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[Music] Town anywhere creates a space where people can come together as both a
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participant and a witness of something that emerges actually what we need is here a kind of Yearning a longing for a world that is driving in which everybody can flourish Town anywhere is a large scale
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participatory visioning process that can bring a group of people together to vision and actually enact a positive thriving future for that place and the wider planet and environment it's like a
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barn raising of the future to step into a space in time and once we have explored imaginatively in the present a whole range of possibilities in our
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Mind's Eye those possibilities become nearer it's a rehearsal of what is possible today we've been in Hull and we went from 2023 into 2040 we physically step in and the whole of the rest of the
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day takes place in 2040 imagining what a town could be if designed by a very large group of people we had about 230 people to guide through the day in
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stages that allow people to imagine a town in 2040 what is the town that people yearn to build with the skills and capabilities that they have so the first stage is to invite people just to
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wander around the space to imagine that this is their home and then we ask people to go and have a chat with their neighbor and to tell each other a personal memory or story on a series of themes celebration trees home change
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strangers and they listen to each other and then they write on a Blackboard what they've heard a story [Music] about and then we ask groups of
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neighbors to imagine how could a street really support people to flourish what ideas could there be for how you could look after everybody in your street and the habitats that surround you and then
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the next thing is to go to town in effect to say we've got these local building blocks of a town and now how can everybody contribute to making the whole town so in effect we give a design
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brief we have around the room a whole series of blackboards on which have themes that make up the town green blue gray spaces governance economy food
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celebration creativity [Music] design but in this this case we're saying go around and leave a message or an idea for what you would like to see in this
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[Music] town and then the next stage is that we ask people to look and really think what's drawing me here when people really bring their longing onto the
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space and so we ask people to go and find a role for themselves in creating and fulfilling the needs and the messages that the rest of my fellow citizens have said they'd like to see here and then they work together to say
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okay what project could we make how could we create a venture and that's when we say okay now you need to make it so it comes out of our heads and it comes into our hands and often it's in
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the hands that people can really start creating in effect we start being the town enacting the town and making the town and that's where the whole thing lifts and people start to make their Ventures
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we also ask them to fill in a charter and this is a way of really getting people to think how is the Enterprise that you're creating serving the town and then they also go to a map and they decide where in the town they want to
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be and then we have an official Town opening and we had a huge cake today and we usually find the resources of somebody in the town to have that moment of Celebration which is so important today and and then we do Walkabout we
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say Town anywhere Walkabout where different people go and visit each other's Ventures and this is where somebody can start saying we could provide this for you and really that's one of the real powerful moments when we
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see a whole town system working together when we can really see that interconnection where everyone's working in the same direction for a fair sustainable and flourishing [Music]
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town and and one of the things that we do is we ask people to write a postcard to their 2023 selves from the future to send messages back to themselves to be bold to be open to believe that things
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are possible that things can change then we time travel back and we look into the space and we see that a Whole Town's being created from people's imagination there was a lot of emotion
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actually the whole journey of traveling into the future and then back again and then playing whilst in the future was brilliant I found it really interesting the different themes energy and transport and creativity and green spaces all together so I'm just so
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impressed how many people care about living as a community and being closer to other human beings this isn't just about today this is about what happens next we can be creative and we can discover together but we should also
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start taking actions together as well this needs to be the beginning of something that's much bigger when do we get the opportunity in our everyday lives to in essence play with
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over 200 people about designing and imagining and building a town which we momentarily inhabit we're not creating a fantasy we're saying if we work together
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if we bring all the resources and the energy that we have that actually everything is here in all of us and hopefully go away with the sense that well yeah why not
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