I spent Thursday and Friday at the Creative Places and Spaces conference, where both imagination and Kool Aid flowed in roughly equal proportion. The theme was “Collaborative Cities.” When I left, I had no more idea of what that meant than when I showed up. Maybe that wasn’t the point.
To me, collaboration implies a coming-together of disparate energies and viewpoints; and, if we’re going to turn it into a capital-letter fetish object, the meausre of a “Collaborative” society would seem to relate to the initial distance between the participants, and the ability to identify and bridge these distances. Otherwise it’s just called “working together,” which is something you can really only avoid if you make an active effort these days.
There was, as expected, a preponderance of “social media” types, and my question for them remains the same as always: how did the telephone, the megaphone, even the soap box, never qualify as “social media?” The term as we use it often just seems to apply to tools used by those of us in certain privileged, technology-enabled social groups, and “collaboration” used in the same context seems, with some exceptions, to mean not so much a dissolving of barriers as an expansion of this particular caste in to government and Non-Profit circles, and them into it.
From where I sit, admittedly on the outside, it appears largely as the already upwardly-mobile strategizing ways to become horizontally mobile. I don’t think it’s even much of a stretch to make a limited analogy to mega-corporations dissolving national barriers in the name of “globalization” but functionally in the service of ecological destruction and class conflict.
Don’t misunderstand - a number of the folks and organizations in this nascent “Open” milieu (open source, open data, open cities, open government) have genuinely progressive goals and ideals, and even occasional designs on wealth-redistribution. But others just want to have fun, make money, and accelerate the process of turning “world cities” in to playgrounds for them and their friends. And unfortunately, the former seems so fare unwilling or unable to coherently call the latter on their limitations.
I’m genuinely excited that there are people with access to power and resources talking about making collaboration a guiding principle of urban society. I’m also worried that without addressing some basic questions about who has the privilege to engage in a technologically-mediated, time-intensive paradigm grounded in “social networks” (ie., neutral-sounding, refractory subsets of what we used to just call “class”), it’ll end up as just yet another way to recapitulate old power relations under a new guise. Lipstick on a pig. A green roof on a slaughterhouse.
Collaboration can only happen among equals, and equality these days is at more of a premium than square footage in a waterfront condo. If we’re not addressing this, what’s new? In polite society, we’re not supposed to point out that there is still a class war raging across the globe, and urban regions are becoming its primary theatre. There was at least a flickering, vestigial recognition of this among some attendees - including, surprisingly enough, Mr. 14:59 himself, Richard Florida - but it needs to be articulated more clearly, and it needs to be recognized that many partisans of “collaboration” are placed, not by desire, but by default, by the nature of the economy, within the circle of the agressors. Otherwise, I fear the warm and fuzzy principle of “collaboration” will only come to evoke echoes of its historically more sinister cousin: every ugly conflict, after all, has always had its “collaborators.”
I’m still going through audio from the conference for a piece in the print edition of this week’s NOW Magazine. In the meantime, here are a few exemplary quotes I jotted down during the conference sessions:
THE GOOD
“We have a saying at tamarack: fear not communities that have no leaders, fear communities that need them.” - Paul Born, founder, Tamarack
“Collaboration is a fundamental violation of ‘command and control’… it’s a non-market exchange.” - David Wolfe, U of T
“If this were kindergarten, we’d say [of Toronto government], ‘Doesn’t play well with other people.’” - David Wolfe again
“[Digital society means] we can collaborate with whomever we want to, at any time– we’re also becoming very segregated, in that we get to choose who we can collaborate with… Go find people that you don’t know, who your life doesn’t let you cross paths with. Ask them what it’s like for them.” - Katerina Cizek, NFB’s filmmaker-in-residence at St. Mike’s hospital, director of The Interventionists
THE BAD
“360 degree thinking [is] going to change the world.” - Tom Wujec
Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t “360 degree thinking” sound like something that would just naturally lead to “talking in circles?”
“Collaboration is as simple as sex. It’s coming together and becoming more. It is who we are as beings.” - Paul Born
It’s a nice analogy, as far as it goes. We’ll assume he was talking about consensual sex, of course - which, unfortunately, is precisely where the analogy collapses. The majority of people with less power or (class, race, gender, pick a card, any card) privilege don’t get to truly “come together,” despite pretty frequently getting fucked.
“There are some people who [incorrectly] look at service as subservience” - Ken Robinson
We call these people pessimists. Others look at it as a chance to steal Ken Robinson’s chequebook. We call these people optimists.
THE RICHARD FLORIDA
“Neoconservatism isn’t about foreign policy… it’s about an attempt to control the cities.”
He’s right about that, even if The Stranger beat him to it by about five years.
[Farmers in the exodus from rural lands to cities at the end of the 19th century] “came to cities to be themselves.”
Turns out a lot of farmers were, in their heart of hearts, displaced and newly landlesss wage slaves. Some people live their whole lives without ever discovering this about themselves. Thanks, rural displacement!
“People [newly immigrating to cities] will pack themselves in tighter and tighter spaces - for collaboration.”
Rooming-house bedbugs also offer unprecedented opportunities for Parasite-Hemoglobin Synergy.
THE TWEETS
Participants regularly posted thoughts to the #cpands hashtag on Twitter; most of them were streamed live on monitors throughout the conference venues.
“As Pier Giorgio [Di Cicco, Toronto's former Poet Laureate] warned, be wary that govt/Corp world doesn’t just adopt “collaboration” as buzzword without structural change.” - Jowi Taylor of Six String Nation, @SixStringNation
It would be lovely to have an opposing view on this panel. The opinions are valued but the audience has koolaid smiles on. - @jasoneano
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
“Collaboration means giving something up. And it’s the people without the power who usually have to give up the most.” - Jacqueline Gijssen, Senior Cultural Planner with the City of Vancouver, who wasn’t speaking at the conference, but who I (gladly) spoke to near the end
