Rethinking Change: A contribution to the Remaking Places Network

A mapping of ideas from the YoCo Change Makers Workshop facilitated by Joanne Rule and Fay Andrews-Hodgson in May 2022.

‘Rethinking Change’ is written to inform YoCo’s involvement in the University of Leeds Remaking Places Network ‘Rethinking Change’ event to be held on 30th January 2024. To join the event, sign up here. It was written by Helen Graham and Phil Bixby with editorial input from Jane Hustwit.

In essence, YoCo’s approach to change is ‘Propose, Don’t Oppose’. We’re not entirely sure how that phrase emerged or who we nicked it from, but one of the people who helped shape YoCo – Rebecca Carr – used to have a Buckminster Fuller quote as her email signature ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. So it may have evolved from there.

A site like York Central – a large brownfield site primarily owned by Homes England and Network Rail – is easy to oppose. The existing masterplan and outline planning consent is based on models of city planning obsolete 30 years ago. It is easy to point out the combustion engine-based transport plan that will clog up and mar the air quality of the new public square outside the National Railway Museum. Or the unwillingness to mandate Passivhaus standards for the 2500 new homes and the palpable danger that – far from addressing any of York’s housing needs – many of these homes will become Air Bnbs. Or the uninspiring nature of the ‘Great Park’, which will not enable play, growing or biodiversity. But the problem is that simple opposition is very unlikely to bring about the changes we want to see.

Instead, YoCo has sought to steward the ‘My York Central’ 8 Big Ideas, vision and principles which came out of a 2018 public engagement process facilitated by two of our members Phil Bixby and Helen Graham. In 2021 YoCo turned the My York Central Big Ideas, vision and principles into the YoCo Community Plan for York Central. The Community Plan for York Central has developed into concrete proposals for a co-owned neighbourhood that will enable forever affordable homes as well as walking and cycling, through a grassroots, community wealth building approach to the local economy. We aim to create this neighbourhood of c120 homes and commercial space in an early phase of the site’s development, providing a model that might then influence the build out of the rest of the site and also have relevance for other high land value, gentrifying cities.

The elements of our theory of change – informed by a Change Makers Workshop facilitated by two of our members Joanne Rule and Fay Andrews-Hodgson – are:

Build alliances across the whole system

It’s tempting to think of powerful organisations as a ‘they’.  However, every organisation with which we have to engage is made up of very specific people with different briefs, their own agendas and diverse personalities. We are keen to develop connections with individuals in the different organisations and neighbourhoods that make up the complex system of York Central. Most people in professional roles have some agency in how they do their role. Part of the work involved in whole system change is figuring out the 15% flex (another shout out to Joanne Rule for this reference to Mogan and Zohar 1998); we need to understand how these fifteen precents, combined together, can shift something fundamental. We do this through making lots of approaches, having lots of meetings, starting where people are and seeking out all sorts of potential. There is considerable power in a good idea being constantly resonance tested and nuanced.

Maximise local roots

Local neighbourhoods around York Central will be significantly affected. One of our key concerns is how to make York Central positive for these neighborhoods. It’s a two way process. We need to consider - not only how these local neighbourhoods will be affected but also how the already present potential – people, community groups, local economies, heritage – can enhance and affect York Central. So we must continue to go deep locally, as we go wide systemically and across hierarchy. We do this through regular open meetings, our work on local heritage as well as keeping in touch and being involved with other things that are going on locally.

Adapt a vision to material realities – in ways that transform those realities

York Central is – everyone always says – expensive to develop. York is a high land value city in general.  York Central is especially so as it has cost a lot to build the infrastructure to unlock it for development and remediate the land after a century of use by the railways. We are seeking to understand the development economics at play, as realistically as we can and without being naïve. And, at the same time, – informed by brilliant work on alternative economics and governance models developed nationally and internationally – we intend to keep pulling together an alternative response. Our alternative response has to take into account problems created by existing realities (and the ways different people we are working with across organisations experience these problems) whilst, at the same time, challenging and changing those realities. York is a city of significant economic inequality; a key focus in developing our proposals is on how to use opportunities to engage wealth and commercial activity for redistributive purposes. We are developing our alternative response through organising events, with relevant and provocative speakers (such as Don’t Extract, Redistribute! How to co-own your local economy and running a panel as part of Big Tent) as well as regularly attending events created by others developing these approaches.

Respect – and keep talking to – others who are opposing

There are other groups that have focused on opposing York Central – we always talk with them. We see all of the different community-led groups as playing different and mutually productive roles with the wider democratic system. …And we have formally objected to certain planning proposals, but in ways that set out an alternative so proposing as well as opposing.

‘Cleaner burning fuel’

There’s another quote that now underpins our work – a reworking of Phil’s from Darren McGarvey – who said “those who use anger as a chief recruiter… …need a cleaner energy”. YoCo seeks a cleaner burning fuel. Anger, frustration and feelings of powerlessness – while they are sometimes the only types of emotion that seem possible – all carry visceral costs. They deplete us, exhaust us and simplify things into binaries of for/against.  Life is much more complicated than that.

Persistently believing good things are possible both supports the conditions for change, whilst also making the everyday present of activism, and the ways we can be with each other as we do it, feel better and more rooted in creativity. To return to Rebecca’s quote: to make change through imagining and building alternatives, rather than fighting.