A better story about a city that is better for all
Swedish cities are using storytelling to speed up the transition to climate neutrality by 2030. A tool to help that transition is a co-created declaration of what that future will feel like to its inhabitants. And it’s free for all cities to use.
Plato the philosopher often gets credit for saying that storytellers rule the world. But did he? If he did, we wouldn’t know because there are no notes of it and there are certainly no recordings of him saying that. But maybe that’s beside the point?
Or maybe is it exactly the kind of point he is making? In his magnum opus The Republic he writes about the importance of educating the guardians of the state, the worrier class, through stories. Our first business, he argues, is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if he articulated that storytellers rule the world or if he didn’t, because it’s obviously what he meant. And if you want to convey a key message, a suitable quote attributed to a greek thinker is always suitable.
Platos definition of “the warrior class” is broader than the military, the police or the juridical system that might spring to our minds. On choosing what stories to tell he writes that “We shall persuade mothers and nurses to tell our chosen stories to their children, and by means of them to mould their minds and characters which are more important than their bodies.” He’s speaking of the non-ruling class, but the state he writes about is ancient Greece, not a modern day democracy.
Still, the guardians of a modern state is the general public and the trust they have in the institutions are vital for the legitimacy of that state. And the stories they are told about the future of that state will shape culture, character and behavior. As long as they can make sense of that story, that is.
Storytelling as a design strategy
Platos advise on how to craft stories with the ability to persuade mothers and nurses to tell our stories to their children does sound like propaganda, or a pr-exercise if you will. But it’s is also a testament to the fact that if you want to engage the general public (or anyone) you cannot give them facts and expect them to understand. You need to tell a story in which those facts makes sense to them, in order to get their reaction and engagement.
At Viable Cities, we’re helping nine Swedish cities to become climate neutral by 2030. Without the support of the general public, it’s impossible. So these nine cities have to figure out how to tell a story about the future that the general public find attractive enough that they will want to contribute to that goal by changing their behavior, their character and the culture of that city.
As the Chief Storyteller, I’m heading up Viable Cities efforts to create a tool box that will help cities engage the general public. The first tool we release is a story of what the future will feel like in a city where everyone can live a good life within planetary boundaries.
The idea was is to create a generic vision statement of 2030 for cities to tell their citizens, something that could work as pre-face to city plans on how to achieve the vision of becoming climate neutral. Whereas city plans are filed with facts on how to achieve specific goals, the vision statement is the story that makes sense of the facts. They complement each other — the plans are “the how”, the statement is “the why”.
We decided to call it “the Declaration”, a declaration of fossil independence, of a better life for all, of how a future city would make us feel.
The first step was to get the basics right. During the past nine months we’ve been talking to all kinds of people in “our” cities to get their view on the future and what city life would look like in 2030. This has been done though a series of meetings and workshops (on-site and online) were drafts have been discussed and modified, things have been added and other things have been rejected. (I wrote about the process here, in Swedish.) The result was a co-created final draft outlining that future.
The Declaration is a story
When creating stories that people would want to tell their children, Plato urges us to choose the stories that are suitable and reject the rest. The same could be said of the words and expressions used in a declaration. And when it fell on me to edit the final draft in order to create a declaration, I remembered Plato.
The language of the draft was dry, precise and factual, just like public documents tend to be. But to get the public to listen, you need to talk as the public. And to get as many people as possible engaged, you need to be engaging.
And this is why the Declaration, despite its name, doesn’t declare anything. It tells a story.
It’s designed to creating an emotional understanding by the reader before creating an intellectual understanding of what we are facing. As we put it, “This is not a declaration that you should sign, physically, but the ambition is that as many people as possible that read it will think, ‘I’ll sign on to this’.”
In line with the ambition to create a document that is accessible to anyone, we’ve chosen using everyday language that anyone can relate to and understand, whether it is a politician, a police officer, or a pension fund manager. The everyday language also makes it accessible to anyone, at the same time the document contains links to scientific and credible sources, to show that what we describe has factual basis. The declaration is deliberately free of details about what should take place, but describes the ambitious goal and why change needs to happen in cities right now.
If storytellers do rule the world, then we better use stories to make the world a better place. That’s why we’re making the Declaration free to use for anyone. All you have to do is copy and save it and use it as a declaration of what life will be like in your city.
Everybody loves a good story. That’s why they have the power to change our behavior, our character and our culture. Said Plato.
