By Dan Phillips
The UK’s integrated national transport strategy asks the public to tell the Department for Transport how to improve our travel experiences and, for organisations, to share how transport systems could be better ‘joined up’ and how ‘data’ and ‘technology’ could improve our transport network. These questions rely on the idea that strategy can be developed through the magical combination of piecemeal and individual daily experiences combined with the power of innovative big data and technologies.
But what if the questions we ask – and the transport systems that we are trying to change – are not simply quantifiable and visible but controlled by human qualities and values instead? Systems thinkers, like Donella Meadows, have recognised that all human systems are built on foundations. Like an iceberg, these foundations are hidden from view, and more powerful than the material evidence of the system in action.
At the surface, we see parked cars, polluted and often congested roads and adverts for the comfort, freedom and speed of current and future vehicles. Just below the surface are the structures and feedback loops that shape our experiences – the policies, technologies and infrastructure that control the system’s behaviour. But deeper still lie the mental paradigms, values and beliefs where true system change begins.
“Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.” ― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer
Listening to Leeds
Our plan is not to simply ask people how to improve their current experiences or to adopt the latest data and technologies. Instead Infuze asks citizens in Leeds to take some risks and share what really moves them and how their philosophies, emotions and skills can help to shape their city and how we get around together.
So far, we have heard from over 450 people. This is well over one in a thousand households from across the city. Your values, knowledge, hopes and fears will help to shape a series of creative assemblies and neighbourhood activities. These will lead to the codesign of trials, transport and place-shaping events that could help Leeds become a city where people’s choices are designed by and with citizens, not simply for transport users and customer needs.
The way the infuze team is working is grounded in principles of inclusion, empathy, clarity and creativity. Citizens bring their diverse skills and imaginations to develop collaborative principles, missions and visions for the future of the city.
PEKEM: A framework for system change
Our creative assemblies build on new approaches to participatory democracy and use a novel approach to system design that we have called PEKEM. It’s not a badly spelt reference to a neighbourhood in south London but a framework that helps citizens explore Leed’s transport system from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
PEKEM stands for Philosophy, Emotions, Knowledge, Experience and Material Change. It offers a framework for embedding people’s insights into co-design methods and can even be implemented in agent-based computer models of people, transport and cities.
Listening to each other, learning together
Our philosophies capture our deeply held commitments and help to shape how we respond to the future both individually and through communities. They are informed by our parents and our experiences. In many ways, they represent our openness to different types of change. On a simple level, a city of competitive individuals will need a contrasting approach to a city of collaborative communities. And cities will have diverse values that need a patchwork approach that works for everyone.
Our emotions hold the keys to our willingness to act and capture a wide range of feelings from fear and resistance to optimism, joy and hope. They influence our readiness for action and are shaped by our social norms and our physical and media environments. Do we respond to environmental news with a sense of determination or deflation? Does sharing the number 16 bus from Armley to Moorside lead to a happy natter with your neighbour or leave you filled with unease and despair?
Our knowledge about transport choices and our awareness and understanding of benefits and risks associated with different futures affect our decision-making clarity. But do adverts and media bring confusion or comprehension? Perhaps the way we share and discuss the impacts of our choices needs a complete redesign too.
Our first round of creative assemblies will focus on these deeper hidden layers of motion and emotion. We hope that they will reveal not just the openness, willingness and decisiveness of Leeds citizens but also shape the principles and missions that will drive the second codesign session.
Imagining the future, making change that matters
Our second assembly asks citizens to redesign their future transport with these principles and missions at the heart of their thinking.
We’re going to work with everyone’s lived experiences not just to improve current ways of getting around. We’ll also imagine future journeys and streets that are built around their values, needs and aspirations. Our personal and household routines shape our perception of what’s needed. But design can help us to imagine more practical, inclusive and delightful futures too – especially when they are grounded in new knowledge and inspired by deep connections to our philosophies and feelings.
The final step in the PEKEM creative assembly asks citizens to think about their own and their community’s material agency. In a world where big data and market forces funnel our choices down narrow and often badly executed paths, we want to know how Leeds can really make change that matters. The changes that will be needed are not just physical infrastructure like cycle lanes and smart new technology but new relationships and partnerships as well as political, legal and economic transformation too. Without real agency, even willing people cannot change.
A Gift to Leeds
Leeds is growing but remains the largest city in Western Europe without a light-rail or metro. And, partly because of this, we drive over 4 billion miles every year. The social, environmental, spatial and financial costs and risks of continuing down this path are not easy to digest.
We’re reading your responses to our first call to action and will be sharing these back to you as a visual gift that shares a picture of who you are, where you live and what matters to you when you think about Leeds’ future and how you get around. It will include possible utopias and dystopias built around your hopes and fears and form a starting point for the creative assemblies and our wider work.
By listening to the hearts and minds of people in Leeds we believe that, together, we can create new perspectives on our future transport and unlock the systemic transformation that cities and citizens want and need.