Fo u r ex p e r t pe r s p e c t i v e s
First expert perspective by: Anonym o u s a n t h r o p o l o g i s t
Anthropology basically means the study of humanity. The first use of the word came from the French explorer Francois PĂŠron, who gave life to the term in a discussion around his encounter with Tasmanian Aborigines. This explorative mindset also resonates with several modern anthropologists. An anthropologist can be described as an adventurer. He explores cultures and transmits the experiences of his encounters to the world. It is not easy to take the anthropological approach in order to reach a higher understanding of different cultures. Even the smallest details matter and generalizations are forbidden. To fully understand, you need to dig down and take the time and approach that is needed. It is not so much about the outcome as it is about the interaction.
2
Approach of anthropologist As a rule of thumb, six months is a minimum to start understanding a culture. Besides taking the time, anthropology is all about asking the right question. This especially goes in a new cultural context. The right question is the tool to uncover the truth about what is really happening. The basic truth an anthropologist is looking for is what a person’s real needs, concerns, wishes and troubles are. Why does the person and his cultural peers interact in a specific way? How do they like to be approached? These are key aspects in order to understand the complex cultural context that is surrounding the specific targets. This “knowledge” helps the anthropologist to grasp what moves people, both culturally and politically, without them even knowing it. The next difficulty in anthropology is that there is no real truth. All information has to be revised constantly and culture is so subtle that there will be differences within cultures, although not directly visible. This means that you can never assume a story is complete. New people and new questions must be found, to widen the understanding of complex cultures. Mindset If you want to attempt to understand a culture, you need to prepare yourself. Try to gain awareness of your own assumptions. Ask yourself which questions you think are obvious to ask. These questions will probably reflect the influence clichés around a culture have on you.
3
Put yourself in the shoes of a 6 year old and try to ask questions the child would ask. This will help you remove yourself from your assumptions and focus more on what you see, hear and experience.
Preparation to meet a new culture Another way of preparing is reading up on the history of the culture. Don’t assume it’s relevant information today, but have it in mind and be curious about it. When in the context of your adventure, try to work with the forces. The most natural entry point is where the power is and you need to respect the cultural power system in order to maintain the culture and minimize resistance by following your own agenda. An example is a project of making schools in the Brazilian favelas. Here you need to get the permission from the local drug lords in order to proceed your work or your work will be much harder or maybe impossible. In general, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) are a good source of information. They will typically have direct interaction with the culture and are trying to evaluate their work in order to see whether they’ve reached the desired effect. NGO’s can also be a good partner for projects, since they can create the sustainability in shorter projects. As a last note, remember that the key is the interaction. And that even though you are the adventurer, transformation also happens to you. And that this possibly will be the biggest transformation happening. This cha p t e r i s b a s e d o n a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h a n PhD. in anthropology. His iden t i t y i s k e p t s e c r e t , s i n c e h e i s c u r r e n t l y undercover in a new explorat i o n . H i s i d e n t i t y i s k n o w n t o t h e e d i t o r s of this book.
4
Second expert perspective by: Chris t e r W i n d e l ø v - L i d z e l i u s princ i p a l o f t h e K a o s p i l o t s Å r h u s
The case How do you franchise a great initiative successfully? If we could answer this question easily, cities around the world would improve immensely. The fact is, that not all fantastic initiatives are universal. Or at least, they often need a new spin in order to be transformed into a new city culture. We at the Kaospilots know this from first hand experience. In this chapter we will focus on the pursuit of Kaospilot expansion to other countries, why it failed and what we learned and would do differently next time. The story is based on conversations with Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius, principal of the Kaospilots Aarhus. The reason for going international The idea of franchising the Kaospilot program came in a time period of economic pressure. The schools income wasn’t high enough to maintain the quality of the education and run the program as it wished for. Different solutions were aired, all of which faced difficulties. The decision was then made to franchise the concept to other countries.
5
Already at this point, Christer pointed out the first critical errors. The staff of Kaospilots was already overloaded. They didn’t have the surplus to start up a big lengthy process of creating several new schools. The decision was made out of an immediate need for money and not from a greater purpose. By not having an outspoken need and purpose for the schools besides money made it a very difficult platform to work from. It didn’t create an alignment in the project and removed our focus from many important issues.
Finding initiative takers The next step was finding people who wanted to start up new schools abroad. The Kaospilots reached out through their network in order to find potentially interested people. A few very diverse people stepped up to the task with their individual visions. And after a short time schools were starting up in Norway, Sweden and Holland. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned and all the new schools had to shut down for different reasons within the following years. This has obviously been a subject much reflected upon at the Kaospilot headquarters in Aarhus. Reflection what happened First of all no one even considered that the franchise would fail. Everyone was so sure of the concept that a very naive approach was used, which showed in many aspects of the franchise adventure - this will be addressed below. The Kaospilots didn’t do a real screening of the people showing interest in starting up a school. They were given the go-ahead if it felt right to the Aarhus staff. The general assumption between all stakeholders was, that there were no difference in motives for entering this phase, i.e. the difference between executing a concept and starting an independent school. They also assumed that everyone understood what Kaospilots means and agreed to this. And lastly, they assumed that the conditions in the new countries would be the more or less the same. The easiest way to prevent this would have been to make razor sharp contracts between the stakeholders and the Aarhus headquarters from the beginning, stating the mutual grounds on which they entered the franchise. Instead, the roots on which the new schools were build, were not aligned with what the Aarhus headquarters had hoped for, which naturally led to conflict.
6
The optimistic and positive feelings, that led the initial phase, also dominated later on. The school in Aarhus didn’t sanction if the newly started schools didn’t live up to expectations. Often a shrug on the shoulders was the only reaction, because they off course trusted the start-ups. The clearest learning from this was seeing the importance of sanctioning and being able to step in when something is not okay, even if it’s hard to do so, because the established relationship doesn’t include these means. If Christer could have done it all differently he probably would. To begin with there needed to be a surplus of energy in the organization. From there on, determining what it is the Kaospilots wants to achieve with the franchise could possibly have been a better start. Take the time needed in the start up phase in order to test different business models, train the new staff and prototype. A good way of training a KP staff who aren’t educated Kaospilot could’ve been an internship in Aarhus, learning the values and methodology from the inside. If there had been room for making pilots, maybe later costly mistakes would have been discovered and fixed already in the preject. The Kaospilots also struggled with adapting to the new contexts. Because it was a reactive move in order to solve money problems, they were not prepared to survive outside the Danish climate. The locations weren’t actively chosen for the new schools to flourish in an environment that matches the Kaospilot values.
7
Third expert perspective by: Sara Wa l l é n a n t h r o p o l o g i s t a n d K a o s P i l o t
“How to adapt yourselves from one context to another” When transferring an initiative to a new context, we also, as initiators, transfer ourselves to a new culture. This expert perspective by Sara Wallén, anthropologist and KaosPilot, explains what happens to the initiative taker, if he or she takes their project somewhere else and stays for a longer period abroad. What happens to us when we move to another country as expatriates is initially all cognitions, meanings, and interpretation from our home country i.e. our frames of reference which are built from childhood- are met with new cognitions, meanings and interpretation from that of the host culture1.
It starts as a slow process, and the model could look like this
Source : Psychology professor Ingemar Torbiörn of university of Stockholm
1
8
From here one can make a choice, and that is to consciously choose to go in one of two directions: 1.) Dismiss all of the triangles. 2.) Look, taste, smell, explore the triangles. I would choose route #2. Is that not why one chooses to expatriate? To be in a foreign country. The purpose should be just to live there - to taste, experience and be challenged by the triangles. In the long run that is where personal growth, development and new initiatives takes place.
When one chooses route #2, this is what happens:
9
This creates a spicy, energizing soup in the brain. This picture is an expatriate in culture shock and is sad and confused. This mess in the brain makes it both frustrating and annoying, but it is very dynamic and alive. What I am arguing here is that by taking route #1 it becomes possible that one lives in another country and doesn’t go into culture shock. How is that possible? One is not living in the culture. One is isolating oneself in a safe expatriate world. Back to TorbiÜrn’s research: after a culture chock, it will always require one to 1.5 years to sort out all of the new information, make sense of it, and be able to navigate in it.
The model then looks like this:
10
Again, away from research, to my reflections: the result of taking these steps is personal development, personal growth and being able to look at oneself and one’s own background, and platform critically. From this confrontation one can create a new set of interpretations and meanings. To grow, develop by functioning outside of one’s comfort zone. What does expatriation have to do with adapting initiatives to a new context? Moving to a new country requires that you adapt in order to fit in. This also requires to make the effort to give in. Off course you still bring your core, your values, and vision. Yet, unless you want to spend your entire expatriation period in an expat compound, sipping tea with other expatriates, playing tennis, - then you need to give in to some things and adapt. There will always be some things done in another way than you think is best. After all, that is what happens when you leave your home land, the context where you come from. The same goes for good initiatives. Good initiatives cannot be directly transferred, blueprinted or the like. A good initiative in one place can be a horrible initiative in another. Cities are just like people, made up of a core. Around the core is the orbit of which the direction, speed, rotation can be altered. Remember the time it takes for one person to change some cognitions, then imagine the time it takes to alter that of a whole city. 11
Fourth expert perspective by: Igor Cal z a d a academ i c c i t y e x p l o r e r a n d d o i n g a P h D a t U n i versity of Nevada
This expert perspective is written for people wanting to undertake or implement a initiatives to their (own) city or just looking for a fresh perspective on how to view cities. How do you investigate for an urban innovation perspective? What are the elements you need to know if you are going to explore? Igor Calzada is an academic city explorer, doing his PhD at University of Nevada. His article shows his vision of where the future of exploring cities might take us. Abstract: Executive Summary Cities are at the front of any economical, environmental, social and cultural dilemma and discussion. Cities are the unit of understanding and intervention of our societies. Cities are not just an urban phenomenon. Cities are a representation of human complexity. Thus we need to explore a city as our unit of analysis and we need to carry out and design intervention projects in line with the urban innovation. At the end of the day everything boils down to the balance of cities that combine 4 different approaches of a city: - Spontaneously CREATIVE - Effectively CONNECTED - Strongly PARTICIPATIVE - Really SUSTAINABLE When talking about new paths and ideas around cities, we could summarize all these ideas in these 4 different approaches and strategic axes. This new discipline that is combining ideas coming from architecture, design, arts, engineering, urbanism, biology, anthropology, marketing, sociology,
12
economics, technology, political sciences, social issues, mixing them and trying to contribute with new solutions to old problems. “New ideas require old buildings”, as Jane Jacobs said, and is in my opinion what we could define Urban Innovation by. Urban Innovation is a new discipline that requires new observation, new observers, new ways of thinking and feeling about our unit of analysis and intervention: the city. Thus, Urban Innovation should start with a common way of exploring a city. In the following brief Decalogue we introduce the ten most basic key-ideas in order to start building the Urban Innovation discourse based on the practice from a real and critical perspective after exploring many cities.
13
Ten key-ideas for the Urban Innovation discourse 1. Global Cities vs. Second Division Cities The first question: What do we mean when we say city? Maybe this is the first dilemma. Let’s explain this: cities and territorial development literature in the last 40 years have been focusing on the urban phenomenon, with the main contribution of Manuel Castells, who has contributed with research in “information societies”. The globalization process increased the opportunity to consider and understand cities - in specific “big” cities a.k.a. global cities or world centers like New York - with Saskia Sassen being the main author introducing this approach to the discipline.
The point is that nowadays, hopefully, the world is not flat as Friedman proposed, but maybe closer to Florida’s approach of “spiky” world compounded by “different” cities with their own idiosyncrasy. This is why I, from the beginning, will be partially in favor of the new “league” of cities - those we could call “Second Division Cities”. Cities that are medium scale, postindustrial, and have a strong sense of rebuilding, remaking and creation from the tradition of a new authentic city personality. 2. Urban Dynamics/Dynamism The first thing that we are going to feel in a city and that we should observe is how the dynamic works. We observe human movements around the city, social habits and spaces usages, collective energy events, specific geographic locations, local communities or neighborhoods’ natural initiatives. 3. 2.0 Citizens The second key element is; how connected citizens are virtually speaking. We assume that virtual connectivity could increase the chance of real social connectivity, but that is not a cause-effect relationship. The aim of encouraging 2.0 citizens is the assumption that the digital connectivity will help the city and its citizens being more proactive, autonomous, participative and collaborative. 4. City as a Network As a result of 2.0. Citizens we are facing the city as a “real” person-toperson network. We could think in both levels.
14
4.1. Space & Geographical conditions We could analyze different factors: Neighborhoods, linkages, transport hubs and mobility patterns. 4.2. Virtual & Digital Conditions We could do the same checking those items: Local WiFi, access rate, connected per capita, usage rate of the net. 5. Streetwise: Conquer the Street Related to 2. Urban Dynamics, we need to know the “real” usage of the streets. What is the main purpose of the urban planning in this city? How is the ranking of users in the streets; bikers, pedestrians, elderly people, kids, cars? 6. Diversity & Difference If we need to encourage urban policies that could create the vibrant atmosphere, we should focus the attention on the heterogeneity, self-expressionism and freedom of opinion. These three aspects are the key elements that contribute to a cultural diversity’s social integration.
15
7. Tradition vs. Modernity In the global scope, uniqueness is the key element. Our city should be authentic and unique. Thus traditional authentic values and rules can contribute to this aim. The point is that traditions should be shown as inclusive and not exclusive. Here the open-minded attitude is really important, in terms of mixing the “old and real” values of traditions with the attitude to experiment, combine and create identity.
8. Identity vs. GloKalization Therefore, we get to this dilemma: Our cities should keep the own identity, but at the same time be really open in the global playground. There are two main aspects: 8.1. Conserve and take care the local identity 8.2. Build social global networks with cities and persons with the common interest. 9. Mobility We should design human-scale cities. People should be the city. We would not care about the maps and concrete. We should start designing from the smallest scale, asking people in their neighborhoods about their own infrastructure in their local area. In this sense, cities where you can combine bike- and train-friendly infrastructure are getting more and more accepted as the future city model. This future city model should readapt the nonsustainable infrastructural city model. Due to the crisis, the lack of sustainable city model in the last 20 years right now requires an effective and imaginative solution to “shrink� our cities. 10. APPLY! Where? Now we should start thinking what areas to intervene after the exploration and observation. Potential working-fields in a city: 10.1. Biking 10.3. Associationism 10.5. Public Spaces 10.7. Social Dynamics 10.9. Human Creativity.
10.2. Transport 10.4. Connectivity 10.6. Physical Environment 10.8. Demographics 10.10. Green
16