- My name is Angela Brown and my business is Brown Angel Skin and Hair, a plant-based clean beauty product line that features vintage black actresses on the labels.

My business is a micro business, and I was concerned about taking that risk to get this new concept out.

The Comcast Rise Grant has given me an opportunity to take that risk and scale up my business and take it to the next level.

I feel that my business helps increase representation for black women on the shelf.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] What role did past leaders in pivotal moments play in shaping The Seattle today?

We really don't know our history.

- We have to constantly make choices to be, The Seattle that we want to be.

- [Narrator] And how can we envision Seattle's future?

- Could we involve larger segments or the whole community in a way that actually then moves fairly quickly?

- On tonight's Civic Cocktail, local experts look back and forward.

- Hello everyone and welcome to Civic Cocktail.

I'm your host, Monica Guzman.

It's spring 2022 in Seattle and there is a lot going on.

The pandemic and its disruptions, clashes on battlefields, virtual and actual, challenging issues right here at home from homelessness and all this growth, to inequality and public safety.

But rather than zoom into any of those issues, we're going to kick off this new season of Civic Cocktail by stepping back.

First, by taking stock of where we've been and then where we might be going after some of the most tumultuous years we've ever known.

How do we do that in just an hour, you ask?

With the help of my guests, four locals whose work and stories help us better understand our own.

From well before the city's founding in 1851 through war migration, innovation and incredible growth, ours is a story of conflict and collaboration, of heartbreaking exclusion and steps toward learning how to include more of us than ever.

Can knowing where we've been, show us where we ought to be going?

Stick around because that's what we're here to find out.

So with us to reflect on Seattle's past, are three residents with very different, fascinating perspectives on the story of our city.

And I would like to welcome Leonard Garfield, Executive Director of the Museum of History and Industry, better known as MOHAI.

(audience clapping) Also Jerry Large, former Seattle Times columnist and president of BlackPast.org.

(audience clapping) And finally, Ron Chew, former director of the Wing Luke Museum, trustee of the Seattle public library, an author of the recent memoir, "My Unforgotten Seattle."

Welcome Ron.

(audience clapping) So let's begin here.

The present is complicated enough.

Why is it even important for locals to expand our understanding of our history?

And let me begin with you, Jerry.

- Well, I think it's, if you don't know the history, you don't know how we got to the situations we were in, in the present.

There was a story a week or so ago about some folks trying to ask the state to remove restrictive covenant notes from their housing documents, because they felt it was embarrassing to have that on their records, their personal records.

But without that, we forget how our neighborhoods were formed.

And a court ruled that those notations should stay so the future generations would understand how we came to live in segregated neighborhoods in Seattle.

And that was one of those mechanisms.

So if you don't know the history, you don't know that.

You just kind of forget how all of this happened.

- Yeah, and you know, I think the other thing, Monica, to build on what Jerry said, is that history also has, not just lessons to learn from, but actual tools that we can use to build the future.

We've been a community that has been incredibly inventive at addressing issues, similar to the issues we're facing now.

And we've often got it wrong, but we've also gotten some things right.

And I think history gives us a chance to find those.

- Mm-hm, and maybe some inspiration, it sounds like.

- Inspiration and a chance to leverage off what we had.

- Right.

- I've I've often heard it said that we can build on history, but we don't need to be bound by it.

- [Monica] And Ron, what would you say?

- Yeah, well, again, add my voice to Jerry's and Leonard's as well in terms of their points.

You know, we're at this point of, you know, the term, moment of reckoning, comes up often.

We've had many moments of reckoning.

But you can't achieve a moment of reckoning unless you know What those other points were earlier in your history.

There are lessons in this point in which the country's very polarized, where we can find examples of collaboration across racial, ethnic boundaries, where people look past the xenophobia and so forth.

I like to point out, and I brought it up in my memoir, that there were Chinese immigrants here back, beginning of the city, from the very beginning of the European settlement.

So we're not strangers or foreigners, we help build, whether it's paving the streets in Pioneer Square or rebuilding city after Great Seattle Fire, Chinese laborers.

There are points even my history and experience of seeing collaboration between the African American community and the Asian community, in terms of Jackson Street Community Council, the rebuilding of the International District in the 1970s.

So we have a lot to celebrate and we need to embrace those pieces of how we collaborated and cooperated beyond these sort of polar extremes at which people operated.

- So let's dig in there.

You've been in Seattle, I think, your whole life, right?

Yeah, born and raised.

So zoom into maybe one of the events you mentioned.

What is an important story or event that you think that, as we look back today for lessons, this event really needs to pop up in our consciousness and we need to zoom in and make sure we understand what it meant.

- Yeah.

Well, I attended the University of Washington in the 1970s during that period of turmoil, social change, and many of us who grew up in the city, and myself, I'm third generation Chinese American, we decided to embrace the restoration of the neighborhood.

So there was a lot of activists centered around an old hotel called the Milwaukee Hotel.

- [Monica] And around when was it?

- This is in the late 1970s.

So we all came back down to the neighborhood.

We said, we gotta keep these low income residents here.

We'll fix up the hotel.

Well, it wasn't simply the Asian community that came and repaired the hotel, kept a human fire watch going.

It was Tyre Scott and United Construction Workers.

He brought his folks down, they repaired the hotel.

Roberto Maestas from El Centro de la Raza was there with his folks.

Bernie Whitebear, who later started up United Indians of All Tribes.

So those were examples of where we collaborated, and yet I found myself transported to the future.

And then this highly polarized charged situation where particularly, in terms of some of the communities of color, it's sort of like, well, we don't get along with you.

But then, they don't have any examples to draw from to see that their experience is also one of collaboration, cooperation.

- Yeah.

I mean, we can dig in a little more to, you mentioned a couple members of the illustrious gang of four, Bernie Whitebear, Native American, Roberto Maestas, Mexican American, other two members, help me out.

- Bob Santos.

- Bob Santos.

- And Larry Gossett.

- That's right, that's right.

So let's dig in there, 'cause their story does seem to have a lot of lessons for today.

Jerry, do you wanna tell us more about that?

- So the four of them, they each were leaders in their own communities and of organizations in their own communities.

And they realized that they were competing for the attention of the city at large and for funds, for support for their projects.

And they decided that rather than competing against one another, because their numbers were fairly small for all of those groups, that they would collaborate and they formed the Minority Executive Directors Group, is that what it was called?

And they worked together.

And one of the great things about this group of four people was that they also had a great sense of humor.

And they had fun with each other while they were doing this very arduous work.

And I think that's important to keep in mind is that if you are facing really great challenges, you need to take those seriously, but be able to retain your energy and sense of humor helps.

- Leonard do have a story about- - What, Monica, what's so interesting about that period is at the same time the establishment was creating Forward Thrust.

They were gonna create this great civic plan of parks, waterfront improvements, hopefully mass transportation.

Some of that it got done and is a legacy, some failed.

But the gang of four and the community came together and they did some real stuff as well, simultaneously but parallel.

Providing social services, providing conversation with the police department, creating community centers, the real kinds of centers that, sort of theoretically, Forward Thrust us was dreaming of.

So it was those two forces that essentially composed the whole community.

Not necessarily working in concert, but ending up with some very, very powerful results.

Right at the time that we were thinking of creating improved jails through Forward Thrust, Aaron Dixon was talking about, how is racial injustice going to be reconciled with our Black community?

- [Monica] And this was in the '70s, right?

- Exactly at the same time.

- [Monica] Yeah, so- Go ahead.

- I was gonna add additional example just from my experience of, again, I think it's the lens to which you see the world that determines how you choose to shape the future.

But, my mother worked in the sewing factories, which was populated mostly by immigrant and women of color throughout Seattle's history, from the Alaska Yukon gold rush period when Seattle became this sort of outerwear outfitting place in the country.

But you know, she worked alongside Native American sewers, African American sewers, Filipinos, Japanese Americans.

And I know because they all came out of the sweat shops at the same time, and people speaking different languages and so forth.

But we don't know that.

My dad worked up in the Alaska canneries along with my uncles.

Many of the Asian community went up to Alaska, Bellingham and Alaska and worked there in the fishing industry.

Well, I remember seeing these photos of cannery crews that were all African American.

I didn't realize there were African Americans up there.

So we're constantly excavating and we need to be open to reenvisioning what our past was, so again, we can build on that with a truer representation of who we really are.

- Yeah.

And that brings up almost a philosophical point that I'd like to offer.

The story of Seattle is, and kind of has to be, the story of each of us as a people and coming together.

So where have you seen it get hard for some to hear a new account of something that contradicts what was previously understood or was already accepted as true?

And why can that be difficult?

- I would begin that conversation with the notion that history and Seattle began in 1851, which I think we've already said in this conversation.

- [Monica] Right, right, it goes before- - It did not.

And I think the reconciliation and the understanding of indigenous culture, traditions and history that was established for millennia is really the difficult beginning point of what we call history today.

And until we really understand that, we're constantly telling ourselves stories that probably aren't completely true.

- [Monica] Right.

- One thing I noticed when I first moved to Seattle, I remember a number of people would tell me that I would really enjoy living in Seattle because it was so different from other places that I'd lived.

I mean, I grew up in Eastern New Mexico, which is practically Texas and I had lived in Texas for a few years before California and then here.

And one of the examples was that Seattle schools, unlike schools elsewhere, voluntarily began to desegregate itself because Seattle believed in integrated schools.

I thought, okay, that's really interesting.

(laughs) But part of my brain was saying, usually when people say that, there's something else in the story.

And I quickly learned that the population of Seattle schools at the time of busing, the white population took a precipitous slide.

I mean, there were 80,000, I think, white students in Seattle schools, and just before busing for integration began and there were, what was it, like 20,000 toward the end of that process?

Private schools, Seattle became one of the top places in the country for sending people to private schools.

But there wasn't a great acknowledgement of that.

And if you don't acknowledge that, then you don't acknowledge that the community has played some role in the problems that we are facing and you don't deal with them.

But sometimes people in the community do, and we don't recognize, we don't always see those stories.

I saw something, you probably saw too, in the paper about... You should always read the newspaper, by the way.

(all laughing) - Says the former Seattle Times columnist, who we do respect.

- And it was talking about the majority of Seattle neighborhoods now are composed people who, families that make over $100,000 a year.

One of the top neighborhoods was Madrona Denny-Blaine neighborhood.

So it was like something like 78 or 79% of the households there earn over $100,000 a year.

And it reminded me of something that happened back in the '60s, in which a lot of neighborhoods were facing what they felt was encroachment of black folks who were moving out, tried to move outside the central area.

And there was a big push in Denny-Blaine to people, and Madrona people were putting up yard signs saying whites only and stuff like that.

But another part of that same community began to say, we're gonna help people who wanna move here, move into this neighborhood.

And they were very successful at doing that.

So this latest story reminded me that the neighborhood didn't go hell.

(laughs) - You know, and I think one of the things that inspires me about Seattle history is similar to what Jerry's saying.

You know, we're a city that really appreciates the smart idea.

We're a city that has engineering in its DNA in a lot of phases of our history.

We're a city that looks for practical solutions, whether they're social solutions or physical solutions.

We're not always right, because oftentimes that kind of mindset loses the larger vision.

But I think there is a lot of that in Seattle's past, that is something, as to Jerry's point, that we can build on.

- Can you think of an example, what comes to mind?

- Well, I think that, for example, the cleanup of Lake Washington.

What a smart idea.

It wasn't dictated by courts, it wasn't something that one person decided to do, the community came together, Republicans, Democrats, suburbs, the city.

- And when was this, for those of us who were- - This would be in the 1950s and into the 1960s.

And we got that lake clean, but you know what we did, we lost track of some of the environmental damage to the Duwamish River.

We lost track of some of the income communities that were really depending on clean water as much as people who enjoyed the lake recreationally.

So we did a great thing, we cleaned up Lake Washington.

But there was a bigger picture and a bigger vision that the engineering approach perhaps missed a little bit.

Let's merge that engineering can-do spirit, the Seattle Spirit, that we've been talking about, and let's blend it with the larger vision of what's an equitable community.

That's what history, I think, can point us in that direction.

- Yeah, and you bring up something interesting, which is that, history in hindsight, we see what we missed.

We see what we were missing.

So I wonder Ron, what is something in our history where you look back and you go, wow, we really missed that.

And we don't wanna repeat that kind of oversight again.

- Right?

Well, here's the complexity.

Just again, from my own personal experience, being a third-generation Chinese American.

My grandfather came to Seattle in 1911.

So as I reflect back on it in the writing of my memoir, I realize, well, hey, I'm kind of one of the pioneer Seattle families.

I never saw it in that way, and the reason why is because he had to come here illegally because of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

In 1882, the US Congress passed legislation which barred Chinese laborers from coming to the US.

It wasn't repealed to after World War II.

And even then a very tiny quota.

So 90 plus percent of the Chinese community somehow is here because of somebody who came here illegally.

So growing up, we were in the shadow of trying to stay out of the limelight.

So when I attended the University of Washington, we didn't apply for financial aid, because you don't want to fill out forms.

My mother was deathly afraid we were gonna be deported.

So you don't really find out your history, you see.

I think about that in the context of what's happening now with another generation of dreamers, other folks who we force into this kind of silencing of your history.

If you don't know your history, then it really scars you for life and you end up spending your whole time trying to just deal with your personal stuff rather than being an accepted part of a larger coalition to do the kind of things that Leonard talks about, that Jerry talks about, so you can build communities in a truthful kind of way and to reach across boundaries.

- So you're talking about missing groups of people, like entire groups of people- - [Ron] Missing whole histories.

- Who are here and ought to be part of the story and part of building the story.

Jerry, do you have something that comes to mind when you think of what we missed that we don't wanna miss again?

- Well, okay, something sort of re related to that was that early on in Seattle's history, when the African American community was very small and starting to grow, people felt like this was a really awesome place because it was, and they started inviting people from other parts of the south, especially, to move here, because you could really make a life for yourself here.

Now, you couldn't get jobs in the mills, you couldn't get jobs in the store, you couldn't get jobs...

But you could get jobs as maids and butlers and you could do be barbers, that sort of thing.

But you know what, you weren't being beaten and killed.

So they thought, wow, this is, this is really good.

And the overall Seattle community, I think, felt good about out that relationship.

One of the things that was also happening at that time was that most of the racial animosity was being directed at Chinese Americans.

So 1880s, you have that incident, huge incident, in 1886, where people started trying to chase Chinese out of Seattle, and about half the population left.

Then these big crowds of thugs went through, rounding up Chinese people, took them down to the dock, forcing them to get onto ships to take them away from Seattle.

Something similar happened in Tacoma.

All over the west coast, things like that were happening.

And long story short, this idea became that what jobs needed to be for white people.

Chinese were not welcome in most of these jobs because it was felt they were gonna take all of the jobs.

The little moment where it felt like there was a window of opportunity for black folks didn't last, because once you started having this whites only signs popping up all over, then they apply to everybody, right?

I mean, they spread to all other people.

And did it have to be that way?

I mean, no, I don't think it needed it to be that way, but it was, and it was manipulated by politicians, by some companies who wanted to pit workers against one another based on their skin color.

And then we're left with the detritus that accumulates in the wake of that kind of... - And it seemed like that was, I mean, there was a lot of fear, a lot of suspicion, right?

And there's other points in our history where those two have crept up and caused us to do some things against each other.

This is the 80th anniversary of Japanese internment as well.

So from here, I wonder if we can look, come almost with a bird's eye view.

We've talked a little bit about the character of Seattle, inventive and these different reputations it's had at different points of time.

Well, this is a beautiful segue to the next set of questions.

If we don't learn from our past, we're doomed to repeat it, right, that's the saying.

So I'm gonna name some issues that we are having a very hard time navigating today and ask you to give us a time in our past when we learned something that might help us.

It might be something we already mentioned or something fresh.

Homelessness and housing.

- You know, I think homelessness is about who belongs, who's in our home.

During the Great Depression when Seattle had the so-called largest Hooverville, homeless encampment essentially, named derisively after president Hoover, the supposed precipitator of the depression.

But in fact, that was a very well regulated community.

The city empowered it, it had its own government, it had its own city hall.

It had a sense of belonging.

Now that wasn't, obviously, a permanent solution to some of the challenges that it represented, but it was a level of dignity and respect that allowed the larger community to understand that this was a problem that needed to find a solution.

The solution did not come of course, because even economy picked up, and that was the solution.

But I think we can learn from history that homelessness doesn't have to be always viewed in a black and white context of it's a terrible scourge or it's something that needs a completely novel solution.

We have times in our past, when we've looked at homelessness and transientness and really addressed it as who include in our home and how do we make them feel at home?

- It has to do with our, I mean, it's a very expensive city.

And so that contributes a lot to it.

And I mean, everybody sort of says, nowadays, the obvious thing is if you're homeless, what you need is a house.

And who's gonna build that, right?

I mean, property is very expensive.

People who are doing developments aren't doing them for the fun of it.

I mean, they're doing it to earn money, and we have to, as a community, find some way to do this.

Government funded, partly government funded, whatever, to create a housing system that works for everyone.

I mean, when Seattle built public housing, it was one of the few places where the city insisted that public housing be integrated.

- [Monica] And what time period?

- Right.

- When it actually started during world war II.

But the Democrats from the south ran the Senate and they said, if there's a drop of federal money, it has to be segregated.

And Seattle said, no, we're not gonna do it that way.

And as Jerry said, it broke the model.

And created a better one.

- There you go.

How about public safety, crime and policing?

- I think public safety is also, who's, protecting whom?

I think about the public safety during the anti-Chinese riots where people, vigilantes, were creating public safety for their perceived white community, but the government was deputizing other people to protect the Chinese people, which in turn, was protecting some of the economic interests of the establishment who enjoyed the low income labor.

So I think that, again, you have to unpack that question about public safety.

- And if I might jump in, not that I have a solution to that, but you know, certainly in my lifetime, I've seen, partly because Seattle's changed so rapidly, back in the day, you sort of knew everybody, everyone looked out for one another because it was a smaller city.

So now, even on Beacon Hill where I live, I hardly know my neighbors.

There just isn't that break in period there.

And there's economic divides.

So we're living in a fairly fractured time with a lot of upheaval, and it's hard to create that sense of bonding in a world that's much more factionalized.

- And hopefully that is something, that is a big challenge for today for sure.

So to close down this segment, I'd like each of you to just quickly kind of address the following.

The way you see it, what are the most important lessons our city's past can offer our city's future?

- Well, the most important is that when we cooperate, when we work together, we all do well.

And there have been periods when that has happened.

And when that doesn't happen, we create pools of people who aren't doing well and aren't going to be doing well because of the situation that they're locked into.

To the degree that we can avoid that, we protect all of us.

We make all of us safer, happier, and we just have to recognize that that is the case, rather than thinking that there are some groups that are just beyond the pale.

- And maybe just building what Jerry said, it's also an attitude of welcoming, not only respecting differences, but welcoming people to the community who bring those different perspectives.

Pretty much every era of Seattle history has been enriched and changed and moved forward because new ideas, new people, combined with respect and honoring those who have been here.

And we haven't gotten that quite right yet, but I think that's a something for the future.

- I'm just gonna go back to something that Jerry talked about in the very beginning, which is just understanding our history.

That's a huge challenge, because we really don't know our history.

Even as somebody who's been here all my life, I'm rediscovering.

So if we can bring ourselves within our institutions, whether it's our museums, libraries, news media, our conversations to take a second deep dive to have some real conversations, I think that's a good beginning point.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you so much.

And we'll be right back for the second part of our Looking Back to Look Forward program when we talk about the future.

So stay tuned.

(upbeat music) (audience clapping) In this two part program, we talked first about Seattle's complicated history of conflict and collaboration, as well as inclusion and exclusion.

Now we're going to shift and use what we learned about our past to help inform how we can build a future that supports us all.

With us, to help imagine what's possible for the future of Seattle, is Glen Hiemstra, founder of futurist.com.

Hi Glen.

- Hi.

(audience clapping) - So Glen, you are founder of futurist.com because you are a futurist.

What the heck is a futurist?

(audience laughing) - Yes, I am the founder of futurist.com.

I will say that I did sell that a a year ago after being a professional futurist for about 30 years.

And I've been in Seattle since 1980.

So I feel almost like a native Seattleite.

So professional futurism really consists of two primary tracks.

Number one is a group of people come, largely out the academic world, who concentrate on trying to ascertain what are probable futures, what are likely futures, what are scenarios for futures?

And then there's a second track, which is a little bit more on the consulting side, which really help organizations that might be a civic organizations, or a nonprofit or a city council or a business for that matter, try to envision the future that they prefer, that's the term that I like to use.

So to ask the question, what is your preferred future, often called a vision.

Describe what that is and then kind of work from that back to the present and try to figure out what you want to do.

So those who are professional futurists tend to do one of those two things or both.

- So this feels like an interesting time to think about the future, in part, considering that back in 2019, I think a lot of people had an idea about the immediate future that was completely thrown out the window by the pandemic.

So did that, what do you take away from something that is so surprising?

Does any part of you think, oh man, forget this?

Or do you go, okay, all right, se can work with surprises?

- Well, you have to work with surprises.

Actually, one of the most interesting people I ever met in the futurist field was Alvin Toffler.

And he said...

This was in 1980 or so, I met him in the field that existed really academically for about 10 years.

And he said, the key question is, why have we had no influence?

- [Monica] Why have we... - Why have we had no influence?

We've been talking about it, studying the future for a while.

And he said it's because we've been concentrating too much on trying to anticipate what is likely to happen in the future and not enough on anticipating things that are probably not gonna happen, but if they do, will change a lot of things.

And of course, that's what the pandemic did.

It wasn't that the pandemic was unanticipated.

There were lots of people, including our very own Bill Gates right here in the Seattle area who had been warning us for a long time that a pandemic was likely.

And if it did happen, here would be some of the consequences.

But those tended, those warnings were ignored.

- So you've been a professional futurist for some time.

If you take us back to, say, the year 2000, what about the future today, in 2022, were you already talking about at that time?

What did it look like at that time?

What would a futurist say in 2000 about- - Oh gosh, we were talking about climate change and how global warming would influence public policy.

We were saying things like virtually every public policy decision would have to have an environmental component.

People would ask you, well, how is that gonna impact the environment?

That was actually fairly obvious back then.

We were talking about the aging of the population.

I was writing about probably the most significant dynamic in terms of population in the year 2000.

And that is the impending decline of the human population on planet earth.

And we just read this week, those of us in Seattle, that the Seattle population declined a bit in the last year.

Now that's driven largely by the pandemic and a little bit about migration and so on.

But if you look globally, one of the most important dynamics that will shape the future of Seattle will be what happens to the global population.

Let me say two things about that.

We've thought for a long time about and worried about over population, but what's actually happening in the world is we're on the verge of a declining population.

And once the world population begins to decline, it might be a fairly steep curve.

It'll be very hard to reverse that decline in the population, and there are large parts of the world which are already in that.

Russia is one.

- So you're saying that that would come to Seattle, a decline in population.

- That will probably come to Seattle, but Seattle might be a special case because we're so attractive as a place to move to, as Richard Florida pointed out a couple weeks ago, I believe it was a chamber event or some other Future of Seattle event.

- Yeah, there's a poll recently, right?

Where college graduates said that this was the number one city they wanted to move to.

- Yeah, a poll of college graduates asked where you want to live.

- [Monica] Ask the future.

And they said we want to come to Seattle.

And yet, we did decline.

But if the global population begins to decline, what will dry up is the potential for immigration and immigration has been the key competitive advantage for the United States versus other countries and other regions of the world, and the fact that we've been fairly open to immigration.

Although more recently we've begun to close that off.

And so what happens with larger population dynamics will eventually impact Seattle.

There's a whole lot more we can talk about there, but let's go to the... - Yeah, yeah, but that sounds like that's one of the things you're thinking of.

So turning to Seattle, you talked about probable future, preferred future, and that you're focused more on preferred future, a vision, a strategy for getting there.

How do we figure out what our preferred future even is?

- Well, it actually is one of the more, well, it's one of the more interest questions to ask, but it's actually, in some ways, the easier question to ask than what is probable.

Because the future is relatively unpredictable.

I mean, there are certain large dynamics like population or like global warming and so on, which are fairly obvious and will in fact shape the probable future.

But there are many aspects of the future which will come as surprise to us.

Probably the most important thing that will happen in the next decade will in fact, surprise everybody in the room, including me.

That's just sort of the way the future works.

But if you ask what is your preferred future, people can, with some thought, define what that is.

What would we really like the city to look like?

And for example, in the discussion of history that we listened to, there was a lot of talk about inclusion and what's happened with the diverse community in Seattle.

Well, it would be very interesting if the city could sit down and answer the question, what do we really want to look like in terms of inclusion and and diversity, for example, in economic development?

Right now there's a fairly major emphasis coming out of the pandemic on if we're gonna rebuild, let's say, the downtown small business community.

How can we make that more diverse?

How can we make that more inclusive of the diverse community that's here?

Well, is that really the vision?

If we say that's the vision, then you immediately then are given ideas or ideas come to mind about, what would we do in order to make that more likely to happen?

And in that way, defining the vision then begins to shape what you do.

The way I like to say it is that the vision of the future is the most important leverage point for change in the present.

That if you can change the future, you can change the present.

Change the future first, and then the present kind of follows.

- So you mentioned the challenge of inclusion that we did talk about in the last segment.

When I think about a company coming together and setting a vision, I've seen that happen.

I've been part of that process.

When I think of a city doing that, that's a lot of people to consult.

(audience chuckling) So how in the world does a city begin to think of its future this way?

How does it set a vision and know that it actually serves everyone?

What kinds of steps does a civic entity take?

- Absolutely.

The larger the scale, the more difficult that is.

In my work over the 30 years that I really did this professionally, before I mostly retired, I had an opportunity to work with virtually every city council in the greater Puget Sound area and many others around the state at some point or other, because all city councils eventually have, or annually at least, have retreat in which they ask, what's our future plan?

And I would get invited to these things, including with the Seattle city council.

And at that level, it's actually fairly easy for that group to say, well, here's our vision for this city.

But if you really want to involve the whole community, there are processes for doing that.

I learned how to think as a futurist from a guy who, if you're really an old timer in the state of Washington, you might remember, and that was a guy named Ed Lindaman who was president of Whitworth College, now Whitworth University, in the 1970s.

And he was invited by governor Dan Evans to coordinate one of the first ever statewide efforts to think about the preferred future, it was called alternatives for Washington.

And it was a massive effort to sort of survey and engage people in civic conversations like we're having right here, around what would you...

Essentially, what you're asking is, if you could wave a magic wand over, let's say, the city of Seattle, and it's 25 years from now, what do we look like?

And then there are various kinds of survey questions you can ask.

You can evolve people through surveys, through civic meetings, and so on.

It's not impossible to do.

The key, one of the key outcomes of that are statements of what I call descriptions of the preferred future.

And it actually turns out to be perhaps less important that then those are immediately followed up with policies that will make sure that they happen, 'cause I've had some ever experiences in which, for example, the city of Pullman, we did a future vision for the city of Pullman.

We engaged, we had a large number of community meetings.

And they have a city manager form of government, at least when I was with them they did.

And it was about five years later, I was talking with the city manager and he said, "You know what?"

He said, "We created that vision," and he said, "And it was written down and I had it in a drawer on my desk, and every now and then I open up the drawer, and I'd look at it."

And he said, "And I would get frustrated 'cause we weren't passing policies to make it come true."

But he said, "You know what?

After about five years I opened that drawer up and I thought, almost everything we said, we've done."

- [Monica] Interesting.

- So just the act of getting together.

And I don't think we've really done that in the state of Seattle on a community-wide basis.

And there would be diverse voices.

There would be diverse opinions around, do we want to be bigger?

Do we wanna stay the same, and so on.

But if we did that, it would begin to have an impact that would last over time.

- So I wanna bring in a couple of questions from our audience.

They're asking, what does the future of certain things.

One from Betsy speaking about work, was this current state of remote work predicted?

What do you think it will look like in another 2, 5, 20 years?

I know that the future of downtown, the future of our office buildings, you know, even what a city is, in some ways, relies on what will happen with work.

- In about 1995, here in Seattle, we had a conference on the future of telecommuting.

Remember that term?

And I was on a panel.

The panel was moderated by Bill Nye The Science Guy.

- [Monica] Oh, nice.

- Yeah, which was really fun.

- [Monica] He's great.

- And there was this guy named Craig McCall.

And McCall was on the panel and he was one of the founders of, one of the initiators of the whole cell telephone business.

And I'll never forget that Craig McCall said, on that panel he said, "In the future, we will travel to get together, but not to do most basic work."

- [Monica] And he said that what year?

- 1995.

- Wow.

- And he said, "Why do we go to the office to wiggle our fingers on keyboards when we stay at home and wiggle our fingers on keyboards?"

(Monica laughing) So people did anticipate that.

And so, and now we've had the pandemic, which has suddenly sped that up.

There's been a gradual move towards some remote work or at least the ability to do remote work.

And now we've been sort of time shifted very quickly into that world.

And so I would anticipate that perhaps 25% of work that used to be done in downtown offices will be done remotely.

That might mean you might go into the office three days a week or two days a week or another office might downsize by 30% and so on.

And so that raises all kinds of questions about what do you do with high rise- - Right, the whole architecture of our city.

- Office hours and so on.

But it opens up a whole range of creative possibilities of how you rethink what a core downtown looks like and what it can do and what its function should be.

- I do wonder if we can, or should, all be futurists?

Like we can all sit here and dream and imagine what the future ought to look like.

But is there something that each local really should be thinking about when it comes to the preferred future for their city?

You consult with city agencies that do the load of that work.

How can each of us do that?

- Yeah, so let me say two things in response to that.

Number one, yes.

I think everybody could benefit from learning to think with the future mindset.

We're learning more about other species now.

We used to think that human beings were quite unique in this ability.

We may not be quite as unique as we used to think, but we know that we have this ability to remember the past, which was what the first session was about.

And we know that we have this ability to anticipate or to envision or to dream about the future.

And most of us spend most of our lives ignoring those two aspects of our ability.

(Monica laughing) Because we're just sort of stuck, just sort of getting through the day.

And so we say, I don't have time to worry about what happened yesterday, and I certainly don't have time to worry about what's gonna happen tomorrow.

I've got stuff to get done today.

And so we get caught in that.

And yet we have this unique, or at least this powerful, human ability to do those things.

And so the more we can engage in those two activities...

This Ed Lindaman who was the president of Whitworth when I knew him in the '70s said one of the most impactful things that I've ever heard.

He said, if you don't go far enough back in memory or far enough ahead in hope, your present will be impoverished.

(audience clapping) - That's good.

- So, which is what I loved about when I was invited to this program, because it was specifically a program about going back in memory and then ahead in hope.

So that's the first thing that I would say.

The second thing is that whenever I've worked with communities to envision the future, there are about a half a dozen themes that come up over and over and over again.

I think they're very consistent in terms of what people would like to have in the community.

They will say, well, we want a healthy community.

And that means we wanna have good healthcare facilities, we want access to healthcare, but we also want access to things in the community like parks and bike trails and so on that enable people to be healthy.

We might want a more walkable community that enables to be healthy.

We want a community that's economically vibrant, that isn't stagnant, that is somehow changing and growing all the time.

We want a community that is capable of learning, which means we want to have good schools.

We want a community that is, mostly they would use the term green.

We want a community that's environmentally sound or environmentally resilient.

And so there are certain themes, that if you sit down and ask people, no matter what's happening in the world, and you say, what do you really want a community look like?

Those themes will emerge.

And then if people embrace them, then you can ask, well, what are we not doing right right now that we could be doing that would enable us to move in that direction?

Not that we'll ever essentially ever totally get there.

And not that that vision might not change as you move toward it a little bit, but you can begin to see things that we're not doing.

And in fact, that's, what's happened through the pandemic and through Black Lives Matter, and so on.

We began to identify some things that we're not doing that actually, if we did them, would take us closer to the kind of community that people would prefer to live.

- Right, so let let's end with that.

One of our audience members asked, what will the next big thing be for Seattle?

And I wanna turn that a little bit into the next big opportunity.

What is the thing that's out there?

And if we can just get our act together, (laughs) maybe we could reach it.

And you only have two minutes.

- Yeah, yeah, I know.

(audience laughing) - Well, I think the next big thing for Seattle Proper, that is the city limits of Seattle, is actually to ask the question is, what is a central city to be all about over the next 10, 20 years, if it's not about high rise off office work?

And it will probably be still largely about that, but maybe not quite to the same degree.

So then what does that mean in terms of, what is the ground floor of all the buildings in Seattle?

How do you have a vibrant downtown life, restaurant life, entertainment life, and so on, if you have fewer people commuting in and out of work?

And I think that that's really, really critical.

The second thing is, and Paul Krugman wrote about this last week in the New York Times.

He's asking the question, he's actually making the claim, and I think right now it's a question, is what's happening in the world, primarily in Ukraine right now, the beginning of the end of the second round of globalization as 2014 was to 2019 was the end of the first round of globalization.

Paul Krugman argued a week ago that it probably is.

And if we become a less global economy for a period of time, what does that mean for a city which envisions itself as a global city, and which is partly based on being a global city in terms of shipping and so on.

So that's something to watch.

It may not be something that we have much control over, but it's something to watch.

So those are a couple things.

The list is quite long.

- And hopefully it makes use of, in the first section, we talked about our strength being creativity, inventiveness, we wanna lead the way.

Do you see, do futurists look at the future of our character?

Is that something we can expect or hope or push to keep as part of our DNA?

- Yeah, the character of a community, but the character with people.

One of the things that I have both concern over and hope over is that when we're in this period...

In fact, and you've just written a book on this, as a matter of fact.

(Monica laughing) We're in this period of sort of ultra division.

And there are all kinds of forces, some of which are quite deliberately created, trying to push us apart.

And the challenge is to figure out how to pull back together.

And that means right, left, Republican, Democrat, rich, poor, and so on and so forth.

And I think that perhaps is the challenge over time.

Because if you don't fix that, then it's really hard to come up, for example, with a cohesive community division.

So it could be that that's the major area of focus.

I have some hope for that because I think people are beginning to pay attention.

And I think your book is gonna help in that, as a matter of fact.

- And our historians already identified that as an area for improvement, right, that we can be creative, but then we don't make the table big enough.

We don't bring in everybody who's actually got a stake.

We lose sight of the larger picture of who's here, and who's a part of this question?

- The description during the history panel of the gang of four or whatever they were called.

Which I've heard of those people but I didn't know that they had worked as a group in that way.

That was quite powerful in terms of an example of what we need to do.

But with the inventive thing that we have to do in Seattle right now, I think, is one inventive thing is figure out how to do that in a way that doesn't mire us in process forever.

As we know in Seattle, the.

- [Monica] The Seattle process?

- We criticize ourselves endlessly for endless process.

So could we involve larger segments or the whole community in a way that actually then moves fairly quickly?

And I think that would be a thing to try to improve.

- That'd be cool.

Yeah, all right.

We're all gonna get right on that.

That sounds awesome.

So, well, what ultimately, you mentioned hope, that beautiful quote earlier about you've gotta have enough hope in the future.

What do you, this is a question from Daryl in our audience, what do you hope for our region's future?

Where is the hope located for you?

- Well, I would say there are two or three things.

Number one, I hope, I'm a person who believes that change is good.

Not only is change inevitable, but it's actually good.

One of the really fascinating things to do when you're doing a future vision is to say, well, so what did Seattle look like 25 years ago?

Like physically, and what was it's character like?

And then you say, well, if the question is, what do we want Seattle look like 25 years from now, you have to assume that it will look at least as different as Seattle today looks compared to 25 years ago.

And so then that gives you all kinds of space to say, oh, if things can be that different, then we could, you know, we could build this or not build that.

We could combine these people in all kinds of ways.

And so to me, that provides a lot of hope.

And so if I was to wave my magic wand, I would say, for example, that we do indeed embrace becoming a more significant international city, that we embrace becoming a more inclusive city so that when we look back 25 years from now, we say, we didn't just talk about it 25 years now ago.

Now we really are a very diverse business community.

And the third thing I would say is one that really continues to leverage the technology inventiveness, which we heard about in the history panel, but technology centric economy that evolved in the last 25 years here, because that is the technology centric economy that will continue to lead the world.

And if we want to be an international leader, that's what we need to embrace.

That is all kinds of educational implications and lots of other implications.

- Yeah, well, all right.

I'm feeling a little hopeful.

I don't know about y'all.

I think we got some good stuff.

Well, thank you so much, Glen, for these insights and for getting us to imagine what might be possible.

Thank you everyone for being here and good night.

See you next time.

(upbeat music)