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Making Cas happy
One of my favourite books is Flow: the
Psychology of Optimal Experience (by
Mihaly Csiszentmihalyi) published in
1990. Politics was traditionally about
telling people what they must, should
and cannot do. After reading this
book, it seemed to me that politics
should be about helping people to
engage in positive flow. That is, a
feeling of well-being that benefits
both the individual and society.
In my 2004 election leaflet I stated
that I saw the councillor’s role as
helping people to do the good things
in their life, rather than creating
rules to prevent them. Government
should be enabling not authoritarian.
An example of such was given by
Charles Landry, founder of the
cultural planning consultancy Comedia,
at a lecture I attended at Xscape. One
Canadian city fined those without
bells on their bikes $52 but each fine
cost the taxpayer $100. Far more
effective to buy bells and place them
on the bikes. I suppose there was a
cultural as well as economic benefit
as most offenders probably just didn’t
think of getting a bell.
In 2005, I noticed books and articles
were appearing on the subject of
happiness, which seemed to be
expanding on this notion of flow. I
read these with glee, determined to
work out what local government can do
to help increase flow and happiness.
While I was doing that I found out
that the BBC was about to do practical
exercises about happiness in Slough.
The result was the four programmes
called Making Slough Happy. However,
what follows is not a simple copying
of the Slough experience to
Castleford.
The two are different places; I think
Castleford has a community spirit that
gives it a head start, and some of the
lessons from the happiness research
did not reach Slough. In addition, the
programmes looked at experts educating
the people, whereas I am concerned how
the local council, local agencies and
community groups can work together to
increase happiness in the town.
As the soon to be shown series “The
Happiness Factor” points out,
happiness is important for well-being,
better productivity and a longer
life.
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