OUR SEED LIBRARY OF CIVIC INNOVATION

Jaclyn Youngblood // Boston

Civic innovation in Boston

I am a member of the New Urban Mechanics team, and this piece is my particular perspective. It does not reflect the views of the team as a whole, nor should it be viewed as representing the City of Boston. 

In all of the darkness and sadness of the global Covid-19 crisis, I have found a glimmer of hope in seeing some of my team’s old civic innovation prototypes find second life as part of Boston’s early-stage pandemic response. 

Often, the initial purpose of these prototypes is to show that an alternative is possible; or to bring a small bit of delight to a resident’s experience of their city; or to kick the bicycle tires, so to speak, on a proposed service design. Sometimes our prototypes flourish for a few months, while others iterate annually, seven years strong. 

But who is this mysterious first person plural I’ve just referenced? 

New Urban Mechanics is the City of Boston’s civic innovation, research, and design lab, housed within local government. We work across internal City departments and external communities throughout Boston to explore, experiment, and evaluate new approaches to local government and civic life. We believe civic innovation is more than just increasing government efficiency: it's also about improving the experiences and well-being of people.

Our team has a long-standing, playful critique of ourselves that we keep too many relics of old projects. Our office —whose homey, concrete nooks we are currently missing—is a hybrid that is part active workspace, part museum and archive.

It’s a junkyard of sorts, chronicling the history of one part of the civic innovation story in Boston. It is host to remnants of explorations we’ve had to shelve a bit too early; projects that achieved their prototypical goal and then came home to roost, and civic fictions—zany ideas that we, as Mechanics, have tried to speak into existence—that never quite found their way from whiteboard to asphalt.

Because we are continually exploring across a wide range of topics—from the future of streets to asking what a “third space” is for someone who is currently without a “first” space—we often find that a prototype or a project mock-up never quite makes its way from “Explore” to “Experiment.” For some prototypes, once the experiment has run its course, it doesn’t have to scale throughout the city. A project like Block Quotes found a comfortable resting place on our walls (see—or squint—in the photograph above) once it ended. 

In 2019, our Passenger Pick-up / Drop-off pilot created spots for pick-up and drop-off activity in an effort to ease congestion, improve safety, and make it easier for drivers and passengers to find each other. The sandwich boards from the project found a second purpose serving as ersatz signage for the City’s Covid-19 mobile meal sites for young people, one of many such resources available while our schools are closed. 

The greens didn't quite match. (The font point size was pretty close, though.) It wasn't the most elegant signage ever created. But there was something about the manual act of making, contributing with my hands—even something small and simple—while my mind was short-circuiting with the enormity of the crisis,. thaIt brought me a welcome bit of clarity.

Another “relic” of the Passenger Pick-up / Drop-off pilot were curb regulation changes that the City of Boston reinstated to allow small businesses to request temporary curb regulations changes for takeout customers. This familiar policy muscle flexed under different circumstances.

From the Open Streets part of the archive, extra duct tape from a week-long prototype in one of our farther-from-downtown neighborhoods, Roslindale, found a second calling: to help create hundreds of boxes to carry hundreds of thousands of flyers of Covid-19 information in eleven11 languages for distribution throughout the entire City. 

Would we have found other duct tape to create boxes if it weren't for the cheerful tan rolls from the Birch St. prototype? Of course. 

But there was a small moment of collective delight when we walked into the box-making room, arms full of seemingly endless rolls of heavy duty duct tape, which came from the serendipity of a suitable contribution from a most unexpected source.

I haven’t fully thought through what this means for the future futures of our projects-that-will-become-old. I experienced a deep, comforting gratitude that our ragtag team was able to show up with something in hand, with something to offer, to contribute to the herculean efforts that our colleagues in City departments are undertaking here in Boston. 

Many departments have reflection practices and learning habits that they’ve honed over time. I’ll be curious to see if our small contribution—these provisions, this way of repurposing insights and vestiges from the past—turns our self-perceived “junkyard” into more of a seed library. And whether it inspires other local government teams to begin or strengthen their own resilience habits through such approaches.

I have other thoughts about trust in local government; and over-sharing observations as a meaningful redundancy; and the role of creativity and making and inspiration during a pandemic; and reframing “innovation” as care. 

On the last piece, in particular: we’ve been workshopping this idea for at least two years, and from my memory, it started showing up in our community talks in early 2019. However, the COVID-19 crisis has brought more urgency to the stance that innovation can’t just be about cost-cutting and making dashboards. In a civic context, innovation has to be about that which is ephemeral, is equitable, and is fundamentally human: caring for—and with—each other. 

In the coming weeks I think we and our colleagues in the City of Boston may start to see that some of these practices around observing, archiving, repurposing, and storytelling lend themselves kindly to the tasks of processing, reflecting, iterating—and caring—that are ahead of us.

I don’t know what that will look like exactly, but I suspect, at least here in Boston, it will be a collage of sorts: a kernel of things—policies, services, experiences—from the past, refashioned and re-presented in a care-full and novel light.

Author Bio:

Jaclyn Youngblood is the Chief of Staff with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. She focuses primarily on civic action and collective well-being prototypes, while supporting administrative work like MONUM's fellowships and international collaborations. Her love for cities (of all sizes) is second only to coffee (and reading while having coffee.) She is known to cause distractions (by pointing out adorable dogs on Boston’s sidewalks) and confusion (by biking all winter).