Creating fertile space

A new book is seeking to inspire others to follow the example of those behind the emerging civic economy. Joost Beunderman explains

Incredible Edible Todmorden finds an imaginative way to display homegrown veg at last year’s Todmorden Agricultural Show. The initiative is among 25 case studies in the Compendium for the Civic Economy.

It has been nearly two weeks since we launched the Compendium for the Civic Economy together with Nesta and Design Council/Cabe and we naturally much enjoyed seeing it covered in news sources and on blogs.

It seems that as a society that is searching its way out of a deep economic, social and ecological black hole, we have a real thirst for positive stories – in this case, stories for a different regeneration future.

However, important though stories are, the next step is to engage in a discussion about (and, even more importantly, practical prototyping, testing and iteration of) ways to create the shared new cornerstones that will enable more of these ventures to spring up. What the Compendium for the Civic Economy really aims to open up is a pathway to rethinking the institutions that underpin place.

Some of the 25 case studies in the book, like Incredible Edible Todmorden, have figured in the pages of New Start before and were indeed meant as a compilation of good practices in order to show that the stepping stones towards a more civic economy are already becoming a tangible reality in some places.

Together they show a perspective on place, on regeneration and genuine socio-economic development that is by no means wholly new. Far be it for us to claim we are the only ones speaking about this new economy and how it can affect the places we live in. But it still has some considerable way to go before it is genuinely embedded among most regeneration and economic development professionals.

The newly formed habits of 15 or so years of ‘urban renaissance’ may die hard, especially because they perpetuated a longer established mainstream habit of seeing ‘place-making’ as a real estate driven process. But what we need – and what the 25 examples hint at – is a shift in the way we operate places. In a rapidly changing context and against the background of increasing resource scarcity, what matters for places is how we own or have access to them, how we re-occupy, share, co-develop and finance them, how we commission and procure goods and services, how we regulate them etc.

That is why the cover of the Compendium shows (pictured above) a model of a rather everyday townscape, not unlike what we already have in many places – and certainly not a kind of radically futuristic vision that in most places in the UK would be impossible to fund, even if it was acceptable to people.

So, it’s the places we know, but not as we know them, because of the way in which energy reductions are achieved (through practical peer-to-peer advice), how learning takes place (in high street tutoring centres that hide behind a mad pirate supply store, in low-threshold youth centres that are actually advertising agencies, or in a FabLab where you can literally build your inventions or prototypes), how an old market is revitalised (through a deeply social and collaborative exploration instead of a physical redevelopment), how homes are commissioned (by the users), and how energy resources are developed and their proceeds shared…

The examples are diverse, from local internet and energy supply to member-driven supermarkets and from zero-carbon theatres to peer-to-peer car sharing services. The civic economy is about workplaces, cultural institutions, enterprise (and certainly not only social enterprise), public sector agencies, public space, homes, energy and movement. It is about local citizens’ initiative but also about the behaviour of private companies and people across the public sector.

Growing this economy – not as a particular, easily distinguishable sector but as a shared way of doing and thinking that can affect an increasing section of the economy and of our places – is the task at hand. And this is about creating the fertile ground for it to prosper and grow – and not, as is often suggested, simply about the type of examples that we speak about ‘scaling up’: the language of ‘scaling up’ and ‘social franchising’ points to a misunderstanding about how civic entrepreneurs and the ventures they create grow and prosper, and it is dangerous to use such terms indiscriminately.

Instead, what is needed is to create the conditions for mass proliferation – enabling similar ideas to spring up in many places. And that brings us back to institutions: the availability of and access to finance, the reform of the planning system and access to vacant premises, the way ‘meanwhile’ strategies are integrated into long-term plans for growing talent as opposed to seeing them as crisis time-only niceties, and the integration of FabLab-type equipment and ethos into neighbourhood infrastructures like libraries.

This is a conversation about the economics of genuine localism, including the financial infrastructure that enables this. For example, building local investment funds that can match-fund promising local initiatives and investments (whether in time, skills, experience or money) instead of commissioning the next regeneration masterplan.

Our book shows how this institutional change could happen in a range of fields: procurement (as shown by an NHS hospital catering team that breathed life into existing legislation to procure food sustainably by actively reaching out to local farmers); commissioning (for instance, the case of Brixton Village, where the local authority’s moment of genius was not to claim the lead in regenerating it but instead to connect the market owners to a group of talented social entrepreneurs); market regulation (witness the battle of local internet providers and energy generating villages to enable self-provision in a regulatory field aimed at facilitating large scale providers); frameworks for micro-finance; preferencing players that create greater social value (the town of Tübingen in Germany explicitly preferred self-builders and self-commissioning groups over developers when allocating housing plots); and facilitating peer-to-peer learning between civic ventures, allowing them to be more than just brilliant local initiatives.

All these are questions of interface – of building or evolving new institutions that mediate between intractable social challenges and local initiative. Building this interface between the ‘small’ (local people’s creativity, energy and drive) and the large (the willingness and ability of large public sector organisations and corporations) is the overriding challenge and not just for a reforming state but also for institutions like housing associations.

What this points to is that regeneration and local economic development trajectories may well be less dependent on massive new capital investment or legislation, but should actually focus on subtle changes in practices and frameworks.

It is these new interfaces, platforms and other institutional shifts that will make the difference between the places we know and the new civic economy – creating places like the ones we thought we knew, but operating in a way that is fundamentally more inclusive, sustainable, economically effective in the true sense of the word, and ultimately more democratic.