The Ragged Optimist 22
Making it together
Welcome to The Ragged Optimist’s 22nd newsletter.
For the last few years, everyone working in the arts or in community organising has been using the phrase 'co-creation'. Funders love it - Historic England and Arts Council England both demand it now. Without really knowing what it is. The report Let's Create by Naomi Alexander has been the best attempt to frame what it means. And importantly, how it works. There are a series of podcasts alongside the report, and I’m in there if you want to listen.
But I have kept digging to see where ‘co-creation’ comes from. There's some suggestion it was being used by business in the early-1980s, in relation to product design.
But the first references I can find to it come from the Findhorn Community. They seem to have used it through the 1970s, and it gets a whole section in their 1980 book Faces of Findhorn - which I’ve just read, after finding a copy in the Ellington Park Bookshop.
They use it to mean - not just co-created by different people (their practice was to have have 'focalizers' not leaders on projects - quite interesting). But also co-created with nature and with god. Anyone got an earlier reference?
I think the idea of co-creation is a good one, and in many ways it has been part of my practice as a social artist for 25 years - but it does mean a letting-go of control of the outcomes which is going to be hard for arts and community organisations (and their funders) to really embrace. Most of the things I apply for want me to co-create things with a community, and want me to define exactly what I’ll make. You can’t have the two together.
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I’m reading an extract from my new extra-long poem about bamboo this week, at the UK Bamboo Summit. It’s going to be a major new work, so get in if you want to see this scratch version.
Just a marketing gimmick, but as Jimi famously said "you've gotta have a gimmick", I like these classic novels paired with Dulux heritage colours. Now, can somebody at Dulux send me a set?
I hate all the wearing hi-vis to litterpick stuff (and from the archive - here’s me as a pioneer in using social media to promote micro-volunteering opportunities like litterpicks). If you're on the beach or in a park, you don't need hi-vis. It's just performance. Litterpicking dressed as a clown, though - genius.
Heritage Action Zones (HAZ) are designed to bring whole neighbourhoods back to life by capitalising on their heritage buildings. This is a good idea - see Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn for more on why! But HAZs have a patchy track record, with many not getting any further than one brick deep, as the funding’s too widely spread. But it looks like Swindon Railway Village, focused on a well-defined area, is a success.
Half a million oysters will be grown in the Humber Estuary, as part of Wilder Humber, a partnership between Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust and the green energy company Ørsted.
There are clear signs that the once-extinct red-billed chough will thrive again in the South East. A wild chick hatched at Dover Castle this year - they’ve been absent for about 200 years. Choughs not beavers this week. Anyone got new beaver … er … news?
On the north Devon coast 222 acres (197 football pitches, for those of us who like standard units of measurement) of newly created rare wildflower meadows on National Trust land reached their first full bloom this summer.
Opening in October, this exhibition looks at London's lost gardens. Caught my eye, because I wrote a book about the Isle of Thanet's lost pleasure gardens, and because I'm hoping to work with The Bay Trust, which was founded by Fred Cleary. He was a property developer, but he had a liking for reusing old buildings, and he gave the City of London lots of its post-Second World War parks.
Annabelle Chvostek's music always lifts me up if I'm down. It's joyous. Needed it a lot, this week.
Chris TT and me seem to have been running on parallel tracks for a long time, although he's done far better things than me. But this, from his latest substack, really resonated. "Any value in my own ‘activism’ has shrivelled this decade and I’m ashamed for it. ... But it’s urgent now. We all need to figure out what on earth we’re meant to be doing — too many ideas, too much incomplete work — with the rest of our time on this planet..."
Thanks for introducing me to Annabelle Chvostek. Ne ver heard her before ... fab!