Sugar House Summit: Strengthening the Assets

How does a community strengthen internally to build its assets and resources with the hope of providing service? Further, how does a community invent itself to build public and private partnerships that meet this end?

Last month the NY Times published an article titled Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time is now. The author drew attention to the importance of building public and private partnerships, and balancing social and environmental concerns. Addressing the importance transportation plays in the role of connectivity for community he wrote, “last week the federal Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development announced the creation of an urban task force that would promote the development of sustainable communities linked to public transportation — a small but encouraging step in advancing a more integrated approach to urban growth.”

The article provided ideas for building sustainable, livable, and socially just cities and referenced Frank Gehry’s suggestion that concentrating more public transportation and cultural institutions along a thoroughfare, a city is able to find its center, both geographically and socially. I thought of 2100 South immediately when I read this.

The Westminster and Sugar House partnership can be viewed as a center, a nexus. A nexus is a connection, a tie, a link. It connects a series or group and is defined as the core, or center. In biology it provides intercellular communication and adhesion. In its origin, nexus is defined as a binding, joining, or fastening.

Gary offered the Summit as a nexus, a pinch point, “a place in the life of a community where the currents rub up against each other and in so doing create something new…new friendships, views, agreements, conflicts all built out of the old.” He then directed, “I expect we will come up with ideas, a toolkit, a vision for the future, a commitment to the past. But I am particularly hopeful that it will be the location where by bringing people together we help to create new leaders, new coalitions, new activities, and new businesses.”

With these ideas in mind, organizing the Summit around key community, partnership, and people building elements would assist in the process of creating new ideas, leaders, coalitions, activities, and businesses. These elements include (but are not limited to):

Places for People
Water
Food/Gardening/Markets
Environment
Legibility in the Landscape
Transportation/Accessibility
Access to Goods and Services
Education/Learning
History/Stories
Art/Culture/Music/Beauty
Local Business/Commerce/Industry
Health/Well-being
Social/Civic Engagement
Common interest/purpose/service for good

These elements have power to strengthen resources, create partnerships, and build community because they provide for connection. People are the assets. If an individual is supported and sustained, a family, community, and society is strengthened by extension. People are incredibly resourceful in finding solutions once they understand what the need is. The Summit will serve as an ideal opportunity to inform and be informed by the Sugar House community. In making our places beautiful, meaningful, and sustainable, creating partnership through information is essential.

What is a summit? Why a summit?

I've been suggesting for a couple of years that Westminster College and the Forum ought to host a Sugar House Summit.

What is a summit? A chance for campus and community members to come together for a wide-ranging, creative, unpredictable set of conversations about Sugar House--its culture, needs, assets, future, and past. The benefit of a summit is that it can be a host to all of these things. It can include a keynote speech from a respected community builder, the examination of plans, the airing of grievances, the generation of new ideas. It should include the spoken, the visual, the tactile, the musical. In short it takes all of the practices of a healthy community and compresses them into two intense days.

Why host a summit? Consider a metaphor. Communities are like streams. Streams are home to currents. Some move fast, others slow. Some circle back, or dive under the surface. Some are shallow, others deep. Currents play lots of roles--deep ones allow fish to shelter, shallow ones let insects live. Slow ones let plants take root. But there are points in every stream where the currents come together, compressed by a bend in the stream, or fallen logs, or stones that encroach on the stream bed. These narrower points compress the currents, mix them together, force them to move more quickly. At the other end of the pinch point the stream contains the same water, but it is an entirely different stream.

The summit is a pinch point--a place in the life of a community where the currents rub up against each other and in so doing create something new. And then the community moves on, but with newly arranged currents--new friendships, views, agreements, conflicts all built out of the old.

My hope is that we think of the summit this way, not as a one-time event, or merely a gathering (a pond to extend the metaphor). By thinking of it as a pinch point I hope we'll remember that its process is as important as any plans that come out of it. I expect we will come up with ideas, a toolkit, a vision for the future, a commitment to the past. But I am particularly hopeful that it will be the location where by bringing people together we help to create new leaders, new coalitions, new activities, new businesses.

Invention, Innovation, and Playing to Win

Wikpedia defines innovation this way: the term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

For me, the Sugar House Forum has been a place to gather ideas and inspire innovation. Ideas go out, are added to by a comment, strengthened by a suggestion, stretched by a question, and a conversation happens that changes not only the dialogue, but the way everyone participating thinks. The exercise makes the original thought uncommon.

Working to serve the Sugar House community, the Forum has been exceptionally useful in getting insightful, constructive feedback to my thoughts. The questions offered have made me think in different directions about what I’m saying. Having an educator on board to guide the conversation has been invaluable.

True, we’re all working in different ways to build community in Sugar House. But as we explore ideas, I believe we find common ground and will be inspired with innovative ways to realize success. I come away from the process feeling like I’m part of a team finding uncommon solutions to common concerns.

Sources of Innovation: People.

Thank you to Mark and to gary for extending our thinking about crowd-sourcing and planning. I've been thinking about their remarks and questions and have been intrigued by the word innovation as it relates to creating community.

Tonight Mark Morris, Steve Cornell, and I walked through Hidden Hollow. The air was cold and I'm certain the water in Parley's creek was much colder. But the sound of the water moving was refreshing nonetheless. A couple of large trees had fallen at the creek's edge, contributing to the very natural feel of the hollow. Walking along we spoke of the history of that place and I wondered out loud about the stories the land held. Mark mentioned the Sugar House Stories done by gary and Westminster. We talked about what this land could be for the community and all the possibilities it held, the history there, and the importance of doing the right thing with this precious resource.

The key to success when it comes to creating a community (for a place, a product--IPod, Facebook, Rock and Roll, Starbucks, for example, or whatever) is having a great product and/or concept. Frankly, if you create a great place/product/concept, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried. By contrast, it’s hard to build a community around mundane and mediocre places/products/etc., no matter what you do.

Gary asked: Does Sugar House have particular sources of innovation and resources that allow innovations to flourish and then sustain themselves? I think the sources of innovation are the people, their ideas, and their stories. How we plan to include the community and how we assist people and organizations in the work of creating something worth building a community around is essential.

Mark shared Cooltownstudios with us writing about "Crowdsourcing" which relies on the participants in a group to identify what they need in their community. Maybe it's time for a Sugar House Community Studio: an umbrella organization that serves to connect people and their ideas about their place to the resources and the avenues available for change.

The Sugar House Community Studio could provide for placemaking that promotes connection, is informed by local history, and is designed by and for the local community. The studio would be local to Sugar House. The players in the studio would come and go depending on the project and what the needs are. And in the process, the community will build a pool of resources from which to draw to get things done.

The Envision Sugar House Masterplan concept fits nicely into this studio concept. So does the idea of extending the Westminster Campus into the Sugar House community. (I know this hasn't been mentioned, but it's conversation worthy. Eg. Savannah, GA)

Earlier today I discovered this great little quote. Mark has it posted above his desk. "Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking." Wangari Maathai

People will build community around great ideas. Branding Sugar House and building community in new ways from the history won't be difficult to do. We just need to create the forums for expression and then find the ways to help people do what they find the words to speak about.

Crowdsourcing and planning

Thanks to Mark for the post on crowdsourcing. I'm drawn to crowdsourcing for lots of reasons:

• it allows activists to succeed
• it isn't centrally directed
• it functions very much the way that healthy cities have long functioned (here I'm drawing on Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities where she argues that diverse interests expressing themselves actually build much healthier communities than where zoning and planning dictate proper use and design)

That said, I wonder about a couple of implications of crowdsourcing when it is applied to real communities as opposed to virtual ones. Here are my concerns:

• in the real world, people who don't crowdsource can be hurt by the behavior of people who do. This is much rarer in a virtual world where unlimited space and virtual resources mean that groups can do what they wish. But in real communities it is often those with connections who bring about change, and the poor and marginalized who suffer the effects.
• crowdsourcing can be seen as an end-around existing processes that are meant (at least) to be democratic and deliberative.

I don't mean to suggest that crowdsourcing ought to be considered a bad thing. I wonder, though, what the process that goes from innovation (or crowdsourcing) to stablity looks like. Can communities incubate innovations and then, at some point, choose those that best suit it, while letting the others pass away? How?

And more specifically, how can Sugar House do it? Does it have particular sources of innovation? Resources that allow innovations to flourish, and then to sustain themselves?

Crowdsourcing

Sugar House can benefit from the high interest of its populace in community connectivity. It enjoys a great reputation for being a great place to live, with park space, great connections to the rest of the region, a great commercial core, quality (relatively) affordable housing, and people who are highly interested in the success of their community.

Lately I've been following a blog called Cooltownstudios, which focuses on a concept called "crowdsourcing." Similar to the concept of "outsourcing," crowdsourcing relies on the participants in the group to identify what they need in their community, gather a group together that sees a similar need, and once they reach critical mass, look for a sponsor or entrepreneur to meet that need.

From Cooltown:

Start crowdsourcing the kind of project you'd like to see in your city or neighborhood. Is it a coffeehouse? A coworking site? Attainably-priced lofts? You define the vision, then start attracting people to build up a crowd. What's next? Once you build up a sizable crowd of at least a hundred people; a beta community, we'll help you find a 'Sponsor', that is, an entrepreneur willing to work with your group to implement your collective vision.

Similar to the concepts of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing relies on the user to "create content" or to be the direct, driving force behind development of community assets. Crowdsourcing employs the tools of the virtual world (online communities, Facebook groups, etc), but has the added benefit of being able to use those communities to create something in the "real world" and see real community change.

This concept is similar to good old fashioned community activism. A recent effort that exemplifies crowdsourcing was the installation of lights at the Fairmont Skate Park. Users of the skatepark saw the need, and collectively gathered more than 1,000 signatures to petition Salt Lake City to improve the skatepark so that it could be used later into the evening. This effort benefited from having an existing physical location where interested people gathered frequently, and could be easily identified. Crowdsourcing can champion change for elements that don't currently have a physical location, but may have an as yet unknown group.

Sugar House Chatauqua?

In my comment to Kathleen's post I wondered a bit about how to make a community plan while at the same time creating a creative and collaborative process. One way to do that is to host events that both serve to educate the public about the community and the plan, while at the same time revising or creating anew the plan. Such events would both give strength to the core idea of creating a community plan and allow community members to create their own plans, linked tightly or loosely to the first plan.

In other words, I'm imagining something like a real-world wiki. The closest historical example is the chatauqua movement that educated and entertained millions of Americans between the 1890s and 1930s. The trick today wouldn't be to create a one-time event that drew hundreds of visitors to Sugar House--Brolly Arts has shown that it can do that with the Legend of Hidden Hollow, as have Lynne, Sheri, and the KOPE Kids. The trick would be to do it in a way that provoked face-to-face and online interaction between the events. How do we do that? How do we build the spirit of chatauqua (or local, democratic community-making) into the practices of local organizations, the classrooms of local schools, and the lives of local residents?