Questions of Civic Proportions: Perspective and Imagination

Experiment. One California city has plans to pilot a “Universal Basic Income” program in 2019. A select number of families in Stockton, California will receive a monthly stipend of $500 for 18 months. Mayor Michael Tubbs has pointed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community and hopes the program will push back against stereotypes:

“We want to push back against those stereotypes, by highlighting the stories and putting a face to this narrative... It’s the mother who was able to pay for child care, it’s the student who was able to go to community college, the couple with credit card debt.”

Tell their stories. Vote Riders are pushing beyond the assumptions and statistics of voter ID. On their website you can find “Stories from real voters meeting-- and overcoming-- obstacles to obtaining voter ID.” It's human nature that stories are compelling in a way that statistics never are. Getting to know a real person who has sacrificed time and money that wasn't easy to give helps others see how the struggle for voting rights is as real today as it ever was.

Connect people with what's possible. Several European cities are making it harder to drive a car into downtown. Realizing their cities are choked with pollution and automobiles they are looking for ways to introduce residents to other ways of getting around.

A car-free city center becomes a shared vision through smaller moments like Paris’s annual car-free day. For this single day, pedestrians have the right-of-way. The city’s deputy mayor explains the annual car-free day works to make “people aware of the issues, and show them that it’s possible actually to move within Paris without a car.”

Keeping with the car-free theme and having a little fun with it...

There’s an annual effort in the states to re-imagine downtown parkings spaces as tiny urban parks. Does your city celebrate Park(ing) Day? Austin has joined the effort for a few years and all our local organizations adopt a parking space for the day. Cities all over the country participate each year, but the movement started in 2005:

"So one day in late September, the group found a parking space in a particularly gray part of downtown San Francisco, and converted it into a mini park. On what had once been concrete, they rolled out living grass, put up a bench, and placed a potted tree. Then they retreated across the street to observe the results, hoping their urban intervention was not an arrestable offense. Within minutes, a man sat down on the bench, took off his shoes, and began to eat lunch. Another person joined soon after, and the two began having a conversation. That’s when Bela and his collaborators knew they were on to something: 'We created an opportunity for social interaction that wasn’t there before.'"

Small acts of imagination can add up to big results.

My Fellow Citizens,

Questions of Civic Proportions

How do we create a movement with imagination? One that has a vision for what the world properly ordered would look like?

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What's next from the Initiative for the New Constitution?

Good Work: Everything Old is New Again by Jen Sorensen

“If old garbage ideas are always up for debate, how do they ever get defeated?”

Will you please share this email with someone who has a good take on keeping a civic perspective? We would love to invite them to our walk through the stars with Scipio.