors and spectators through individual or social participation, transcending agency to action and facilitating transitions. Stuart Brown said it beautifully when he was quoted in New Philosopher, Issue 20:

"Play is the vital essence of life" and "the basis of what we think of as civilisation"

Play can express both intrinsic and instrumental value, combat self-sealing logic, break down assumptions and challenge governing beliefs. Play is central to social imagineering and collective futuring, it is a performative intervention in everyday life and is instrumental to my practice.
A vision for play.
I'm curious about play as a political instrument. One that can facilitate the reimagining of and transition to future habitats. My mission is to launch a critical investigation into the remodelling of strategic design that centres on play and experimentation, blends participatory, speculative and transdisciplinary design and borrows from the humanities as well as behavioural psychology and science.

Imagine a future where humans are no longer the dominant intelligence in the world, and your choices are dictated by a set of external algorithms. My game, The Humanity Trade-Off Challenge challenges participants to relinquish aspects of their humanity to AI order renew their own human intention. What fundamental characteristics of humanity will still hold value in the age of AI?

Games like this allow us to interrogate a new human logic based on our difference and intrinsic value as human beings. In a world where we exist side by side AI, we need to redefine what it means to be human. We still need to play.
A road less travelled.

"The human as a being-in-the-world situates (her)himself in the architectonic place where (s) he inhabits" - Martin Heidegger

But I can't help resisting a predetermined future.

Think of it this way. Humanity is the only species that is capable of imagining the future that we know of. But, when it comes to the mainstream imagined futures, most visions have been dictated by multinational corporations and patriarchal oligarchies whose interests lack the aspirations of the citizenry. It would seem, and I'm generalising here, a human's ability to imagine alternative futures has been and continues to be kept at bay.

That's why I seek to investigate the alternative method of authorship and action in the creation of reimagined communities and future habitats with the help of equally passionate collaborators. It's my hope that the knowledge created through this research will contribute to the ongoing practice development and discourse in the field of strategic and speculative design.
A remodelling of strategic and speculative design.
The widespread adoption and commodification of design thinking and human-centred design is diluting the value of design.

Design within society is maturing, but for the most part, designers are merely perpetuating the anthropocentric now, creating dire consequences for the future of our living habitats. The opportunity here lies in interrogating the role of the strategic and speculative designer in the facilitation of societal transitions towards reimagined communities and future habitats.

This exploration, research and collaboration will afford me the time and space to develop ways of reflecting on any community's aspirations for future habitats and make a contribution to knowledge on the role of a renewed strategic design practice in creating such conditions.

It's about redistributing power and agency back to the many, including the marginalised, the displaced, and with indigenous peoples, whose defence over the systems that govern them exist as communal and collective.
A woman's perspective.
If we are to address humanity's immediate challenges and transition societies towards alternative, fair, just and sustainable futures, design needs to be radicalised. It's not a new idea, but one that needs further interrogation.

We've seen past provocations on 'smart cities' expressed through Disney's vision for the Progress City, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), and Dr Athelstan Spilhaus' Minnesota Experimental city 'a laboratory for urban technology'. These are examples of singular patriarchal visions of the future, driven by capitalism and Western ideologies.

I'm interested by and respect the provocations of women before me. I take inspiration from people like Lizzie Magie. Joan Littlewood. Jane Jacobs. Terry Irwin. All offer something totally unique. All offer a unique take in their own right, of course, not just as women, but as brilliant minds.

My endeavour to radicalise strategic design as practiced today is articulated best through Alain Badiou's Theatre and Philosophy,

"(s)he must propose a theatre that is not the negation of theatre, but a new theatre, a theatre of the possibility of the impossible; not a theatre of identification but a theatre of transformation."

And like theatre, through multi-actor play and playful and participatory narratives, we might be able to respond to the structural inequities that cause future disparities and create visions of the future that are considerate of the sociotechnical, cultural and political fabric of specific communities. After all, as William Gibson famously said,

"the future is already here, it's just not that evenly distributed."

A new story with multiple authors.
If we are to recognise and deliver on the potential for design to take on and contribute to the reimagination of and transition to future habitats, we need a design narrative that can redirect how visions for the future are authored and enacted. Prioritising design efforts to satisfy corporate interests in response to capitalist markets will only accelerate the demise of our living habitats.

The current narrative is dominated by corporate interests, profiteering, short-term gains and sometimes corruption. I intend to contribute to an emerging discourse on the role of strategic and speculative design by conducting a series of place-based experiments that create a new narrative in reimagining communities and model future habitats.

In my current practice, visions for alternative futures can only be partially realised. In a government transport project I worked on within Deloitte, I used VR and AR prototypes and tabletop games as tools to test and immerse citizens in a speculative transport future, I was led to question - Who authors and enacts urban futures? Is it mostly dictated to us?

And does strategic and speculative design as practiced today provoke alternatives, validate pre-defined solutions, or at most pivot those solutions to meet the same end?

I see a need to explore counter capitalist movements like Buen Vivir (good living), Ecosocialism and Cosmopolitan-localism in future narratives. How these movements play out across different communities, formally and informally might present useful provocations for how design methods transfer and adapt to specific contexts.
A final thought.
What I envision happens through collaboration. But my endgame remains to examine how to achieve the integration of empowered and disempowered approaches to reimagining communities and model future habitats that are transdisciplinary and participatory in nature.

I will collaborate with government, industry, institutions, peers and communities within different contexts, primarily within Colombia, Spain, the Netherlands and Australia on multilevel, multi-actor short and long-term project initiatives to explore new design methods with intended transitional and transformative design outcomes.

I will bring my experience as a creator, agitator, instigator and questioner.

I invite you to bring yours.

After all. If what Richard Barbrook suggests in Imaginary Futures is true, that "the present is continually changing, but the imaginary future is always the same," then the designers' tools must make the future tangible enough to play with. In order to imagine something radically different - we need to make the future familiar enough to interrogate it before it arrives.

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Searching for Neverland: A theatre of impossible futures

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How can play be used as a political instrument in facilitating the reimagining of and transition to future habitats? And, what is the role of the designer in facilitating the collective action and...

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LET'S MAKE LONDON GREENER, HEALTHIER AND WILDER

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LET'S MAKE LONDON GREENER, HEALTHIER AND WILDER

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Over 150 passionate people of all ages, from across all of London, with a wide range of experiences and talents who will help make London healthier, greener and wilder

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY

This is your invite to join our free online community for the National Park City movement for everyone interested in making our cities greener, healthier and wilder.

FRONT GARDENS - THE MOST LOCAL OF GREEN SPACES

As most people's nearest local green space, front gardens have a vital role in making London greener, healthier and wilder.

#WhatIf we all brought life back to our streets?

We've launched a dedicated website with the Ealing Front Gardens Project. Read more about why and then explore the research, inspiration and tips.

The London National Park City officially became the world's first National Park City in June 2019, with a festival celebrating London's new National Park City status with over 300 free events across the capital.

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Get outside with the London National Park City

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London National Park City is the grassroots movement for people making our city greener, healthier and wilder. London became the first National Park City in June 2019, opening our eyes and ears to the wonders of urban nature of which we are all part.

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A movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world

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A movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world

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Transition Network encourage communities to come together and rebuild our world. Step up and address the big challenges we face by starting local.

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Urban Tilth is the proud recipient of the 12th Annual Leadership in Sustainability Award! Check out more UT news here!

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Dig into clay, explore what the material offers

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Dig into clay, explore what the material offers

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Civic Spaces, Exhibitions
Museums and Galleries, Regeneration
Maker spaces, Rural Sites

Archaeology
Youth and Adult Community Groups, Professionals
Art Groups, Families, Students

Collaborations, Archaeology Sheets
Commissions, Thinking Hands? Research
Knowledge Exchange
Researchers

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Clayground Collective - Dig into clay and what the material offers

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Civic Spaces, Exhibitions Museums and Galleries, Regeneration Maker spaces, Rural Sites Archaeology Youth and Adult Community Groups, Professionals Art Groups, Families, Students Collaborations, Archaeology Sheets Commissions, Thinking Hands? Research Knowledge Exchange Researchers

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Fin mai, Marie-Adélaïde Scigacz de France Télévisions, a rédigé un article sur l'intervention de Rob Hopkins dans le cadre du somme changeNOW qui se tenait à Paris. Elle y synthétise quelques idées phare de Rob.

Lire l'article

La Fête des Possibles 2023 se déroulera du 8 au 24 septembre partout en France et en Belgique. Chaque année, ce sont des centaines d'événements organisés pour rendre visibles les initiatives citoyennes qui construisent une société plus durable, humaine et solidaire. Vous pouvez dès à présent détailler le programme de votre événement sur le site [...]

Une initiative de transition rassemble des habitants d'un territoire qui souhaitent réfléchir et surtout agir pour préparer leur communauté à l'après-pétrole et au dérèglement climatique. En effet, la situation énergétique et climatique est préoccupante, voire angoissante, et quoi de mieux que l'action pour se redonner du baume au cœur ? Pour cela, chaque association ou [...]

Les groupes de transition sont souvent des forces de propositions et des acteurs co-constructifs, mais parfois elles jouent aussi un rôle de résistance à des projets qui vont ralentir, voire empêcher, les transitions nécessaires.

Le groupe de Canéjan en Transition, en Gironde, s'est engagé depuis quelques temps contre un projet emblématique : celui d'un [...]

Le mois de juin 2023 marque la moitié du mandat des maires et président.es d'agglomération, élus en 2020.

2023 est une année charnière, qui permet à la fois de faire le bilan des premières années d'un mandat annoncé comme "le dernier mandat pour le climat", mais aussi de tout mettre en œuvre pour obtenir davantage [...]

Depuis 2017, la Biennale des Villes en Transition de Grenoble est un événement visant à découvrir des alternatives locales, nationales et internationales en faveur de la transition sociale, écologique et démocratique.

Dès la première édition, des associations d'habitant-es ont organisé des initiatives inscrites dans le programme et dans des activités " off " pour [...]

A l'occasion du sommet ChangeNOW qui se tient à Paris du 25 au 27 mai 2023, Rob Hopkins a répondu aux questions de France Info. Retrouvez l'article intégral ici.

Les villes et initiatives en transition du territoire provençal organisent un festival itinérant du 22 avril au 14 mai 2023 : c'est FestiCités. Il s'agit de la troisième édition d'un festival qui voit les choses en grand. 23 jours de festival, 16 communes, 11 types d'événements différents : ciné-débat, conférence, table-ronde, fresque, actions de dépollutions, [...]

- Les nouvelles d'Avril 2023 -

Soirée ouverte : Fresque des Nouveaux Récits

Toulouse en Transition vous propose de découvrir la fresque des nouveaux récits, lors de sa soirée ouverte du lundi 17 avril ! Elle aura lieu de 18h30 à 22h. Le lieu vous sera confirmé dans les jours à venir. [...]