Welcome to the first ever PLog: the Planet Leeds blog.

As you’ll hopefully have picked up from elsewhere on the site, Planet Leeds is a free annual street festival, featuring performers from all Leeds’ diverse cultures and communities in the heart of the city. Through the event, we aim to give the good folk of Leeds the (frankly unusual) opportunity to encounter new people, new cultures, new sounds, and new sight.

 

Indeed, in our massively diverse society…

(and here’s a thing: Leeds is statistically the most ethnically mixed UK city outside London), encountering different cultures shouldn’t be unusual – yet it is. Why? Because as people we don’t naturally venture outside our normal grooves, don’t naturally connect with those unlike us, don’t naturally go beyond outside our comfort zones.

This is no bad thing in itself. In fact, its crucial for our sanity and well-being: cultures and sub-cultures are fundamental for us all as we establish and maintain identity. Without being rooted in a community with the same language, rituals, norms, values and so on – against whom we can reference ourselves – we’d struggle to make sense of ourselves and our lives.

 

But there’s danger here too.

Because when we become too enmeshed in a culture, without exposure to that which is different, we can easily become blinkered – that is, lose the capacity to see the world from a range of perspectives, to enjoy difference and newness, to be pleasantly surprised by the unusual.

On this basis, Planet Leeds simply seeks to create a space for people to encounter difference, enjoy it, and catch a glimpse of the rich possibilities within an increasingly diverse and mixed society. Indeed, we have easy access to a unprecedented range not just of cultures to enjoy, but also wisdom to learn from. Which is why businesses increasingly talk about the ‘diversity advantage’ – whereby companies deliberately seek to employ a diverse workforce; not to tick boxes, but because this gives them a greater pool of perspectives to draw on, and therefore greater possibilities for cracking problems, and discovering creative solutions.

 

I hasten to add: events like Planet Leeds won’t magically make everything ok

and nor do we want to force anything on anyone. Many people have genuine concerns about the increasingly multicultural nature of our society – and we have to listen to these, not simply brush them away.

We also need to wrestle with big challenges such as how to ensure that our diverse society is becoming increasingly inter-connected and mixed. (See next week’s PLog on ‘inter-culturalism’.) And also that we don’t just stay at the superficial level (and music and art can certainly be such), but try to ensure that this mixing up become increasingly embedded in the daily lives and relationships of regular people.

 

But we can’t do everything in a day, or even a weekend

– so Planet Leeds is our modest offering to help achieve world peace, and we’re very much looking forward to it. We hope you are too: see you then!