YoCo Labs, setting the agenda

YoCo Labs in one of the YoCo Working Circles and is focused on action research. YoCo Labs is all about exchanging ideas, coming together to dream, to imagine and to explore. 

YoCo Labs has started to set an agenda for the questions we want to ask and how we want to work together. We did this through two linked workshops (via Zoom) and used a combination of Liberating Structures approaches to have different types of conversations. Throughout the two workshops we wanted to find ways of linking setting a research agenda with our personal motivations for getting involved and our hopes for how working together would feel and be like.

All the digital post its have been uploaded to this Flickr album for perusing.

What do we want to bring and get from being involved in YoCo Labs?

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  • Make a difference in the Leeman Rd/Holgate, build YoCo, shape York Central

  • Connect the local and the city and the planet

  • Ideas create action, action creates ideas

  • Working with people bring all sorts of ideas and energy – really break down barriers to involvement

  • Bring design thinking, link all this with design

What are the big questions for YoCo, York Central, York, the world?!

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  1. Alternative economic models, exchange, post-capitalist, landownership

  2. How do we create democracy in YoCo and on York Central – how can we ensure lots of different people get involved?

  3. Pollution/reducing cars - do we understand the air quality in York Central?

  4. How can York Central be sustainable?

  5. Can we link making, doing and ideas? How can we use storytelling and other creative methods to explore all these questions?

  6. How can we follow the questions that attract the most energy?

  7. How does YoCo work with existing affordable housing %?

  8. Can we design an emergent neighborhood where not everything is decided in advance? Could this work with the phasing of different parts of York Central?

How shall we explore these questions?

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  • with the community involved from the outset

  • intergenerationally

  • sociably, making it fun

  • with food!

  • through experimentation and trying things out

Next steps

The next step is to start to develop events around these different strands. Plans are already in process for events around alternative economic models. Watch this space.

If this catches your imagination and you’d like to join YoCo Labs – one of the YoCo Working Circlesget in touch. Be great to hear from you.

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Celebrating World Localisation, YoCo-style by Imelda Havers

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Why the Dutch cycle and what we can learn from this… Juliet James