Hello everyone,
continuing my report on ‘webinars about what collaboration looks like in social innovation’. Today, I’m sharing insights from a keynote at the Social Innovation in the Energy Transition conference. The presentation was delivered by a scholar who I presume needs no introduction: Patrick Devine-Wright. (If you need an introduction, start here.)
You can also listen to today’s edition. I start off with the previous edition on Jamie Cross’ presentation, so if you missed that one, you’re in luck! If you didn’t, fast forward to a little over halfway.
Devine-Wright of course is known for DESTROYING the notion of NIMBYism by pointing out how resistance was often due to a lack of adequate participation in decision-making processes. But the notion was also a reason to start thinking about people’s attachment to a place – and how that might be a positive force in participation, rather than ground for rejection (‘my place doesn’t deserve your wind turbines’). His research on participation has kind of naturally evolved towards the idea of social innovation as an example of the good kind of participation, and yes, “place” helps to understand why these approaches can work! So, let’s take a closer look.
To start off, what does ‘social innovation’ mean for Devine-Wright? Well, for him it is basically a gloss for “co-creation”. Co-creation means taking people seriously, not only by actually listening to them, but by sharing power over the course of shared effort. In an earlier presentation this year for the SHIFT project, Devine-Wright specified some basic rules about what that means. It means that people’s input
has to be organized early,
it has to be substantial,
it has to be actually implemented, and
even defended if the results come up to resistance from, say, local administrators.
So what can attention to place and people’s attachments to place add to these stipulations?
“A world of places”
That phrase by sociologist Tim Cresswell means that for us human beings, places matter and places differ: ‘we look out from them’. That maybe sounds a bit fluffy, but in a very down-to-earth sense, it means that places have histories: people have experienced things there (ranging from the first forays into romance, to daily strolls with the dog, to (perhaps ill-conceived) roll-outs of rehabilitation projects). These experiences inform how people respond to new ideas and propositions, and they shape their willingness and ability to come up with their own ideas and propositions. If you therefore want to set something in motion, you won’t be able to get around these idiosyncrasies of places, so best to understand them, work with them, and build on them.
Alright, so now that you have the basic gist of social innovation and place, let’s see how we can put these two together in practice!
Zero Carbon Rugeley
An inspiring example comes from Rugeley, a town of nearly 25,000 just north of Birmingham. A town that has innovation in its genes, because it was the very place where the first telephone call via Telstar satellite was made! (Thank you, Wikipedia.) The project “Zero Carbon Rugeley” builds on this tradition and is turning the space of a decommissioned coal plant into a smart (and green) local energy district through a state-of-the-art process, involving:
A multi-stakeholder partnership of private (energy) companies, a university, a theatre company (for animation), a solar cooperative, and more.
An approach with co-creation at its heart: uniquely, a third of the budget was dedicated to “user-centric design”. Nor was that money to be spent by some lonely participation professionals either, but it cut across the whole project. This is a necessary prerequisite for participation to go beyond tokenism.
“Instead of ‘educating’ users and trying to sell them on some technology, we start with the people, their needs and then see what we could change accordingly”. (interviewee ZCR)
An approach that takes local specificity seriously. Thus, it recognizes that Rugeley was already an energy place with its coal plant. In fact, trying to redevelop that site has made it more central to people’s perception of their history and heritage. So the guiding question became: can we build a narrative that will stitch the coal past to a zero-carbon future?
Place-making
Devine-Wright then offered some concepts to help understand why this particular approach is so valuable.
Firstly, when you propose to renovate a district, or upgrade the heating system, you are transforming a foundational framework through which how people experience themselves and the world. That should give pause to any well-meaning, enthusiastic policymaker or eager energy (heating) company. Tread lightly!
“You can’t just treat people as ‘users’, or ‘consumers’, or ‘adopters’. Because they are also denizens: dwellers in the place you are proposing to re-make”. (Devine-Wright)
In justice literature terms, we would say that not doing so would fail to recognize this part of people’s lives. And doing so can lead even the well-meaning to pave the road to planning hell.
This was actually the case recently in a town near Liverpool, which Devine-Wright also reviewed, where a shale gas fracking company wanted to develop a new site and chose to define community stakeholders in a very narrow, legalistic way, excluding people who lived in the same social space, but which happened to be across some jurisdictional boundary.
Those people outside the thus ill-defined community were left unrecognized. The consultation unmade their place for them. They were extricated from it. Conversely, Rugeley Zero Carbon tried to remake the town. People in Rugeley were asked to re-imagine and re-invest in their locality. To revive the history of Rugeley for a post-carbon future.
OST of the week, courtsey of R.E.M. 🕺
Wisdom sits in places
I imagine that for the well-intentioned, the following question can be a powerful guide to self-reflection: ‘Are we un-making place for people or letting them re-make it?’. At the same time though, co-creation is easier said than done. In fact, I’ve been thinking about this for this newsletter too: it feels like many of you know the theory, but it doesn’t always help improve your practice. So I wonder: would it help to see more case studies here? So see the complexities and learn from them, rather than understand the always simplified postulates? Let me know what you’d like!
Take care,
Marten
Know anyone who would be interested in knowing more about the value of place in social innovation? Don’t hesitate to share this newsletter!
PS Want to know more about co-creation from the SHIFT perspective? Check out this scientific publication, or this report written for a non-scientific audience, both written by Anatol Itten, Fionnguala Sherry-Brennan, Thomas Hoppe, Aarthi Sundaram, and Patrick Devine-Wright.
Together with Sherry-Brennan, Devine-Wright has also written about how tricky it is to draw a (necessary) perimeter around ‘the community’ of stakeholders in new development. I covered that article in “How to make sure locals benefit from new energy infrastructure”.
Place-attachment as powerful resource in social innovation