Unleashing Urban Imagination through harvesting collective intelligence
By: Jenny Andersson
Tags: Urban Planning, Creative Thinking, Regenerative Business, Basingstoke, Imagination

Yesterday at a great local gathering of imaginative minds in Basingstoke, we set about re-imagining the future vision for this interesting town in the middle of some of the south of England’s prettiest countryside as part of the Horizon 2050 project. A slew of work has already been done to gather and harvest information from the local communities both inside and outside the town by Ipsos Mori which provided a base from which to harvest more imagination for future states.

Unsurprisingly, many of the concerns raised by the Basingstoke communities in prior research include all of the usual suspects: Housing, Health Services, Infrastructure. What was more interesting was that a general consensus rather than resistance had emerged that population in the area would increase, local villages would have to expand and Basingstoke could not remain doing ‘business as usual’. And so we were able to approach this re-imagination session with a reasonable set of endorsed criteria that included fast, flexible but commuity-focused growth, a sustainable borough and a focus on being a business hub. Specific items on the pubic’s wish list included growth in supporting services to serve population expansion, and building on brown-sites first.

4 Focus Areas for Development in Basingstoke

What was also exciting was the public view that they want to establish Basingstoke as having a purpose and reputation which it is felt is lacking. Unlike its ‘cuter’ and smaller market town neighbours like Farnham or Chichester, Basingstoke’s older architeture is outlying in villages like Old Basing. So in absence of more internal cultural heritage, Basingstoke wants to be ‘known’ for something. Rich territory for re-imagineering!!

So here’s the vision the group I facilitated came up with. Note: this was not met with unanimous approval!! :)

Vision/Goal: to become the exemplar town for regenerative innovation as a sustainable learning centre and innovation hub.

Components that might help to achieve this stretch goal.

A new transport/distribution system moving industrial centre out to M3 J7 brownfield zone shifting heavy traffic out to established flow infrastructure from M3 to A34

shifting heavy traffic out to established flow infrastructure from M3 to A34 Rebuilding inner city brownfield sites as mini-villages with affordable housing and integrated urban farming

Re-imagining rest of distribution system using advanced tech such as drones in order to out-Amazon Amazon!

in order to out-Amazon Amazon! Becoming the first large driverless city using only solar/hydrogen powered vehicles (@Riversimple take note).

using only solar/hydrogen powered vehicles (@Riversimple take note). Becoming a centre for innovative technology education at FE level, creating centres for biomimicry and exponential techhology learning (in partnership with The Biomimicry Institute and Singularity University) rather than trying to compete with other local University towns, especially as HE is much less agile in the time-frame for developing and validating new education programmes.

creating centres for biomimicry and exponential techhology learning (in partnership with The Biomimicry Institute and Singularity University) rather than trying to compete with other local University towns, especially as HE is much less agile in the time-frame for developing and validating new education programmes. Incubating Innovation Challenges on pollution, air quality, transportation.

One of the most interesting presentations of the evening prior to the re-imagineering session came from Professor Peter Guthrie of Centre for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University. Peter has worked on many of the large scale infrastructure projects in the UK including innovative ideas to solve the challenge of sewage flooding into the Thames during heavy rainfall, mixed developments, mining projects, housing, and educational buildings.

How Infrastructure Projects are developed in the UK (source: Uni of Cambridge)

His explanation of how the UK approaches sustainability in large infrastructure projects was illuminating. By only taking sustainability into consideration after economic feasibility, social acceptability, finance ability, and project design is done regularly ensures that environmental costs, measures and sustainability are an afterthought rather than an integrated goal. He is a fierce critic of HS2 on this basis as a project which may well see it being completely irrelevant to the future of transport in this country as technology advances at speed to change the face of mobility.

His talk highlighted the challenge of speed of change for infrastructure planners, which is a key challenge in all other areas of business. The speed at which technology is making exponential advances is completely outpacing traditional planning methods and making it desperately difficult for engineers and designers with a traditional approach to timescales to imagine what needs to be done. His presentation highlighted for me the deep importance of incubating imagination and creative thinking not just in business, but in education across the board so that we can bring completely different mindsets to the challenges we face.

All in all a fascinating evening in which passionate advocacy and discussion hopefully opened minds to the absolute potential for this fascinating Southern town. Great job done in convening a group of interested and bold imagineers by Horizon 2050, and Diana Davidson and Tim Hole of Breathe as representatives of The RSA.

If you would like to explore how to expand the culture of creativity and imagination in your organisation or team or if you would like help re-imagining the future, do get in touch with us at We Activate The Future.