Be the Change in Cambridge are holding a community event on Saturday 14th March, 2015. This is an opportunity to help ‘…facilitate the creation of ideas and bring the city together to make Cambridge greater than the sum of its parts‘.
Anglia Ruskin University East Road CB1 1PT Cambridge United Kingdom Saturday, March 14, 2015 from 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM (GMT)
This short video below helps explain their mission.
‘This is a project to bring Cambridge’s many communities together to do more than just talk about our city’s future, but to decide what shared actions to take in order to shape it
We’re particularly encouraging young people – in particular those in further education – to take part. This is our response to research showing 18-24 year olds are least likely to vote as an age-cohort.
We’ll be asking everyone to commit to either a one-off small action, or a small behaviour change as a result of taking part. If dozens of us do that, our impact could be greater than the sum of our parts!’
If you are in the city on Saturday, March 14th this is a great opportunity to get along to Anglia Ruskin and contribute to the debate, to the generation of ideas and to the creation of community change.
See you there?
If you are a Fellow developing or leading a community change event or project you can send copy, links and editorial contributions to the team at conversationsEAST.
We’ll be happy to feature your work, twitter our followers and generally spread the word.
If formally invited along, we’ll write a review and supporting article too. Tell us at editor (at) conversationseast.org. or use the drop down ‘contact us’ box on any of our web pages.
Saturday 28th February, 2015 – There is a great day of volunteering opportunities for the Fellowship in Cambridge this weekend. Visit The Guildhall and see!
Members of the regional Fellowship will be abroad, supporting 80 Cambridge based organisations who are ‘…working to create positive social and environmental change through volunteering‘.
‘The aims of the fair are to get more people involved in volunteering, bring together organisations with shared aims and to break down the town/gown divide by opening the event up to students and locals alike. Anyone and everyone in Cambridge is welcome to attend!’ The Cambridge Hub
This is a great event that offers many opportunities for Fellows, anybody in fact, to seek out and engage with a broad range of organisations in Cambridge.
Volunteer and donate time and your specialist knowledge to any one of these great organisations. If you are a Fellow in Cambridge, or its hinterland, here is the event to start your journey with a new community.
By supporting The Hub, you are also helping students at Cambridge support and make a contribution to communities, helping them tackle their social and environmental issues. Working in a collaborative and supportive way. You can see the story of The Hub here.
Image credit: Painting for the community – picture courtesy of The Cambridge Hub.
As part of the Fellow led Chelmsford Remembers Project there is an upcoming joint meeting of RSA Chelmsford and The Civic Society at Anglia Ruskin University , Chelmsford.
Date: Monday 9th February, 2015 – 5.45pm for 6.00pm start
Venue: Room 001, The Sawyer Building, Anglia Ruskin University.
We are very pleased to announce that our guest speakers for the event will be Air Vice Marshall Ray Lock CBE, who is Chief Executive of the Forces in Mind Trust(FiMT) and Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes from the Veterans and Families Institute at Anglia Ruskin University.
This event, as part of Chelmsford Remembers, links the centenary commemorations of the First World War to the effects of deployment to war zones today. Other items include…
Final report on the Ideas Festival 2014 (IF2014) and the initial consultations on 2015. IF2015 will run from the 18th October 2015 to 1st November inclusive.
Update on negotiations on future uses for the Hall Street Marconi Factory.
Notifications on upcoming Chelmsford Remembers event with Dr. Paul Rusiecki author of The Impact of Catastrophe – The First World War.
If you are able to attend, do please confirm with Malcolm Noble – (mnoble3211 at yahoo.com), or use our ‘contact us’ panel above and send Malcolm a message directly from this web page.
The Fellow led RSA Cambridge Network are offering their support to the Abbey People community project.
This is a call to action for new volunteers from the Fellowship in the East of England and beyond.
Abbey People is a community group working to support residents in the Abbey Ward , located in the east of Cambridge City. This is a dynamic, energetic and committed community that are responding to a need for change in community resources, the environment and in their economic landscape too. Can you help?
This great short film, made by Hilary Cox for Abbey People, conveys the energy and enthusiasm of the community. (…and some stirring and engaging piano playing too…Ed.)
The group are currently looking for Trustees and other support for their governance and project development…
View, print or download this information and contacts here…pdf version
“…Trustee roles
We have bi-monthly Trustee meetings, usually on a Monday evening. In addition to meetings Trustees contribute their skills to different aspects of our work e.g. events, projects, consultation.
Treasurer – We are looking for someone with the financial skill and experience to become our Treasurer. We anticipate this role will take approx. 5 hours per month, including meetings.
Trustee – Someone who is keen to support our aims in the Abbey ward and who has skills, time and experience to contribute. We would be interested to hear from anyone with an interest in developing a particular area of work e.g. supporting Older People, Improving our Environment
Supporting roles
We are a young community group with ambition. To help us fulfil our potential we would appreciate support from people with expertise and time to offer in these areas
• Administrative support – including taking minutes, collating information
• Book-keeper ideally a volunteer, but will consider small remuneration. To maintain the accounts using Quick Books (training can be provided) ensuring payments are made, correct recording, running payroll monthly, dealing with HMRC, liaising with the Treasurer. Approx 8 hours pcm
• Marketing and Communications – including developing our communications strategy and use of social media
• Volunteer Coordination – including recruitment, development and retention…”
As a Fellow, wherever you are in the world, the power of your imagination and the internet can help you to help the people of Abbey with their project aims.
To get connected you can download the Abbey People notice above. Or you can securely send your contact details, immediately below, to conversationsEAST and we’ll speedily forward them to Stuart, Wendy or Sam.
Ipswich Arts Centre in association with Ipswich Historic Churches Trust and Re-Create are to establish a new Ipswich Arts Centre at St Clement Church.
In early November there will be an evening of talks, discussion, music and refreshment to celebrate the rebirth of St Clement as a new contemporary arts venue forming a bridge between the waterfront development and the town centre.
“The aim is to create a contemporary arts centre which will host national and international acclaimed acts in a diverse range of media including music, visual arts, performance, film and theatre. It will complement and support Ipswich’s existing cultural offer, placing Ipswich firmly on the regional and national cultural map.
The rebirth of St Clement as a contemporary arts centre aims to restore this beautiful 14th Century building, which provides a natural space for creative expression, where people can congregate and share in this experience”.
The opening of a new Arts centre in any community is a red letter day. The impending work at St. Clement is set in a long tradition of utilising redundant church property as theatres, community centres and libraries.
The creation of a new, full mix Arts Centre to add to the cultural context of Ipswich and East Anglia as a whole is very exciting indeed.
The project has already attracted media attention and has been featured on BBC news, The Stage and East Anglian Daily Times.
To discover more information about this new Centre and the role that UCS in Ipswich will play see…
Today sees the launch of a new RSA report, generously sponsored and in collaboration with British Land – Socially productive places – Learning from what works: lessons from British Land – born out of an earlier RSA conference.
Social productivity is the additional social value that can be created through better relationships between citizens, society, business and public services…
The report is a long letter to developers, communities and planners, essentially pleading the case that ‘…long term property value is driven by the long term economic relevance of an asset’.
A socially productive place would build community capacity to benefit from and drive growth, and increase resilience to shocks and give an ability to adapt to new circumstances. This is not a new idea. The evidence in the report tracks community development progressive initiatives from early EU regional funding to the New Deal for Communities.
What is new, perhaps, is the tight focus on new skill acquisition by all partners and a fresh focus on method and delivery for impact. The same refocus is taking place in the community finance sector, where the ‘impact investor’ and how outcomes are mapped and delivered is a priority for funders, project planners and community partnerships. The report exercises this viewpoint well.
(As an example of this new social finance mode of delivery see how Social Enterprise East Midlands worked in collaboration with Big Society Capital to deliver an informative and effective mapping session for politicians, social bankers and financial intermediaries in this new sector. See more here…Ed.).
The RSA Report also shows how private capital is developing both it’s land bank and its ideas with impact in mind. The report references brands such as Asda ‘... adopting a ‘community venturing’ approach, forming partnerships with charities and public services‘.
Discover more about shopping for shared value and community venturing in a recent edition of Matthew Taylor’s blog – read more here.
Planning should be thought of as a front-line service.
The success of a development should be judged by its impact on those who use it and its ability to contribute to a broader set of social and economic outcomes, the report declares. Building high quality public realm is expensive, but, says the report, privatising public space is not the answer.
Accessible public realm is an important feature of social productivity places – places designed to support social and economic connectivity. When built, the people must come.
To achieve the above, then there are a number of often new issues to wrangle with for key players in the development process. Investing in community relationships, by any mature, established corporate entitity requires agility and commitment. The report focuses on three key elements…
Successful community investment takes time and effort by developers, including long term consistent representation, engagement by senior executives and dedicated staff.
Local political support is essential, site specific planning frameworks are not.
The results for developers can be profitable as quality of public realm drives rents, and local consent for density allows greater floorspace yield from a site.
The Cambridge sub-region:
One of our own sub-regional cities features in the report too. Cambridge, which quietly broke out of green-belt constraints in the 1990’s, created new communities and growth areas. These well designed and built communites, although having offered an increase in take up of local services were less successful, the report indicates, in increasing employment in those new communities. They have, however, increased pressure on transport links.
As universities become ever increasing drivers of economic development, then local areas should increasingly consider graduate retention as an important part of their
social and economic development thinking, the report highlights. Working with both universities and developers to pursue this goal should be a strategic priority for the future. Certainly a key development driver for Cambridge, being the world class research nexus that it is.
Finally, the report gives readers examples of non-linear, non -traditional development models which utilise public spaces for community benefit in innovative ways.
One such featured is Incredible Edible – whose growth has been achieved by by-passing bureaucratic processes, ‘…which rely on a narrow account of how value is created and maintained’.
In summary, this is an important paper, which whilst containing no ravishing new insights or philosophy, should score very, very highly with the community development sector in the way that it brings together, in a new meld, a variety of distinct skill sets to map a new way forward for developers, planners, politicians and community groups.
You can still find the content of the original conference, and the papers presented by a list of distinguished speakers here, on The RSA web site.
Image: Albert Robida, 1882 – The Public Domain Review, 2014
A wonderful vision of city and cultural life, imagined in 1882. Even in the 21st century it is hard to contemplate leaving a cultural event in a city, stepping into your floating air carriage and drifting off home in ease and solitude.
Even after the most vigorous Tannhauser at the Royal Opera House, a trip on the Northern Line to return to the solace of High Barnet bears no comparison.
We have not given up on the city yet, though.
Our recent Fellows Annual dinner in the East of England was held in the surroundings of Emmanuel College in Cambridge. Dating from 1584, the original Dominican Priory has been embraced by later buildings, yet Fellows were able to hear an entertaining and informative after dinner talk by Matt Lane, Head of the Royal Opera House site at Thurrock, the Bob and Tamar Manoukian Production Workshop, where ROH productions are built and delivered to cities.
The conversation also ranged across the occasion of the region’s forthcoming conference at the University of East Anglia. The programme for which includes Norwich Fellows session on Empowering Invisible Norwich and another on What is a Learning City? So although we will not arrive by hover car, the idea of the city will continue to echo.
Extending the city:
Writing just before the start of this century Peter Hall, in his book Cities in Civilisation – Culture, Innovation and Urban Order ( Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1998) was minded that…
At the turning point between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, a new kind of economy is coming into being, and a new kind of society, and a new kind of city: some would say no city at all, the end of the city as we know it, but they will doubtless prove wrong…
Hall goes on to develop his argument about societal change and stresses the enormous impact of technology on urban dwellers across the globe. This is true, but the forecasts of the end of the city have proved somewhat premature.
In fact, the building, or extending of cities, continues to be a hot political issue. For the forthcoming report by Sir Michael Lyons there is an indication that he will recommend that cities should be allowed to expand at their edges, a return to the New Town concept perhaps. With councils free to borrow and invest in house building and bringing reform of land release for house building to the table.
This latter point outlines how strong the the High Victorian concept of urban spread as an entirely bad thing remains. Surely the point is what sort of urban extension or city growth you achieve. We must not build urban ‘rookeries‘, or blanket ‘Bedford Brick‘ box extensions across acres of green fields either, we would argue.
Land release for social housing or city corporation development will be a thorny issue for private landowners, what ever the political persuasion of the originating idea, we suspect. You can see this debate outlined in more detail in a recent article from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian here.
Farming the city:
Using existing infrastructure in conurbations for innovative purposes is immensely appealing. Using it to farm, to develop new urban and social businesses based on food, new flowers and green space cultivation is a great way to deliver new skills, better diets and employment into communities, we would argue at conversationsEAST.
Robida in 1882, or Hall in 1998, could not have imagined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MITCityFARM project.
“As part of the City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, we explore the technological, environmental, social and economic design of scalable systems capable of producing affordable and high quality food in the heart of our future cities”.
If you have an interest in this green aspect of the debate an on-line visit to MIT is worth it. The MITCityFARM team are working in three key areas.
Re-thinking the ‘grow it there, eat it here’ agenda
reviewing the ‘urban infrastructure facade’
developing global open access course-ware, to make knowledge about agriculture available to all.
In the East of England, the agricultural heartland of the UK, arguably, there must be Fellow’s projects that can be blended into delivery of vertical gardens, rooftop farms or the reclaiming of industrial and derelict sites for community owned small holdings or gardens? (Write to the Editor, let us know, we’ll do a feature…Ed.)
The edge of the city, in the city garden:
A blending of city growth concepts and urban farming/community greening agendas come together in the now, with the recent release of the short list for the Wolfson Economic Prize.
The Wolfson Prize team undertook research to see what sort of urban development was uppermost in people’s minds. The Garden City was by far the most popular ‘civic choice’ of growth mechanism. Simon Wolfson talks about the design choice in this short film below…
In conclusion, maybe the time is now right. We have innovative thinking on edge development, an energised architectural sector with modern materials and community sensibility, coinciding with increased interest in city farms and Garden Cities from the civitas.
You can see the original film on Vimeo here.
You can book your free ticket on-line at Eventbrite here.
