Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the city, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host, Tamlin Shimizu, and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the city is brought to you by BABLE Smart Cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE Smartcities EU so we are back with our next episode as part of our series for the Urban Innovation Leadership program done in partnership with the Urban Innovators Global.
It's a fully customizable program for cities and other stakeholders looking to scale up and scale up. So with education on the mind, we are diving into some really interesting topics around collective learning and much, much more on this episode. So I'm excited to speak to these wonderful guests that we have today. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce you to Honorata Grzesikowska. She's the founder and CEO of urbanitarian and a spatial and equity designer. Welcome, Honorata.
[00:01:26] Honorata Grzesikowska: Hello.
[00:01:27] Tamlyn Shimizu: Hi, nice to have you here. And joining her today to join in on a lively discussion is Mela Atanassova. She's a facilitator in innovation design. Welcome, Mela.
[00:01:41] Mela Atanassova: Hi, nice to meet you all.
[00:01:43] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, nice to have you here.
We like to start off with a bit of a teaser to get warmed up. And so to start off a bit lightly, I want to ask you for fun, if you could redesign any city in the world, which one would you pick and why?
[00:02:03] Mela Atanassova: I would practically pick all of them. I was thinking, I'm a gardener, so I love, you know, nature, and especially, you know, the messy nature, not the French, you know, gardens type of very square type of nature. Yeah. So I would love to have cities that look more like jungles than what we have right now.
[00:02:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. I like that, too.
[00:02:27] Mela Atanassova: I haven't found a city that looks like this yet. Otherwise I would be living there. But yeah, I itch to make them that way.
[00:02:34] Tamlyn Shimizu: Cool. So I know you're based in Brussels, so I guess you would pick Brussels to look like a jungle too.
[00:02:43] Mela Atanassova: Totally, totally green everywhere. Rooftops, walls, everywhere.
[00:02:47] Tamlyn Shimizu: Cool. Yeah. Hanogata.
[00:02:50] Honorata Grzesikowska: My first thought was my town, basically a place where I live because I'm very pragmatic and I want to live in a nice place.
[00:02:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: And where do you live?
[00:03:01] Honorata Grzesikowska: I live in Catalonia, just 2 hours, 1 hour, 2 hours away from Barcelona.
[00:03:07] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay, very nice.
[00:03:09] Honorata Grzesikowska: But, you know, it may sound a bit egoistic, but in fact, I go with this rule to take care of yourself first. Otherwise you cannot help others. And in my case, while I am an urban designer, you have to imagine that I don't have holidays. The moment I open my eyes in the morning, I see things. I see how the things are designed all around. When I step out of the building, I see the pavement, I see the placement of the buildings, I see this doesn't work. I see there is no greenery. So I really can never rest. So if the place that is just around me is designed well, I can then focus on my energy on designing places elsewhere. So I think this was my first thought when I had the question. But also, we have to remember, too, that saying, designing just for fun underscores the possibilities that creativity has to be for fun. So everything that we do has to be for fun. Please take this advice. And I know that Mela also does it like that.
[00:04:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. I want to get into the main conversation, the topics, but first, I really love to give our listeners a bit more insight into who you are as people. Like, what is your background? Where did you come from and how did you get here today?
Mela, maybe you want to start.
[00:04:39] Mela Atanassova: There's so many layers to that question. So I'm a Bulgarian that ended up somehow in Brussels, came to study and got stuck.
So I've been living in Brussels for many, many years. And originally I used to be a white hacker. So white hats sort of, you know, the good guys that chase the bad guys. So cybersecurity was my field, and I spent a good chunk of my beginning career in that space. And then I sort of had an epiphany that I wanted to work more with people rather than with machines.
And I did not like myself being the suspicious self I was while I was doing the other job.
So I retrained as a facilitator. So since then, I've been doing that. I help people do things collectively in a way that is productive and fun.
And I've been using that skill to help people innovate. Big companies, small companies, startups. And the last few years, I've been working with. I've been very lucky, actually, to work with Koro foundation and the UNDP to help cities and countries innovate the same way. So think about how to design for the sustainable goals and how to transform the systems they live in.
So that's sort of what I do. And I'm on the way of transitioning again and becoming a full time farmer, so hence the gardening piece.
[00:06:04] Honorata Grzesikowska: Oh, wow.
[00:06:05] Mela Atanassova: So that will be my. That's my retirement plan.
[00:06:08] Tamlyn Shimizu: Wow. Really interesting background and story, and it's always one of my favorite parts to hear about the journey of someone and what led them to what they're working on today.
Honogata, I would love to hear also from you, like, what is.
[00:06:23] Honorata Grzesikowska: What has your journey been like now? Mela, when you were explaining your story, it reminded me that actually what I do now is being a detective, because I am trying to find out the authors, the meaning, what are the ideas behind the different urban scale projects around the world. And this is how urbanitarian was born. But before that, I am polish. I was studying architecture. I have architectural background, but, you know, always I had this problem while designing architecture and designing building.
My problem was that from the beginning, I knew that the given building that we were supposed to design was not placed in the right situation in the city. So then I never could focus on the design, on choosing the facades, for example, or the color of the facade, because the problem was much deeper. And this. This is how I kind of introduced myself into urban scale and into urban planning, into urban design. And I used to live in the Netherlands, and I ended up here in Spain.
[00:07:33] Tamlyn Shimizu: Oh, very interesting. Yeah. I really wanted to get more into your work and how you view the world in this way. So maybe I want to start off with a bit of understanding about this topic that you brought to the table, which is collecting learning.
So, Mela, maybe from your perspective, why do you think we struggle with learning from what's already out there and what makes collective learning so challenging when we think about system transformation and strategic innovation. Maybe you can share some thoughts on that.
[00:08:10] Mela Atanassova: So we had actually a conversation with Honorata a little bit around our interest, and we landed on this because both of us have been experiencing different, I guess, biases in the way society works in order to work with knowledge in general. And so why don't we learn collectively? Well, we actually could, but there's a few things that somehow we got a bit wrong on the way. I'm not sure when exactly one is this idea of the lone genius and the glorification we have in society of inventors in general, people who create and generate new knowledge. And that's probably something that we've had for a very long time, if you think about the savants and the role of people, of knowledge in communities.
So it has to do with power, I guess. And asymmetry in how knowledge is distributed, that gives power to those that have it and not to those that don't have it. So that's kind of a fundamental thing we have as a bias in society that makes it difficult to learn as a collective.
Now, on top of all of that, I mean, if you think about all of the different awards we have or things, they always celebrate an individual, right? It's never a team, it's never a group. We have embedded this kind of things in all of our institutions. So it's very rare that we build mechanisms through which we recognize the collective rather than the individual. So I think there's a couple of things that are changing in this which give me a lot of hope. So one is the fact that there is quite a lot of push to democratize access to knowledge.
So to change that imbalance of power to allow people to have access to more, but we need to change that attitude of, you know, there is glory in the invention and not in the reuse. So using new stories, basically creating different symbols that put value to that sort of thing. So instead of having just individual awards, why not have team awards that celebrate team achievements, not just individuals, or when somebody achieves something, basically celebrate everybody else before that have allowed them to get there, just create that sort of beginning steps would probably change a little bit how we think of collective learning. I don't think we are generally bad at it because we do it well in family situations, in tribal situations, but we have engineered things in society that don't help us well.
[00:10:47] Honorata Grzesikowska: It's exactly the same in the field of built environment and in the field of city design. You know, when at some point people began to realize we actually should give some prize to women as well, they gave it straight away to Zaha Hadid because they were doing it in the way as they were doing it before, looking for the single genius, individual, single genius men. And they found these features and these characteristics hadith. But it can take really long time until we find again a woman like that. So it's really putting value into collective knowledge and collective learning. And this is a bit also what happens if we compare architecture scale and urban design scale. In architecture, it is really easy to define one author, although it is never true, because it is always effort of a whole team. But with the urban scale project, you always have this bunch of experts from completely different fields that put the knowledge together in order to create this one master plan, then they never have time to because it's also not trendy and they don't have time even to promote themselves, as it happened with architects or with star architects. What we can see with the changes that are coming now, even with some things that we did in the past with urbanitarian, when the hashtags were still trendy, we did hashtags, free your master plans or do it in public. Because really the biggest challenge was to get to this knowledge, because the knowledge is there, but it is somewhere sitting on the shelves.
You have to go through several links, through some city administration pages. And also, I don't know why people want to keep the things for themselves and they don't want to share.
So there are so many steps that you have to take in order to obtain the knowledge in urban scale projects that basically no one does it.
These are very similar situations that I have in my job, the same as Mela has, the same that Mela sees in her job as a facilitator and working with so many cities and in so many projects of different subjects.
[00:13:15] Mela Atanassova: I think what's interesting as well is the fact that we're getting to a stage where we need it more than ever, the collective learning. Because practically all of the problems that we're trying to solve require several people from different fields and different disciplines to come together. We can't solve any more problems individually. We've reached a limit at which an individual can own and generate alone knowledge. And that's exactly what was saying with this. In architecture, in a building, you can have attribution to one person, but once you start talking about the more complex space, then you can't anymore have a single person. You've got to have a team. And I think we're seeing that in practically every single field of our life, that we're getting to a point where we have to put people together, they have to share knowledge to be able to break through and create a new innovation space. But we don't have good enough processes yet and habits.
Yeah.
[00:14:13] Tamlyn Shimizu: What I'm wondering is how like, so this, this all sounds really great, right? I'm just wondering, how can we make this, like, how can you do this actually in practice? What is it? What, what could be an example of this?
[00:14:27] Honorata Grzesikowska: First thing, we have to come into a realization that we don't know, because there is a huge gap between the theory and then actually the solution. And we have, we tend to go straight away to the solution. This is also also how you are teaching at the universities.
You have to find the idea. You know, what is your idea? What is the idea? And there is no value put in the research that you do or in the questions that you are asking, we already know that, most importantly is to find the right question, not to have the right answer.
And the moment someone can stand up and say, I don't know, I have to go out and ask people who actually live there, the street or on this neighborhood, and I have to make participatory processes. I have to take people to sit by the table, then I will get the right questions, and later on I can get the right answers. So there is this huge gap to be filled in with new professions that have to come. Look how many new professions are in it business. They pop up every month when we talk about build environment. It's an architect, engineer, landscape architecture. Even when I was going at some point through the list of my network on LinkedIn, and I can see so many new types of professions that people are actually creating by themselves because it's difficult to tell, to say it in one word as architect or as urban designers. So this gap between the scales, between the knowledge, between the academia and practitioners, there is so much things to be done and so many ways to create the knowledge that we can learn from.
[00:16:16] Mela Atanassova: So, you know, we call a lot this process of going back and asking questions. Well, so there's two parts to it, right? One is the asking the questions, and then the other one is looking what others have done. So the whole piece around reconnaissance. So one of the things that we have tried to do with the United nations development Program, when they engage with cities in this asking questions piece, is actually adopt a methodology that forces Neelie people to spend a lot of time in that space. So similarly to how you would impose other methodologies, let's say agile or anything else.
What we do is we've called this a portfolio process, but one of the fundamental parts of it is that you spend a significant amount of time creating a model that helps you understand how you see the world. And that model is there exactly to interrogate it, to say, well, what are the questions I'm asking myself, and what is it that I know, and what is it that I don't know? Part of this is going out on the streets exactly. And doing, listening. So asking people that kind of same questions. But the process is quite difficult for people because it requires you to have the patience to stay in a space of ambiguity, and it's extremely uncomfortable. So it's not just the exercise itself, putting tools on the table, etcetera, but recognizing that most people derive comfort from a solution.
And so spending time in a space where you consciously stop yourself from finding a solution is really, really uncomfortable.
[00:18:00] Honorata Grzesikowska: It reminds me straight away a very practical thing which I did once I conducted a simple exercise. I was asking the group of people to mark on the map places that they like in this neighborhood and they dislike. And they were in every answer they were at least two times more negative answers than positive ones.
So we really are not used to thinking what is good for us.
We ourselves, we don't know what we actually want and what do we need in my case, from the city, from the physical space of the city and my surroundings and going back to this, to asking great questions. Tricked it a bit. And I ask, what if you were about to live and live somewhere else? What would you miss?
And this straightaway, give me a bit of a knowledge and even for people to dig deeper into their brains and their imagination.
[00:19:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting thoughts there. I know that you also mentioned Honagata about this kind of not event, not invented here syndrome.
I'm wondering if you could. What does that mean? Can you address it? Can you discuss any, any implications of that?
[00:19:30] Honorata Grzesikowska: Yeah, not invented syndrome. Not invented here syndrome. I don't know if it exists in my profession, because actually everywhere you go the buildings look the same, they are all concrete and glass.
But I don't know if you know the opposite of that which is proudly found elsewhere, which I think it fits much better to also at least what I do at urbanitarian. But the actual syndrome, not invented here in our profession, is more problem, I think, internal problem within our companies. And everyone copies on top of that. Everyone copies, but everyone lies.
[00:20:13] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely.
Maybe I need an example to put it in my head a bit better.
Can you explain it a bit more for everyone?
[00:20:26] Honorata Grzesikowska: Well, first of all, when I'm saying that this is the problem of internal structures, it goes back straight away again to the academy, how we were taught that you have to invent something new is the invention, is the originality, is not putting three things together. You know, when they say you do one plus one, you get more than two, you get three or four or five. This doesn't apply in the education that we have nowadays in architectural fields and in urban design fields. So the same happens when you are working in an architectural firm. Of course, not everyone actually, you can realize now that bigger architectural firms, they are opening their own research department. So you can see the change in that and you can see the value in research more and more. But up until now it was about not looking anywhere, not looking around, not looking anywhere else, and just being an inventor and being the best being the highest, you know?
Yeah. Actually, women are the real architects of society. This was said by Harriet, one of the best minds in the field of the design. And it really is about working collectively.
It's not about being the fastest, being the highest, being the strongest, but doing what is needed to be done and listening to the needs of everyone else. You know, why we are not learning from kids, why we are not learning from disabled people? We are not listening to them. We are not trying to find the solutions that fit all, because we want to be the best and we want to rule the world.
[00:22:30] Mela Atanassova: I can give, as a couple of examples from my work that go in this not invented here syndrome, one of the things that happens often when we work, especially with cities that don't have a lot of capabilities, whenever they're presented with ideas from other cities. So look at what this city has done or that city has done. Their immediate response nearly all the time is, yeah, but they're not us. It's not our context. It's not applicable. And there's two parts to it. One is indeed, there is a recognition of uniqueness in each context that people are proud of, and they want to make sure that that is reflected in any ideas they use. But there's also something else that comes back to the previous conversation we were having around ideas and questions.
There is a lack of creativity in how we take an idea and strip it of its component parts to say, well, I could take this piece of this idea, and I have a problem that is shaped this way, and maybe this idea doesn't fit exactly, but if I take this idea and a piece of that idea and a piece of that other idea, I can create something that fits. So we have a bit of a stuck way of thinking about problems and solutions that they need to be the same shape in order to work.
Often that's not the case, certainly not with complex problems. And so it makes it really hard to find things that look exactly the same shape as the problem you're having. And that's a skill, basically, we can learn. It's not something that's unlearnable. It's not something that's innate. It is a. A skill that can be learned at school, that can be learned by practicing and so forth.
[00:24:11] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. I actually echo that a lot, actually, in our work that we do at BABLE, because what we really, how Babbel was founded was that we were looking at replication in cities and around smart city projects. And what we found was, why are people, why are these projects not getting replicated and scaled up was mostly because of the lack of the learnings being passed on effectively.
So I definitely echo that a lot that we see that. And there's some interesting. I did a podcast episode, for example. It's my favorite thing to say now is copy, edit and then paste, because people are not copying enough, actually, and instead they're creating news. So I definitely echo those sentiments.
I want to ask a little bit more of that about Mila. Maybe you can explain what is collective sense making, and how can that be effectively integrated into our organizational processes.
[00:25:15] Mela Atanassova: So, sense making is a process where, basically, you structure a group's interactions in a way that help them literally make sense of things together. And that means not just hearing information and absorbing information, but being able to extract patterns out of this information and then base decisions on this. So it's a process that allows you to go from hearing the what, interpreting the so what, and then getting to a point where collectively, they can do then what you know, so what are we doing with what we're learning? And there's different formulas about this. So there's different processes that have been designed to do that. The one I have been working with is the one that Quora foundation, the company I've been working with the last few years, designed together with UNDP. And it's for use in this kind of context.
And it's a process which basically has a very strict protocol to it. It's a workshop where you bring all people together, but the protocol that. So the protocol is like, you know, the format of this workshop. It involves a stage of presenting where you have selected well curated things to be presented as data points. These may be projects or experiences or things that people are seeing in their daily life.
Then you have dedicated people in the room who are there to listen and listen to this information from a different perspective. So you impose this pattern searching and pattern surfacing by giving them an information infrastructure that helps them do that. So, for example, one person may be listening to what are we hearing about unsatisfied needs? Or what are we hearing about enabling conditions? Or what are we hearing about the questions that we had about this topic to start with and some potential answers. And so these people are there to start reframing this information, start looking for the patterns in it. And then the group collectively has an insight generation session where they reflect on what they've heard with a focusing question of, so what does that mean to us? How does this inform our next decisions? And so the interesting thing is, something like this is that you rely on, first of all, human interpretation and the fact that different people will be picking different things. But you also create moments for what we call dance floor and balcony. So moments when you are on the dance floor talking and listening actively, versus stepping back and reflecting and having this done by the entire group in a guided process. There's a few others that exist that are sense making processes that are around there. So neurobates and warm data is one of those, for example. And it all kind of relies on the premise that we, as human beings, have a way to interpret context that is dependent on our experiences. So if you can surface that interpretation in the group and see these different perspectives, you can move much faster towards an aligned decision, but also you have a better understanding and better intelligence out of this exercise. So the new element to this, compared to any other sort of workshops, is that you have that enforced listening piece and reframing that is done by the group themselves.
[00:28:43] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really interesting process. Thanks for walking us through there now. Yeah, we're already getting to the end of the main interview part, but I do like to give you the open floor. Now, in case we didn't talk about something that you think is especially important for our listeners to know about.
Is there something that you want to mention here or want to discuss with each other?
This is the open floor, so now's your chance.
[00:29:11] Honorata Grzesikowska: Maybe I can start. I would like to mention, and I would like to express this, the story of a city as a place that is not just an area where we live in a city is much more. A city is not neutral. It shows us who we are, who we become. And in my practice, everything I do is basically finding examples that prove that physical space design influence who we become and influence our trajectories in our life. Because city, for example, with the lights and the places that are lit in the night, shows you who is important in the space, because what is normally lighten up in the night.
City administration buildings, some statues, which are mainly for men, because in every city, at least in European Union, for around 150 statues of men, it's around five statues of women. And in the cities, there are actually more statues for animals than for girls or for teenage girls. So when you are walking around the city, you have to realize that designs that we do and the physical space that is designed around you influences who you are in the society.
For example, we have a playing r e s for kids, and usually they start from three years old, as if the kids are born from three years old, you know, up there, no spaces designed for them at all.
So, yeah, I think this should be tough already in primary schools, and I did actually one research on playground areas and how, how based on sex, on biological sex, how kids are moving around. And we see already that kids of five, seven years old move differently based on sex, and the girls from seven years old up move less and do less sports than boys. So this is all connected with the design of a physical space. So now the question is, how can we use the technology to assimilate all this, to find the data, the numbers that everyone likes, that prove all these concepts, and how can we do it better in the future? And this is for sure by sharing the knowledge.
[00:31:57] Mela Atanassova: Yeah, I would just add, you know, one thing to what Honorato was saying, because that's something we also discussed before, is I would be very curious to know, you know, what does this city that codifies for collective learning look like? So if space can influence our behavior, how can we design spaces that actually make it not just easier, but obvious to do more the group and collective stuff than the individual stuff?
[00:32:27] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really, really good thoughts there.
So now we get to move on to our fun segment, and this is actually a new segment for us, so I'm very excited to try it out with you. I hope you don't mind being the guinea picks here.
So this segment is called the urban decision dilemmas.
Urban decision dilemmas.
You steer the story, crafting cities one fictional challenge at a time. What's your move?
And so for this I've chosen, the green oasis dilemma actually goes really well aligned with what you pictured mela as your ideal city, also as a jungle.
So here's the scenario. In the heart of a densely populated urban area, a large, unused plot of land has been discovered. Two primary proposals emerge. One suggesting the development of a green oasis, a park providing much needed green space for residents, and another advocating for mixed use development that includes affordable housing, commercial spaces and a small park.
So, balancing the urgent need for affordable housing and economic development with the equally important need for green space, environmental sustainability.
Walk us through. How would you navigate this decision, and what factors weigh most heavily in your decision making process?
Are you excited?
I'm excited to hear your answer.
[00:33:55] Honorata Grzesikowska: Oh yeah.
[00:33:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Who wants to start the conversation?
[00:33:59] Mela Atanassova: Why the binary choice? First, why can't we have both? Why the binary choice? So let's figure a way to reconcile the two.
So do both green and affordable housing. These don't have to be exclusive.
[00:34:16] Honorata Grzesikowska: Yes, we can also adopt strategies which actually are happening now in some of the new neighborhoods that are being developed in Switzerland, where half of the, let's say, half of the land that is to be developed is left for the use of citizens for this one year. And citizens are able to do whatever they want on the land. They can start to grow vegetables. They can put, I don't know, some temporary buildings, they can dig a hole or they can plant a forest, put.
[00:34:51] Mela Atanassova: A tent, go camping.
[00:34:54] Honorata Grzesikowska: And after this one year of the research of analysis, at the same time, participatory planning, then they do the final construction. So I think this, if we have time, this is a very good approach to choose the best option, a and b or maybe c, or combining one plus one is four.
[00:35:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, good approach.
Anything else to mention there on navigating this now?
[00:35:22] Mela Atanassova: I love this, using the space as a canvas and see what people do with it rather than have some. Because at the end of the day, who decides?
[00:35:29] Honorata Grzesikowska: Right?
[00:35:30] Mela Atanassova: Who decides what's more useful?
Well, let people use it and see what emerges as the most useful thing. Right.
I'm going to apply this.
Can I steal it proudly?
[00:35:43] Honorata Grzesikowska: Yes, of course. It's sharing knowledge. I didn't invent this. I took it from an example, which I dig into researching 10 hours and translating German to English.
[00:35:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very interesting. I think that it might be interesting also if we can link to this, right. So the listeners can also do some learning from that as well. Honorata, if you can direct us to the right place. So, yes, very good. Now we get to the final question, which is the question we ask every single guest who comes on this, and I'm really excited to hear your answers from your perspectives. The question is to you, what is a smart city?
[00:36:23] Honorata Grzesikowska: For me, smart city is more humanitarian than technocratic.
[00:36:29] Mela Atanassova: I think. I'm not sure if this is the only thing about it, but the one thing about it that I would say for me characterizes smart is a city that has an identity and agency, because without it, you can't really do very much.
[00:36:45] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very nice, very well put by both of you. Very concise and well articulated. So thank you very much for that. With that, that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much to both of you for coming on and sharing all your research and knowledge. And yeah, doing some helping facilitate this collective learning between me, you, and all of the listeners, of course, as well. So thank you so much.
[00:37:11] Honorata Grzesikowska: Thank you.
[00:37:12] Mela Atanassova: Thank you.
[00:37:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: And to all of our listeners, don't forget, you can always create a free account on BABLE smartcity eU. And you can find out more about some smart city projects, solutions, implementations and more thank you very much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
