Readers of my blog will (hopefully) realise that I am passionate about my home City of Nottingham. I really do want the best for the City. Much of my work is based here so it matters about how the City looks in physical and social terms.
Nottingham - friendliest city in the world, probably
We haven’t always had a good press – especially on the crime front, but the figures show a reduction in the figures. There is still much room for improvement – but we are going in the right direction.
I was watching the brilliant TED last night and came across a talk by Kiran Bir Sethi which is really inspirational. If you have 10 minutes to spare – watch it here.
What is fascinating about the talk is the simplicity of the approach – engaging kids at an early stage.
Kiran talks about the kids going on a journey, which has three key components:
Aware – see the change
Enable – be changed
Empower – lead the change
The children were immersed in some real life experiments – which they then formed their own clear opinions on. They had such conviction about what they had learned that they went out onto the streets to ‘change the world’.
The lessons in the talk are just brilliant – and something we should think about!
I am involved in the early stages of a project with Outerarc where we hope to introduce a competition in schools with the Sheriff of Nottingham and Lord Mayor of Nottingham to reduce energy use in schools (not the PE sort of energy!). After our initial meeting we were thinking that the collaboration we will encourage for the project can be easily extended into other areas.
If we can get the kids engaged in the aspects of what makes a city great we might have a chance of making it an even better place. But then you come across the thorny issue of what makes a City great. Some ideas:
The Physical environment – great buildings and places.
People – in all their guises
Day and Night activities – including great food!
A Centre – the Market Square
Diversity – in everything
Art – including the Contemporary
Education – our celebrated Universities and Colleges
There’s then my mini-campaign to tell everyone that Nottingham is (probably) the friendliest place in the world.
We should have some new advocates – the children of Nottingham!
