Paulista Institute of
Creative Cities and Cultural Identities
watch the video and learn about the IPCCIC
The Paulista Institute of Creative Cities and Cultural Identities have been studying one Social Technology of their own. The technology has to collaborate with the cities management since its creation, in January 2013. Working with multidisciplinary formation and transdisciplinary activities the group systematized one set of organized actions in 5 notebooks.
Phase (1) Diagnosis of the cultural references and cultural identity of the city (ground source – from the society) - This diagnosis is compromised in doing the download of everything that had been produced about the locality, recognizing others actors, talking with the population, searching to make visible what is invisible to the manager eyes, like is suggested in the studies of City of Future Lab, from ETH, Zurique. (2) Report of possibilities Highlighted in urban-environmental and cultural guidelines. At this moment the researchers use the prototyping tool to create proposals. This is about one systematization of the think organized ideas model from Design Thinking methodology. (3) Elaboration of a set of projects to invigorate potentialities from Creative Economics, Social entrepreneurship and in the formation of the co-creator citizen of their own place. In this stage it is important to contextualize that the projects follow all criterias of initiatives to be evaluated by the private market and also by the government field with references to Siconv, Incentive laws and notices. Another addendum at this moment, is the study promoted by the researchers of the work of the economist Donavan Ripykema, proponent the project Main Street United States. The proposals core is to generate income from actions of Preservation of cultural heritage. (4) Incentive to the creation of cooperation networks in order to do item 4 (stakeholders). This practical emerges yet like Physical materiality from the previous phases and will give support to the other projectsimplementation. (5) Avaliation with indicators especially created in the begging of the five steps. The researchers chose the Theory U(Developed by Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer MIT – Massachusetts Institute Technology) as reference and method and Design Thinking as methodology, one creative tool to think the cities putting people in front of the institutions. The Theory U suggests one path to be done from de level of listening 3 and 4, when there is empathy between the partners for obtaining the diagnostic and to show the results. The model
of society delineated over the path is understood by the Theory and identified as 4.0. The core of the process is embased in the elimination of all criterias that comes from ego-system, in the harmonization from the ecosystem, in cooperative activity with emphasis on social entrepreneurship and especially in the changing of the citizen to a co-creator citizen. This is about creating ways to the local citizen find ways to compose socially and by motivations generated by the technology, be part of the process of management of their own community.
The Institute elaborated, from Theory U, the first three notebooks to the city of Ribeirão Preto. Over this process that is documented in the Institute website in the posts. The women presence was observed as something recurrent and relevant. Since than the group created one special space to develop actions. To structure actions directed to the universe of women. The creation of cooperation networks foreseen in the Creative Cities project has intensified the strength of women in the economy, as income generator, gastronomy and crafts.
These indicators took the Institute to think about transformative actions from the women in a settlement area. This is the project outlined in this notice.
Read abou this book
Social technology for city management: citizenship and co-creation
Preface of the book: Social technology for city management: citizenship and co-creation
Org .: Adriana Silva, Lilian Rodrigues de Oliveira Rosa, Sandra Rita Molina
Preface, by Wilson Nobre
Since that Otto Scharmer offered the first online and free course about U Theory, in January 2015, the quantity of people that got in touch with this powerful toll of social changing increased in Brazil and all over the world. We have news of many groups that undertook projects about social innovation during the course as an exercise to use the tolls developed by the author. However, it is known that few of them had progress after the course evolving to a full propose of changing as it is the Social Technology developed by Paulista Institute of Creatives Cities and Cultural Identities. We present our Social Technology with details in this first book about the using of U Theory in Brazil. With a pleasant and fluid narrative, the authors brought their discoveries about cultural identities from many cities that the group the group did researches in the last two years intertwined with the construction step by step of the diagnosis technology and action which consolidated itself as an important instrument to support those interested in the collective of cities.
This book also offers a practical view of the application of the Research-Action methodology, proposed by Kert Levin in the end of the 1940 decade, in the United States, and today widely used in searches in opens social systems. One important aspect of the Research- Action to the cultural identities studies is the equal treatment given to formal knowledge, that of the academy, in relation to popular knowledge, of the citizens who give life to the city.
To operate in a equal way with the knowledges, the research needs to decrease the voice of its prejudices, anchored in their knowledge acquired among the pairs of scholars, to activate its inner curiosity with an open mind and connect with those interviewed empathically, with the heart. If this happens, so, together, they can put the energy in the construction of one utopia that elevates local identity to another level of evolution. This theme was treated in a lucid and brave way in the Identities and Self Esteem chapter.
At this point the choice of the Theory U was opportune because its author offers a set of tolls and orientations to a opening journey and practical innovation that wants to emerge. These tolls were tested in his many years of experience in the Society for Organizational Learning, entity founded by Peter Senge, Who deals with organizations in several sectors of activities, all over the world, since the early 1990s. Open minded, open heart and open willing are the invitations of U Theory to face the three enemies of the social ties: the voice of prejudice, the voice of cynicism / mistrust and, more difficult, the voice of fear.
To face this last enemy, that hides itself in the inaccessible depths of the human mind / character, Otto Scharmer, proposed the creation of a safe environment with strong social links between the participants of the group, that creates one “safety container” and allows you to access your innermost sources of creativity and Love. Therefore it transforms each individually, by finding the way back to its best human potentialities, but this transformation takes place in group and in group, leaning and mirroring each other.
The human cities, last work proposed from IPCCIC, dialog directly with the approach from U Theory and from the Design Thinking, another methodology used by the researchers group, because both place human beings at the center of strategies and attention, As we discovered right in the beginning of our researches with innovative organizations, from Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), in 2000, just people innovates. A very significant change of view of this time of civilization, after so many years of progress of the strict materialism that put the "thing" - economy, money, success, etc. - in the place of the human. Since the industrial revolution “coisificou-se” the human being as “manpower” to ajust to the others “economics resources” , as it is the capital case, machines, raw material, information, technologies. And the cities were reforming with the growth of the companies; lending them the productive methods and their efficiency indicators; shaping both the concept of politics and political organizations, which, following the logic of the companies, have assumed the monopoly of proposing policies and managing public affairs.
We have turned the millennium and a new generation of people, now informed in a less centralized way through the internet, clearly expose the symptoms of exhaustion of the previous model. We are rapidly changing into a time of abundant innovation in all walks of life, in cities and in the countryside. Tightened structures present cracks, exposed fractures; we watched some of them collapse as in the implosion of a building, seen in slow motion. Until the dust from the rubble settles, we will still be very uneasy.
But the breakthrough innovations in all fields of human doing promise a great and intense acceleration in direction to new utopias. Facts that have been treated like science fiction, very recently, become utilities that operated by the children operate from the youngest age. Everything is so fast that even what we understood by the understanding of the word utopia begins to lose meaning.
In the face of the tsunami of fast and gigantic changes, we need light boats, rather than cannons. We need to find again what makes us human, what are our most eternal properties, who are eager to flourish freely, and widely. It should not be by coincidence, but by synchronicity, that the science of biomimetics grows so booming in these two decades of its proposition by Janine Benyus. Look at Nature and its wonderful solutions to learn from it and translate this knowledge into technologies that lead us to a better harmony with the environment.
The first principle of nature, enunciated by biomimetics, is: life creates conditions conducive to life. The beings of Nature now create the conditions that will support the next ten thousand generations of their fellows. So there is much to innovate in cities and in human systems so that these special beings, who are also part of Nature, but have moved away from their evolutionary principles, can find their harmony with other beings and with the whole.
Another principle of nature, enunciated by biomimetics, is the optimization of local resources, in order to provide highly efficient processes of evolution. Everything is done with the local resources of energy and matter. There are no residues, everything is recycled in a continuous flow of using, transforming and offering the surplus to the next, in an evolutionary cycle of generation of new forms. Applied to cities, this concept serves as the basis for another important contribution of the IPCCIC and its Social Technology:, the identification of local making as a cultural identity of the city and its people
In this book, many cases of discovery of important local actions are presented, which rescue the knowledge of the ancestors and were not seen by their filmmakers as something of value. The social bonds established by artisanal craftsmanship may be the most important results in constructing the "safety container" that Otto Scharmer indicates as necessary to realize the emerging future and realize it in an instant. An innovative society, which finds local solutions to support its flowering, needs these safe spaces, between people who respect and admire themselves, true "human beings endowed with autonomy, intelligence and affectivities", in the words of Morin, rescued in chapter: From development to involvement: Edgar Morin as a base
Finally, I was charmed by the courageous work of the IPCCIC researchers by including love as an element of research in contact with the field, with people and their cultural identities. This widespread and often vilified concept had the resilience of appearing in conversations with citizens and in research questionnaires so strongly that it imposed itself on the reductionist objectivism that science has recommended for more than three centuries.
Perhaps that Love, proper of our human essence, is the greatest of innovations to rebuild cities as flourishing spaces of the best potential brought as seed in every human being. This only needs proper soil and special care through social relations, to blossom and produce the best fruit that competes for the existence of the human in this immense universe.