citythreepointzero

What happens if you get 40 people in a room for a day ands tell them to write a manifesto for the future of the city? Well, this (see below). This declaration was one of the products of ‘Global Policy Dialogue: Sustainability and the City’, a workshop held 29-30 March, jointly organised by the University of Edinburgh and the British Council. I can’t be objective as I was involved in organising it, and was the MC on the day (see Jim Medway’s drawing, above). It was a fascinating piece of urban therapy, however. I use the word ‘therapy’ advisedly. As MC, I modelled the process surreptitiously on the gestalt model of therapeutic dialogue, which is to say (a) the staging of a ‘safe emergency’ in which participants could say hard things without fear of hurt, and (b) an emphasis on process, rather than product. Needless to say, nobody got the…

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