Stretching Imagination: Browne Dreams Vancouver

In the last of our series of in depth articles examining citizen engagement in other cities, Think City speaks with Bliss Browne about how she has used imagining a better future to spur change in Chicago.

Bliss Brown has just made it home after a 30-hour trip from Beijing. She worries she might ramble a bit in the interview. It turns out that nothing could be further from the truth.

Home for the middle-aged Browne is Chicago. But at the moment the windy city is merely a stopping point. Later this week she'll be on the plane again –- this time heading to Vancouver –- where she'll be a keynote speaker and facilitator at the Dream Vancouver conference.

Co-hosted by Think City and Simon Fraser University's Public Policy Program, the Dream Vancouver conference is described by event organizers as an opportunity for participants to move from their dreams about Vancouver to a possible agenda for change.

Supporting the charge will be the internationally-renowned Browne – who has been mobilizing and facilitating community projects-of-change in Chicago and around the globe since the early 1990s.

At first glance, Browne's career trajectory seems eclectic, to say the least. Prior to creating Imagine Chicago, where she has served as president for the last decade and a half, she took a degree in divinity studies and became an ordained Episcopal priest. And for a full 16 years, until she left to found Imagine Chicago, Browne was also a corporate banker and division head of the First National Bank of Chicago.

According to Browne there is a common theme that links these various roles.

"From the outside it may look like these are all unrelated, but in reality they're not," says Browne. "At heart they are all disciplines of the future... each, in their own way works to anticipate and attempts to realize a hoped-for future... and each works off of a relationship between what we want and the investment that we need to get it."

"This is also linked with my role as a mother - because when you raise children you always end up thinking long-term," says Browne. "You want to work to raise them and you always do so within structures that are both changing and beyond your immediate control. So each role is premised on a sense of tension between a vision of what life could be... and the material reality of the present."

Civic engagement, public participation and governance also rest on this notion of a great working towards. And yet often times the process or sense of movement seems stalled. This was one of the motivating factors that got Browne into politics.

It started with a reflection on both the language and ecology of relationships.

"Living in multiple worlds and roles... I became more keenly aware of how the various discourses and silo mentalities that exist within government, civil society and the private sector have divided up and compartmentalized our thinking," says Browne. "And this has made it difficult to think as a whole... it inhibits a more holistic way of looking at and building community."

Against this tendency Browne began to look to other, more inclusive ways of seeing relationships and community. She was struck be the image of a garden.

"I like to think of community as something of a garden," says Browne. "In order to make it work one has to have a keen sense of the interdependence of things. And if one wants to be an active player in community, then one also has to be aware of the ecology of things."

Thinking about the image further, she says one conclusion became apparent: that the act of city-building should aim for a similar form of completeness.

"In a system of ecological balance nothing gets wasted," says Browne. "I believe we should be aspiring to this sort of holistic economy in our efforts to make better cities and communities."

This was back in 1991. That year, Browne and some colleagues organized a conference on city-building and community. As a way of tapping into people's desire for change she got participants to reflect on images that shaped both their existing perceptions of the city and those, more elusive views that reflected their hopes for the future.

The result was a profound insight into people's capacity to dream and also their desire and ability to build on community assets. Being witness to this collective sentiment lead Browne to re-evaluate her own work to that point, and her commitment to change. Four days after the conference was over she made the decision to set aside a 16-year career in the financial services sector.

"I reckoned that if I was going to invest such importance into this idea of community-building then I should bet my own life and career on that," says Browne.

It was a big risk, but she hasn't looked back.

Building Change on a Foundation of Good Images

Browne's approach to community-building has often been referred to as a form of appreciative inquiry - a methodology developed by researchers studying organizational behaviour at Case Western Reserve University. As a term it refers to an assets-based approach to building collaboration - whether in companies and communities. In other words, rather than assessing group dynamics that often focus on identifying what's wrong - deficiencies, gaps and so on - Appreciative Inquiry focuses on fostering innovation by discovering the positive stories, successes and images that people have. It then uses these as a means of leveraging areas of change and growth.

Appreciative Inquiry is a helpful antidote to the problem-centred approaches that are often used in community processes. It sounds a bit obvious to say it like this, but the problem-centred approach, says Browne, can be problematic.

"It's so widespread in our society, this problem-oriented approach," says Browne. "And it's not that it's always wrong to think this way. Indeed, it's helpful to be problem-oriented in a lot of things... but human-systems organizing and community development is not one of them."

This is because defining community in terms of problems has an inherent tendency to put someone - a group, or individual - into a position where they feel themselves under attack. The go-to position becomes defensive, rather than collaborative. In other words, where effective community development requires different stakeholders in a community to open-up, problem-centred language tends to act in a way that shuts people down.

"It's important to focus on the components of community that work in order for the twin processes of community-development and city-building to move ahead," says Browne. "Think about it: if you, as a person, have 100 experiences of partnership where 99 were dismal and one wasn't... you'd focus on that one to go ahead because otherwise you'd be a masochist."

Of course, in an age where cynicism and glib, ironic detachment are more in vogue than ever, this can be a challenge.

"It's easy to be cynical," says Browne. "As a culture we're quite used to it... but let's be clear: cynicism is a cheap way of shutting down possibility before it's born. If you're invested in community and want to see change, you have to be prepared to set cynicism aside."

As part of this moving ahead, participants in Browne's workshops are encouraged to constructively articulate what they want in their community. She is careful to point out that this is not about creating unachievable expectations. Rather it's about using any dissonance that exists as a means to strengthen our system of relationships.

It's also about maintaining a sense of openness.
"If you want to create something where everyone's contribution matters then you can't be prescriptive," says Browne. "The starting position should be one of attentiveness, and you have to be prepared to begin by listening. Little can happen unless people are ready and willing to hear what others have to say. This is where the opportunity for adaptation really comes to place."

All of which means that imagining change - often seen as light, frivolous and pie-in-the-sky, is actually a deeply generative political activity, something that has far more ability to catalyze real action than grumbling about the status quo. Indeed, when you think about it, there's something radically counter-cultural about the process of dreaming. In Browne's work, the practice of allowing oneself to freely imagine change becomes the grounding place for inspired action.

"Even when people are angry about something that has happened in their community... there is a way to use this to facilitate imagination," says Browne. "So you're angry - you know something is wrong, something bothers you... but now, in very concrete terms, let's articulate what the right way would look like. Let's name the good path and use that as the central point of mobilization."

Conferences like Dream Vancouver, says Browne, are a place where hope is given space and validated and is alive with very practical ideas.

"As a form of grassroots agenda-building, collaborative spaces of this sort can be liberating experiences," says Browne. "Accordingly, participants in the conference can expect to get their imagination stretched."

"One of the things that I've learned is that people have astonishing degrees of imagination... deep hopes for ways to better community," says Browne. "It's just that, over the years, people have learned to bury this willingness to imagine change. When I come to Vancouver, I'll be working to activate this."

The timing couldn't be better. As the city gears up for a municipal election in 2008, and as the Olympic steamroller draws ever closer, there are critical questions being asked about the future of the city. There are also very legitimate concerns being raised about how the civic agenda is being set.

This sort of environment is a fertile one for the imagination. It's also a rich point for exchanging not only ideas for the future but also the fundamental queries that motivate them.

"It's critical we use spaces of dialogue such as Dream Vancouver to exchange ideas for the city," says Browne. "But more than anything, it's important that people have a chance to hear the different points of motivation that act as a source for these ideas."

"Exchanging answers is good... but what's really important is that citizens have the space to hear each others questions," says Browne. "That's the stuff that really fires the imagination."