Seeds of Possibility
"Great cities love themselves," wrote Jane Jacobs, a journalist turned urbanist and activist after a series of stories focused her attention on the functioning of cities and neighborhoods.
She’s right, of course. But reading that quote without context can give the impression that great cities are loved because have the roads, retail, and resources that make us say "ooo" and "aah" in the same way we do over shiny, pretty things.
And reading it with a problem-plan-process-solution mindset, the path of a city towards "greathood" looks like a linear one with a clear order of operations and a finish line: after years of checking every requested box of demands and jumping through every hoop of requests, the city can be deemed worthy to swing open the pearly gates to the Cities of Greatness promised land.
Said in another, maybe more transparent way, this perspective is "Great cities give us what we want, when we want it, all of the time."
This probably seems like I'm painting this perspective like it's about consumption, not citizenship, and you'd be right. Yes, cities need to provide resources. Yes, cities need to provide services. But taking on the perspective that we love our cities because they give us things turns us into shoppers, not citizens.
"Hmm...I have a coupon for a couple of new restaurants, very nice….jobs are on sale today, I see…
*GASP* They're out of roads, AGAIN? How DARE they!"
And just like that, we discard our communities like a left-swipe on Tinder. That carelessness and ease of disregard, and the impossibly high bar of, “If you as a city don’t give everyone whatever they want, we won’t like you” doesn’t a great city make.
So if cities aren’t great because of what they provide, what makes them great?My favorite quote from Jacobs gives us the context we need to shift our perspective from one of consumption to one of creation:
“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
Growing up, my dad had a garden in the backyard. The term "backyard garden" doesn't do it justice, though. Tomatoes, squash, green beans, rhubarb, peppers green and yellow, cucumbers— every summer, we had everything. My brothers and I would sit in the vegetable beds after weeding and picking rocks out of the dirt, grabbing and eating all the cherry tomatoes and snap peas within reach. To this day, a ripe tomato or the taste of dirt on a green bean will send me hurtling through time, landing squarely in a patch of soil covered in watermelon seeds.
Although I would eat my dad's produce until my cheeks were raw, I don't know much about what it takes to grow an entire garden utopia from seed, let alone a single plant from a single seed. While I don't know the techniques or the process, I do know the ingredients: seed, water, soil, sun, and love.
Love?
A month or so before the weather turned warm, my dad would start planting his seeds indoors, covered with grow lamps and clear tarps for warmth. To us, there was nothing there—just dirt, and seemingly a large amount of work, trouble, and attention for nothing.
But my dad didn’t see the problem of empty soil with no vegetables we could eat. He saw the seeds not for what they were, but for what they could be. To connect those dots—from soil to seed to success—takes love.
The beginning is the most critical and precarious part of the process, with no immediate reward for time, investment, and effort. There are no tomatoes to eat, no plants to touch, nothing that could say, "All of this work is worth it."
But that’s the lesson for us, planted in those little, empty, rewardless patches of soil: great cities aren't loved because they're great, cities are great because they're loved.
Jacobs wrote at length about the physical constructs within our communities: the design of roads, the size of city blocks, the layouts and makeups of downtowns and neighborhoods. And although during her life she was decried as an imposter by "experts" as being a writer posing as an urban planner, most of her ideas are being repeated as scripture by those leading the current wave of placemaking. She, more than most in the placemaking world, was able to talk at length about sidewalks, parks, and population density without losing focus on what should be the centerpieces of our cities: people and their interactions and relationships with one another.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody,” she wrote in her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Even taking up the belief that "great cities are great because they give everything we want", working backward we see "everything" needs "everybody", and in order to get the things we want, we have to get people involved.
In the public sphere, it's hard enough to rally a cohort of five or ten like-minded individuals....but everybody creating the entire city?
This call for the necessity of collective co-creation is a huge, nearly impossible request if we limit the tools we use to things like leadership, meetings, ideology, and planning. Leaders are biased and limited individuals, meetings are well, meetings. For every good idea, there will be ten people shouting "BAD IDEA! BAD IDEA!", and planning often turns people into chess pieces and math equations living in a perfectly predictable vacuum.
Ok then, so how?
We love ourselves and each other more.
In our “square hole needs a square peg” world of metrics and measurables, this seems like a complete non-answer, one that appeals because it lacks accountability. We need concrete answers! Numbers! RESULTS! A football team wins games with touchdowns. Touchdowns equal six points. So to win a football game, the answer is easy: score more touchdowns. Right?
Right?
I used to coach football at a private high school where no student coming in as a freshman had ever played football. Ever. Not in a community league, not in the street, not on the playground. Worse yet, most of them were soccer kids, so they came to us with a game they already knew and like.
But the high school didn’t have a soccer team, and mix in a hefty dose of school tradition, nostalgia, and my-dad-play-when-he-went-here, every year we would end up with 30 freshman young men who not only didn’t know how to play football, they didn’t care about football.
Have you ever tried teaching someone something they didn’t care about? More than that, have you ever seen someone great at something they didn’t love in some way? It’s hard enough to teach a team how to score more touchdowns, but if they don’t care about touchdowns, their teammates, or love the game, it becomes an impossible task.
Love comes first, results come second.
These questions of, "So how do we teach a city to love itself? How does a city show love? How can the people within a city show love to each other?” and “Why is love so important—more than economic development and planning—to the life and future of a community?" is the fuel and the fire for this newsletter over the next twelve months.
It might seem tangential to talk about civic love, pride, and relationships in a newsletter focused on civic marketing and storytelling. Yes, there will definitely be how-to's and top ten lists. There will be practical strategies, podcasts, and problem-solving.
But marketing is communication, communication is about creating change, realizing possibility, and deepening relationships and all of these things require pride, love, and trust.
I am going to resist the urge to answer, "Yeah, but how…?" in this post, not as an intentional cliff-hanger (ok, well, kinda) but because this is a critical question—perhaps the most critical question—in a world that is distracted, disconnected, apathetic, and constantly at odds with itself. Our communities are fractured, conversations are merely shouted-opinions, and when community leaders talk about current growth and vibrancy, many of us either feel left out or nothing at all.
But despite the long list of problems we face, a community's growth, restoration, enjoyment, happiness, and like rest in the realization of its possibilities. The easy answer is to run down a checklist of problems and solutions, a once-and-done recipe for reclaiming our places.
Problem-solving looks backward, and whether we have a city of 50 or 50 million, it will always end up in finger-pointing, blame, stagnation, and dissolution of trust. But asking questions framed with possibility—how would our city be different if everyone felt acknowledged? How would our quality of life improve if communication was clear, consistent, and honest? What would our community be like if we financially supported things that carry meaning, regardless of the anticipated return on investment?—is how we move forward.
Seth Godin is a marketing expert with one of the one popular blogs in the world, 20 best-selling books, and more than a lifetime’s worth of experience, expertise, knowledge, and ideas. He doesn't write explicitly about cities and communities, but he does write in a way that blurs the lines between marketing ideas and tactics and the necessity to use them in a way that creates substantive, existential change in the world.
Since I'm not leaving you with concrete answers, I will leave you with this short essay he wrote back in February, one that directs our attention not towards was is wrong, but what can be right.
"We might be settling scores or we might be opening doors. It’s up to us.
Grievance and possibility have confusing roots.
Grievance isn’t about grieving. In fact, it’s the opposite. Grievance is the narrative of getting even.
Possibility doesn’t itemize everything that’s possible. Instead, it focuses on the side effects that come from acting as though things are possible.
Grievance looks back and possibility looks forward.
Organizations and relationships that are focused on grievance care a lot about their share. About the competition. About maintaining ‘enough’.
Organizations that are focused on possibility care a lot about how big the pie is. About innovation. And about what’s next.
You can build a relationship or a career on grievance or on possibility.
And you can run a justice/penal system that way as well.
Possibility begets more possibility. Opportunities multiply.
And, alas, grievance leads to more grievance. Because it’s the fuel that keeps the narrative going.
Organizations/partnerships/systems that are usefully focused on possibility don’t deny that there are reasons for grievance, that there have been actions and omissions that must be addressed. In fact, they adopt a posture of forward motion as the best way to address the problems that came before.
One challenge is embracing the effective and generative approach of possibility when we’re sure that we’re entitled to grievance.
Toward better."
Toward, better, indeed.
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