4 Nov 2013
When I was in Houston, Texas recently, I was fortunate enough to meet, and to share a platform with, Jason Roberts of the Better Block project and of the organisation he founded called Team Better Block. Jason hails from Dallas, and his approach has inspired people around the world. It has been described as “a demonstration tool that acts as a living charrette so that communities can actively engage in the buildout process and provide feedback in real time”. For a crash course in his work, check out this talk he gave at TEDxOU:
We caught up at Rice University in Houston, and took half an hour to go and sit under a tree in the sun to have a chat. As usual, you could either download or listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below:
Over to you Jason:
Can you give us a sense of what Better Block is?
Sure, Better Block takes, typically, blighted blocks but not always, in vacant, underused areas typically nestled inside a neighbourhood. We rapidly transform them with communities. So let’s say we’ve got a series of old buildings that are falling apart, lots of graffiti. We quickly go in there and create local businesses: local coffee shops, flower shops, art galleries, book shops, spaces for kids.
Then we’ll take it out in the public space, the streets and transform them rapidly to allow for bike infrastructure and put out café seating to allow for a café seating experience. Then we go off and take the rules and the ordnances that won’t allow all these things to occur, because typically we’ve created all these rules.
We print them off and show them in the street so that the community can actually see what’s holding the place back. Really the project is kind of a combination of this urban planning exercise meets a block party.
Where does the initial ‘pulse’ come from for the stuff that you do? Is it people in the place going, we’ve had enough of this, or is it that someone somewhere thinks this place needs a makeover?
It’s both, actually. There’s that bottom-up with people from the community that come out and say, we need to have a neighbourhood destination, a place for us. But it’s also top-down in some cities. People are saying, we recognise that these areas are missing these things, and could you at least come and educate them on the value of these things.
The beauty of the project is that it’s very bottom-up, and it allows the community to take ownership. It takes away this assumption that you’re going to manage and take care of this for me and puts it back onto the community. If we want these great places, we need them together, how can we create them together?
What’s your experience in terms of the response from the communities where that happens?
It’s been huge. At the very least, people see the images from the project and there’s definitely a visceral response, because changing a place from blight to beauty has a transformative effect. But really the big effect is getting everybody talking and connecting again. You probably get that with your work. That’s the stuff that we walk away from, and we come back six months later and wonder what’s changed.
Maybe there haven’t been a whole lot of physical improvements, but it’s all of this social capital that’s been raised that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. When that works and that’s healthy, the natural by-product is the great stuff. You need to get down to the root cause of what’s causing these problems.
At the very base root, whether it be in Dallas, Texas or London or Tehran, or Melbourne, where there have been Better Block projects, the lack of social connection the lack of social cohesiveness, and creating exercises and activities for the community to restitch themselves.
When you go in with those ideas, there’s a lot of things you said happen when this arrives. It takes a resource to make that happen. Where does that resource come from? Do you get funded to do particular projects?
We typically try to do it with as little money as possible. We like to show that if you want innovation, take a zero away from your budget, and if you want ultimate innovation take two zeros away from your project. I have this concept that you have to blackmail yourself. Give yourself a short deadline so you have to get these things done. But what happens when you strip away the funds?
Then you rely on people, and what people can bring to the table. Since this is a temporary project, it’s not that hard to go in. We have three concepts. First, let’s try to borrow. That was out of necessity initially, but we learnt how powerful the idea of borrowing was. In the US, maybe they have this overseas as well, we talk about this idea of if you move into a neighbourhood, how if you don’t know your neighbour initially, let’s say you’re making cookies and you run out of sugar. You go next door and rather sheepishly ask: ”I’m new to the neighbourhood, I’m Jason, I’m making some cookies, could I borrow some sugar?”
The neighbour typically says: “Hey, I’m Joe, I’ve been wanting to meet you. I’ve been looking for an excuse and I’m so glad we’re connecting right now, absolutely, let me give you some sugar”. So this dialogue occurs. Some trust occurs because they’re giving you something, you have these conversations. Then I go home and make the cookies and what do I do afterwards? What we’ll do here is we’ll share them with the neighbour afterwards.
We say thank you for this. I found that by accident, borrowing and allowing people to give over things to help transform a space and to feel that they’re helping to improve it together and that they can enjoy it as a community is so powerful.
Secondly, if we can’t borrow it, we build it together. Which is also a concept we talk about here in the States, a barn building exercise, which comes out of the Amish getting together and building barns together. It’s what you do when couples get married to help them become part of the community. That barn building exercise, working together creating physical activity to improve a place together, gets you to a deeper level of connectivity as a community.
We know that when we start adding physical activity for some reason in a dialogue, it gets you deeper, faster. We’re having a conversation now, but if we were sitting here playing cards together or some other activity, we’re going to get some deeper, more interesting anecdotes that are going to tell me more of your story, and you’re going to hear more of my story and we’re going to get to an even better place. I don’t know what it is about that but we’ve found that that’s important.
Lastly, if we have to, we buy things. But we try not to. We try to tell communities, this is really how you make a better place. All places have two major issues. The problem’s scale, the problem’s too big, and not enough money. How do you fix a problem whenever you have those two issues? It’s just a different way of problem solving.
The first experience of it is the one you talk about in your TED talk. How did that give you confidence that this might work?
The first one was in a little block in my community. My friends had started a little bike shop and it was zoned poorly. It was zoned as light industrial and not retail. I don’t know what that means, but the takeaway was that they were only allowed to have 10% of their space for retail, the rest had to be for service-oriented business. But they didn’t do that. They were a bike shop, 90% of the floor needed to be for retail and 10% for service. They broke the rules to make something that the community wanted.
That made me realise – what other rules are there? I started cataloguing all the rules we put in place in this area and found that we weren’t allowed to do any of the stuff that makes the place great. Then when I asked people about it, they’d say that these rules had been in the book since 1941 and nobody knew why we were doing them.
I’m also a musician, so I had a pretty strong arts community to pull from in my project. We thought, let’s all get together and treat this like a giant museum installation. We’re going to create a better block simply so we can live in our neighbourhood. Let’s put in all the resources we can so that we can live in our neighbourhood, so I don’t have to get in my car to get a gallon of milk … just simple ideas.
This stuff is not complex. But when we started putting it out there, it was amazing how powerful people’s response was to transforming this space in their neighbourhood and making it into a shared neighbourhood destination.
At that point a friend, as a little side project, made a 6 minute video and it went viral. That led to the TED presentation. Better Block was actually one of about 10 projects I had put together for that week, and specifically trying to get people to think differently about our community, and do things. It accidentally became an international movement.
It was not premeditated. I’ve just become friends with the guys at Rebar who started PARK(ing) Day and we were talking about our projects together. They open-sourced their project which became an international movement too, out of necessity because people asked them to come and do it there. They said that they didn’t have time but gave out a how-to. Ours is the same. People keep emailing me, asking how you do it. I just say here’s how you do it, do it yourself and tell us what you learn so we can share that information and create the best practices out of it.
That first project was where it all started, with the community and people that I knew and loved, and said let’s work together to make this a better place. Out of necessity, I started to wish I had a bookshop, a café. We started discussions like how do we get a coffee shop for two days, what can we do. When you get 30 people in a room, someone says “well I can roast coffee beans”. “I’ve got a spare coffee pot that doesn’t get used”. “I’ve got a spare this…and does anybody have any spare seating, does anybody have any spare tables and chairs?” And someone says “yeah, in my garage, in my office. They just closed down a building over here, there are tons of tables and chairs”.
When you start connecting all the dots you start realising all of the waste we create, this waste is basically things that we have that aren’t being put to use. We fill our houses and storage units with this stuff. Instead of it being waste, why don’t we make it a shared asset?
One of the big contexts at the moment is the whole austerity push, the squeezing of public budgets and people feeling they have less and less and less control over the places around them as they start to unravel. What do you think are the main lessons from what you’ve learnt that really relate to communities that are suffering under austerity?
A lot of this work came at a time when the economy was really depressed. There is really interesting innovation that can occur whenever you start taking these zeros away. I’ve got mixed emotions about it. You definitely want to take care of the most marginalised in your society who are super old, infirm, ill, or the young. How do we create environments that allow them to just live?
If we are experiencing austerity, create visions. Let’s have a better place together, even when things start getting taken away. We still ultimately want to have a better place. There’s got to be a way. We all know that we get really creative when there’s something we want to have and we just don’t have the money. That’s the lesson, I think, from that.
The last question – I mentioned that my recent book is called The Power of Just Doing Stuff. What, for you, is the power of just doing stuff? What is it when people take that step across and say “let’s do it” rather than just moaning about why nobody else is doing it? What is it that people find in themselves, what do they discover?
I think that for me, I just wanted to have some accomplishments. I realised I was working for other people. I had a transformative moment when my grandfather was dying, he had a stroke and I remember him saying he didn’t do all the things he wanted to do in life. He said that over and over again. I remember thinking I don’t want to be like that. I need to get things done.
I started doing all of these little projects, for my sake. I realised that when you start looking back, hey, I did a ton of stuff! I started Better Block, I brought a streetcar back, I created bike lane infrastructure, I ran for US congress, I had dinner with Michelle Obama, I got kids to cycle to school with punch card projects. Random little things.
At the end of the day I feel that the short deadlines are important so you don’t talk yourself out of the things. Blackmailing yourself to publish it, put it out there so it puts you on the hook is so important.
The analogy I use all the time is if my apartment is a mess, you get to a state where you can’t get anything done, it’s going to take me a week to get this thing knocked out, how can I clean this? Just call your friends and say you’re going to throw a dinner party in four hours. It’s amazing how clean your place gets and how efficient you get. All the distractions go away and you start making things happen.
We actually work pretty well as human beings under these constraints. We all know it because when we have term papers due, we’ve got two weeks to do it but we get it done in the last 24 hours. We have the deadline and it’s short, and things happen.
We have this mindset that the great things that happen in communities and society are because of someone’s inspiration – they have to sit around and drink coffee and think about what they’re going to do. The reality is you look at some of the great music that came out of the Tin Pan Alley area in the ’20s and ‘30s like Irving Berlin and Gershwin. Were they just sitting around drinking coffee thinking up ideas for songs? No! They had a deadline.
A Broadway play came out that needs 12 songs. They needed to have great themes for all those songs, needed to get things done. At the end of the day though, you end up getting a catalogue of standards we have that we know we love, like oh, that was so inspired. It was actually probably George and Ira fighting with each other saying, “I’ve got to get this done, quick. This’ll do, we need a slow song in ¾ in a minor key, the girl has just left the guy”. When we create these boundaries and constraints, we can be ultimately creative with that out of necessity. And at the end you look back at the catalogue two or three years later and think yes, I’ve got some things done.
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1 Nov 2013
One of my favourite Twitter follows, @TwopTwips, tweeted, on the afternoon of Halloween, with the sage advice “SAVE TIME and money this Halloween by always answering the question “Trick or Treat?” with “F*** Off”. While entertaining, it was disappointing, as I took my 11 year old and his friend Trick of Treating in the streets around my house last night, how many people seem to have taken that advice to heart.
The significant majority of houses had their gates closed, the lights at the front of the house switched off, notes on their front door saying “No Trick of Treaters”. Now, I can completely get the arguments that there are some people, usually older people, who feel threatened by Halloween, and some kids who use Halloween as the opportunity to get up to all sorts of mischief.
What touched me though, traipsing around with The Joker and The Crazy GP With the Machete, was what can happen when you do decide to open the door, to create a chink of possibility in your life that engaging with the children in your neighbourhood might actually be a good experience for both you and them.
If you are not a Halloween regular, there is a kind of Halloween ettiquette. You generally only knock at houses that look inviting. Usually if you want to be visited, you put a pumpkin in the front garden, or indicate in some way that you are interested. The houses with the lights off and the gates closed you just avoid. Everyone I saw out Trick or Treating respected that kind of unofficial Code of Good Halloween Practice. But seeing what happened when people opened their hearts to it was really touching.
On one street near me, a group of 5 older women had really gone for it, had dressed up in full witches outfits, with brooms and everything, and were sat in their front garden around a cauldron over a real fire. They were actually, I must say, just a bit on the odd side of odd, almost as though they spent the year looking forward to this opportunity. They were in their element. Every group of kids who approached were asked to tell them a joke or sing them a song before they were given any treats. My two companions thought, as we stood there in the cackling and the swirling smoke, that that all sounded like a bit too much effort, so we headed off to the next house with a pumpkin in the window.
In another street, a woman in full witch costume was sat outside her house, with spectral ghostly music playing, trying to psych out the kids who wandered past and thought twice about whether they would go in and ask her for anything. What was really lovely was the number of older people who had made a real effort. The Joker and the Doctor approached one house, knocked on the door, which was opened by a older man, delightful, really friendly, asking them about their costumes and how it was going, and gave them some treats. Just as they turned to leave, they jumped out of their skins. Right next to them, unseen as it was slightly out of the main lights, was a life-sized witch statue, leering down at them.
Some people had spent the day baking little skull-shaped biscuits. Some took the time to ask the kids where they lived, and were able to piece them into their knowledge of local families and geography. Some just had a big basket of sweets by the door and thrust it at each successive group that came calling. It felt like walking the streets from pocket of welcoming playfulness to pocket of welcoming playfulness, passing through a sea of “go away, leave us alone”.
It is of course entirely anyone’s business if they choose to take part in Halloween or not. It’s an odd festival, it’s silly, and yes, the kids get lots of sweets. And this is just in the UK, where it’s not such a big deal. In the US people have the pumpkins out and the decorations up for up to a month in advance of the day itself. Grist have the story of one woman in North Dakota who instead of giving out sweets, gave out letters addressed to the parents of what she determined to be “moderately obese” trick-or-treaters. The letters read:
Happy Halloween! You are probably wondering why your child has this note; have you ever heard the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child? I am disappointed in “the village” of [blank]. Your child is, in my opinion, moderately obese and should not be consuming sugar and treats to the extent of some children this Halloween season. My hope is that you will step up as a parent and ration candy this Halloween and not allow your child to continue these unhealthy eating habits. Thank you.
I mean, what a bloody miserable curmudgeon. She could have given them fruit, or something else. What a great way to totally bum out some kid’s experience of Halloween. As a psychologist interviewed in the article wrote:
“It’s just that kind of thing that, for some kids, if they’re vulnerable, might trigger major problems.”
What struck me was that part of the community seemed to be having a lot of fun, a lot of laughter, a lot of silliness and getting to meet and connect with local families, while the other half was hunkered down in their sofas with the curtains shut and the front lights off. Also, how much fun the people, especially the older people, who had opened their hearts and their front doors to the whole thing were having.
Whether it’s the tabloid press or whoever, people seem to have convinced themselves that Halloween is all about horrible kids throwing eggs at your house and demanding sweets, and of course if people feel vulnerable they have every right to drop out. But we can also look at Halloween as the opportunity to open our doors to our neighbours, to meet those young people we might never normally encounter, to feel more connected to those around us.
Rather than handing out sanctimonius notes to tubby kids, our friend in North Dakota could have given them fruit, given them cookies she had made, actually chatted to them and got to know them. Rather than shutting the curtains and hoping they will all go away, the delight of chatting to little kids dressed as witches, realising you know their parents or whatever, and helping to make it a fun evening seem to me far preferable.
Think of it as a street party, think of it as community-building, think of it as a way of meeting your neighbours every bit as valuable as Transition Streets or The Big Lunch. Out in the streets was the sound of laughter, of cackling, of a night that kids approach with a certain sense of the magic of the whole thing. The benefits to us all of taking a few steps towards that, getting into the spirit (if you’ll excuse the pun) of Halloween, seem to me to far outweigh the very slight risk of a misdirected egg or one rude Trick or Treater.
In a recent Guardian piece, one contributor asked “Is it OK to ignore trick or treaters? I can’t be the only person hiding in the lounge, hoping they’ll get the message fast and move on (some don’t, and knock twice: awkward)”. Well, of course it’s OK, kinda, but perhaps next year, having tried the “hunker down and turn the telly up” approach, you might carve a pumpkin, light some candles, make some biscuits, and welcome the little kids dressed as witches, ask them where they live, tell them you like their costumes, wish them a Happy Halloween and a good night, and then see which of the two approaches you preferred, and made you feel more part of the world around you. My money’s on the one with the biscuits.
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1 Nov 2013
One of the most inspiring Transition initiatives I visited in the US recently was Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition in Boston. With our theme for this month focusing on austerity, JPNET (as they are known to their friends) have useful contributions to make to our discussions. They formed in 2009, and hosted a Transition Training. Following the training, they sat down to explore how they might set about doing Transition in their community of 40,000 people, an inner-city neighbourhood, where half the people are non-white: Asian, Latino or African-American. They resolved to set about building resilience with a particular focus on livelihoods, but in a way that reflected the neighbourhood’s diversity. I spoke to one of the initiative’s founders, Chuck Collins, to find out more.
What follows is based on our conversation, sections of which will be posted through this piece as audio files you can play or download. Firstly Chuck introduced the group and how it came to be:
As a group, they strive in all their events and meetings to welcome everyone, and produce their materials and run their events in both English and Spanish. The project’s manager and community organiser, Carlos, is fluent in both. I asked Chuck to describe some of the things that JPNET actually does on the ground:
They include:
The annual State of the Neighbourhood Forum: a huge event (between four and five hundred people) which invites people to reflect on the community’s needs and to problem solve creative ways forward. The elected city official are invited, but as ‘keynote listeners’
JP YardSharing: a Garden Share scheme similar to that run in other Transition initiatives
Egleston Farmers’ Market: a community-led initiative to make fresh, healthy, locally-grown food accessible throughout the year, bring people from all parts of Jamaica Plain together, and support the local economy
Supporting existing businesses in the community: it’s not just about new enterprises. For example, they worked with a local butcher’s shop to help him find a local supplier and then expanded his clientelle by letting people in the JPNET network know that it was available
Working with local businesses to reduce the health risk of their operations: in particular beauty parlours and dry cleaners
Boston Food Forest: an ambitious plan to plant food-bearing trees across the community
JP Resiliency Measures: some fascinating work looking into indicators for measuring resilience in the community
Egleston Community Orchard: a community orchard (see below) planted on the site of a former waste ground that was the site of a shooting. The garden has played a part in reducing crime in the area
The Boston Bean: A local currency scheme that is currently being piloted (see below)
I asked Chuck about how he sees the work of JPNet in the context of austerity? “We don’t want to start by assuming that there is a need for austerity”, he told me, quoting a friend who had told him “we’re not broke, we’re just twisted”. However, it is clear that austerity is here to stay and although it’s not entirely necessary, it is, as he put it, “an opportunity to define a sense of community agency”.
As Chuck told me:
“We won’t have the same flow of resources. We have to adapt and make a shift. We are certainly not going to have the same energy resources. Austerity also makes us think about what really matters. What is real wealth? How do we organise so that the resources that the community needs are still there. We can’t sit out the austerity debates, we have to participate in them”.
We discussed the potential of being able to model a new economic model on the ground. Chuck told me:
“Even though the government looks like it’s broke, there’s a lot of private wealth, and one of the things that has happened is that we have become extremely unequal, but some of that wealth can be drawn back into the locality if we invite it in in the right way. We ask the wealthy people in our community to re-establish a stake in our locality. It’s both a personal and an organisational ask.
We invite them to make investments in local businesses. Move their money out of Wall Street and into the local intermediaries that invest in the community. Take your money out of the fossil fuel sector but also put it into the local new economy businesses. That’s where I think we’re trying to move the resources that have moved out of our community, to bring them back or to hold them”.
I was curious as to where he feels JPNET will be in 5 years time:
For Chuck, one of the key powers that a Transition group has is what he calls “The Power to Convene”. By this he means the power to mobilise people around an idea, a new enterprise, a project. If someone comes to JPNET with an idea for a new enterprise, the group can organise an event around it, and invite people who share that passion to get involved. That is something that the group feel committed to continuing.
They also see a role as a broker, working with different local organisations to help them make changes. For example, Chuck outlined the possibility of working with the local hospital, who are committed to promoting healthy lifestyles, to invite them to support a post looking at how the community could produce more calories locally through a range of exciting JPNET activities. The JPNET of the future would never be a huge organisation, never more than 3 or 4 people who could sit round a table, but that catalytic role is central to its evolution.
One of the striking things about JPNET is the degree to which they have put issues around diversity and class central to their work from day one. The group’s leaflets are all done in both English and Spanish, and they have an awareness about how to present Transition, in terms of language and how Transition is presented. As Chuck told me:
“If you put out a call and say “climate change, peak oil, environmental threats”, you get one group of people who tend to rush into the room, and they tend to be people who have a little more social capital, they tend to be white, they tend to be people who understand the environmental threat as the paramount threat. If you put out the call for local jobs, jobs of the future, ways to address rising energy costs, youth opportunity, decent wages, opportunities and livelihoods, and you want to address both race and class inequality, then you get another group of people in the room. Our challenge has been from the very beginning as part of the DNA of our group to say that the equity issues are central to our Transition and sustainabiulity. We want to live in a community that is flourishing and much more equal than the society at large”.
In this final piece of audio, Chuck reflects on the difference the way in which you message Transition makes to who turns up and gets involved.
If you want to find out more about the group’s work, visit their website. My thanks to Chuck and to the other members of the group who were so welcoming, and for the fascinating tour of their work.
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