rdn32

Saturday afternoon of last weekend, I went to Anglia Ruskin on East Road for Cambridge Conversation Café, the inaugural event of Be The Change Cambridge. This is my write-up of the event. Or rather, it’s more a write-up of my experience of the event. If you want something more objective you might want to try Michelle Brook’s account.

Before I describe the afternoon I want to say something about why I went. And before I do that I want to explain a couple of the misgivings I had about going at all.

One thing that occurred to me was that I might be a bit out of place. I expected other people there would be political activists and policy analysts, people working in government or in NGOs. I am none of these, and it’s a whole different world to the one I’m used to. However, whilst I wasn’t wrong about the sorts of people attending, it wasn’t really a problem: I rarely felt like this was a conversation I didn’t know how to take part in.

Another thing was that something about Be The Change triggered some bad associations. In a corporate setting I have had unhappy experiences of things like culture change programs and staff morale working parties. As often as not, these seem to be manifestations of what Matthew Stewart calls Theory U (for Utopian) and what Venkat Rao, rather more bluntly, calls cluelessness. What is objectionable in all this “no ‘I’ in team” / “work smarter not harder” / “people are our most valuable assets” guff is that it tends to be disingenuous about power dynamics whilst playing on people’s natural sense of loyalty.

However, this brings me on my reasons for taking part, since sentiments that seem misplaced in the contractual, provisional relation between employees and their employer are in fact much more fitting for the deeper relation between citizens and the places where their lives happen.

As I’ve already indicated, I’m not involved in politics: for most of my life I’ve not been much of a ‘joiner’ in general. There are reasons for this, which I’m not going to go into. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong-headed in this, and so it is now my ambition to become a well-meaning, middle-class do-gooder (well, there has to be more to civic virtue than just paying tax and voting…) and so I’ve been looking out for opportunities in this area to crop up. That’s the nub of why I went along to Saturday’s event.

Having got that little lot off my chest, I’ll say something about the event itself.

The basic format was this:

• we all came up with ideas for discussion which we wrote on post-it notes and stuck them up on a wall
• the ideas were grouped into a small number of themes
• people formed groups, one for each theme, to discuss the ideas
• one member of each group then presented discussion results
• finally, three politicians (one from each major party) took turns to respond to what they had heard

The politicians were: for the Liberal Democrats, Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge; for Labour, Lewis Herbert, leader of Cambridge City Council; and for the Conservatives, Vicky Ford, MEP for the East of England.

I was in a group discussing art and culture, the other three members of which were all culture professionals. That made for quite an interesting dynamic, and I wonder in retrospect whether we should have discussed it explicitly, since the question of art and culture being a domain of professional expertise was touched on, albeit fleetingly, in comments from a number of people over the course of the afternoon.

I recall there being two main conversations within the group: one was about finding spaces outside the city centre; the other was about building a new music venue, larger than either the Corn Exchange or the West Road Concert Hall, somewhere in the city. I didn’t have much to say about the latter, as I didn’t understand the rationale. (My personal experience from when I was a regular gig-goer was that the Corn Exchange was about as large a venue you could have for a gig and it still be good.)

The former conversation started with a comment from me about the north end of Milton Road (by which I meant the Science Park and other nearby business areas) being a cultural wasteland. One way of looking at this particular example, which occurred to me afterwards, is that Google often invite world-famous authors to its Mountain View headquarters to give talks, and the number of employees it has there is roughly comparable to the number of people working in hi-tech companies in and around the Science Park. It seems a shame if we couldn’t manage anything similar, given how much goes on in the city centre, less than four miles away.

Things broadened out to consider the outskirts of the city in general: what spaces there are, who might use them, how they might find out about them, etc. One of the reasons I think the Science Park area has interesting potential is that there are already companies who open up their premises for out-of-office-hours events, even if it is currently just technology events. If you can have drones dancing to dubstep in Red Gate’s atrium then there must be all sorts of other interesting things you could do with this and similar spaces.

I won’t go into everything that was talked about, either in our particular group or in the event as a whole. There is one point I wanted to pick up on, which a number of people made but that I though Vicky Ford made most clearly: Cambridge is a successful city, and the problems it has—particularly those of housing and transport—are problems of success which, whilst being real problems that need addressing, are good problems to have.

One of the odd things about Cambridge is that people look at it and say how great it would be if it more like somewhere else. You even hear this sort of thing regarding the hi-tech sector: if only it were more like Silicon Valley, or more like Shoreditch. People make all sorts of pronouncements about what Cambridge needs to do “if it is to succeed”—as if it weren’t already an incredible success. David Cleevely came out with a factual curiosity to illustrate this: there are now more Cambridge-designed ARM chips in the world than there are human arms.

There was something else that Vicky Ford said that I wanted to respond to. She indicated that it had been an unfortunate oversight on our part not to say anything about science and technology, given the global significance of work being done in Cambridge. I don’t know exactly what other people thought, but my thinking is that there’s very little that a venture like this can do directly to support science and technology, there’s a great deal it can do indirectly by helping the people who work those sectors.

This was what motivated my interest in the theme of art and culture. I once heard a story about a company (it might have been Cambridge Consultants) who hired a sculptor-in-residence, who would lead their engineers through various sculpting exercises. The idea was not only to promote creativity, but also—and perhaps more importantly—to help the company to fulfil its duty of care towards its employees by reducing stress. In a knowledge economy it doesn’t do anyone any good to have knowledge workers burn out.