Sustainable Cities and Neighbourhoods
The COVID-19 crisis offered an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on how we live together in the city: our dependencies, relationships, blind spots and processes, as well as our stories and mental models that hold our society together. The growing ubiquity of remote work and heightened public health awareness are now added to the list of new developments that have been shaping our cities: the digitalisation of commerce, growing real estate prices, the smart city project, migration and inequality, just to name a few. We decided to start collecting individual responses in the city of Bern to this new situation, guided by the question: How can we, individuals, currently witnessing local and global events and their inter-relatedness, reimagine the city, and how can we support our communities to take agency for a regenerative transformation?
Our prototype: Bern2020_Learning City Series for Bern’s regenerative future
People are the most agile, capable and smartest resource on the planet. We are aware that the multiple challenges of health, economy, nature’s and climate system crisis call on us to reinvent our cities. How we do this living work is critical from now until 2030. With a series of dialogue & co-creation sessions that focus on the impactful SDGs of our city, we invite people to build their learning capacities, resilience and agency. Then embarking on this five week journey we engage in seeing and sensing the social fabric of Bern’s challenges. Each session focuses on a sectoral challenge that brings the actors together to sense envision new pattern making. We invite diverse citizens into a considerate, safe and opening space for co-creative process and valorising outputs. In Feb. 2021, we continue the learning ventures by hosting a range of Communities of Practice where Learning City cohorts lean into the co-creation process and build agency. Our team of facilitation practitioners hosts dialogues using a rich toolbox of awareness based & action research methods with groups for co-learning. We move through phases of dialogue, collective harvesting and iterative ecosystem co-creation with playful sensing and immersion in the complexity of patterns in our learning city. We appreciate everyone’s contributions.
Outputs
Development of the “Learning City Bern 2030 Concept”
Design and Implementation of a series of 5 dialogue events. The key topics of the Learning Cities sessions were selected to build around practical issues of the city of Bern: Hosting and being hosted in Tourism, New Work, Intergenerational collaboration, our Health/One Health (in collaboration with the One Health working group) and to close the series a call for Inclusive Democracy for SDGs. Have a look at the event brochure for further description of the topics.The dialogue series had to happen online due to Corona.
Outcomes
The participants of our dialogue events came from diverse locations, from corporations, were as young as 18 and experienced with 82 years behind them. Our main attractor and relevance to the people who showed up and were fully present had to do with person learning in a safe space to explore together their potential for transformation and agency in 2020. I am confident that each of our dialogues for learning cities brought those who attended our fire to grasp at the generative level their capacity and agency.