#agency

Why We’re Teaching Urban Planning Students To Write Poetry

Op-ed: To prepare students for the complexities of community work, two educators turn to creative writing to help ignite imagination, self-awareness and communal connection.

Civic engagement is central to the mission and moral legitimacy of higher education. While it is challenging to foster authentic relationships between campus and community, we have found a way to make it happen: We’re teaching urban planning students to write poetry.

In the basement of an off-campus building with unreliable heat, our students pulled their chairs into a circle and pulled out their writer’s notebooks. The class consisted of Drexel students, West Philly community leaders, and two faculty members who had gone way out on a limb – us.

Few in the class had ever written a poem, let alone read their work out loud in front of an audience. We each took turns reading the poems we’d written, while the others snapped and nodded in affirmation. This was not a humanities course. This was the final “exam” in a required class on civic engagement and participatory planning.

Our class, Civic Engagement and Participatory Methods — a required course in Drexel University’s Department of Architecture, Design & Urbanism — helps students hone the skills necessary to engage in community work, whether as an architect, a community organizer, the leader of a local nonprofit or an urban planner. We have co-taught this Side by Side class for the last nine years; half of the participants are students at Drexel University and the other half are community students who reside in surrounding West Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Over the course of 10 weeks, students explore and refine their approach to leadership, how they show up in a group setting, cross-cultural communication skills, public meeting facilitation, media engagement and other essential competencies. The class blends practical training with a critical look at the historical and present-day factors that influence life in the city of Philadelphia.

This raises two questions: What does poetry have to do with civic engagement? And why center the humanities in a class designed for urban planners and architects?

We see civic engagement as a creative practice. Planners, architects, organizers and block captains need to strengthen their creative muscle so they can respond to the demands of a dynamic, uncertain world.

Writing and reading poetry does this by surprising us, drawing our attention to a particular moment in time and space, and making space to process difficult emotions. Poetry allows students to draw upon their humanity and meet each other (and themselves) across vast differences in expertise and experience. These tools help us understand the stories of people who are different from us.

Poetry cultivates our capacity for attention to people and places. This sensitivity allows us to imagine together, turning the dream language of the poem into the steel cables of Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge or the rust and gold of J.P. Clark’s Ibadan. Civic awareness makes poetry stronger, not just planning.

Access to poetry’s dream language enables us to be more flexible. To successfully run a community meeting, facilitators need to be able to “dance in the moment” (a favorite phrase in the coaching world). “Dancing in the moment” refers to being fully present for the person you are listening to while tuning in to your own reactions. It requires curiosity about what the other person brings with them, even if it doesn’t fit the story about them that you came in with.

The poetry we write and read in class helps our students learn to dance in the moment, and it helps build the bonds of trust that allow Drexel and community students to reckon with each other’s stories and viewpoints. From our own years of experience in community work, we know these are essential skills for any community leader and any aspiring urbanist.

These days, there is a lot of handwringing about the future of the humanities in higher education. After all, the humanities, including creative writing, have been considered essential to a well-rounded education for many hundreds of years. We believe students stay away from humanities courses not out of a lack of interest, but because they are worried about the return on investment.

So why are some of us simply wishing for students to come to their senses and prioritize humanities and arts classes, when we can integrate these tools into every discipline and allow creative practice to permeate our pedagogy?

In spite of reports of diminished student resilience when it comes to difficult texts, we do not feel the need to water down the rigor of our class. We have been consistently inspired by our students’ excitement, and their bravery, when writing poems with pen and paper so that they may add more tools to their urbanist toolkit.

Early on in the term, we studied Ross Gay’s “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” a poem set in our beloved city of Philadelphia. Gay describes a moment when strangers unexpectedly come together around a neighbor’s overflowing fig tree. Students wrote poems trying to capture this feeling of unexpected togetherness. For one undergraduate, this inspired her to write an ode to public libraries in Philadelphia, which she sees as “an underappreciated staple,” “a gathering place,” “a shelter,” “a mental escape,” even “a home office.” For her, the social infrastructure of the public library provides a space with “the possibility of conversing with a stranger.” In a time of disappearing funding and the ongoing privatization of public space, public libraries just found their newest advocate.

In the fifth week of class, we introduced the describe-interpret-evaluate model, an intercultural communication tool we have adapted to teach students how to communicate across differences of race and class. This tool forces students to withhold their impulse to jump to conclusions, pausing long enough to take in the whole situation from a variety of points of view. Only at the end of the exercise are they invited to engage their faculty of judgment.

The pause is what matters, and it is precisely where students frequently struggle. This year, we assigned a poem about forgiveness — “Phase One” by Dilruba Ahmed — to help students accustomed to the hot takes of the social media era to learn how to pause to offer grace and understanding, to others and to themselves.

After crafting her response poem on forgiveness, an architecture student reflected, “A crucial part of both forgiveness and being a leader is accountability. Leaders make mistakes and they deserve grace. As a leader it’s important that I learn to forgive myself, but also important that I take accountability for my mistakes.”

We have taught this content many times before, but only this year, when engaging her creative muscle, could a student come to this insight so quickly. We wish all experts in planning and design would be open to making mistakes, taking responsibility for them, and using that insight to grow and change.

Like every city, Philly has its struggles to overcome. Our students, from Drexel and the neighborhood, are working to mend this broken place. In response to Alice Walker’s poem “I Will Keep Broken Things,” a graduate student reflected that “brokenness does not equate to worthlessness. In fact, there is an inherent beauty in things that carry the marks of time, history and experience.”

Recognizing this beauty allows designers, planners and other leaders to work with the strengths and assets that exist in every community and neighborhood in Philadelphia. It gifts the power of poetry to the practice of planning and offers the insights of the attentive urbanist to the poet’s gaze. Too often, experts notice only what’s missing, deficient or broken, and we lose the power of possibility to reimagine and build anew.

Just as we did in our class, poetry can ignite our creative capacity to reimagine together what possibilities exist for cities and communities that stand together, recognize each other’s worth and dignity, and build collective power.

Around 9 p.m., the classroom’s heater sputtered. The security guard rapped on the window, telling us it was time to close up for the night. The students signed each other’s poetry zines, like you would a high school yearbook. We emerged, lingering for a few more minutes under the streetlights of the West Philadelphia neighborhood we call home.

▻https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/why-were-teaching-urban-planning-students-to-write-poetry

About Deep Listening

Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.

Inherently collaborative, the first published Deep Listening scores and activities (Sonic Meditations, 1971) were workshopped in the context of a female-identified collective, the fem-ensemble, over a period of many months. From the 1980s onwards, Deep Listening workshops, retreats, and the Deep Listening Certification Program were developed and facilitated in close partnership with playwright IONE (also Oliveors’ life partner) and movement artist Heloise Gold. Today, the philosophy and practice of Deep Listening continues to evolve through a growing international community of listeners.

▻https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening
#deep_listening

How the Arts Can Create the Foundation for a Multiracial US Democracy

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A few Mondays ago, the emails started to roll in. One after another, my colleagues announced their departure from leadership roles at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). These advocates helped culture thrive in every corner of the United States—on an annual budget that was less than 10 percent of the cost of the Trump Organization’s latest $3 billion condo project in Miami. Their farewell letters came on the heels of grim updates about cuts in the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Let me be clear: President Donald Trump and his administration have taken a chainsaw to programs that affect actual life and death. By contrast, the arts may seem a matter of small importance. Still, for me, these were the cuts that broke my heart.

For instance, I help run one of the leading university-based arts administration departments in the country. For more than 50 years, our program at Drexel University in Philadelphia has helped train thousands of students for careers in arts management, fundraising, community engagement, and cultural planning.

And yet, I have a confession to make. To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is something rotten in the way arts and culture work in the United States. The Trump administration’s actions, harmful though they are, are a wake-up call. For too long, the arts have been an elitist, exclusive space. The chance now is for arts workers and creatives to heed that call—and do better.
Arts and Democracy

The current upheaval of our sector gives those of us in the arts and creative fields an opportunity to rethink everything. Instead of seeking a return to the status quo, we have the chance to place culture and creativity at the center of US political life.

Artists explore complicated questions. They help to open new ways of understanding and acting in the world. They take us on a collective journey that can be joyful and exhilarating.

For me, nothing compares to a live jazz drummer pushing the beat on the ride cymbal, while a trumpeter dances up and down the scales. No laughter is more genuine than an improv theater group that takes an audience suggestion somewhere very, very silly.

These tools of group process, improvisation, and deep listening are vital tools for building a democratic culture. Arts leader and former NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson linked the domains of democracy and creative practice, when she said during a 2024 commencement speech that “creating and experiencing art is one of the most powerful ways to develop the skills and habits needed to be curious, to ask questions, and to fulfill the duties of citizenship in a participatory democracy.”
Legitimation Crisis

Of course, many people have lost faith in the US political system. Even before the 2024 elections, 68 percent of people surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they were dissatisfied with the way America’s democracy works.

Discourse on democracy may sound appealing, but try asking poor people, Black people, queer people, youth, people with disabilities—the list is long—how much influence they feel they have on how the system functions. The answer you’ll get in most cases, simply put, will be little or none.

And this popular perception is not wrong. Back in 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published a study that found that “business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

In reality, what the media likes to call “democracy” feels out of reach to most Americans, especially if by “democracy” we mean popular control over governance. As it happens, a similar malady affects the thing that many people like to call “the arts.”

In fact, both politics and the arts are widely considered the province of elites, removed from everyday life. Too many political leaders are “sorry, not sorry” about this. Political scientist Nicholas Tampio wrote back in 2017: “In recent years, numerous political theorists and philosophers have argued that experts ought to be in charge of public policy and should manipulate, or contain, the policy preferences of the ignorant masses.” And philosopher Olúf ẹ́mi O. Táíwò noted in 2020 that “when elites run the show, the group’s interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.”

My own field of arts and culture has also been content to reward experts who embody “excellence” with funding and institutional support. Notwithstanding recent efforts to support equity, diversity, and inclusion, the arts field remains mostly dominated by large, typically Eurocentric institutions, like ballet companies and symphony orchestras that receive the lion’s share of funding from private philanthropy.

Sixty percent of arts philanthropy goes to just 2 percent of cultural institutions, according to research by Holly Sidford and Alexis Frasz of the Helicon Collaborative. These institutions generally do a poor job of speaking to the hopes, fears, and questions of everyday people, steeped in symbols and behaviors that are utterly incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

For example, I may be a university professor, but even I have only a foggy idea of how the Electoral College works. Nor can I figure out the appropriate time to applaud during a classical music concert. Yet somehow these systems claim to represent us.

Instead of leaving our fate to the elites, there is an opportunity, particularly in this moment of crisis, to use the arts to build a true multiracial democracy through participatory, collective, creative action.
Building Democratic Culture Through the Arts

Over the last year, I have seen firsthand the power of the arts breathing life into democratic practices. I’ve been gathering artists, urban planners, policymakers, and students to explore the ideas raised in Democracy as Creative Practice, a book I coedited with cultural planner Tom Borrup.

Instead of talking about democracy, we’re trying to improvise it together. We’ve pretended our bodies were trees in Nashville, generated performance poetry in Denver, and devised theater skits in Spain. After the artist-facilitators help us create something together in real time, only then do we sit and talk about democracy and “the issues,” and have noticed the conversation flows much more easily. There is even video evidence of the fun we had in West Philadelphia, when we used art to reclaim democracy.

One moment stands out. At a pro-democracy conference held this past April in Toronto, I led workshop participants in a surrealist writing game. Vocalist Roula Said helped us transform these poems into a set of improvised songs. Choreographer Shannon Litzenberger turned the whole glorious mess into a folk dance.

The participants, including policymakers, funders, scholars—not the typical arts crowd—laughed, sang, and danced together. We moved beyond rational argumentation into embodied cocreation. The rest of our conversations about the US-Canada relationship and the future of democracy proceeded from a place of intimacy and camaraderie that no group of strangers could ever attain at a different sort of political meeting.
Envisioning a New Role for the Arts

When I describe participatory arts practices, I often get arched eyebrows and am regularly asked: “If everyone is an artist, does that mean that anything is art? Don’t good artists have to spend 10,000 hours practicing first?”

I respond with a smile. Art has the capacity to be many different things; there is room for experts, hobbyists, and dabblers alike.

I am a mediocre piano player, so I pose no threat to Thelonious Monk. In fact, I spend more time and money than most people I know so I can see professional artists practice their craft, since I know firsthand how hard it is to play music well.

Creative practice is everyone’s birthright. When it’s done as a collective activity by amateurs and experts alike, we can hold each other in community and bolster our brave explorations.
The Path to Rebuilding Culture

In short, to rebuild democracy using creative practice, the arts and culture sectors need to make their own structural changes and clean our own house.

We need to start with a narrative shift. Arts and culture are not just about excellence. Creativity is also a vital tool to make sense of our individual and collective experience. The arts are a radical act that enables sovereignty over our own narratives and our own attention in a time when attention has been coopted as a for-profit commodity and narrative sovereignty is a battleground—politically, technologically, and economically.

Artists should be embedded in government agencies to make them function better. Theater should be part of the curriculum in every K-12 classroom, not just an elective where funding permits. Participatory art is key to reimagining our cities.

Certainly, it is important to join the fight to save the NEA and the Smithsonian, but let’s not leave it at that. Let’s remake society around our collective artistry. I commit to being part of building a creative democracy, and I am not alone.

Now that US democratic practices and the arts are in free fall, this is an opportunity to assert that their fates are inextricably linked. Let’s not greet Trump’s takeover of culture with a shrug just because other vital systems are under threat.

Resisting the enclosure of our own minds, and our bodies—that is what democratic, revolutionary praxis is all about. This is especially the case when done collectively and made visible so that we may bolster each of our efforts and exploration.

▻https://nonprofitquarterly.org/how-the-arts-can-create-the-foundation-for-a-multiracial-us-demo

Democracy as Creative Practice. Weaving a Culture of Civic Life

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Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life offers arts-based solutions to the threats to democracies around the world, practices that can foster more just and equitable societies. Chapter authors are artists, activists, curators, and teachers applying creative and cultural practices in deliberate efforts to build democratic ways of working and interacting in their communities in a range of countries including the United States, Australia, Portugal, Nepal, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The book demonstrates how creativity is integrated in place-based actions, aesthetic strategies, learning environments, and civic processes. As long-time champions and observers of community-based creative and cultural practices, editors Tom Borrup and Andrew Zitcer elucidate work that not only responds to sociopolitical conditions but advances practice. They call on artists, funders, cultural organizations, community groups, educational institutions, government, and others to engage in and support this work that fosters a culture of democracy.

▻https://www.routledge.com/Democracy-as-Creative-Practice-Weaving-a-Culture-of-Civic-Life/Borrup-Zitcer/p/book/9781032758725
#livre

Frontex and FRA agree to establish fundamental rights monitors

Today, Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) have agreed to work together to establish fundamental rights monitors, design their training programme and integrate them into Frontex activities.

“The establishment of the new monitors is another step to make our activities even more transparent and promote fundamental rights throughout all our activities. We are committed to ensuring the highest standards in all that we do. And Fundamental rights are an essential component of effective border management.” said Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri. “The Fundamental Rights Agency is a key partner for us in this task,” he added.

“It is essential that the EU, its Member States and agencies do their utmost to protect people’s fundamental rights. Fundamental rights monitoring of operations at the land and sea borders can help ensure that rights violations do not occur. The fundamental rights monitors are an important preventive tool and FRA will provide its fundamental rights expertise to help establish them. The vacancy notices should be published as soon as possible so the monitors can be deployed,” said FRA’s director Michael O’Flaherty.

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In a ceremony that took place online, the two directors signed a Service Level Agreement in the virtual presence of Didier Reynders, Commissioner for Justice, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, the Chair of LIBE Committee in the European Parliament and Georgios Koumoutsakos, Alternate Minister, Greek Ministry for Migration. Other participants included high-level representatives from Germany and the European Parliament, as well as the Chair of Frontex Consultative Forum on fundamental rights.

The main tasks of the Frontex fundamental rights monitors will be to make sure all operational activities are in line with fundamental rights framework, monitor all types of operations and contribute to Frontex training activities.

The monitors will be integrated with the agency’s Fundamental Rights Office. The Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer will oversee their work and assign them to particular operations.

By the end of the year, Frontex and FRA plan to establish a team of as many as 40 fundamental rights monitors. They will undergo enhanced fundamental rights training before they take up their duties next year, when Frontex will deploy the first members of the European Border and Coast Guard standing corps.

▻https://frontex.europa.eu/media-centre/news-release/frontex-and-fra-agree-to-establish-fundamental-rights-monitors-OBabL6
#monitoring

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Cet essai propose d’analyser sous un angle féministe quelques-unes des caractéristiques de la « culture populaire féminine », un terme qui regroupe les genres, formes, phénomènes, pratiques et supports culturels et médiatiques qui sont associés aux femmes et au féminin – ces deux termes sont ici envisagés comme des catégories sociales et discursives façonnées par les rapports de genre, mais aussi de classe, de sexualité et ethnoraciaux. S’ils ont jusqu’ici suscité relativement peu de travaux au sein des universités françaises (dont la culture dite populaire a déjà mis bien longtemps à pousser les portes), il existe en revanche dans les universités anglo-américaines un très riche champ de recherche autour de ces objets et pratiques, né dans le sillage des Cultural Studies (une école de pensée apparue en Grande-Bretagne à la fin des années 1950 et tournée vers l’étude des cultures et des modes de vie populaires) ainsi que des mouvements féministes des années 1970. En portant à la connaissance du public certains des débats qui ont structuré ce champ particulier de la théorie féministe, cet essai entend aussi contribuer aux discussions en cours au sein du féminisme politique. Alors que la « 4e vague » féministe apparue sur les réseaux sociaux aux alentours des années 2010 bouscule l’ensemble du corps social, il semble en effet plus que jamais nécessaire de comprendre les ressorts du succès persistant de cette culture massivement (mais non exclusivement) consommée par les femmes et généralement perçue comme conservatrice, productrice de normes oppressives, voire comme un redoutable véhicule pour la « culture du viol ».

#agency #empowerment #cultural_studies

C’est pas très bien mis en ligne (Spip ?) mais j’aime bien le propos, très mesuré.

digne du « petit traite de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens » ...