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“The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being.”
—Donella Meadows
What happens when a neighbourhood starts to tell its own story, from all its different vantage points, via the many lenses through which we see our lives, our place, its challenges and its opportunities? The chance to paint our own portrait gives us an opportunity to not only see ourselves and celebrate our strengths, but also notice where we fall short, share stories and hopes of how we wish to be together in the future, and reframe what might be possible.
As we find ourselves in increasingly difficult, uncertain, complex times with many crises being felt all around the world, what power do we have together? When we can tell a new story of who we are, reframe our collective goals, and build out civic power, we can unlock the collaborative, creative, courageous communities that we know we can be. The beautiful thing about a Portrait is that it doesn’t have to be perfect; there doesn’t have to be just one, it can be created by looking through many lenses and from a range of vantage points. When we make our portraits visible to one another, we can also see what and who is missing, where we like, what we see and want to do more of, where we don’t like and want to change, and when we invite our imagination we can envision more beautiful futures than we dared to dream of, and bring them lovingly into being.
“Both hard and soft evidence is used, thereby avoiding the common trap of giving preference to the quantitative above all else, which is especially dangerous when working in areas of knowledge where reliable measurements do not yet exist or data is overwhelming.”
—Helsinki Design Lab, Recipes for Systemic Change
In Chapter 04 | Can Our Neighbourhood Get In The Doughnut? we started to lay out how to break down the larger inquiry question of Doughnut Economics by ’unrolling’ the Doughnut into Four Lenses. The DEAL platform talks about the four interconnected lenses of Local-Social, Local-Ecological, Global-Social and Global-Ecological as helpful starting points in crafting and co-creating Portraits.