The 7 Foundational Principles

1. Anything is Possible if You Have a Story

In 1987 I found myself part of Citizens Against Route Twenty. A week later, I found myself media spokesperson. I had no previous experience in community activism, no formal education, no interest in traffic and urban planning and no idea about politics.

Full of incredible optimism, I started my new job with a six-hour door-knock along the proposed route. At every door I got the same response: 'Once they (the state government) have decided to do something, there is nothing you can do to change it'. I was stunned by this sense of resignation and powerlessness. Even our committee didn't believe we could win. 'We will give them a good fight', I was told, '...but we cant win'.

I was outraged, but didn't have the foggiest idea of what to do. Out of sheer desperation I suggested to the committee that we spend a half-day pretending we had won. I suggested we make up stories about how we won and that these stories should start from our current reality.

On the day we pretended we had won, we invented many stories about how it happened. We then chose the story that seemed most plausible and built our campaign strategy on this story.

Something significant happened during our half day of play. The committee changed its tune from 'we can't win' to 'maybe we can'. Prior to us playing 'lets-pretend-we-have-won', there was no obvious road that could take us from current reality to our desired future. But in creating the stories, we had built a bridge in our imagination from 'here' to 'there' and suddenly the impossible had become possible and we had a rough mud map to guide us.

Three years later we won the impossible battle and it happened largely according to the story that we had created three years earlier when we played 'lets pretend'.

I once met someone in Atlanta doing a thesis on 'the politics of the possible'. How is the ceiling set on what is possible in a community? Why can Dutch cities rebuild their streets in brick every five to ten years, but we can' do it once? Why is one community locked into envisioning a future that is the same as today, while another community believes they can create a future that is very different to today? One of the things that puts a glass ceiling on the possible is the degree to which we allow rational, linear thinking to dominate the playful dreamer and storyteller.

Simply taking the time to tell a story of how the Great Civility Outbreak in Brisbane happened can transform the impossible into the possible.

2. What Makes One City More Livable than Another is its 'Civility Surplus'

You may live in a mansion designed by the greatest architect in the world, but you may as well be living in hell if you are at war with the other people living there. The most livable cities are not those that are the best designed. The most livable cities in the world are those in which there is an abundance of 'civility' - people generously giving to the wellbeing of the other residents. In these cities, everyone gets back more than they give. It is my observation that livable cities, such as Portland, got that way because citizens took the initiative to enrich the public domain. Great design will automatically follow an outbreak of civility.

3. Declining Citizenship will Bankrupt a City and its Residents

As citizenship declines the politics of blame escalates and the politics of blame always demands very expensive infrastructure.

For example, blaming traffic problems on 'other bad motorists' requires slowing them with very expensive traffic calming devices. But if we simply signed a good citizenship treaty with each other - ' I will not speed in your neighbourhood if you don't speed in mine'- most of these traffic problems would evaporate overnight and we would save ourselves millions of dollars. Or if we all refused to use liability suits as some kind of lottery, our kid's sporting club may actually survive.

Declining citizenship hits us very hard in the back pocket, and ultimately bankrupts the citizens, both financially and morally.

4. Physical Design Problems are Usually Social/Cultural Problems

Physical design problems such as traffic congestion, speeding traffic and urban sprawl are an outward manifestation of internal social/cultural problems. For decades we have treated the symptoms rather than look for their source in the social/cultural domain.

5.Play and Celebration are More Likely to Trigger Social Change than Reason and Hard Work...

Healthy humans are a bundle of contradictions: they love intimacy, but they also love solitude. They love order but they also love spontaneity. They love to travel and go adventuring. But they also love to stay at home and feel rooted to familiar surroundings. At the heart of most social problems is an inbalance in power between our contradictory desires - one need is dominant and the other is locked in the basement. Traffic problems arise when our need to move dominates our need to reside.

Social change automatically happens when the power relationship between contradictiory needs are changed. The best way to change the power relationship is not by attacking the 'dominant voice', but rather by amplifying and legitimising the 'submerged voice'. This is best done, not through reason and hard work, but by simply celebrating the submerged voice.

Finding a more creative way to balance our contradictory needs can never be a rational process, because the needs themselves are paradoxical opposites, bound eternally to each other in a never-ending dance of the impossible. We can only play with more creative ways to fully embrace our contradictory needs.

6. Social Revolutions Do Not Sell a New Value but Release a Submerged Desire...

When too much power has been given to our need to 'look after number one', our need to 'be a good citizen' and help make the world a better place cries out in the basement for expression. In our Civility Outbreak Play Day, we are not trying to find a way of selling some unpalatable new product. Instead we are searching for the means that allows people to embrace and celebrate this submerged need.

7. Positive Social Revolutions are Viral

Viruses are simple organisms that are easily passed from one host to another. As such, a viral social revolution needs a simple 'word container' that allows it to be easily passed from one person to another. For example, in 1991 I invented the Walking School Bus as a means of getting kids walking to school. This idea has now spread all over the world because the name is viral. We have chosen The Great Civility Outbreak as our viral idea. We are open to playing with this idea.

Viruses also need a simple way of spreading. How can we make it easier to pass the civility bug from one person to another? How can we make it spread and multiply, even while we are asleep?