‘Future Communities’, an exhibition at the ICA in 1981

Pages from the catalogue of the ICA’s 1981 Future Communities exhibition, with a foreword by Colin Ward

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Dark Matter and Trojan Horses

9 min readMar 8, 2025

I’m sharing these images of Institute for Contemporary Arts Future Communities exhibition from 1981 as I suspect that it’s a relatively rare artefact. It’s a very slim volume, essentially a photocopied (photostat?) booklet, and in every sense a product of its times.

However, I’m relating it to the article I just published about Colin Ward, who provides the introductory text to the exhibition catalogue, which reinforces my sense that some of these ideas are more relevant now than they were then.

As I try to outline in the Ward essay, if you can lift the ideas out of the muddy brown fug of the 1970s*, scrub them down whilst leaving their essence intact, we might see that a range of ideas that are swinging back into view: commoning and sufficiency (Saito, Hickel, Reduction Roadmap), participation and community-led projects, the scale of communities (a question asked by the recent book, Kuni, on Japanese rural regeneration), alternative technologies (Non-Grid and Lo-TEK etc.), self-build technologies (Wikihouse, WeCanMake, VUILD etc.), distributed and decentralised low-energy systems and passive solar design, garden cities and regenerative agriculture etc.

(* Noting that, as Danny Dorling describes in Shattered Nation, 1974 was actually the year that Britain was at its peak in terms of socio-economic outcomes.)

I can find no images of the exhibition itself, but the ICA’s then-Exhibitions Director, Sandy Nairn (later rather influential, as Nicholas Serota’s Director of Programmes at the Tate Gallery and ultimately Director of the National Portrait Gallery), described the competition process thus:

“There were four categories of submission — professional, lay, school groups, and individual children — who were invited to ‘design the sort of community in which they would like to live in the future’. The community was to be ‘self-contained for a mixed population of around five hundred people in the year 2000’. Two real sites were detailed in the competition brief, one in Milton Keynes and one in New Brighton on Merseyside. In addition competitors could select a real or imaginary site of their own.

To my broader point, Nairn’s introduction captures the urban debates of the 1970s and 1980s perfectly well, but could equally apply today:

“The way that planners, architects or designers affect the surroundings of our lives can be identified as an area of growing public interest. In particular, planning for the future has increasingly become the concern not only of the professionals, but also of those who care to counter the assumptions of local authorities and other agencies involved in planning. The post-war development of towns in Britain shows a depressing, and much criticised, gulf between high-rise blocks and detached private housing in endless urban sprawl, and a seemingly inevitable divide between domestic and work environments. The exhibits presented here question many of the assumptions behind this development and offer an alternative range of possible solutions and ideas. Some are more concerned with social organisation, with physical environment and buildings. All of them wish to involve those who might make up a community, all of them allow for flexibility in development, and all of their ideas have been shaped by the debate over our environment that has arisen in the last ten vears. All of them are looking for ways of making future communities now.”

In retrospect it’s odd, but interesting, that Terry Farrell led the winning team (‘Buffer Thinking’, by ARCAED LTD, which stands for “Architecture & Computer Aided Energy Design”.) This would be just as Farrell set up his own practice, the year after he left Grimshaw, and before he embarked on a very different kind of architecture to that suggested here—although he is of course also responsible for the Farrell Centre in Newcastle, which is entirely in line with at least one flavour of inclusive and participative planning. Their entry is largely landscape- and urban design-led, all ecological and recreational natural buffers and neo-Victorian arcades, and the notes on the obvious failings of all-glass towers are both prescient and a little ironic given where practice ended up. Esther Rowley’s illustration style is, for me, a Proustian rush back to the Usborne-style ‘explainer’ books of the late 1970s, early 1980s.

There are plenty of lovely ideas here, not least Andrew Page’s work for Dartington Institute of Community Studies (which is now another part of the extraordinary Dartington ecosystem, incl Dartington College—though I see Schumacher College has sadly shut—and in some way, must be another Michael Young invention.) There’s much here that would not be out-of-place in a contemporary development like The Phoenix in Lewes.

I also like the sound of Roger Westman’s Walls proposal, which sounds like it was a sort of self-build Milton Keynes, based around some familiar late-1970s conjectures: smaller households by the end of the century, blurred divisions between work and family life, high cost of housing and commuting, increase in unemployment but also self-employment, increased cost of welfare services, “the increasing sophistication of telecommunications” etc. Those projections now feel true enough, even if the timing was a little off.

“The exhibit prepared for the ICA exhibition emphasises the ways in which current building controls and planning discourage this informal approach to living. It shows in 1:50 model form a number of plots, some developed, some waiting for visitors to model their own houses and workplaces. A polaroid camera is available so that people can permanently record their ideas.”—from Walls, by Roger Westman

And as noted, it’s interesting to see the Town & Country Planning Association in this context. Its name, and arguably its public profile, does little to suggest the often radical work it has led over its long history. And just before this exhibition, its Education Officer was Colin Ward. We might be fairly sure that the following passage was written by Ward for the catalogue—at least it has his fingerprints all over it:

“Above all the Association fights for full public involvement in planning. Only by combining the grassroots knowledge of local people with the technical expertise and general knowledge of professional planners and elected representatives will the planning that results be right. Not only should everyone have the chance to contribute but, only when all contribute will planning be successful. Planning is too important to be left to the politicians… or the planners … alone.
The Association has continued to support a full and effective planning system in this country. However, the Association’s view of planning is not one of petty restrictions or insensitive policies. Planning can be a tool for better living standards, especially for those most in need. It can ensure that the new homes of today do not become the slums of tomorrow. It can safeguard our heritage and fashion the new. It can conserve energy and reduce waste of resources and lives. Planning involves vision.”

The exhibitors:

Nicholas Albery: The Fourth World — Small Nations, Small Communities and a Human Scale
ARCAED Ltd (Architecture & Computer Aided Energy Design) AKA Terry Farrell et al: Buffer Thinking
GREENTOWN (Spinning out of the Town and Country Planning Association’s proposal, as an ‘update’ of Howard’s Garden City, oriented towards free land at Milton Keynes, and following the COMTEK alternative technology festival held in Milton Keynes in 1979)
Harold Lane: Organic Regional Planning for West Cumbria
David Morgan and Steve Moseley: New Brighton Proposal
Andrew Page: The Dartington Model of the Community for the Future — An Approach to Integrated Community Planning
Town and Country Planning Association
Roger Westman: Walls: A Framework for Communal Anarchy

And here‘s the catalogue itself. Click the images to see or download larger versions—they should be big enough to read the text and glimpse the drawings.

Sandy Nairn’s Introduction to ‘Future Communities’

Here’s Colin Ward’s introduction to the catalogue. Note that amongst his perennial touchstones—Helen Rosenau; Ebenezer Howard; Patrick Geddes; Peter Kropotkin; William Morris; Giancarlo Di Carlo; WR Lethaby—you can find some typically thoughtful and provocative questions, connecting architecture, planning and urbanism to wider social and political questions:

“What is the class structure of the fun fantasies of Archigram? What is Paulo Soleri’s theory of government? Who rules le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse?”

And some insights into planning and policy cultures accordingly:

“Grand visions of future cities have come and gone, with little influence on life, except when they have been taken seriously by our professional or elected representatives and, at enormous expense to the citizen, been made real in stained and grimy concrete in our cities. Needless to say, the most grandiose and expensive models for a mechanised future have been imposed on the poorest and most dispirited communities. Our most depressed city, Glasgow, has the biggest mileage of urban motorway of any city in Europe. Liverpool, with an acute housing shortage, has resolved to blow up housing only eight years old, that the city won’t have finished paying for until well into the twenty-first century.”

Ward’s typical concerns are reinforced, quite rightly, such as the ability to make and shape one’s own home environment, or a pervasive, inclusive and craft-based approach to learning— “In the community I want to see, every school is a productive workshop and every workshop an effective school.” These sit alongside the familiar plea to frame prosperity, or ‘riches’, holistically, drawing from Lethaby, which is an idea of his that I borrowed, placing at the heart of the Ward essay I wrote for Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy, as well as the Oslo Architecture Triennial essay, for Mission Neighbourhood book.

But we amongst these“elementary questions which we ask of anyone’s plan for a future community,” we also find the particularly prescient: “Does the environment of the home or of a group of homes provide space and opportunity for making a living? … The so-called informal economy is going to have more and more significance in people’s lives. Do our plans for future communities contain the flexibility to enable the household itself to be a productive unit…?”)