Four Lenses Walkshop Canvas

Go on a journey through your neighbourhood, bringing your curiosities and using the Four Lenses framework to guide you

Posted by CIVIC SQUARE on March, 16, 2023

Last updated: August, 08, 2026

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This tool was created as a companion to taking the doughnut on an unrolling walk, and the walkshop approach Kavita Purohit and Alice Hindson-Matthews are developing is an invitation to explore learning live in our place, from nature, infrastructure and our neighbours. The canvas can be used to go on a journey through your neighbourhood, bringing your curiosities, using the Four Lenses framework as a means to relate to and make sense of what comes up in the form of insights and questions connected to wider dimensions of our ecologies and social fabric across different scales, but make them more practical and tangible.

"On our walkshop we noticed the lichen and sticky weed, the high fences and denied access, and loved drawing the ‘porous’ connections between local and global, ecological and social. The conversations flowed across birth(ing new ideas) and justice (or lack of), cycling, gender and loads more all held in the gorgeous Eat Make Play space. We can’t wait to bring the resources and ideas back to the rest of our group and try to give them a sense of the journey we’ve been on this weekend." — Rachel

We've already noticed that this means conversations can traverse many things with ease whilst being connected to different important viewpoints and the bigger picture, from learning about lichen, reimagining how we might (re)common sites of land, to broader effects of air pollution around the globe and the new financial instruments required for different systems of value to be practiced on our balance sheets.

This freshly developed (and printed!) Four Lenses Walkshop canvas v1.0 was trialled for the first time during the Peer-To-Peer Kick Off Weekend, both by peers walking together in (rainy!) Ladywood, and remotely with the International Neighbourhoods cohort and other peers taking it out where they were. That means there are lots of learnings for us to gather and put into practice for a next version very soon with further insights from the DEAL team too for us to implement as how they communicate the lenses evolves too, but in the meantime, here's the tool we started with, as we prepare to take it with us on lots of walkshops in Co-creation Week #3 next week. Information is at the bottom of this story if you'd like to join us.

Download 4 Lenses Walkshop Canvas v1.0

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