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Living The Dream?! sustainable living & a Great British conversation just begging to be had.

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Austin Powers, Banter, brands, Castles, Cats Cradle, China Dream, Climate Change, Constituencies of Action, Consumerism, Dreams, Emerged Economies, faith, great British conversation, Identity, John Stuart Mill, JUCCCE, Lighter Living, love, M&S, Pay Day Loans, Peggy Liu, Pork Scracthings, Prosecco, Reimagining Prosperity, Smarter Living, Stenna Stairlifts, sustainable living, Transforming Desire, UK Dream

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Funny how some phrases just fall in to your lap. Funny how some just stick. Living the Dream is just such a phrase – a gift horse that was staring me in the mouth.

In the space of two days I had the polarities of Great British aspiration and disappointment writ simple and large on my storytelling wall. Our Great British M&S-stylie Prosecco & Pistachio lifestyle and its poor PaydayLoan & Pork-scratching cousin came gift-wrapped in one exquisitely simple phrase.

In a West London brasserie bar sat a woman, fashionably turned out, the odd fancy shopping bag at her killer-heeled feet, a glass of bubbles in front of her, txting furiously on her i-phone 6. Her friend appeared suddenly, looking a little bedraggled, but on seeing her shiny friend she brightly chirped,’ living the dream babes…look at you…bubbles and everything…’

And within days of the upbeat version wafting in front of me, its poor cousin appeared in North London, just beyond N1. I see a bloke, obviously far from rolling in it: a bag of DIY stuff in one hand, one child in the buggy, the other mid tantrum, on the phone to his partner/girlfriend/wife/babymamma. She is patently giving him an earful. Cue a friend of his walking past on the other side of the street who shouts ‘ Oi Tommy..Living the Dream then mate!?’. The beer-battered sarcasm of this banter simply inspired a meek self-deprecating shrug in the bedraggled bloke on the mobile. True.

As a phrase Living the Dream does what every great tenet, mantra or philosophy of any authenticity and substance should do – it easily and effortlessly embraces every extremity, turbulence, nuance, depth and not so subtle shade of the thing it seeks to define or describe – in this case the quality of life the person is leading at that very moment the phrase is deployed.

It allows enormous complexity to sit just behind it, knowingly, without ever having to say it. The back-stories of these two people were plain to see without having to set them out.

This was the power of the phrase for me.

To be fair I had been searching for one to wrap up a very UK ‘dream of better’ for a while.

We had searched for a conversation starter around a more sustainable lifestyle – one that started in the real everyday world.

In 2013 we ran 4 pilot workshops in London for the UK Dream project to that end – to find a more populist, scalable conversation to inspire a more enduring model of prosperity: a thriving vibrant life open to all, underwritten with sustainable truths.

We needed a new narrative: a new lexicon of better for people to use in their everyday lives. The old narrative was simply not working. Sustainability people speaking to themselves: impenetrable, arcane, complex, off-putting.

For most people the end of the month comes before the end of the world. They are more concerned with making ends meet than with how they might meet their end in some post-apocalyptic climate-induced catastrophe. The old narratives, rooted as they are in the activist roots of environmentalism simply do not chime with your average Joe and Jane.

So we had a chasm to cross. We needed a simple and very UK-centric or British hook that allowed us to start with simple everyday human-sized truths – What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What does good look like from where you’re standing?

In a search for this new narrative, we had already applied the 7 stage Dream-In-A-Box methodology (well, three of them at least) to try and shape what better might look like and scaling the everyday conversation around it.

We got as diverse a group of individuals as possible into a room to play with, pull down, interrogate and explore the traits, dimensions, idioms and aspirations of a prosperous life underwritten by sustainable truths. And we did it by first banishing the language of the circular economy, up-cycling, collaborative consumption (a co-created art installation project by 17th Century British poets surely) stewardship, materiality, EP&L, Net Positive and every other phrase on the trending circuit.

The most interesting and charming conversations were sparked around the old arts of thrift – smart shrewd living skills. A form of street smarts for aspirational living. people who know know…

The idea of Lighter Living. Lightening the burden on oneself (bills, cost, beyond ones means) and on the world in which we endeavour to thrive offered an overarching narrative hook that felt aspirational; breezy; cool.

So UK Dream identified Smarter lighter living represented a good beginning – positive – something one feels before one thinks it.

But we still had the tricky D word. Left to its own devices, Dream is a very divisive word, regardless of how you underwrite it; especially in Britain. On the up side everyone likes a dreamy something – we are happy to have the dream job, the dream holiday. But these are specific uses of the word that define a clear and tangible set of benefits and experiences.

Use the D word on a more rarified cultural and nationalistic level and the long shadow of John Stuart Mill enters the room at the faintest whisper of the word.

Dreams. A tyranny of pasteurized living. The death of individuality. An opiate under whose suffocating crop invention withers and spirit is anaesthetised. Dreams: the heartland of the indolent and fearful. The sharp corners and friction of individuality are what keep us alive. Not buttered populist platitudes for us to get fat on.

For the UK audience, Dream just invites the cynic and the heckler to rip it up; test its edges, even when you try and put it in a box.

Hence my search for the phrase that delivered the idea of a dream of better as part of life in the here-and-now; as measured in clear and tangible terms – a phrase that could happily ladder up or down; for better or worse; good or bad; funny or sad.

Cue Living The Dream?!

As soon as we place the ‘Living the Dream?!’ question at the top of our conversational ladder everything shifts – and becomes more human.

It allows us to engage with really simple scenarios to begin with – what keeps you up at night? the ‘mares big and small of every day life – What gets you out of bed in the morning? the dreamy stuff that makes life worth living.

This simple two pillar approach can be used to inspire conversations around identity, fashion, lifestyle, living, food & drink, education, energy, finances, technology, travel & transport, leisure & entertainment, white goods, furniture – anything. Easy conversational doors into complex nuanced stories.

It also means that we can reframe conversations that interweave multiple dimensions (usually only looked at or explored as single threads) and explore them as we find them – as slightly more chaotic jumbled buckets of conversation.

For example:

Love & Shopping

The old intrinsic nature of love and how we demonstrated it – through nurture, provision, protection, empowerment, support and belonging – has been hijacked by brands trying to inveigle their way into a lead position on our purse. We are more likely to make an active demonstration of love through a commercial transaction than we are through a personal one. The extrinsic demonstrable nature of the neu-love we now practice is making us live beyond our means.

So we find ourselves living in a culture that celebrates Saturday shopping in Westfield as an act of bonding and love. Families share in the pursuit of living the dream; even if it just loading love on a credit card for later. Every demonstration of love seems to come with a bar code: DISCUSS.

Faith & Banter

Faith has become more than just the repose of religion – faith and leaps of it are required in every corner: humanists take the leap of faith in humanity and its ability to prevail. Philosophers cross the chasm of the ontological between universals and particulars. Artists relentlessly leap from humanities to science to metaphysics to the primal with an absolute faith in the eventual ascension of something sublime. Even in brittle science, in the absence of an M Theory waiting to be revealed, they undertake a leap of faith of their own every day between the two quantum truths without a bridge to join them.

But in the UK, if you get too serious, watch your language, lighten up and Get over yourself. This is the nation of ‘taking the piss’, heckling, ribbing and anarchic banter. How does something so serious play out in a culture where to be serious is to be dangerous. DISCUSS.

Castles & Cat’s Cradle

Every man is an island and every Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, ‘ish’. Given the level of Great British personal debt, mortgage rates, the ascendence of the pay day loans, just to keep the ‘castle’ from falling down, the old securities of a fixed and stable life are fast disappearing. And as the castle walls shrink or crumble, splendid isolation gives way to dynamic connection and collaboration. We are stitching ourselves back together again in myriad different ways, finding new ties that bind. If 2008 smashed the family china and pulled down the gazebo and the politicians are fracking society who’s got the UHU?

In the gaps and cracks they leave behind new opportunities and alliances form. Run down regions and communities are regenerated. people find new purpose. Can a new more enlighted aspiration for a more enduring life rise with the cultural phoenix? DISCUSS

Wellness in an highly emerged society.

In exploring the Living The Dream conversation, we also realised that culturally, socially and systemically, the UK is so emerged it’s submerged. Simple and very meaningful topics so easily and directly dealt with in other cultures are in ours hidden inside a complex and codified landscape. Triggering conversations around these topics is a minefield: an assault course of social gaffes, trip wires, trap doors, raspberries and silences. So achieving just the right lightness of touch and integrity is critical.

The conversation around wellness and wellbeing is just such a conversation. It is not in the direct line of conversational fire. We speak indirectly of these things, usually as part of a different conversational thread. We are more likely to fall upon the topic of well-being through jokes about Stenna stairlifts, incontinence pants, supersize mother in laws, smoking in bed and Austin Power’s teeth than we are directly with a straight face.

Wellness is a supermarket trend supported by chemist brands – it is NOT a stitched in part of the great british psyche just yet. But we are getting there in our own sweet time.

This is very different to the China Dream where its emerging economy status means that health & well-being are absolutely central to the idea of what better looks like. A conversation that begins and ends with the need for something drastic to happen around air, water, food integrity and diet and their role in building a more resilient and dynamic society.

All in all, Living The Dream?! (for now at least) creates a simple conversational foundation for a bigger conversation around what good looks like and how we might get there individually, communally and collectively. Apply simple rules of smarter, lighter living at the heart of it and perhaps we might move the dial from over indexing on what keeps us up at night and start peaking again on what gets us out of bed in the morning!

All we need now is the right partners to scale the right conversation and start asking the right questions of the right people.

So any platform or brand looking for a purpose in the UK – looking for a conversation to fuel, inspire, support and celebrate – come on down. We have the beginnings of something good.

FOOTNOTES

LivingTheDream is planning to undertake 10 workshops across the UK in 2015 – simply to start asking the right questions of the right people; of what better might look like for them – in their language, in their words and from where they are standing. The curated outcomes will then be shared with the constituencies of action – local communities, councils, faith leaders, collectives, interested parties, brands, institutions and organisations – to adopt, reflect and act upon to start making better a reality.

Living The Dream & the art of smarter, lighter living is an organically developing theme rooted in the original Dream in A Box UK Dream project workshops and part of a wider DreamInABox initiative which includes the founding China Dream movement run in China through NGO JUCCCE and spearheaded by the inimitable Peggy Liu; inspiration and co-founder of all things DiaB.

verukas, prosperity & the detritus of parental love

02 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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adult tantrums, boarding schools, cheap money, China Dream, Consumerism, credit card debt, designer baby clothes, Dream In A Box, ethics, family holidays, hogwarts, love, millennials, moral compass, nurture, parental guidence, propserity, quality of life, the 2 week summer holiday, Transforming Desire

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Who pandered to her every need?
Who turned her into such a brat?
Who are the culprits? Who did that?
The guilty ones now this is sad
Dear Old Mum and Loving Dad

Is the quality of contemporary parental love destined to go down the garbage chute quickly followed by the children it breeds?

Is the structure on which it is founded becoming increasingly fragile, facile and unsustainable?

Or will our children or grandchildren eventually just turn against us; crippled by their disappointments, and their inability to repeat or recreate the same or a greater quality of life for their own.

We already know that this is the first generation in recorded history that will be passing down a diminished quality of life to their children by our current measures of prosperity.

This question of whether parental love in its current form is unsustainable first raised itself whilst I was trying to assess and deconstruct the current model of prosperity we currently embrace and pursue.

(Let’s face it, for some the highway commercial robbery of Valentines Day, the poisonous barometer of the Tiffany box, Gypsy Weddings and the reoccurring arrival of Kim Kardashian’s latest ‘one and only love’ has firmly flushed the romantic model down the spiritual khazi already)

The exercise in deconstructing prosperity is a major part of a larger one I am undertaking as part of my ongoing involvement with the Dream In A Box initiative and its UK Dream iteration – which in particular terms seeks to Re-imagine the UK model of Prosperity through the transformation of what constitutes a desirous life.

On closer inspection (hardy surprising) it seems that a large part of what makes up our current model of prosperity lies in how we imagine, perceive, measure, pursue, and demonstrate ‘love’ and attachment: to friends, family, prospective partners, spouses and most pointedly our children.

There is no greater demonstration of loving provision and the profound contract of human care it seems than that hosted within the living bond between parents and their children.

But what was once only noted and measured in mostly invisible and passing terms – the degree to which we throw money at our children’s happiness – now seems to be worn like a badge of honour by everyone from the cord-breeched pseudo-toff urban preppy and the polo-shirt & chino mini-mes of the suburbs to the highly singular estate-inhabiting parent with a Burberry buggy.

The integrity of our attendance to our children’s needs and the strength of the love we hold for them now lies in the measure of its social visibility and worth.

We must be ‘seen’ to gladly or otherwise use every scrap of ‘cheap’ money we can get our hands on to further facilitate our children’s ability to hover above the ugly brutal truths of life.

Increasingly our ‘love’ seems to be wholly predicated on the scale of our investment: and not of the balanced, grounding, attentive, affectionate kind.

It would seem that it is wholly acceptable these days for a child to be intellectually stupefied, emotionally ignored, set aside and abandoned or passed over to some one or some thing – a digital device usually or perhaps a new pair of trainers – as long as the parent can be seen to have ‘invested’ at every turn.

From the designer baby clothes they learn to stand up in, to the grotesque and engorging hoards of seasonal gifts they now receive (from skip loads of Easter Chocolate to mountains of Christmas presents) and the increasing quantity of kit they now require to ensure they’re not seen as ‘going without’ – phones tablets game consoles to name a few – the scale of society’s expenditure on the presentation of the ‘loved child’ is staggering.

This is not reserved solely for the ‘kit’ we deck them out with. It seems to infect every corner of the family model for what constitutes a thriving life.

Another hellish tyranny of loving provision embedded in our current model of prosperity is the family holiday.

Even as I typed the words ‘family holiday’ I was suddenly washed in a sun drenched, lens flared, refracted moment of azure blue sky and crystal water splashes; stress free parents and laughing children perfectly framed against a distant white villa horizon speckled and coloured with the lobster clawed, 3 types of fish, pasta, pizza and west Indian slash Asian slash Mediterranean slash Tex Mex slash barbecue buffet.

The tyranny I refer to has nothing to do with the usual clichéd hooting and wailing you hear from many modern parents about the prospect of 2 weeks locked together in some slightly disappointing family resort.

(On that particular matter it will be music to the ears of every emotionally challenged and ‘highly individual’ parent to know that there are now two good reasons as to why that tyranny will quickly become a faint memory. Firstly we are seeing (so the people watchers tell us) that the 2 week block summer holiday meticulously planned and desperately undertaken is in its death throes in the more advanced mature economies. We are taking more and shorter and more impulsive holidays (with all that extra money we all have!!!) And secondly booking.com is chirpily telling any member of the aspirational mobile middle classes who wants to listen that never again will they have to booking arrive to find themselves trapped in some booking desperate, substandard hell-hole with a pool surrounded by drawn-on people and a dodgy booking breakfast buffet – as long as they book with booking dot com that is.)

Given the tsunami of availability and astonishing social pressure to just say yes to everything, it is no surprise that we’re running up a credit-card based personal debt mountain bearing a striking similarity to a Himalayan range built out of bullion and gemstones.

If a family doesn’t get to go on an all you can consume holiday plus a few weekends away and a second holiday thrown in, then they’re not cutting it. That a family with a annual family income of circa £30-40K quietly expects itself to demonstrate its loving provision through multiple holidays abroad is both financially unsustainable and morally questionable.

Education is another ugly social battleground on which ‘love of the child’ is undertaken with everything but balance. True this is a more particular and less universal truth – something usually set aside by the worthy as a First World problem.

It is of course driven by the clawing desperation of the upwardly aspirational middle-middle classes*, (the downwardly aspirational Toffs and upper-middles being otherwise healthily engaged in a swaggering mockney-gangsta walk through White City, Hoxton, Deptford, and the arse-end of Tooting).

These parents are not the first generation to have realised that the route to securing an improving prosperity for your child is a decent education.

The role of education (and skiing holidays for that matter) in social aggrandisement is not new. Parents with a particular predilection for elevating their own narrow lives on the back of the tiniest increment of superiority have been judging their dinner party neighbour by the scale of their educational investment for many decades. But they were (and still are) of a particular rare breed, reasonably cloaked and easily ignored.

What’s particular in the new trend is the frenzy with which the greater majority pursue this madness in the blinding glare of the social spotlight.

Over subscribed schools, post code hopping parents, dodgy intake policies and the see sawing fashion for Public versus independent versus Free versus State versus ‘who said Grammar? I didn’t say Grammar?!’ schools certainly has a lot to answer for.

But that’s still no excuse for the lack of human elegance, the vacuum of discretion, and the gaping hole that seems to have opened up in their ability to circumnavigate the sensitivities of others.

They take a bludgeoning approach to improving the child that is conspicuous by its conspicuity – gratuitous over expectation, intellectual bullying, litanies of after school clubs, multiple tutors, competitive schooling and the most insidious social engineering are all worn in public like a beacon.

Educational trends currently also raise some rather interesting existential questions – of the ‘life-imitating-art-imitating-life’ kind.

The recent Disney-fication of boarding school culture via one small wizard and a place called Hogwarts has had a large number of parents who can ill afford it sending their little darlings to prep and boarding schools ‘because the child demands it’. There’s only so long you can get away with stuffing the fees on a credit card until the house of plastic cards collapses. And love is rarely proven resilient by the relentless use of the word ‘yes’. But that is how society seems to be shaping the model of demonstrable love in a prosperous life. If the child demands it – the loving parent must give it: and blatantly.

For me these are reasonable examples of how warped I believe our sense of how we demonstrate love for the child has become, and evidence of a toxic model of prosperity.

If one takes these lite examples and generously sprinkles them with tons of over packaged brightly coloured and quickly discarded plastic, £400 bikes, theme parks, and mountains of cheap cotton basics with pointless groovy graphics, the landscape of parental love, certainly that currently exercised by the average emerged economy parent, is looking sparkly, cluttered and bleak, and ultimately unsustainable in so many ways.

Is this love of ours Tainted. Maybe. Is it Human. Very.

Is this progress? Perhaps. Or is this simply the gene pool opportunistically wrapping its progeny in as much as it can get its hands on before the moment passes. Most likely.

Regardless. Navigating the modern world and the byways of fruitful love, especially that which we feel and demonstrate for our children, was never going to be easy or simple.

But re-imagination of the model of prosperity we base our life, love and dreams on: one which holds greater store by that which cannot be bought might give us a few more compass points along the way.

It may well also help clear up some of the side issues: like the increasing population of staggeringly spoilt, increasingly sociopathic children… oh and that of personal bankruptcy of course, and a sparsely furnished dotage.

So, veruka cream anyone?

FOOTNOTES

*the middle middle classes are how I refer to a very active, vocal and seemingly forever squeezed section of the British population. They are, in class terms what Mickey Flannagan’s ‘out out‘ is to going out.

Sustainable Human Existence, The D Word & Treading carefully

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Brian Cox, cary Grant, China Dream, D Ream, Dream catchers, Dream In A Box, Freud, gramsci, Identity, John Stuart Mill, Loveboat, Mad magazine, Martin Luther King Jnr, Morpheus, Peggy Liu, Philosophy, Science, Sustainability, The Ancients, The Civil Rights Movement, Transforming Desire, Walt Disney, Yeats

Screen Shot 2014-08-03 at 00.05.59

Funny things dreams. Profound to some – sophistry to others.
So please mind your language!

I used the word Dream in a presentation once in the UK. Won’t be doing that again in a hurry any time soon: certainly not without a lot of qualification.
Let’s just say I had not realised how ‘spooked’ grown ups can get by a word.

Equally, it served to remind me that my own slap dash use of language and bumbling naivety could do with some heavy spanner work and a healthy dose of tuning fork.

To be fair the D word popped up in very particular circumstance – a discussion about a methodology called Dream In A Box.

The methodology endeavours to reuse and recycle old wisdoms, contemporary cultural signposting, local idioms and vernaculars to write a new narrative – to re-imagine prosperity, reframe sustainability and transform desire – the consuming kind particularly – to a more enduring and sustainable model; all this in pursuit of a more sustainable human existence.

The D word was chosen for its particular resonance with and reference to ‘the American Dream’ and the staining nature of its most recent variant on our beleaguered planet. Not that it was always thus.

The American Dream was one under which all men (and, sure, yup, women, and ok, eventually, if you’re going to push it, with a civil rights movement for example, Afro-Americans) were equal.

In the heady industry-rebuilding, economy-expanding (where waists would surely follow) post-war rush to create the perfect American thriving, surviving white-picket society, that dream took a few toxic turns, until finally, it eventually settled on the perfectly trimmed lawn of the idyllic all-consuming sub Urban lifestyle that we know and love.

Cue Cary Grant movies. Loveboat. Doris Day. And the chirpy satire of Mad Magazine.

It was a dream promising the consumer citizen infinite growth, financially, spiritually, socially and collectively; all merrily based upon an apparently infinite, fecund and plentiful pool of glorious ‘Godly’ resources; material human and physical.

The patently obvious and accelerating realisation of how wrong that immaculate assumption actually was aside, the feeling in the Dream In A Box camp was that the Dream bit of the phrase was reasonably off set by the In A Box bit.

The In A Box part of it made the following particular point: unless you can find a way of containing the otherwise intangible, lofty, unreachable and mildly frustrating dimensions of a Dream and make them real in ways that are meaningful and valuable to everyday people in the everyday thread of life, you are merely peddling opiates.

Even so, for some it smacked of an over simplified homogenous hideous social chimera. A one size fits all piece of social bullying or bluff that was fundamentally anti–social in its anti-individualist bent.

But this vehemence is not a feeling reserved exclusively for the more square cornered sustainable analysts, scientists, engineers underwriting the operational truths of supply and value chains everywhere.

Dreams generally enjoy a dynamic polarity in many people’s minds.

Dreams seem to inhabit a similar place to things like religious fervor, faith and Walt Disney for many of the reason and rationality junkies out there.
To the nay-sayers and doubters, the idea of having a dream (a phrase preferably spat out or sneered through) verges on criminal self delusion and puffery.

The intangible what if nature of them seems to fill them with some form of existential dread.

There is no place for dreams in a reasonable world, especially a scientific one and certainly no place for reason in dreams  – so what if Brian ‘Mine’s Hadron Collider’ Cox’s band was called D.Ream. Doesn’t mean he ascribes to them.

The reoccurring theme seems to be that Dreams, like faith, are dangerous things – dark instruments. Dreams obfuscate the real raw nature of our human existence and all of its incumbent challenges, puzzles and conundrums.

The realm of Morpheus is a confection that far from enlightening us is seen as one that diminishes us.

Its almost as if Dreams are flawed in some evolutionary way: rendering us incapable of basic human survival; stupefied by our hazy, twinkle-filled and fantastical view of the world.
A small rummage around the point counter point arguments of, on the one hand, the evolutionary benefits set out in Anttii Revonsuo’s Threat Simulation theory, and Flannagan’s concept of Evolutionary epiphenomena (dreams as a state that lacks any form of adaptive function) on the other clearly inform us that the evolutionary jury’s out on this one.

And the case for Dreams as a scientifically proven improver of our human condition is never helped in the eyes of the scientist by the presence of Dream Catchers and other juvenile voodoo bric a brac in the windows’ of student houses and hippy retreats.

Perhaps the most virulent critics spent one long night too many at college or university pretending to give a crap as the fragile teen sitting opposite them bleated their dream stories in some desperate effort to seem windswept, deep and interesting.

Equally the phrase ‘to follow one’s dreams’ doesn’t help, in that it implies a sheep-like loyalty: a subservience in service of something intangible beyond your control. And we know how rationalists like a smidgen of control. 

Whatever it is that causes the anger and disdain; it is a powerful and quite corrosive emotion.

But, for the Dream believers, Dreams are a way of allowing people to transcend the bleak sharp cornered truths of what is and embrace the brighter potential of what could be. Dreams allow us to rise above the deterministic absolutes of any given situation and envision something better.

Martin Luther King had a dream that succeeded in helping to shift millions of black Americans from a position of sub human species needing to know its place to a powerful ethnic constituency in search of a spiritual homeland and tangible human rights and respect.
I doubt even the fiercest doubters could ridicule or set aside the power of that dream to change lives and human existence for the better in some shape or form.
There is a sense that, in the USA of the 1960s, the political power elites, intellectual tribes, state collectives, regional advocates and community activists all jostling for position on either side of the colour divide would never have convened their mighty voices into that one immutable, immoveable and deafening roar without the focus of that Dream, voiced so eloquently and publicly.

But equally, John Stuart Mill found the idea of galvanising and socialising a nation through a singular collective idyll – an idea or dream of better – was at best childish and naïve and at worst an aggressive act of hubris and societal hegemony – a social tyranny.
He believed in the axiom that ‘man should judge everything in life based upon its ability to promote the greatest individual happiness’.
“the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling is more formidable than many kinds of political oppression …leav[ing] fewer means of escape … and penetrat[ing] more deeply into the details of life. ”The “tendency of society to impose … its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and if possible, prevent the formation of individuality, not in harmony with its ways”

There is a sense in this view that an individual Dream is fine while it is held safe and unsullied in the heart and the mind of an individual. It is a beautiful and highly personal wonder, broadly uncorrupted though perhaps a little influenced by the dreams of others.

(It is worth reminding ourselves that Martin Luther King Jnr. said ‘I have a dream…’; not ‘We have a Dream’. It was his; it just had the potential to move many others within it.)

It seems that while in its unadulterated individual state, that which is most emotionally proximal to its originator, a dream is widely lauded as the profound generator of poetry, music, art and literature.

Yeat’s Cloths of Gold directs the listener to ‘tread gently for you tread on my dreams’. They are presented as the purest, most precious things he has to offer the world.
Mamma Cass’s ‘California Dreaming’ protested a desire for a sunnier brighter life far removed from the cold emotionally bleak east of Fall and Atlantic swells. It is her dream and hers alone: just one that happened to be shared by a generation.

The problem it seems is that when mobilised, industrialised and socialised at scale, a dream becomes The Dream – the Mother of Suppression of the Individual in hot pursuit of the collective good. The Dream quickly becomes the destroyer of intelligent dissent and the brutal editor of different orthodoxies and philosophies that did not quite ‘fit’ ‘The Dream’. It becomes all that John Stuart Mill berated and warned of in his view of one dimensional models of collective happiness as some conjuring trick played on the masses.

Dreams also have an ill-judged and reoccurring tendency of turning up at the very heart of large orgiastic excursions into nationalistic and hubristic megalomania.
Dreams of Empire whether by Georgian and Victorian Britain, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy or the German Third Reich always seem to bear out the truth of Mr Mill’s perception.

To use a singular Dream in this way is to squash the very diversity and healthy human tension the enables us to evolve as a species. Dreams are a recidivist and controlling mechanism that are worthy of deep suspicion.

The pollutant seems (as so often is the case) to be somewhat rooted in what man has done in the name of dreams; not in the condition of dreaming which in itself is a pretty confounding experience. They are after all an axial mechanism of our deepest mind.

Dreams at their most basic level are the powerhouse of our emotional computing.
They are the synaptic equivalent of taking the big data from every facet and corner of our existence and atomically mixing it up with the narrative skills of Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Spielberg and Plato.

Dreams are the super processor of individual human potential.

They are the transcendence mechanism in us – they are the ‘reach’ mechanism that compels us to perhaps stretch beyond what seems immediately possible or probable to test the edges of what could or might be.

Science clearly sets out the power of our sleeping computations in regards to cognitive ability and capacity.

But given their sleep hosted ‘madness’, flaky associations, the abstracted corollaries that exist within them and Freud’s rather particular take on them, it is easy to set Dreams aside as garish hyperemotional gibberish – or reinvent them as some twist of needy or proving self-identification and elevation.

Most people find the sharing of what one dreams an immature act of identity assertion; usually by those who feel there is little social or intellectual mystery or magic about them. Given that it is a habit that one usually hopes dies out with the arrival of slightly greater intellectual and spiritual surety, perhaps the mere sight of the word makes them run for the hills screaming.

There is a theory that dreams exist in the sleep-scapes of REM Rapid Eye Movement and NREM Non Rapid Eye Movement and do so with a very clear function.

It is believed that the process of sleep to encode and transfer data from the temporary memory store in the conscious mind accesses and activated in NREM sleep to the long term memory store in the subconscious mind accessed and activated in REM sleep – and the continual activation of this flow is what stimulates dreams. So in that way they are a robust and meaningful process of our body science and an enricher of our more adaptive cognition.

It is not just the science of the brain that frames the arguments and beliefs around dreams and their role.

Human history and the texts of the ancients are riddled with expansive philosophical treatise and frameworks. From the ancient Mesopotamians, Chinese, Upanishads, and Babylonians, to the Egyptians Greeks and Romans, the powerful nature of dreams have always held a deep and profound place in our collective social memory.

In some ways perhaps the truth of Dreams lies as with many things somewhere between the two; at the point at which these two distinct perspectives overlap and stitch together; neither being the predominant force but both represented as balanced and weighted in a perfect symmetry with each other. This duality might offer us a more productive way forwards.

Gramsci invites us to apply Pessimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will in all things. Perhaps this is the filter through which we should view Dreams and everything to do with them in regards to the ambition of transforming the more toxic desires of the average consumer.

Certainly in regards to the Dream word being used as a way to frame the spiritual social and material vision of a more sustainable form of consumption, Gramsci’s invitation would help balance the two dimensions.
The pessimistic Intellect – the science – interrogating the truths of how we engineer and support these more sustainable lifestyles while the optimistic Spirit – the philosophical – compels a more transcendent human nature be applied at every opportunity – a higher human purpose that might take everyday humanity beyond the impenetrable science and just doing enough to scrape through.
This would liberate the word and the language around it to be both rooted in the deep science that will be required to reinvent our standard forms of consumption and yet elevated by the optimism of a collective human endeavour lived in real time in the real world.

And perhaps if we liberated the word – set it free from the shackles of an Either/Or model of determinative application we might find something richer and more human again in Dreams.

If perhaps we also recognised that in regards to visionary models of human consumption, Dreams can be nuanced, shaded and culturally meaningful even at a meta level.

In the Dream In A Box initiatives undertaken so far we already have 5 Shades of Dream – Emerging; Latent; Resurgent; Extant; Evolving – starting to reveal themselves in regards to formulating desirable and enduring lifestyles of consumption.

I am certain that more will present themselves before we are finished.

So here’s to those turbulent, intangible, flaky, studenty, inspirational, nation-shaping, scientist irritating things called Dreams.

If for nothing else they should be considered eminently remarkable purely on the basis that they can elicit so much passionate debate and discourse purely by their mention.

As long as each Dream is considered on its merit – not on some preconceived concept of what it does not fulfil, or on some etymological witch hunt dressed up as rigour and realism we’ll perhaps be fine. Until then…

As Stephen Tyler sang: ‘Dream On’

China, you-sized cities & the joy of cutting a different path

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Back to the future, China Dream, China's Emerging Middle Class, Confucian, Culture & Style, Fossil Fuels, Harmony, Human-sized cities, Living, Mega-city, People's Republic, Qi, Respect, retail innovation, Social Fabric, Tan De Bing, The Rural Diaspora, tri-generational living, Urban Carbon Emissions, Urban Flow, well-being

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NOTE This piece was written in May 2012 as part of an exploration on what might constitute the China Dream on a mega-city scale

Its a nice thought – that just by divine chance, Wang Shu, Tim Burton, The Candy Brothers and the People’s Republic all just happened to bump into each other in a coffee shop, got to talking about mega cities and started to think “what if?

It would be perfect: Wang Shu for balance and exceptional sustainable living design: Tim Burton for sheer Magic, Joy and Wonder: The Candy Brothers for monumental ambition and chutzpah: and the People’s Republic because beyond Social Harmony, in the end the mega city concept is still about people: the best of people and their infinite well being, for generation after generation: not just in the now.

In 21st Taoist terms, people and their energy are the ebb and flow of urban dynamic living – the Qi of the mega-city.

Which means the mega-city in its infinite wisdom must be designed and conceptualized around human-sized principles as well as eco and sustainable ones, constructed in such a way as to knit back together the strands of the fabric of society to create more than simple cohesion and structural support. To atomise and empty the rural constituencies requires making quite deep ruptures and rips in the cultural psyche. These need to be either healed or resealed depending on whether you see this as an emotional or rational task first and foremost 

This is about Tan de Bing versus Harmony, Balance & Respect.

With 1 Billion Chinese people expected in urban mega-cities by 2025, how one maintains Harmony Balance & Respect in a way that is both enjoyable and sustainable will become increasingly critical to the national and global well being.

Fossil fuel consumption increasing by 3-6 Billion life years per year with a ten-fold increase in solid waste this becomes a matter of human logistics on an extraordinary scale.

But perhaps just starting by thinking of what it means to be human in a mega-city is a good place to start.

Scale is something that seems to be driven by the most interested party and developers tend to favour scale of ambition over scale of inhabitant too often – particularly demonstrated in the burgeoning mega-cities of the Middle Eastern Sovereign States.

Human Scale

So let’s start perhaps from the small wonder of a human being – and those inextricably linked to that human being, family, friends, community, and those that serve them both professionally and domestically, and the services that surround them, the environments they exist within, and how everything from educational philosophy and medical wellbeing to civic planning needs to be calibrated in the daily flow of urban infrastructure. Obvious yes, but especially critical given the broader societal cultural, industrial and commercial shifts and undercurrents rippling through the nation and how it is perceived both internally and externally.

There are cities where a human scale still survives and becomes the defining aspect of those cities, whether by simple history and divine chronology – the existence of smaller more human-sized historic building scattered amongst the high rises.
The City Of London for example, like many European cities enjoy this aspect of modern urban living.

In a recent New Yorker piece by Evan Osnos, Li Huang the guide showing a group of mainland Chinese travellers ‘Europe’ pointed out the ‘open-ness of the city’ to them while standing on the banks of the Seine. “In Shanghai unless you’re standing right next to the Huangpu River you can’t get any sense of the river because there are too many tall buildings” adding that Europeans “preserve anything old and valuable.”

Even in the US the streets of some US cities like San Francisco and Boston old tradition and historic residences, churches, parks, thoroughfares and in Boston’s case the very halls of the Founding Fathers continue to set human dimensions on the aspirations of the high rise living that surround them.

Also, cities like London have seen the rise in the social and cultural importance of what were the old villages that once circled it. Highgate & Hampstead, Notting Hill & Kensington, Clapham, Dulwich, Blackheath are islands of human-sized buildings, spaces and thoroughfares critical in maintaining the balance between a city’s architecturally progressive and its inexorably human self especially given that they are now fixed firmly inside the UK city’s own version of Tan De Bing – its urban into suburban sprawl.

One could argue that mandating that 30 percent of buildings in any given area of a new mega-city can be no taller than three stories and have as much open space around them as they take up in square meterage would be a good start. Or that perhaps they should be planned with some human sized historic or non commercial building (whether it be a single barn, a temple or a whole village) at its centre, kept as a living spiritual compass for the rest of the city.

Continuing in the 21st Century Confucian theme perhaps a pond-ripple concept might also help keep things human.
If there were a central building: small, low rise (tasked with an active social role beyond being just thematic or symbolic – a community centre and well being clinic perhaps) with open space around it and the development of housing and retail spaces rippling away from its centre, only climbing to the higher and larger scales of buildng at the outer edges, until they overlap other ripples of development.

TRANSPARENCY

The ability to see through things: spaces, areas and buildings to what is beyond is to my mind critical in the health of a city.
Not everything must be wide open but enough to make openness and transparency a signature of better living.

Removing civic opacity to me must be both physical as well as spiritual and political.

The Cities of the future could place this very important ‘Balance’ characteristic at its conceptual core – as a form of ‘letting go’ – of removing the visual and physical barriers that are historically used to close and control communities, spaces, people, lives processes and systems.

Protection in regards to the state institutions has shifted from the more intimate communal protective vigilance of long ago to the more paternal protectionist big brother model – perhaps the mega-cities of the future can start with the one small step on the greater journey to rebalancing this trend.

LUNGS & ARTERIES

Enabling people to feel masters of the environment through scale is one aspect of a healthier urban environment.
The other is open and communal spaces in general, though I would stress a preference for planning that weaves green organic and flourishing habitat into the fabric of the infrastructure planning and not just as spaces set aside for leisure time enjoyment; for example as ways of humanizing commuter routes.

This is more than just a lung concept – these would be truly arterial in that they are oxygenating the traveller along otherwise urban landscapes. As opposed to arterial being a plain descriptor of the role, quality and flow of the traffic in motion along them.
To ‘line’ every road, rail and bike route with flourishing flora of ay sort – to turn them into a landscaped or farmed artery would make for ‘breathing spaces’ in otherwise quite congested high stress channels of flow through the city.
These arteries can also provide areas for the human hand to be seen at work. The still hands of the old might be usefully engaged in planting these arteries, creating shifts and washes of different colours and textures, small strips of pride – the tools and seedlings provided by a hands off civic centre.
If one were to create a grid one could assign the East West facing strips as allotments and urban farm strips, the organic and intimately tended criss-crossing the urban metropolitan landscape. One could even for example create a simple trading relationship between the owners/leases of these and small retail grocery interests around the city to develop a 1 Mile Produce Promise for the people buying the produce.

One Person One Life

The ‘one human’ concept – of people being the same person inside work as they are outside instead of having to become schizophrenic – is helped enormously when you ‘open cast’ their working community alongside the everyday domestic and public flow of life.

Physically knitting the fabrics of the business/commercial retail, domestic elderly and young communities of one city together like this is critical to health and communal well- being.
A true constituency of extant human beings sharing space and fuelling hope and small wonders on an everyday basis.

(NOTE: there is also an inbuilt innovation trigger in this style of interwoven and proximal living as it has a far greater likelihood of driving direct and indirect general idea sharing and creative collisions, making it far more likely for like and eclectic minded individuals t find each other).

This openly interconnected physical formula of: flow x people x experience x action ÷ space drives heightened degrees of mutual respect; of the others right to existence and enjoyment and equally, might also substantially reduce isolation of particular groups which ascendant modernizing societies have a tendency to leave behind in their whirlwind of achievement and pursuit of even greater individual success, e.g. the elderly and young mothers.
Creating working spaces where people travel along or up and down through domestic, retail or public spaces from office to office or from one corner of a business floor to another creates a far healthier attitude and less ‘ shutting away of the worker bees’ – a system proven to ultimately fail by creating social and communal division and isolation with net negative impacts on mental health and potential alcoholism and other domestic issues demonstrated inside people’s lives away from the public eye.

There are also financial possibilities to be considered here in regards to investors in development of these cities: I use the particular example of the Pension Fund standing at ¥1.9Trillion with a track record of low yield investments, lack of transparency in regards to management, low or empty regional pension pots and little impetus to change.

If we were to stitch the elderly back into the infrastructure of the mega-cities, not just by building more residential care homes but by investing their pensions in the very infrastructure of the cities that serve them, this may point to a more accountable and directly applicable financial deployment model of the pension funds that currently enjoy some arcane management at best.
If we were able to combine the financial interests and burdens of the polar ends of society by stitching them into the structure and flow of these new eco mega-cities perhaps it also reapplies a 21st Century version of Confucian harmony.

This is not just some retrograde cod philosophical posturing: a sop to the old wisdoms. We know for a fact from some of the most mature Liberal Democratic Capitalist countries that no good comes of isolating your elderly into the margins.
The soft wisdoms and life learning that comes with them equally disappears with them. The disappearance of these balancing perspectives and small wisdoms break down family cohesion, dumbing down the Emotional Intellect of the family and communities they exist within in by removing the direct effect of their life skills and experience: a removal of balance from the natural social order of things.

Deploying the power of old people back into society as some form of spiritual triage would also remove the tendency for young people to increasingly spend too much time reinventing the wheel in regards to life skills – taking time to discover some life experience that they might have otherwise picked up through sheer social osmosis ultimately takes the young person’s mind away from greater and newer discoveries perhaps.

And finally, old people sitting and watching the world go by being placed in close proximity to the crèches of their grandchildren not only brings the pleasure of young people to bear around them by reinstates the communities kind eyes and watchful carer class

Stitching Well-Being Into Everyday

City living isolates most people ‘away from’ the kinds of small incidental processes of health and well-being that would otherwise do them and their productivity enormous good.
‘Small and often’ in regards to visiting and exploring best-health and well-being practice ultimately pays the individual and the society they live in great dividends – they feel secure and supported, part of a substantial social contract of care, and equally in turn feel less distracted by abstract concerns and better focused on the matters in hand – extant beings working and being in a productive thriving life and society.

So, as an extension of the One Life One Person strategy it would make sense to begin building medical and well-being galleries populated by ‘walk in clinics into this open-cast approach to living working leisure spaces – equally it promotes and builds into the every day psyche a convenience strategy of well-being – critical in a city where people become isolated in their workday from the smallest medical or well being services or considerations.

The Devil’s in the Retail detail.

That every new eco mega city will have a burgeoning and vibrant retail economy goes without saying. It will be a cornerstone of the ebb and flow of life, existence and people’s broad concept of their prosperity.
The fact and detail of how the retail experience: and the brands and the businesses that design and deliver them stitch themselves into the urban society both physically and spiritually will be where the innovation and the harmonious concept development should come.

Most of the traditional retailers and manufacturers are constructed for an American style of manufacture, distribution, format and consumption. In the modern China this model has become simply untenable.
Not only are the American models require a staggering use of fossil, material and human resource to maintain themselves, they are also based upon on a Sub-urban mart and mall model that will not necessarily fit the design sensibility and spatial economy of the new mega cities – they also create cluster and volume formats in which the consumer is guided through a vast arena of offers and multiple purchase deals suited more to the vast double fridge households of the Midwest than the spiritually and physically ergonomic concept of Chinese living.

How retailers adapt to what the Chinese model of consumption will become, as opposed to just pointing at the version of it that currently exists – a cod-American gated villa ranch and lodge style of living that still holds up the SUV double fridge ‘I am therefore I consume’ model as a demonstration of personal meaning – this will be the defining factor in which brands and businesses win.

How the scale retail players deconstruct themselves into these mega-cities – delivering surprise and a more human sized and manageable set of offerings – offers an interesting challenge. Can they still create aircraft hangar sized triple floor temples to their wares and life style signature? Or will they need to sub divide their offerings into boutiques of need, day part and purchase scale scattered throughout the urban landscape? Or will they need to deploy a little of both?

Potentially, bringing in some of these retail and manufacturer partner players at a planning stage while they are still subservient to the greater good, and tasked with stitching themselves sustainably into the future habitat as opposed to helicoptering in and simply ‘planting monoliths to their brand dream where they fancy may be the smartest beginning to that journey

Back to The Future

There has been much talk of a return to the cultural roots of the Chinese – a return to the culture and environment that have shaped this phenomenal culture over the millennia. In returning to this space, and in reconnecting with their roots, there is in essence a trigger for the 21st Century ascendency of new Confucian or Taoist ideals at work across and throughout society.

Pure urbanity is imbalanced in its perspectives and its energies. It must have the organic rural expanse of ‘Other’ to be truly balanced and powerful.

Though some might see this as a cynical cultural play to make every one more personally responsible for their lives and to take them away from the state-orchestrated feel good dependency of old, there is a lot to be said for how we might build this into the vision of the new Chinese eco-mega-city.

If one applies the filter of ‘Perceptions of Prosperity’ over the question of how we reconcile cultural tourism and the rise of the eco megacity, we should simply look at how the most mature western liberal democracies view ‘having it all’.
It would reveal that one of the final steps to the peak of prosperous living and being is the one that takes you into ‘a rural retreat’ – having a place in the country – a cottage, house, farm or barn.
It is seen as the ultimate pressure valve for the modern sophisticated urban player – an escape to something purer and simpler; connected back to the land and the hands that formed it.
For many it is vicarious – many do not actually engage in the ‘hands-on crafts and tending of their property and the land that surrounds it’ even though it has been proven that undertaking these pursuits leads to a greater sense of fulfillment and superior mental health. They’re simply buying ‘the idea’ of it.
But to actually rebuild the bridge back to the rural culture of China could be of enormous social value in regards to a rediscovered and sustained sense of self – though some large negative perceptions and behaviours might need to be accounted for and changed first of all.

To some experts this idea of a return to ‘doing things with one’s hands ‘ – artisan and manual labour; craft works and hobbying’ sits at the peak of the Struggling, Surviving, Thriving, Being pyramid – as a supreme demonstration of ‘Being’, as opposed to near the bottom just above ‘Surviving’.

Given the recent emergent journey up and away from poorer rural roots of many of the new emerging Chinese middle classes, this would probably seem nonsensical or counter-intuitive – just going backwards.
But as has been born out in the western liberal democracies with quite sophisticated social models and concepts of prosperity and success, if one replaces the material striving and existence framework with one predicated on a ‘pursuit of sustainable well- being, balance and harmony’, a new world is revealed. It becomes part of the rupture repair strategy.

In many mature societies, especially those that have moved the furthest away from their original rural agricultural roots post the industrial revolution, it has been proven that hobbies, jobs and professions where ones manual actions are directly linked to having an effect in the physical world – an structural creation or improvement, a communal good, the creation of or maintenance of a personal chattel or machine, an improvement to the immediate landscape or environment – offer exceptional health giving properties and are a source of improved mental well-being and ultimately have a positive effect on people’s perceived sense of personal happiness.

In fact even in the more structured undertaking of civic politics and citizenship, the ability to act on something, directly attributing cause and effect to the person undertaking the action has been proven as a direct producer of ‘happiness’ – as born out in the Swiss cantons that rated highest in one of the global Happiness surveys – their ‘happiness’ rating seemingly attributed to each civic individual’s ability to vote in such a way as to have direct and tangible effect on the quality and progress of their own life and that of the community around them.

So, though I am NOT suggesting that every one need return to their roots and start taking up pot turning and weaving, I do feel that building a supporting environment or infrastructure into the city plan that allows people to ‘reconnect’ with the primal humanities contained in this ‘belonging’ in nature and environment is a good thing – and to that end a halo of eco lodges around as city as an inextricable part of the enjoyment of that city would make supreme sense.

If this outlying landscape was populated by eco-lodges that created an urban escape – one of many different shades – developed as an integral part of a sustainable more balanced living strategy – an inextricable aspect of the urban ebb and flow, maintained by the city as a part of the infrastructure, that would truly be cohesive planning at work. To create a ring fence of rural Eco lodges that any and every inhabitant of those cities could go and use, to escape and reconnect with the old rural cultures just for even a short while would be an amazing embrace of what we know know to be a silent truth about pursuit of happiness – and it would be far closer to the burgeoning 21sts Century Confucian ideal of Social harmony that the central party espouses.

One could also build into the city infrastructure a collection of what could best be referred to as ‘Barn Raisings’ (as a reference to the scene in the movie ‘Witness’ where the Amish community are shown ‘coming together’ to build a barn for a farmer as an exercise of community, brotherhood and social benevolence) – opportunities for communities to come together to put together, arrange, enjoy, expand, build or create something of direct value and enjoyment or utility to them – they could be used as social cohesion projects – one in every neighbourhood – large, communal ways of introducing and stitching together people who may have been drawn together from distant and disparate places

Big Ideas & Small Wonders

One particular thing that we have witnessed as a fall out from the recessions that have struck the western democracies recently is the transient and fluid nature of commercial real estate on the high street as well as in industrial areas.
I focus on the high streets though as they have the most social and communal traction and impact on the broader sense of well-being and as to whether a community is thriving or not.

Many high streets now have many shops that have been without a fixed proprietor for some years – the shops changing hands or being passed on either as a matter of short lettings or as what have become know here as pop up shops.
Over the last 6-8 years these have gone from being very vogue and ‘fashionable’ – a bit edgy and anarchic – to being quite regular spaces of energy and fresh drama on otherwise quite stagnant high streets.

So what if we chose to fix these dynamic moving feasts of retail joy into the new infrastructure of the new eco megacity?
What if we set aside a street of small shops and spaces, ready to trade, with fluid transactional soft and hardware built into each that each resident trader can be registered to use for the period of time that they are there.

What is we created a space populated by a wondrous fluid shifting sand of different small scale boutique cottage industries – of designers, tradespeople, artisans, local hobbyists, in fact anyone with a small volume of materials or products or wares that they wish to exhibit and sell. All you would have to do is register and take your slot. The simple fundamental idea of creating small islands and markets of maker crafts culture and innovations scattered through out the city that are open to any citizen who wishes to try their arm at being entrepreneurial would be a wonderful human sized way of breaking the homogenized tendencies of large urban living centres and creating a new quiet revolution in innovative thinking – but in such a way that it is the civic society that is enabling its own to act upon their skills talents and whims in a way that is productive and positive for everyone from the neighbourhood to the city as a whole.

Digital Glue

The life-changing role of social networks and digital enablement in humanizing cities of an ever-grander scale is critical and absolute. Every eco mega-city must be enabled for people to connect immediately and anywhere. This lies beyond putting up cafes and hot spots and creating the odd social network movement.

This is about the degree to which people can live out their digital lives enabled by the metropolis in which they live – as opposed to relying on the brands and businesses that populate that city to do it for them.

It is also to do with creating the platforms on which they can have their say and act directly on municipal and civic issues, questions and challenges that affect their daily lives.
Social Networks that create, stimulate and elevate a ‘listening’ and ‘acting upon’ culture are critical to engaged and communal environments flourishing and becoming self- sustaining.

That there should be an Open Innovation platform for every city yet to be planned and constructed; an open innovation platform focused on attracting, engaging innovative minds with potential solutions on everything from hi and clean tech and industrial innovation both radical and incremental to social programmes, care initiatives, and community ventures is critical given the scale and the different need states that need to be designed for.

The Open Innovation platform would be not only to harvest the best of local and national thinking and doing but also to create a high profile platform upon which to invite and build relationships with the private sector, where they might tender and where tranches of action and responsibility for the investment and involvement of the private sector in the infrastructure of the new city are presented in an open and transparent manner.

The possibilities that digital sharing living thinking and doing might bring to every aspect of a megacity’s potential both social and structural are only just beginning to be explored and embraced. Watch this space.

Take A Different Path. & Look Up

One last thought in this top note is about things I have noticed over many years, while spending a lot of time in various cities.
One of the ways in which to create social cohesion and engagement is to compel people to perhaps step out of the rigid conformity of their routine – how they journey through the city in which they live and work.

People fix themselves into commutes that are particular and for the most part forensic demonstrations of getting from A to B.
Most urban inhabitants have developed a hypersensitive modus that they apply to every journey..

This tends to lead eventually to a heads-down approach to city living much in the vein of the old New Yorker adage of Look Down Keep Moving.
Although this extreme developed from the time where the streets of New York were a lot less friendly than their post zero-tolerance selves and avoiding people’s gaze just in case was always a good thing, there is a universal truth in that people existing under the auspices of urban pressure cooker living do tend eventually to just put their heads down and get on.

But this creates a downward spiritual pressure on the individual – as they move into ever greater and more reductive processes and spaces of being and action. It creates an urban claustrophobia that is hard to shake and ultimately joyless.

I would contend that one of the greatest challenges to the social health of any eco megacity will be the city’s ability to mitigate or almost eradicate this urban trait – by using their rare opportunity to create as many ways as possible to stop it developing in the first place.

One suggestion if that we develop a travel and transport infrastructure that allows people to ‘take a different path’ to the same destination – getting some different perspectives and taking in different surroundings on the way.
Developing an arterial system that combines pedestrian, bus, tram, monorail, cycle, scooter and car ways in such a way as to allow commuters even at their most time critical to take a different route would create breathing space in the urban ebb and flow – a far greater sense of balance and an opening out of personal perspectives.

I also believe that in creating the opportunity to gently raise people or enabling people to raise themselves out of a sometimes crushing routine helps them to connect and engage with people they might not otherwise have meet or with experiences they might not otherwise ever enjoy – and that is about the earlier point of making transparency and openness an integral ‘living’ part of the city.

If one wants to see this demonstrated first hand get street level in a city where the normal infrastructure of travel is ruptured, stunted, closed, redirected or unsettled by either weather, a national or local event or industrial action.
Initially it is just a city full of exasperated individuals everywhere – anxiety and annoyance are rife. This is simply the immediate emotional reaction to enforced change, the frustration of having no choice in the matter of having to change your routine.

But once the rupture has set in, after a few days, the choice issue dissipates, and you start to see an underlying ‘lift’ in people, small moments or camaraderie, and people beginning to enjoy different aspects and attributes of a city they otherwise would never see.

Imagine if we could build that choice – and the citizens ability to do that – into the everyday travel infrastructure of a city – the ability to ‘take a different path’ and ‘look up’. That would be truly amazing.

Deep Breath

And perhaps in all of these things we could see an eco megacity built upon ore than exceptional carbon modeling, energy use, waste management, sustainable building materials, utility lifecycle planning and infrastructure efficiencies.

We would have a very singular and particular one built to house the new vision of Chinese prosperity – inclusive, interwoven, built around an exceptional ebb and flow of human energy, new dreams built upon old wisdoms, upon urban and rural integration, generations reconnected for everything China is yet to be and yet to do. 

NOTE: China Dream is an initiative designed to reshape a more enduring and resilient concept of prosperity. Developed by Peggy Liu founder of JUCCCE, an NGO, the China Dream is committed to changing the path of Chinese consumption and living for good. 

Photo: Little People Project by Slinkachu

 

 

Man vs. Breakfast & A New American Dream-like-Breakfast-Burrito-thing-kinda.

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Bacon, Bagel & Lox, Breakfast, Burrito, Celebrity, China Dream, Christ In Concrete, Cornbread, Dr Suess, Dream In A Box, fast Food, Food As Fuel, Grapes Of Wrath, Grits, Ham, Hollywood, Identity, Immigrant nation, industrial farming, Jerry Springer, Midwest Farmers, Motor City, Native Americans, New York, Occidental College, Over Easy, Peggy Liu, people Powered Behaviour Change, Pietro Donato, Reframing the Language of Sustainability, Reimagining Prosperity, Route 66, Sam I Am, Sausage patties, Skyscrapers, Steak & Eggs, Steinbeck, Sunny Side Up, TEDx, the American Dream, The Great American Song&StoryBook, The Great Depression, The US Constitution, water stewardship

sir grapefellow

Someone was going to do it. Someone was always going to think it was a good idea to eventually bite the bullet and look the

frickinfrackinlipsmackinallbeefpattyonasesameseed

sunnysideupfried4wheeldriveovenbakedstuffedcrust

justlovinitgasandoilmeupandputmytrash

intheringerjerryspringer                                                                                      

beast of the all consuming American Dream in the eye and say Whoa buddy! No buddy. The time’s they are a changin’.

Someone was always going to go to the dark heart of what has got us all junked up on toxic fantasies of infinite everything and stick a sign on its door that simply says ‘obsolete’.

On March 29th 2014, Peggy Liu of JUCCCE and a fellowship of like minds found themselves doing just that at TEDx Occidental. They had an inaugural ‘You are Here!’moment. A first step towards pouring some cool crystal waters on the seemingly unquenchable fires of the old American Dream.

Peggy gave a deeply-felt entreat for why we might ever choose to set about re-imagining something as unwieldy as the American concept of Prosperity. It’s not just a big challenge. I’d say more planet-sized and very very defensive, aggressive and grumpy.

I understand the power of the ambition and how it could shift more paradigms towards improved human existence than we could reasonably count. But the biggest thing for me is – Where the hell would we begin?

Where do we start the journey to a more enduring aspiration for every American? Especially given how entrenched, sprawling and absolutist the old Dream has become and how resilient its ability to seduce still is.

Where do we even begin in unpacking the old one to get to the new? The Constitution? Hollywood? Skyscrapers? Motor City? Fast Food? Celebrity? Route 66? The great American Song book? Jerry Springer’s underwear drawer? the NRA?

The first stage of the Dream in a Box methodology that I developed with Peggy imagines that you will need to include all of them – the more diverse the collection of mindsets, values beliefs, ambitions, truths, myths, inspirations and provocations the better. The Frame The Dream stage actively encourages them.

The Frame The Dream stage endeavours to explore and curate the most diverse cultural levers – beliefs, insights, idioms, visualisations and language – in such a way as to identify some themes or ideas – something human and everyday – that might help can-open the topic in a productive creative and constructive manner. Because you’re going to need a super simple ‘something’ – a word, a thing, a ritual, a truth, an insight, a moment –  that helps everyone to make a very complex thing simple and engaging.

And given that the American Dream sprawls across a collision of cultures, tribes, myths, histories, lifestyles and beliefs all wrapped in a star spangled constitution, it needs to be a ‘something’ that is both broadly representative and quite singular at the same time.

Your ‘something’ will need to be representative of what is, informative of what can be, and illustrative and what might be.

Furthermore, the Dream In A Box methodology is constructed for and committed to making sure that whatever that ‘something’ might be, that it is culturally rooted and relevant – inextricable from the society it is supposed to grow out of.

So lets just cat’s paw around what that might demand of the ‘something’ that might give us a starting point in this journey.

Well, we’d need a ‘something’ that sits at the heart of every American movie, myth and icon, written into the Great American Songbook; something that builds skyscrapers; with its toes in the red-earth of the native and its fingers touching the craters on the Moon; something that stands as an inalienable right of every American and sits at the heart of the great American pioneering spirit would be great; something that feeds the soul and raises a barn; tells you you’re Home and reassures you when you’re away. And hell while we’re at it let’s expect that it has to be a something that is as much of the Corn Belt as it is of the Montana Mountaineer, New England Fisherman and the Mexican ranch worker. It’s got to be quick slow big small light n heavy. As happy on the front seat of the Caddy as it is on the Stoop.

If it is to help inspire the beginnings of re-imagination and the multiple strands that would need to fall out of that, the ‘something’ needs to be multi-talented – a prop, a firework a lever and a pulley. It has to inspire as much as it deconstructs, elevate to the same degree that it mines, and unify as much as divides.

What’s more, to do that authentically and with meaning it has to have an authentic people-powered everyday language of its own; authentically written through the cultural vernacular of the tribes and lives we are trying to inspire. It must enable us to mine insights; and help us ask the right questions by being something that people talk of without ‘side’.

Most importantly the ‘something’ must come from a happy place – be something that people engage with easily and on which they will happily venture an reasoned opinion.

It has to be something people look forwards to, love, fetishise, pore over, chill with, feel protective of, and loyal to; a powerful signature of their identity and a seamless pillar in their everyday

Only a ‘something’ like that will allow us to exit the Glass Half empty world of mitigation and reduction and allows us to enter the Glass half full world of celebration and aspiration.

So no pressure then.

With all of that in mind, my starter for ten against that small list of needs based criteria: my small suggestion for the room.

Re-imagining The Great American Breakfast

The Breakfast of champions – the Great American Breakfast – legendary output of every diner from Montana to New Mexico and Mississippi, via NYC to LA and Chicago and back.

Movies are written around it. Pictures painted of it. Love is made both before it and after it. Lives complete themselves through it. What fuels the Dream? Oil? Wheat? Gold? Nickel? Gas? Perhaps. Breakfast? Always.

Hash browns, three eggs sunny side up or over easy. Sausage patties. Hickory smoked bacon, grits, cornbread, beans, breakfast burrito, Bagel Lox and cheese, 3 egg omelette, steak and eggs. The list is endless. And it comes fast and it comes big. All in or on the side. This is the corner stone of the old pioneer/engineer/farmer America.

Railways may well have been built upon the idea that a businessman in Chicago could eat a fresh caught Maine Lobster for supper in the dining carriage on his way to San Francisco!! But the railways were forged around the great American breakfast (with an Irish & Chinese twist to be fair).

Big dreams are built on big breakfasts in the land of plenty. Scrawny beaten underfed workers don’t build dreams.

So I say if we’re going to re-imagine the American Dream and build a new one – lets start with the right breakfast.

If we’re going to show how a glass-half-full approach allows us to re-imagine something people will turn towards as opposed to away from – lets use the great American breakfast as an illustration of how we move from hectoring and depressing mitigation strategies of more sustainable living plans – relentlessly obsessing on energy and emission reduction, recycle reuse mantras, calorific intake and portion control – to one of celebration.

We love the Great American Breakfast as the foundation on which American Dreams are built. Every great American breakfast type was built and fit for calorific contextual and cultural purpose. It is deeply etched with physiological and psychological truths.

In sustainability, CSR and responsible living terms the breakfast is a road that can lead us to everything – diet; wellbeing; performance; healthcare; social cohesion; myths and rituals; provenance; water stewardship; energy consumption; land crop and livestock management; logistics; pulp, paper & card packaging; pretty much everything.

We could potentially use the popular people-powered culture of the great American breakfast to start to unpack the old dream to shape a new one based around a more enduring aspiration built of people sized values, not corporate sized imperatives. We could start to see that Green Eggs & ham Sam I Am is a far more productive and sociable lever to get everyday people into talking nutrition, ethics, provenance, traceability, consumer bullying, and the caprices of 6-foot tall Cat In a rather special hat and its role in the Great American Child’s dietary intake!

Let’s use its role in the American Dream to frame the American Breakfast as a fluid concept rooted at the very heart of an individuals concept of Prosperity

Use smart savvy storytelling to go on a journey – show why the vast expanse and sometimes behemoth portions sizes of the American breakfast have evolved; its scale and purpose fuelled both by the original immigrant poor seeking the world where they would never put an empty plate in front of their child or scratch another breakfast again – like the Italian Immigrant Construction workers building the skyscrapers of New York in Pietro Donato’s book, Christ In Concrete. Or the transient and vagrant farming poor of the Midwest walking through the flatlands of the Great depression and the pages of The Grapes Of Wrath. Lets celebrate those reasons for being, not throw stones at them.

Lets look at the breakfast culture of the German and Dutch farmers and their substantial daily foundations of steak cheese and eggs, The lox and cheese of the New York Jewish disapora and the Bear Claw pastry commute. let’s get us some of that Southern grits soul of a Cat On A Hot Breakfast Roll Baking Tin Roof and the sleepy spice of a barrio breakfast burrito signorito.

Why?

Because the Great American Breakfast could be the doorway into scaling the conversation – through stimulating the myths and storytelling of individuals and their relationships with their breakfast.

We can introduce the joy of collaborating across the social networks to co-create the Great American Breakfast of the 21st Century – what is it made up of? Who’s represented in there? Is their a hybrid? How do we socialize around it? Use it as a lever to open up the deeper insights of being belonging and thriving.

In scoping a new model for what the great American people need right now, for how they live and work – framed in terms of dietary needs (energy/nutrition/format), wellbeing, balance, speed of life, community and identity – we can start to engage in conversations around calorific intake, obesity, balanced diet, fuel vs. flavor, provenance, quality as a proxy for resilience, and the role of tribes and communities in reshaping the new dream of prosperity without starting with the don’t do this eat less of that, trash fewer of these, torch less of those and stop frackin that speech.

A chat about the Great American Breakfast as a metaphor for the joy, wellbeing, balance and thriving ecosystem of interrelatedness and mutuual respect of all things good at the heart of the New American Dream just might Switch them on and not turn them off.

DISCUSS (over breakfast perhaps?)

 

 

Dodgy Dumplings, Celebrity Mystery Shopper & a new food culture revolution.

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

Behaviour Change, China, China Dream, Cultural Revolution, Dumplings, F&B Supply Chain Management, Food Hygiene, Food provenance, H7N9 bird flu virus, JUCCCE, Mystery Shopper, New Ways To Eat, Peggy Liu, Pigs In The Horse Meat, Risk Mitigation, Smarter Lighter Living, Xi Jingping

Image

Having listened on many occasions to Peggy Liu (my partner in all things Dream In A Box and the powerhouse behind The China Dream) speak on the worrying nature of diet and the often questionable quality and provenance of food sold in some Chinese eateries, a small article in The Economist* last week made my heart give a little (non-ischaemic) jump.

Not only did the article report on the feel-good factor of a people-powered ‘first’: that of the president of the People’s Republic turning up unannounced in a local Beijing eatery. it may also potentially provide a playful answer to the huge challenges around regulating for better food and restaurant hygiene in China.

And that answer is? The Mystery Shopper. The one time secret-police of the Sales Promotion industry and their FMCG clients in the late ‘70s and ‘80s could just hold the key – especially if that Mystery Shopper is none other than Xi Jingping

That is an opportunity for a celebrity endorsement you wouldn’t want to screw up. A gift horse one would wish to neither look in the mouth nor find in one’s noodle soup.

The chance that you might still be peddling some old bits of shoe in batter just at the moment the esteemed leader enters your establishment would leave you with more than just Foo Yung egg slice on your face and a few apologies to make.

it would leave purveyors of such culinary delights as slow roasted ‘plucked floating from river’ foul in much the same circumstance as they found the bird in question; quite dead in the water – commercially, legally and personally. The loss of face that would accompany such an unmasking would be immeasurable in a culture that holds honour in such great esteem.

Whether the possibility of it would be enough to dissuade the many sellers of the likes of steamed dumplings stuffed with (used) newspaper soaked in a rather tasty rice vinegar; and pork buns filled with abstract species of every kind other than the porcine variety is uncertain.

But I imagine they would do more than think twice about serving up these mutant delicacies if they feared that Mr Xi might turn up in their lunch time queue unannounced any time soon.

Equally, the reverse impacts along their (loosely phrased) ‘supply chains’ would be of benefit to everyone in terms of eating experiences, food hygiene and a more regulated and heavily scrutinised food industry and culture generally.

To instil a blanket terror in every dodgy dumpling merchant would in fairness require little of the leader. He only need turn up once or twice in the four corners of the Republic: and ensure that the media cover following each appearance was massive.  After that he could simply hire 20 or so unnamed Look-a-likes who could pop up randomly in distant eateries while Xingping remained safely tucked away doing slightly more important things like running China.

There is also something quite apropos about a method once reserved for checking up on whether CTN owners, grocers and Wholesalers had put up snack and soft drink sales promotional literature potentially revolutionising food culture at a mass scale in such a high-profile culture.

That mystery Shopper could from such low beginnings rise to the challenge of solving one of the greatest food crimes ever knowingly undertaken by so few against so many, would indeed constitute a sublime example of conceptual social mobility in a culture once renowned for championing the rise of great leaders from humble beginnings.

So, here’s to the inception of Chinese Celebrity Mystery Shopper and a food revolution.

JUCCCE China Dream FOOTNOTE:

  • CLEAN & SERENE – To activate safe food, JUCCCE is working with Ecolab, a company that works in restaurant hygiene and clean water supply, and a local design firm called Impact Group to publish and distribute a guide for “Top 10 tips for Safe and Healthy Restaurants”.
  • YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT – created a New Way to Eat program – melds new nutritional guidelines with low impact foods – convening senior global coalition of nutritionalists and sustainable agricultural experts to develop new guidelines – create school curriculum in YK Pao and YCIS schools, and tasty, sustainable and nutritious school meals with Eurest.
  • JUCCE are developing a NWTE programme with WEFer David Agus (author of “End of Illness”) that is “Good for you, Good for the planet”.

* Original Economist Article – A New Flavour. Xi Jingping gets down with the people.

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