Read about our workshops in Chicago and new Social Life of Cities Collaborative with Cisco and the Young Foundation.

1. The Social Life of Cities
in Chicago
Nicola Bacon & Saffron Woodcraft
30th April 2012

2. The Social Life of Cities is a new collaboration
between Cisco, the Young Foundation and Social Life,
to work with city leaders to drive urban innovation
and to think differently about
creating thriving and sustainable places.
The Social Life of Cities project will work at the
intersection of urban design, social design and
technology design to develop and test new policy,
investment, and urban design models that can make
cities more successful.

3. Social Life is the Young Foundation’s newest venture.
It has been established as a centre of expertise in
social sustainability. It takes forwards the Young
Foundation’s 50 year heritage of work on community
dynamics, including the 2011 report “Design for Social
Sustainability”.
The Young Foundation brings together insights,
innovation and entrepreneurship to meet social
needs. The Young Foundation works across the UK and
internationally – through research, influencing policy,
and creating new organisations, often with
imaginative uses of new technology.
Cisco has shaped the future of the Internet by
creating unprecedented value and opportunity for
customers, employees, investors and ecosystem
partners to become the worldwide leader in
networking - transforming how people connect,
communicate and collaborate.

4. This presentation
1. The starting point
2. The Social Life of Cities overview
3. Our previous work
4. The Social Life of Cities Chicago:
initial thoughts

5. 1 The starting point

6. We continue to build neighbourhoods that fail to thrive as
flourishing communities

7. This is a global issue. And one of increasing importance.

8. We believe we can learn from both the mistakes, and the hopes, of
the past.

9. Our tools: a framework for social
sustainability
The Young Foundation/Social Life Social Sustainability Framework, 2011

10. Our tools: understanding how places
innovate
1
Prompts
2
Proposals
6
Systemic
3
Prototypes change
4
Sustaining
5
Scaling
The Young Foundation social innovation spiral

11. A focus on lived experience: using ethnography and service design
techniques; understanding and measuring wellbeing and resilience;
building on and boosting community assets.

12. 2 The Social Life of Cities: overview

13. The Social Life of Cities
Our aspiration is to accelerate urban innovation and
reshape the way that city leaders and urban planners
think about creating and shaping thriving and
sustainable places.
Co-design and co-produce new ideas and approaches
to urban innovation with city partners, connecting
social design to larger questions of sustainability and
viability of cities.
Our aim is to change thinking and practice about the
potential of social design.

14. Objectives

15. Structure of the programme
The urban
innovators
network
Creating a Tailored local
new body of projects with
thought and individual
practice cities

16. Engagement with global experts (on
urbanism, innovation and sustainability)
and other cities through virtual
networking, TelePresences, and events
Profile, by association with a leading
network and through the production of
outputs showcasing the work.
Capturing the lessons from
our work with individual
cities and the urban The urban
innovators network, we
will develop and document innovators
Aim to create
our experience. This will network opportunities for
give individual city
partners the offer to shape stakeholders to think
new research and policy differently about tackling
directions. urban problems. Stimulate
Creating a Tailored local ‘creative disruption’
new body of projects with
Combining advisory and
thought and individual project development
practice cities support, aim to co-creative
practical local innovation
projects and pilots.

17. The offer to cities
An opportunity to build a practical understanding of
how macro city-wide strategies for economic,
cultural, technological and social development
connect to the experience of local communities.
A testing ground for new ways of working which will
generate valuable lessons for the wider area.
The opportunity to make a step change in their
practice and policies.
Higher international profile as leaders in urban
innovation.
Engagement with global experts and other cities, and
association with a leading network that will showcase
the work of the collaborative and of individual city
partners, shaping future urban policy.

18. 2 Our previous work

19. Hands on innovation: practitioners workshops in in Malmö, Sweden

20. Framing Malmö’s innovation story
Data/studies on
social need Learn from success of
environmental
External inspiration, social design sustainability programmes
principles, co-design solutions
with participants Consensus about need for
new approach Malmö is widely
1
Prompts known for its
Disengaged communities, green tech
poor education, high innovation, in
2
Proposals levels of disadvantage Scandanavia the
6
Systemic
city is also
renowned for its
social problems
3
Prototypes change that have
sometimes flared
into violence.
4
Sustaining
5
Scaling

21. Future communities: our work in Barking, East London

22. Thames View
• Predominantly low -rise
council houses built in 50s
& 60s
• Roughly 50% white & 50%
BME residents
Great Fleete
• Private development built
in 80’s
Barking Reach
• Private development built
in 80’s
Barking Riverside
• Location of the new
school and community
centre
Our question: when new residents and existing residents start living together,
how can a strong, cohesive community be designed so that all the residents feel
they belong?

23. Eco Bicester: working with council and developer of exemplar stage to build
social sustainability into the ambitious new development, planned to be
20,000 homes over 20 years.

24. Community resilience
• Resilience is the ability of a person, group or
community to adapt and ‘bounce back’ in the face
of adversity.
• A key component of wellbeing, how we feel about
the quality of our lives.
• The Young Foundation has developed WARM, the
wellbeing and resilience measurement tool.
• Measuring wellbeing and resilience gives insights
and produce a picture of a local area that
complements deprivation indicators.
• It also helps identify interventions to increase
individual and/ or community wellbeing and
resilience, to track impact of interventions and set
realistic limitations.
• A focus on wellbeing and resilience reveals a more
detailed understanding of the local and city wide
situation that conventional statistics can provide.

25. Wellbeing and resilience in Poplar, East London

26. Prototyping and testing
Using methods more often used in the private
sector to take apart, test, manipulate and
refine new ideas.
Traditionally used in product design – now
increasingly applied to meeting social needs.
Not about designers taking over, instead a
shared process with other disciplines and with
communities.
Allows initiatives to be tested cheaply and
relatively quickly, an alternative to
conventional piloting.

27. 4. The Social Life of Cities in Chicago: initial thoughts

28. Chicago has a proud and flourishing tradition of community
engagement and community organising. We welcome the
opportunity to work in the city, complementing strong existing work
with our expertise and experience of urban innovation and social
sustainability

29. The Lakeside development is an ambitious project that has many of
the same objectives and challenges as new towns internationally,
one of the next generation of new towns that has the potential for
social innovation and social sustainability to be built into the
thinking from the earliest stage.

30. The site in 1970 and in 1996
A challenge is how to spread the benefits of the investment and development
to the wider neighbourhoods around the development site, supporting local
communities to be able to take advantage of new opportunities and
innovation thinking, and to create an area where everyone feels that they
belong.

31. For more information contact nicola.bacon@social-life.co or
saffron.woodcraft@social-life.co
www.social-life.co