{"id":1366,"date":"2024-05-28T10:42:54","date_gmt":"2024-05-28T07:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nikan-demo.ir\/toolkit\/?page_id=1366"},"modified":"2024-06-03T14:17:37","modified_gmt":"2024-06-03T10:47:37","slug":"civic-imaginations","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nikan-demo.ir\/toolkit\/civic-imaginations\/","title":{"rendered":"Civic Imaginations"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Space and Place Civic Imaginations<\/span><\/span><\/h2>
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The work of collective imagination is necessarily embedded in our communities, our institutions, and the land on which we reside. This part of the toolkit includes practices that draw on the myths, stories, heritage, and ancestry of place and space, and that conceive of a \u2018life-affirming infrastructure\u2019 that resists the violence inherent to many of our civic institutions as they stand.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

All of these exercises are concerned with questions around how to find liberation together in relationship, and how to rehearse different ways of being that are not predicated on hierarchy or domination. So, dream and dance with Toronto Imaginal Transitions, find sanctuary with MAIA, and enact collaborative practices in community with the Civic Imagination Office in Bologna.<\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Liberated to the Bone<\/h2>
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Tool:<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Contributor:<\/b> Amahra Spence is a community strategist, artist\/curator, writer and organiser.<\/span><\/p>

Since 2013, she is the founding director of MAIA, an organisation engaging culture as strategy to envision and rehearse a world towards liberation. In 2020, Amahra also started Land Black, a spatial practice and speculative design studio prototyping and materialising works at the intersection of land and racial justice.<\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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I wanted to contextualise MAIA's offering, which are practices shaped for Art School.<\/span><\/p>

Starting from various points of need amidst multi-systemic violence, without centring a deficit logic, <\/span>Free YARD<\/span><\/i><\/a> is MAIA's way of sharing and exchanging in the abundance of resources the YARD community houses; a way of offering porous invitations into mobilising for liberation practice; a way of being in continuous rehearsal of the worlds we're growing. We honour in practice the Black Panther Party and other ancestors who acknowledged the everyday as a site of radical invitation, strategic reimagination and systems transformation led by those most impacted.<\/span><\/p>

For <\/span>Art School,<\/span><\/i> one of the spaces within our Free YARD rhythm, we invite fellow travellers, dreamers, thinkers, designers, artists and builders into an embracing of knowledge as more than the 'cerebral' kind, uplifting. Art School poses a journey of creative practice that supports the imagination, resourcing and building needed for sustained movement infrastructure. We surface the systems that are working to debase our movements and explore tools and practices that enable life-affirming infrastructure, through culture-making, embodied knowledge, lived experience and other ontologies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The practices we share here were from an Art School term titled 'Liberated to the Bone', in reference to the brilliant text of Susan Raffo. Raffo's <\/span>Liberated to the\u00a0 Bone<\/span><\/a> \"addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence... [and] interrupts the traumatic binaries of the political and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and healing and organizing.\" We hold in this the many more-than-human entanglements and relate these threads to the interconnectedness of 'place'.<\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t

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Toronto Imaginal Transitions<\/h2>
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Tool:<\/b> A video \/ audio invitation; two frameworks (the cycle of imaginal transformation and the hidden ingredients of systems), and a dreaming practice\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Duration: <\/b>~10 mins - several days!<\/span><\/p>

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Contributors:<\/b> Tara Campbell and Cheryl Hsu from Toronto Imaginal Transitions, who describe themselves as a cocoon, an underground laboratory, a dance club, a martial arts dojo, a family table, and a circle around a fire. <\/span>You can read more about the work of Toronto Imaginal Transitions here.\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>

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[<\/span>EMBED VIDEO HERE<\/span><\/a>] <\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Video Transcript:\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>

The Siren Call to <\/b>Imaginal Transitions<\/i><\/b>
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<\/b>Did you know that when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, it forms a cocoon and then digests and melts into a soupy organic mush?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Right now, something is trembling and quaking in the ground of our being. And in the terrifying tumult of our systems cracking, what if we ungrip our fists and relax our jaws, and begin to breathe slowly? What if we welcome and even desire breaking down and transformation?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

What if we told you that the dark, thick soil beneath our shiny cities, our metal cars and airplanes is stillness and sanctuary. This soil is thick with mycelium and the wisdom and traumas of our ancestors and animal kin. What if we root down so deeply that we learn to sway with the movement of the earth quaking, as though we are invited into metamorphosis?<\/span><\/p>

In the caterpillar's cocoon of transformation, dormant single-celled organisms called imaginal cells begin to wake up, holding within them the seeds of future potential. At first, the immune system of the caterpillar views these cells as threats and tries to attack and kill them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

But these imaginal cells begin to connect and communicate with each other, sharing information and multiplying until there is a tipping point \u2013 when they stop acting as individual, separate cells and begin to assemble new systems -- wings, legs, eyes and antennae --\u00a0 and the structure of the new multicellular organism emerges\u2026<\/span><\/p>

You are invited to<\/span> Imaginal Transitions<\/i><\/b>, to dance into the emerging patterns and morphology of transformation. Instead of trying to figure out how to fix or intervene in systems, how do we come to learn what Donella Meadows describes as dancing with systems?<\/span><\/p>

You are invited because we want to play with you and dream with you. We\u2019re allowed to be clumsy here, laugh, cry and make mistakes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

There are no prescribed dance moves. The dance we will learn together is relational, improvisational and emergent.<\/span><\/p>

We are called to participate in a transition that is deep \u2014 it is a living ecology of becoming. The personal, the local, the cosmopolitan and the planetary braid together like sweetgrass\u2014and are rooted deeply into place.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

In order to dance with complexity, we embrace the wisdom of the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, who says: <\/span>the times are urgent, let us slow down.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

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An Ecology of Collaboration
A Civic Approach <\/span><\/span><\/h2>
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Tool:<\/b> An outlined approach for local governments who want to pursue \u2018an ecology of collaboration.\u2019<\/span><\/p>

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Duration: <\/b>~ 5 mins<\/span><\/p>

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Contributor:<\/b> With an extensive background in co-design processes and emerging technologies, Michele D\u2019Alena is a public policy consultant working on innovating city governance and social innovation processes. He currently works at the Fondazione Innovazione Urbana, in charge of the Civic Imagination Office: the main outcome is building a stable model to link public resources and citizens by experimenting with new forms of community engagement to support Bologna Municipality.<\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Context<\/b>
<\/b>At a time when trust in national governments has hit new lows worldwide, with public servants under significant stress and service quality steadily declining, both small and large cities are finding interesting ways to deepen their connections with citizens. Not surprisingly, this small revolution is emerging where problems are being addressed.<\/span><\/p>

In proximity, local governments and communities are experimenting with new forms of collaboration, urgently seeking solutions: they are demonstrating that between the state and the market, between state assistance and neoliberalism, it is possible to introduce a third pole: communities. The obsession with efficiency, typical of neoliberalism, is accompanied by relationship building because collaboration with those who were once passive users, the citizens, gives rise to essential projects to address the most urgent urban challenges. This is a stitching work once managed by political parties which connected the \"bottom\", the networks, and communities of citizens, trying to direct the \"top\", the political choices.<\/span><\/p>

These new modes, which we define as \"civic imagination\", are activated thanks to the energy of citizens and voluntary associations. Educational communities, community gardens, energy communities, social cohousing, cultural community hubs: these are concrete and very different examples that share the energy of collective intelligence applied to problem-solving. They have no private purposes but move for the general interest. They are projects born from citizens for citizens and can become <\/span>a city's policy<\/span><\/a> with tools and methods designed to support communities and bring their creativity.<\/span><\/p>

Collaboration for All or for a Few?<\/b>
<\/b>Observing the various projects resulting from community activism, a major problem emerges that those involved in public interest projects are familiar with: in most cases, participation is not accessible to everyone. Minorities are generally excluded, as are young people and economically and socially vulnerable groups. A map emerges where collaboration with citizens thickens in some geographical areas, leaving others empty. This unevenness tends to represent a social geography, with areas with more social resources corresponding to relatively richer ones, while empty areas correspond to poorer and more fragile ones. This inequality, moreover, tends to fuel distrust and create conditions for a resurgence of neglected areas.<\/span><\/p>

This data forms the basis for the approach of collaborative ecology without which there will always be inequality between areas where certain results are achieved because some have the time and ability to get involved, and others do not.<\/span><\/p>

Designing a Collaboration Ecology<\/b>
<\/b>Political decision-makers, public officials, or third-sector activists managing public interest projects must embark on a path to recognize the right to different levels of participation, creating a collaboration ecology. The challenge is ethical and political to develop models, also thanks to technological tools, that allow citizens to have their say, with different degrees of intensity ranging from active speaking to involvement through light, informal, and community forms to management. This means expanding the range of participatory methods offered and creating links between them to facilitate the transition from one to another. Realising this rich and dynamic collaboration ecology appears as a tool to give everyone the opportunity to be active and collaborate.<\/span><\/p>

The web is used for constant participatory design, perhaps by determining artificial intelligence to process large amounts of data. But it is essential to accept a structural fragility, typical of experiments, giving concrete space for community management, for a mechanism of recovery of civic energies.<\/span><\/p>

After years of policies that have impoverished our communities, a new mission is needed for those working in the public sector, becoming community enablers. To do this, time is needed to rebuild relationships and power spaces, rethinking forms of governance, trying to build new collective responses and redesigning power asymmetries that have always existed. Collaboration enlivens democracy, through social empowerment as a collective act.<\/span><\/p>

Collaborative Ecology Project Cycle<\/b>
<\/b>To pursue collaborative ecology, a change in work method is needed: following what has been learned in the field, initiating collaborative processes of different types, a project cycle with three phases is proposed.<\/span><\/p>

Phase One: Alignment<\/b>
<\/b>Normally, design is done according to vertical structures, with hierarchical departments where only managers communicate with each other. Often, the specificities of places are not recognized, those working in proximity are not enabled, processes are not prepared with due attention, and participation is planned only when it is to take place. For this reason, it is necessary to change methods by starting the work behind-the-scenes that addresses bureaucracy and the dynamics of complex organisations. In this phase, it is a matter of:<\/span><\/p>