From Helen
My York Central had at its heart a four-week Festival of York Central. This was, to say the least, intense. A years’ worth of meetings, family workshops, talks, film showings and walks, all packed into a month. A lifetime’s supply of post its written on, peeled off, stuck up, all reimagining the formal boards of the then emerging York Central masterplan.
It was perhaps the intensity which made what started to happen so powerful. That one conversation led to another. An idea planted began to grow, as more people added their knowledge and embellished its potential. Elements that might have seemed initially disparate became connected as different people added links and made joins. By the end of the four weeks what had emerged was a very clear public vision for York Central.
What Phil and I then sought to do was crystalize these ideas into something pithy. That could be grasped and circulated, and that would give immediate power to the incredible vision for the future of York that had emerged. These became the Big Ideas.
It is fair to say that the full imaginative powerful of the work so many were involved in that spring of 2017 – and summarized in the Big Ideas – was not articulated in the York Central masterplan. And many who had given their time to the process were disappointed and formally objected when the time came.
Yet the aim of My York Central (and My Castle Gateway) was never just to extract ideas from people and to simply shrug and walk away if they were not taken up. The final step of the approach has always been to try and make change happen together. This is where YoCo comes in. And, as Phil sets out in his blog, there are lots of good reasons for hope that these ideas can have currency and purchase.
The ideas generated by so many people during in the Festival of York Central clearly anticipated a number of policy changes or new realities that have come to pass since. Whether the Zero Carbon 2030 target, a car free city centre, an approach to housing that is low cost and sustainable, a type of economy that can genuinely include everyone in York or (as we are experiencing now) the need to combine greater online working with local walkable neighbourhoods which provide for food, culture and life. In this sense, doing the My York Central work has confirmed that political leadership can come from the public.
To end I want to remind myself of another of the outcomes of the My York Central process and of that intense Festival period. We’ve banged on a lot about the Big Ideas but out of the same process, a set of Principles for York Central also emerged. I’d almost forgotten the Principles and I found myself slightly surprised when I came across them for the first time for a long time the other day:
Ongoing community engagement: For broad and open ongoing community engagement with the development process. The broad and open approach should also shape as far as possible the process of statutory approvals.
Identify issues and co-design solutions: For community engagement to be based upon a continuity of conversation which allows for consideration of options, viability issues and creative design – in short a “grown-up conversation” where there is an invitation both to identify issues and to co-design solutions.
Shaped by future aspirations not current norms: For the development on York Central to be bold and innovative, shaped by hopes and expectations for future urban living rather than current norms.
York Central as a lever for city-wide change: For the development to be a lever for change across the city as a whole and to move forward in parallel with review and implementation of a widely-supported local plan.
A social contract for York Central: For York Central to be developed in ways which spreads benefit, is underpinned up the city’s human rights ethos and is used to creatively address inequalities.
YoCo is a process where these principles will come to life and evolve, adapt and change as all living things do. But they’ve become anew my entry point to YoCo, a gift given from the York of 2017 to today and beyond.