The Story of Mining the Future

THE STORY OF MINING THE FUTURE

ENGAGING THE CITIZENS TO CREATE

A VISION FOR CANMORE ALBERTA

THE VIEW FROM HERE

Sitting at my desk in Canmore 10 years after the creation of a vision for Canmore, Mining the Future, I wonder about the legacy (if any) that remains. The intervening years presented the town with two major challenges – how to remain viable economically during a downturn (felt as a “softening” of house prices and a bankruptcy for one of the developers) and how to sustain the intentions of the vision, given these changes. Indeed for the first few years after Mining the Future came into being, many of the plans for implementation were carried out. Reasons for this could include the determination of the (then) Mayor and others in the Town’s administration to uphold the vision’s intentions, perhaps the consequence of the developer’s bankruptcy meant there was time to attend to matters other than land use and building quotas, and perhaps the raised expectations and capacity of the citizenry of Canmore ensured more robust engagement.

Immediate implementation activities have included, the School District’s future strategy “Inspiring Hearts and Minds” (an idea adopted with a reworked name by the Provincial government), the Town’s introduction of the Natural Step as a means for business to participate in an integrated conversation about their operations, the building of additional paths and trails to connect the farflung parts of the townand more information has been forthcoming from the Town to its citizens.

Since then, the times have changed and the consistent implementation has been interrupted. Change in Town’s government, the pressing need to rebuild the economic base has created an alternative set of conditions. This has manifested itself in less engagement with the citizenry on many issues, the re-creation of a gulf between weekenders and full time residents, and the relatively high cost of and high price of housing for staff and middle income families. Implementation continues where there is an understanding by the newly solvent developers that engaging citizens is a preferable way forward.

INTRODUCTION

Since 1988, the date of the Olympics, the eyes of the world have rested on what was a sleepy and former coal mining town and seen an idyllic place to take advantage of the beauty of the Rockies (without having to be in Banff). The influx of new development and residents brings an ever-increasing diversity of interests and values to the town. As this was at its height at the beginning of the new millennium, the dynamic of change required the community to re-evaluate its sense of identity and sense of place, where it is are going and what it will become. Town leadership determined that a community driven visioning process would generate the ideas, values and needs to form Canmore’s future. By participating in their hundreds in Mining the Future and regardless of politics or philosophy, a common set of values was derived from the Mining the Future project to provide the glue that brings us together. A set of values (connectedness, sustainability, and diversity) emerged from the group conversations ranging from the need for a vibrant commercial base with stable jobs and families, to keeping natural landscapes healthy, to a balance between commerce and conservation and everything in between.

WHY VISIONING?

It happens to us all. We peer out into the future, trying to make wise decisions, only to find ourselves staring into the teeth of ferocious uncertainties. If only everything didn't depend on, well, everything else! How do we decide what kind of career to pursue when it's not clear what industries will exist in 10 or 15 years? How do we plan our children’s’ education when we don't know what sort of society they'll live in? How do we decide if Canmore is the place for us to live and raise our families when we don’t know what sort of community it is going to be? As we face each of these problems, we confront a deeper dilemma: how do we strike a balance between prediction – trying to see past the uncertainties in an era of constant change - and paralysis - letting the uncertainties freeze us into inactivity?

The answer, in part, lies in having a strong vision of what we want our lives to be and of the communities we want to live in. A good vision, based on an assessment of what is driving the changes we see in town, wraps up our economic, social, and environmental aspirations in a collectively-defined package that allows us to see the gaps between what we want and what we have. While it’s true that being part of a globalized, urbanized society means dealing with circumstances over which we have little control, it is equally true we can make local decisions, develop local tools, and take local actions that will have a huge influence on the sort of community Canmore will become. In 2005, Canmore’s visioning process, entitled Mining the Future, provided the opportunity for all residents to work together to develop a direction for the future – a direction to provide the basis for Municipal decision-making for years to come.

WHAT IS VISIONING?

Many people asked us “Just what is a vision?” and “What difference will it make?”

What follows is one response to these questions.

A vision is a rich, clear and inspiring picture of the state of some aspect of the world – one’s self, family, company, town or country – at a time in the future. It expresses our present imagination of what the future could be for us.Note this phrase in italics. It captures an essential feature of any vision of the future – the adequacy of the vision hangs on the degree to which we understand the world of which we are a part and how it actually works. Well-formed visions do not ask, “What future do we want?”, but “In what conditions might we find ourselves in the future – conditions that our vision of the future must take into account, overcome and capitalize on?”A vision, therefore, is neither a wish list nor someone else’s responsibility to bring into being. Visions require that we put ourselves irrevocably in the picture; that we consciously acknowledge that we must be deeply involved in bringing the vision to life. We must not merely hold a vision; we must live it.

Living a vision, especially if it be at all serious and life-changing, requires that we make conscious and focussed choices. To live a vision is to make choices; to deny ourselves some options that may even be good in themselves. The view that we can have everything – that we do not have to choose among alternatives is incompatible with a vision-driven life. However, a rich, well-formed and inspiring vision can make hard choices easier.

MINING THE FUTURE - THE PROJECT THAT ENGAGED THE COMMUNITY
Encompassing ten months’ effort, Mining the Future involved four broad steps:

1. Participants first identified local, national, and international forces that might affect Canmore’s future.
2. On the basis of those forces, they then developed four possible scenarios for Canmore’s future, each of which presented a distinct world in which we might someday live and work.
3. In turn, the scenarios provided the grounding for robust, often challenging, and ultimately rewarding discussions about what kind of future we as Canmorites want, and how we can move towards that future. Questions asked and answered included: “What values and principles do we share as citizens that will help us create the future we want?” “What goals will guide us towards that future?” And, “What decision-making criteria do we need in order to reach our goals?”
4. Finally, participants sought to define the spirit of the Canmore they envisioned, distilling 10 months’ effort into an overarching Vision Statement.

Residents who wish to add their voice to those who are helping build a Canmore vision can participate in several different ways. You can join or lead a small neighbourhood group with ample coaching from a leadership team; you can encourage a community group to which you belong to participate; you can take on online survey on the Mining the Future website; and you can come to a Canmore Café - a large community gathering that uses a special type of facilitated conversation to allow up to several hundred participants to explore questions that matter and listen together for patterns and insights into Canmore’s future.

Basically, the Cafés provide a respectful, hospitable venue that:

*generate the information on which Mining the Future will be built, stimulate innovative thinking, and explore possible actions around real life issues and questions;
* engage people – whether they are meeting for the first time, or are in established groups – in authentic conversation; and
* conduct in-depth exploration of key challenges or opportunities.

Canmorites showed considerable enthusiasm for the process. More than forty neighbourhood and community groups were involved across Canmore, all of whom were also represented at the first Canmore Cafés and work parties. All Canmore residents – young, old, newcomers, old-timers, permanent, and non-permanent – were invited to be a part of this extraordinary experience.

Scenario thinking is the platform for structuring dialogue around a lot of loose ideas, making clearer the choices we need to make in Canmore. At its most basic, scenario thinking helps people and communities order and frame their thinking about the longer-term future while providing them with the tools and the confidence to take action soon. The scenario thinking process creates a powerful platform for multiple (and oftendivergent) perspectives to come together. The result is an expansion of a community’speripheral vision— it can see new threats and opportunities that might otherwise havebeen missed. One of the challenges facing Canmore is where the tipping point might be between the landscape we have today and the day that Canmore loses its mystique because it is no longer quaint and attractive. “The only way a community can carve out a niche in the future, is if the town is able to safeguard the rare or unique qualities that imbue it with greater meaning in a hectic world”, according to Luther Propst, Executive Director, Sonoran Institute.

These are all the dilemmas the 45 neighbourhood and community groups wrestled with as they begin to think about 2030 and beyond. In these groups, there are people who are willing to step up to this challenge of our time.They worked with the forces to create four scenarios around two key factors – community social fabric (in a range from cohesive to elitist/me first/individualistic) and economic growth and prosperity (in a range from fast growth and wealth to slow growth and poor). These factors form the major dimensions of the scenarios.

In addition 12 other factors as developed by the community and neighbourhood groups are discussed in the four scenarios which were developed and named Back to Basics (slow economic growth and cohesive social fabric),Demanding Heights (rapid growth and cohesive social fabric), the Rocky Road (individualistic social fabric and slow growth) and the Gates of Wealth (individualistic social fabric and rapid growth).

MEANING FOR THE FUTURE OF CANMORE

The group worked very hard to create the possible strategic directions.One underlying caveat emerged - no matter which scenario was discussed and no matter which future faces Canmore, all paths lead towards the need for a cohesive community.

A summary of the six directions is below:

1.OUR MOUNTAIN IDENTITY

Our identity is based on our profound sense of place. This includes our environment, our sense of community, and the decisions we make with regard to land use development. It also includes the need to think about how to maintain this into the future. We need to clarify the limits of Canmore and honour our mountain identity.

2.THE SOCIAL CONNECTION

We need to promote and sustain social connectedness by being involved, compassionate and welcoming (through events, communications and through the creation of gathering places) through engaging communication such as a Canmore intra-net; through the built environment – physical lay-out to relate to social interaction; and through structures and activities to bring people together.

3.ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

The focus here is on the size of Canmore’s footprint and the implications for land use development, about the meaning of carrying capacity for Canmore, and about not postponingimportant decisions about our environment. There was also a note to locals from the Work Party - we need to be better stewards on an individual basis.

4.DIVERSITY

Diversity has three elements to it: Economic diversity; Social diversity; and Diversity of activities (including economic and social).

5.REBUILDING DEMOCRACY

This concerns itself both with formal leadership as well as informal leadership through the continued engagement of a wide spectrum of the larger community. It also points to the need to ensure sustainability and defence of the vision by including the vision in ongoing planning activities, revisiting it and including citizens in the process.

6.LONG TERM MONITORING AND MEASUREMENT

We need to ensure we are responsible to hold and sustain the Vision into the future, by keeping the conversations going.

WHAT HAPPENED WITH ALL THIS WORK?

The strategic threats and opportunities we will face post 2015 and the strategic directions in which we must move in order to deal with them, finally enabled the articulation of a more comprehensive and inspiring vision to guide our development. The ideas were wrapped up into a Sustainability Strategy for the Town of Canmore (S2S), the review of the Municipal Plan is taking place now. Ffuture decisions will have a bedrock of community intentions to guide decision making.

Five possible intervening factors into the rollout of the vision include:

1. Economic slowdown 2007 – 2013;
2. The intermittent up-take of the visions ideas – robustly in Inspiring Hearts and Minds; and less robustly in the review of the Municipal Development Plan review;
3. The replacement of Town Council with people who had not been intimately involved in Mining the Future;
4. The lack of adherence to full engagement of citizens in the revived Area Structure Plan for the new developments; and
5. The need to re-create a robust economic base after 2013 (through a focus on tourism- viewed by some as a divisive strategy not adhering to the diversity value).

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