Fearless Cities : Sheffield

1st - 3rd November 24

This was a really interesting event, very well attended with lots of people doing fantastic work! The venue was very light (in most rooms) and spacious. The lecture theatre rooms rather off-putting as they tended (in the sessions we attended in them) to encourage a 'speaking from the front', rather than a more participatory style of workshop. Does that reflect the top-down nature of learning and so much else in our culture? There felt to be an emphasis on the (very valuable) learning from one another rather than strategising together, which we would have appreciated - though that may have been present in the many sessions we didn't attend!

We learned two new processes at this event (well Eva adapted one and Lachlan from Humanity Project adapted another!):

• When the wind blows - adapted for specific themes. 

When the Wind Blows is an icebreaker game where one person stands in the middle of a seated circle and reveals a fact about themselves, whereupon, everyone in the circle for whom that is also true needs to move from their seat and try to find another one. The person in the middle is also trying to find a seat, which means that either they (if unsuccessful) or someone who was seated will end up with no seat and they have to take their place in the middle, revealing a new fact. People are free to reveal trivial or important things about themselves, so this game invites reflection on how much we share and how much we hide when we’re in groups. In the ‘How to Build Autonomous Municipal Power’ session, Eva was speaking on power and ended up holding small circles with someone who was working on financial sharing, so we adapted this game, asking people to reveal something about their relationship with power or money - it was very interesting and entertaining.

• An adapted goldfish bowl process for feedback sessions:

Lachlan adapted the goldfish bowl to support the feedback process from small group work. This worked MUCH better than the usual reading out from the flipchart list of notes from the session. He sat in the central circle with two people from a group and a spare chair that anyone else could join, and asked them not to read from the notes, but to say something that had stood out to them. This was engaging and useful, where reading from notes rarely is. The feedback from Eva’s session on power (again!) where she had presented a scenario of the local assembly being asked to take over from the council that had declared bankruptcy. It had been an interesting conversation, but the two people who came out to speak about it had been the least happy with it. One was a city councillor who couldn’t get past the fact that this scenario would never happen - there are set policies for what happens if a council goes bankrupt and it would never be passed on to an assembly. So it sounded like this was going to be the narrative for the session. Then someone else from the group took the empty seat and helpfully pointed out the irony of a group trying to look at power through an imaginary scenario, being effectively disempowered by someone in a position of mainstream power. It was a great save and also a really interesting point that would have been lost if we’d used a different format to report back.

Here are a few notes from some of the other sessions we attended.

How to Run a Democratic Assembly (assembly)

This was an interesting session, but the numbers and size of the room meant that some people did a lot of talking and many did none. It might have been good to have planned some more small group work alongside the input sections. The session planning was done via a document, which meant that I hadn't met any of the other presenters before. In contrast, in the session I did with Assemble and co, I met my co-facilitators beforehand which meant that we co-developed the session much more, which I think led to more engaging results. Nonetheless, it was a really interesting conversation.

Feministization of Politics (Workshop)

I was a participant in this workshop which was well run and engaging - I specially enjoyed lots of small group work and the opportunity to talk to others who were there. There was a real issue with many people not being able to hear the facilitators (and some participants) because we were talking in such a large room, which meant I disengaged at some points.

How to build autonomous municipal power (assembly)

I appreciated the decision to split the participants up into groups and have the presenters move round them - it felt like quite an engaging format and enabled me to deliver the power part as a game, which I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I'm not sure how much people felt they learned from that approach (it would have been ideal to have time to draw learnings and/or reflections out - but - timing!!), but it was engaging, different and fun!