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.