Second Plenary Meeting, St Andrews, Scotland 7-10 November 2001
Learning Journey to Dundee – a City in Transition Contents
Page
1. Introduction 2
2. Dundee as microcosm/ integrity 4
Connection, Flow… 5
Continuity, Change… 6
Fear, Anxiety… 7
Abstract Specific… 8
3. Project Ideas 9
Dundee Computer Game 9
Dad Free Action 9
Garden Training Scheme 9
Asda Training Store 10
Regeneration Budget 10
Free Energy 10
Policy Connections 10
4. Conclusion 11
Appendix: Dundee learning journey Introductory notes 12 and itinerary
2 1. Introduction
The second plenary session of the International Futures Forum (IFF2) commenced with a half-day learning journey to the city of Dundee on 7 November 2001. The learning journey was designed to provide a common experience that would ‘ground’ the issues on the IFF’s agenda from the first plenary meeting and subsequent follow up work, notably the contemporary challenges in the areas of governance, sustainability, economy and consciousness – and the search for a second enlightenment.
The journey was assembled by IFF Converger Andrew Lyon with assistance from Tina Estes of the Global Business Network. It sought to highlight some aspects of Dundee’s situation in the early 21st century and provide a real context for deepening the IFF’s discussions about the state of the world and our understanding of it during the remainder of the plenary meeting. The overall effect of combining situated experience and strategic thinking was the release of a prodigious amount of creative energy flowing through our meeting and feeding the creativity and community of IFF2.
While the journey was based on place rather than theme, strong themes emerged from the journey as it, and our understanding of it, unfolded. Two groups of participants visited four places in the City, chosen to exemplify aspects of the City’s development. Thus each of the two groups visited a community location, a computer games development organisation and a hi- tech site, one based on bio-technology and the other based on the development and manufacture of automatic bank teller machines. Each group was accompanied by a local guide who knew the City well.
At each location key people were on hand to explain their activities, roles responsibilities, hopes, fears, challenges, successes and discuss these with IFF members.
A reminder of the detail of the visits can be found in the original papers that accompanied the visit in the appendix to this report. These include a short introduction to the history of Dundee and a description of each place visited on the journey, together with web links.
3 In this note I hope to tell a coherent, but suitably untidy, story of our learning journey to Dundee, by collating themes from our experience and summarising the ideas for action that the visit generated.
I draw for this purpose on:
• The debriefing session and report back at dinner following the journey and subsequent reflection in plenary the next morning; • Our subsequent reflections and discussions; • My own experience in helping to put the journey together and participating in it; • Material already placed on the website pertinent to the journey.
My hope is to stimulate discussion and further reflection on our learning from the journey, rather than provide the definitive version of the journey. I hope to enhance both our search for fuller ways of understanding the world; and provide strong material with which to support new thinking and action in Dundee based on the insights generated by the journey – thinking and action that will make sense both in Dundee and in the wider world.
As a way of organising this material I have chosen to highlight the main themes as I saw them, linking them to IFF’s emergent ideas and metaphors. I conclude with a summary of the project ideas that emerged from the meeting overall. Many of these ideas are already developing towards new action in the City as the result of our visit and subsequent contacts. I hope this report will spur further reflection, ideas and action.
2. Dundee as Microcosm / Integrity
There was general agreement in the IFF that the patterns that emerged from our learning journey to Dundee were well established in other locations with which the group was familiar, either from study and/or personal experience. The insights developed from the journey may therefore be useful in considering the ideas, concepts, metaphors and memes of the enlightenments (1st, 2nd or 3rd ) the IFF is discussing. The journey also generated specific insights that may be helpful to the local integrity that is Dundee as it seeks to tackle problems of economic development, environmental integrity and social justice and making a City which people can live happily in. If these actions demonstrate breakthrough results, it will be possible to replicate them elsewhere, draw policy conclusions from them for general use and reflect upon their implications for thinking and ideas. We will have acted our way into a new way of thinking.
Surprisingly for me, though we spent but one quarter of our time in community settings during the journey, we spent almost all of our subsequent conversation on this aspect of the visit. This may reflect the relative experience of the group – used to seeing hi-tech sites but not community. While that may be true, I think this focus also says something about the concerns of the group towards moral questions around social justice,
4 inequality and exclusion of groups from the benefits of economic and social activity. This suggests that there are implicit values in our group which it may be worth investigating further. These are beginning to emerge in our models and metaphors characterising various approaches to the world and began to become explicit in the discussions of values recorded in the main meeting report.
Connection Flow, Territory Stock
Connection and flow emerged as a strong theme throughout the learning journey and in the IFF meeting. There were many aspects to this theme. One such was the idea of the City as Territory (a stock) which needs to be defended promoted and extended in competition against other such stocks and territories (for example cities competing for inward investment). This perception of the City is implicit in much of the policy making that takes place there and in the response of the City to outside influence, threat and opportunity. An example from my own experience is of Glasgow wishing to make itself a special case in relation to poverty and therefore claim a larger share of the national resources to tackle this, rather than ally itself to other cities and areas which also experience poverty so that they may develop joint approaches to a shared problem. It is often present in the national and local response to the withdrawal of multinational investment (e.g. Motorola), since this takes place in a context in which others elsewhere are trying to maximise their ‘stock’. If the City is seen rather as one in a series of connections externally, (i.e. to other cities) and internally as a series of connections and flows (e.g. between groups or organisations), this might give rise to a different way of operating for maximum benefit. This was expressed at the meeting in terms of a new generative metaphor of the flower and the bee, written up in the plenary meeting report.
New listening, the reformulation and re-education of institutions, dispersed responsibility, communication and interconnection, diversity, participation, negotiated actions, partnership and intrinsic value become essential to finding a way of acting into new ways of thinking. This becomes the case inter–city and intra-city. For example in the Ardler and Kirkton communities, residents saw the main trunk road as a barrier rather than access route to the City.
One question is what is the new governance deal and how can we use the work on integrities developed by Martin Albrow and Tony Hodgson to begin to answer some of these questions from the individual through to global
5 governance systems? What sorts of things can we do to promote these ideas and their use? How much of the answer lies in respectful and caring connection?
Continuity Change, Inequality Remains
A feature of Dundee’s history (as that of elsewhere) is that the benefits of its economic activity are unequally distributed. In 19th century Dundee, most of the population are living on wages 20% below the national average. Profit from the jute industry is taken from the City and invested elsewhere, leaving the City with housing stock unattractive to incoming new investors and workers in the biotech industries etc a hundred years later (who are living in the surrounding countryside and not therefore contributing to the City’s tax base). Currently one could ask similar questions about access to the benefits of Dundee’s new industries for its excluded communities. Are they engaged, do they want to be? In each of the communities we visited I would argue that sophisticated views of their relation to the global were to be found. In each community, residents held views about this, however, feelings of relative helplessness were causing a drift into a withdrawal loop away from action, at least on some issues.
This issue sidles up to an interesting point raised by Alexander Broadie in his after dinner speech. When discussing Adam Smith he suggested that while everyone knows about the Wealth of Nations and the division of labour, very little attention has been paid to the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith argues that the social consequences of the division of labour are so ‘against the grain’ of human nature that action must be taken to ensure that workers are adequately compensated via high quality social goods: for example good housing, leisure pursuits, an adequate standard of living, health and education.
Activities change (e.g. biotech not jute), but the value base remains the same ( e.g. too much attention to profitability, and not enough to social justice) and unnecessary exclusions continue in perpetuity? We spend most of our time ‘cleaning up’ after an economic system that pays scant attention to social, environmental and cultural responsibility. We saw examples of this on our journey.
6 Fear Anxiety, Love Care
Both residents of the communities we visited and those from elsewhere we met on other parts of the journey were fearful and anxious, although in different ways. Some residents did not feel confident about leaving their communities to travel at large in the City. Others from outside the disadvantaged communities we visited were anxious about the kinds of people they assumed to be living there. This echoes my experience from elsewhere. Supporting connections and flows between diverse groups could lead to greater social integration. My sense of other European cities is that geographically-based exclusion is not so great. It is mitigated to some extent by mixed social groupings sharing the same residential areas. This alludes to issues around the use of space in the city as private or public utility. What might a different approach look like in Dundee? Are these communities in the best place to give the best opportunities of connection for residents? If not, what would improve this? And take us into the hope, play, love, care, diversity, belonging, participation side of our loops of fear and love (main meeting report)?
“You don’t speak my language, but we could learn to communicate in time”
This was one of the comments heard from a resident of Kirkton. We were not talking her language – and she thought we would have to spend some time in the community, walking in the community’s shoes in order to learn. This has been on my mind a great deal since we went to Dundee. In seeking to develop actions that resonate with the language, metaphors and ideas the IFF develops, I have been trying to make connection and flow an integral part of project design. In the Glasgow health programme for example, the scheme being developed includes links between different organisations at the policy level.
However, in Glasgow – as in Dundee - a connection which needs to be made is between the poorest 30,000 people in the city and the plans the city has for its future development. For example, how do these plans fit with the notion of integrity at a national and international level? How do they fit with intra-city integrities - community, family and individual? What sorts of employment will be available as a result of these developments? What steps, training opportunities etc, need to be taken in order to ensure that these opportunities are at least open to the city’s excluded populations? One way we are thinking of tackling this is by the introduction of community agents (angels?) who will
7 work with individuals to help them get what they want. Is this an appropriate response? A possibility I have spoken with colleagues in Dundee about is that of community residential learning journeys in Dundee, so that visitors are hosted by the community and are exposed more directly to the language.
More generally does the development of a new language not need to be more widely owned, after a lot of listening, for it to catch on?
Abstract Specific – A City without Theory
A further theme which emerged for me was the extent to which our engagement with the local residents was specific – particular people, particular place, particular time, specific conversations and so on, while the ideas we discussed thereafter abstracted from this. I believe we genuinely tried to link our thinking to specific examples, but it made me think about this difference a little more. One of the ways in which our rational institutions are run is on the need to abstract and homogenise. Once this has been done it is very difficult to work in ways that connect back to the untidiness of reality as order creating rules kick in. How can economic and moral wisdom be re-integrated? Which kinds of objectification, in what circumstances, are conducive to the models we have so far developed, and the types of change we wish to encourage? How are these to be related to our attempts to develop a more inclusive, participative, qualitative perspective and understanding of the present and the futures it holds?
This theme emerges in our conversation frequently. For example some saw the possibility of guidelines being set by government say, but not content. Governance is about process, and the process might be more caring – a governance of love. Others suggested that stuck communities could further their experience by engaging in a process through which they developed their own models. Further suggestions included the possibility that communities that had fallen into introspection could be supported to engage in low risk exploratory play as a way into deeper and more positive engagement with the outside world.
How do we encourage the flow of connection among people, what conditions would help in this? What sorts of tools and language must we develop to capture the spirit of change so that we may inspire it further?
8 3. Project Ideas
The learning journey, the insights it helped develop, the conversations that it contextualised and gave birth to have influenced the project work of the IFF not simply in this aspect or that aspect but rather in terms of the whole approach. In addition I highlight the following as specific project ideas and profile which emerged during the course of IFF2:
Dundee Computer Game
This was suggested following a visit to ICCave at Abertay University. The basic idea would be to develop a game that maps the City and encourages people to play in this space. The suggestion envisaged difficulties and opportunities being played out through the game. An internet version would encourage the Scottish diaspora to play and become engaged in the development of Dundee. It was suggested that such a development is worth investigating but may be prohibitively expensive.
Dad Free Action
The initial idea associated with this phrase came in a contribution which suggested that City organisations, institutions and systems could be re- educated to provide a different kind of input ( leading to a different kind of output). This input would be based on the notion of dispersed responsibility and the idea that associated moral authority is vested in many actors not a few institutions. The role of the institution being, for example, a more equal partner with community in planning and development.
This notion was also expressed in the idea that a Mutual Credit System embodied these concepts: it makes connections, frees participants from reliance on dominant institutions to which access is difficult anyway, and could provide resources to undertake socially useful activity of various kinds.
Garden Training Scheme
It was noted that following renovation, many gardens in Ardler were left messy by contractors. The suggestion was made that B&Q provide local support in gardening skills, tools, training etc, leading to a mutually supportive relationship with the local community. This could be extended to local supply systems. B&Q have a purchasing policy which favours locally produced items for sale in their store where these are available, barbeque charcoal or compost for example.
9 Asda Training Store
The local Asda is closing in Kirkton because it is too small to be a regional superstore and too big to be a corner store. The suggestion was made that the store could be developed as a training store for the company. A store in which trainees were encouraged to be creative. A store which gained a reputation for being a fun place to work.
Regeneration Budget
The whole of the regeneration budget for an area should be handed over to the community. The community should be revisited in ten years to see what has transpired.
Free Energy
Since the meeting, Mark Woodhouse in his response to the Journey has suggested that we investigate the possibility of Dundee being a site where new free energy technology is developed, manufactured and used.
Make Policy Connections
Make opportunities among the Dundee Policy Community to introduce the insights, metaphors and models developed by IFF2. This process started two days after our journey when the City Partnership (main partnership vehicle of City Development) were presented with the insights from IFF2 at their regular meeting. This needs to continue and find its way into both the development and implementation of policy. This is perhaps the space in which ‘action without a theory’ could be developed and agenda free/generating conversation encouraged with local residents.
10 4. Conclusion
The Dundee Learning Journey proved a very effective place to start our November IFF meeting. The connection to a real city with so much going on that illustrated and highlighted many of the challenges we wish to address as a group made our collective nerves jangle and proved the stimulus for some of the great insights and conversations that emerged in our subsequent time together.
This came partly from the simple fact that we shared a common experience going into the meeting which provided both issues to reflect on, think upon and discuss and the basis for building community and conversation. This was made more remarkable by the warmth, generosity, integrity and spirit of enquiry with which we were received by our hosts in the city.
Since the journey took place, Andrew Lyon has been back to Dundee several times to discuss the journey, the insights it raised and the possibilities for action that it presents. IFF contacts in the city remain enthusiastic and IFF inspired actions will emerge during the course of this year. I will work together with others to add value for Dundee from this endowment and ensure wider relevance in Scotland and beyond.
Andrew Lyon International Futures Forum Converger March 2002
11 APPENDIX
Dundee Learning Journey Introductory Notes
Purpose of Journey
This journey to Dundee is designed to encourage insights into the nature of the changes through which we are living and provide a common frame of reference at the start of our time together for the second meeting of the International Futures Forum.
Dundee - Jute, Jam and Journalism? Inspiration, Imagination Innovation? Biology, Biochemistry, Bytes?
Dundee today is one of five cities in Scotland. It has a population of about 160,000. It has, unfairly, say its supporters been consigned to the cruel and inadequate mnemonic of jute jam and journalism – its three economic mainstays for much of the 19th and 20th century. It has, say those who know and love it, been at the centre of innumerable social, religious, political, economic, cultural and scientific breakthroughs over the past 400 hundred years.
The City has set about discovering itself, or perhaps rediscovering itself to meet the challenges which it faces in a rapidly changing world. The learning Journey today will look at some of these issues. First a little history by way of context.
Early Dundee
The name is probably derived from the Gaelic Dun Deagh meaning the fort of someone called diag, though there is archaeological evidence of a settlement here from around 8000BC. By the 11th century, the settlement was important enough to be regularly visited by the travelling courts of Scottish nobility.
The commercial development of Dundee was accelerated in the 12th Century when Earl David of Huntingdon was granted land there by his brother King William the Lion, who was keen to increase his power in the North, and Dundee situated by the sea and ennobled by a navigable river was able to benefit from the general increase in European trade during this period and was granted a royal charter, marking it as a key trading centre in 1191 for fish, hides and wool.
In the 14th and 15th century Dundee was well established as a textile manufacturing town, coarse woollen cloth, plaids and bonnets being specialities. By the 16th Century linen and linen goods were also being made here. Dundee also had a reputation at this time for making high quality pistols from metals imported from the low countries and Sweden.
12 The town suffered a serious setback in the 17th century when Cromwell’s new model army ransacked and looted the town for two weeks in 1651. During this time the town’s written records disappeared, along with much of its accumulated wealth and property and the City walls. One fifth of the population were killed, all of which had long lasting effects of on the town. When it came to the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in1707, it is most likely that most Dundee traders and manufacturers saw little alternative.
J is for Jute
In the immediate aftermath of the union, Dundee’s economy slumped further as the town’s coarse cloth was in open competition with imports from England. National measures and local efforts increased the trade in coarse linen cloth in Scotland generally and between 1746 and 1773, Dundee exports of linen increased six fold, largely from handlooms based in cottage and small scale industries.
Between 1818 and 1822, 10 new mills were built with the main bulk of large new mills being established in the following period to 1836. Cox brother’s mill at Camperdown (look for the chimney!) employed over 5,000 people when opened in the 1850’s. By the 1870’s jute had replaced linen as Dundee’s staple material. By this time there were over 70 mills in the city employing 40,000 people, over 30,000 of whom were women.
Working and living conditions were poor even by the standards of the time. In 1904 almost fifty per cent of Dundee army volunteers were rejected as too light and too small, wages were 20% below the national average and infant mortality among the highest in the land.
Employment in jute declined steadily from the end of the First World War until it disappeared completely in the late 1970’s early 1980’s. The only place where the smell of jute is in the air is at the Verdant Works Industrial Museum, which tells the story of Dundee’s deep relationship with this fibre.
Apart from jute other main economic activities at this time included shipbuilding, engineering and whaling which employed around 7,000 in total in the early 20th Century. The oil from the whaling industry was used as a softening medium for jute, allowing it to be woven more readily.
J is for Jam
James Keiller, a local merchant, bought a consignment of Seville oranges from a storm sheltering Spanish ship in 1797 (so the story goes). They were too bitter to sell from the shop which he ran and his wife, following an old recipe of her mother’s boiled them with sugar to make a preserve – marmalade. This spawned a chain of restaurants, bakeries, boiled sweet factories and preserve making machinery and linked with the local berry industry. The company shifted production to the Channel Isles in1874 to avoid the new sugar tax and thereafter in London until the factory was destroyed during the Blitz of WWII, Production returned to Dundee in 1946.
13 In 1971, Nestle which then owned the brand closed the main production plant and shifted production to Manchester, the brand going into liquidation in 1992.
J is for Journalism
In Dundee this is synonymous with DC Thomson, the local publisher, established in 1906, taking over the titles Lengs some of which have now been continuously running since the 1850’s. Today its titles include: The Courier, The Evening Telegraph, The Sunday Post The Scots magazine with a monthly circulation of 300,000, The People’s friend a weekly with a rising circulation of 435,000 and a whole range of children’s comics over the years including The Beano, The Dandy Victor and Hotspur.
Much criticised for conservative, paternalistic and parochial attitudes, DC Thomson invested some £40 million in Dundee during the 1980’s in one of the most sophisticated printing plants in Europe.
These days employment in Manufacturing in Dundee is much closer to the National average at around 20% and the City has a growing reputation as a place where innovation inspiration and imagination are the drivers for Dundee’s future, which has new found sense of optimism.
The City has a growing reputation in the field of Medical Science Biotechnology and Electronics. Concerted efforts starting with the Dundee project in the 1980’s are being made to revitalise the City in more sustainable ways than it has been founded in the past.
The materials in your packs delineate these efforts in more detail and together with the weblinks listed give access to much of Dundee’s history and its current actions to point the City towards the future.
14 Dundee Learning Journey – Ports of Call
Group 1
International Centre for Computer Games and Virtual Entertainment (IC CAVE)
Based the university of Abertay, IC CAVE in addition to teaching and internationally renowned games technology course also works closely with industry. They run test beds for pre-production games simulating a range of bandwidths and traffic flows user interfaces, they provide consultancy on the future of gaming technology and develop artificial life for games interfaces – believable characters for a range of different audiences, and test pre production games with sample audiences in their lab. Peter Asteimer, our host for this visit spent some time in Scenario Planning looking at technological drivers for change. More info at their website www.iccave.com
IC CAVE works closely with the EPI Centre, just along the street, which we will not have time to visit. The Epicentre concentrates on the human machine interface, works closely with industry and can be found at www.epicentre.tay.ac.uk
Kirkton Neighbourhood Centre
Kirkton is one of Dundee’s less affluent neighbourhoods. During this visit hosted by local residents and community regeneration staff, Claire Whinston and Stuart Murdoch, from the Local Authority you will see and hear first hand how the City has changed, the hopes and aspirations of local people, the main challenges they face and how these are being addressed. No specific website for this visit but associated websites include www.dundeecity.gov.uk and www.dundee.com Action and learning plans for this community are in plan can be found at www.trp.dundee.ac.uk/research/geddes/partner/kirtona3.htm
NCR
An Ohio based company with a 50 year history in Dundee whose main business used to be making cash machines and which last year supplied 27% of all Automatic Telling machines on the planet. During this visit, Mark Grossi and John Hall of the Self Service Strategic Solutions Group will outline NCR’s history in Dundee describe their research and development approach which includes Scenario Planning and asking questions like what does a company which makes ATM’s do when there is no cash to dispense anymore. They also demonstrate some of the technologies they are currently working with. More on the Web www.ncr.com
Dundee Contemporary Arts
Situated in a new Arts facility which includes exhibition space, a print studio, cinemas and a café bar. Babs McCool, of the Visual Research Centre, Jo
15 Coull and staff from Duncan of Jordanstone school of TV and imaging and Sarah Deakin of Community Arts outreach will investigate the role of the arts in Dundee’s transformation. Groups one and two will come together for this visit. www.dca.org.uk
Group 2
Vis Entertainment
Multi media, multiplayer games developer, whose latest development is 24 hour real time virtual horse racing. Vis provides interactive content for all major platforms working in the converging multimedia sector including interactive television. This game requires the company to develop a completely new software platform and open a new digital TV studio in Dundee. Chris van der Kuyl, Chief Executive Officer, who is also your guide for the afternoon will lead on this visit and describe their work and its future www.vis-plc.com
Ardler Complex
On of Dundee’s less affluent communities close by Kirkton which will be visited by Group 1, Ardler is undergoing significant change. Margaret Brown the complex manager and Trish Sutherland who manages the Social Inclusion Partnership in Dundee ( part of national initiative to encourage dislocated communities back into the mainstream in Scotland) together with local residents will talk about changes, hopes, dreams and aspirations and how they plan to achieve these. Underlying this work is a realisation of the need for an informed citizenship, trust, the role of risk and vulnerability and the need to undertake sensitive work in the context of a bureaucracy. No specific website for this visit but associated websites include www.dundeecity.gov.uk and www.dundee.com Action and learning plans for this community are in your briefing packs.
Wellcome Trust Biocentre
Located at the University of Dundee, the Biocentre is at the heart of a wide range of biological, medical and biochemical research and associated spin off companies. The site hosts over 69 research groups scientists working in half a dozen labs at the cutting edge of their fields. The centre is the catalyst for a wide range of biotechnology work in Dundee (described in the note in your briefing pack and in the centre section of the Bulletin newspaper also in you r packs. The Centre forms part of a growing cluster which includes well known research and developments in cancer treatment and endoscopy techniques at nearby Ninewells Hospital. (www.dundeecity.gov.uk/edo/medipark.html) Kevin Bazely who specialises in support for Biotechnology Sector for the Scottish Enterprise Tayside will take us through the role the Centre plays in this growth sector which has prompted one commentator to say “It’s coming to the point now where people are given the choice of Dundee or Cambridge are heading for Dundee” (Professor Roland Wolf Biomedical Research Centre, University of Dundee). www.dundee.ac.uk/biocentre
16 Dundee Contemporary Arts
Situated in a new Arts facility which includes exhibition space, a print studio, cinemas and a café bar. Babs McCool, of the Visual Research Centre, Jo Coull and staff from Duncan of Jordanstone school of TV and imaging and Sarah Deakin of Community Arts outreach will investigate the role of the arts in Dundee’s transformation. Groups one and two will come together for this visit. www.dca.org.uk
17