Designing London’s Recovery: 20 innovation teams putting design at the heart of London’s recovery from COVID-19
Cat Drew, Melissa Bowden, Sandy Tung, Catherine Glossop & Ahmad Bismillah
Designing London’s Recovery is a partnership between the Greater London Authority, the Design Council and UCL’s Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH) to put design-led innovation at the heart of London’s recovery.
An Open Call was launched in March last year, calling for London’s most innovative ideas to help deliver London’s recovery priorities, as set out in nine recovery missions. The programme focused in particular on how to innovate and take a design led approach to the following four mission areas:
- Building Strong Communities: by 2025, all Londoners will have access to a community hub ensuring they can volunteer, get support and build strong community networks
- Helping Londoners into Good Work: support Londoners into good jobs with a focus on sectors key to London’s recovery
- A Green New Deal: tackle the climate and ecological emergencies and improve air quality by doubling the size of London’s green economy by 2030 to accelerate job creation for all
- High Streets for All: deliver enhanced public spaces and exciting new uses for underused high street buildings in every Borough by 2025, working with London’s diverse communities.
Below we provide a snapshot of each innovation team as a brief introduction to the innovations that they are currently developing as part of this programme. You can find out more about our approach here.
Mission Challenge: All Londoners to be able to play an active role in their communities; making London a more equal and inclusive city post COVID-19
COLLABORATING INNOVATION TEAMS
- SHARED ASSETS — FRINGE FARMING
Vision: To expand the land and support available to the agroecological horticultural food growing sector in London, creating new green jobs and productive community hubs whilst improving the resilience of London’s food system and supply chains.
New Ideas: A campaign and support service for landowners to help them provide land for growing, which in turn creates green jobs, green public spaces and community building through the provision of good quality, locally grown and culturally appropriate food for all Londoners.
Website: https://www.sustainweb.org/publications/Fringe-Farming-Breifing-Aug2020/
Social: @shared_assets
- POETRY TRANSLATION CENTRE
Vision: To create shared spaces where Londoners can connect within and between communities by engaging creatively with London’s community languages.
New Ideas: Bringing marginalised communities, like the Deptford Vietnamese community, to design creative activities in a physical space to connect and immerse other communities in diverse cultures.
Website: https://www.poetrytranslation.org/
Social: @PoetryTranslate
- KAFEI — Uncommon Ground
Vision: To develop a toolkit that enables schools to take advantage of their physical location at the centre of communities in order to actively enable and sustain meaningful connections across different groups of local people, supporting the cross-fertilisation of skills that can build more resilient communities.
New Ideas: Using schools and public spaces to cross social, economic, generational and cultural divides in a sensitive and non polarising way, developing oracy through supporting different communities to express their views, listen and respond to others building bridges.
- ROEHAMPTON UNIVERSITY
Vision: To work with Roehampton communities and organisations to co-design and build a space where people can come together to create, make, recycle, repair, grow, cultivate and play.
New Ideas: Encourage a two-way flow of knowledge, skills and learning to support less visible/less heard from local initiatives that share similar ambitions. Provide an accessible support platform that is engaging, transparent and interactive to build stronger communities.
- STAY BUILD PLAY
Vision: To help early years groups to become centres of creative, connected and resilient communities through using the natural recovery abilities of young children (7% of Londoners) as a catalyst for supporting the development and wellbeing of their families (25% Londoners) and wider communities (100% of Londoners).
New Ideas: Ensure London’s 630,000 early years children and their families play a more active role in their communities, collaborating with wider community organisations and integrating a playful, child centred approach.
Website: playbuildplay.org.uk
- KINGSTON UNIVERSITY
Vision: Enable female-led ethnic food enterprises to fulfil their ideas in existing community hubs, helping women to start their own food enterprises and using those businesses to make communities more diverse, and less divided.
New Ideas: Create or enhance a format for communication to enable and support female-led food entrepreneurship and training or work experience opportunities. The idea started from a local level and has evolved to consider how such a format can be scaled and evolve across other communities.
Helping Londoners into Good Work
Mission Challenge: no Londoner, particularly those who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, is unable to access education, training or work
COLLABORATING INNOVATION TEAMS -
- BREAKTHROUGH
Vision: The UK’s first apprenticeship provider to recruit future leaders directly from prison — creating prisons that boost potential, and businesses that relish the talent. Prisons to be reframed as the start of a next chapter, not the end of opportunity.
New Ideas: Most programmes for prison leavers assume low capability and dedication. Breakthrough will work with prison leavers to address this perception and bridge the instability gap between leaving prison and finding good work.
Website: wearebreakthrough.org
Social: @LdnBreakthrough
- CITY & GUILDS AND THE CROWN ESTATE
Vision: Recognising that a restricted view of an individual is one of the most significant inhibitors to securing sustainable, good work. This idea aims to develop potential and nurture ambition through rethinking how skills profiles are defined. Changing the style of engagement, raising awareness of fit with expectations of multiple career paths and matching those to ‘good work’.
New Ideas: Creating a tool to identify job seeker’s transferable skills and match those to jobs and industry needs. Developing the idea to think about skill’s bridges and tools for all ages and sectors.
Website(s): https://www.cityandguilds.com/ | https://cityandguildsfoundation.org/ | https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/
Social: @cityandguilds
- SILVER STARTUPS & INPLOI
Vision: A silver (45+) workforce focused initiative, working with later stage job seekers to help them access and apply for opportunities with vetted employers happy to hire from this demographic.
New Ideas: Improving access to work for underrepresented groups and enabling employers to diversify their workforce, increasing the visibility of certified age friendly employers.
Website(s): https://www.silverstartups.co.uk/ | https://inploi.com/
Social: @inploi
- ISLINGTON COUNCIL
Vision: To help low skilled or diffident workers progress into new roles more quickly by making it easier to identify career goals, skills and training requirements through in-work support.
New Ideas: Make accessible in-work support as a tool for change, addressing challenges such as confidence and access to the right networks, increasing independent thinking and dynamic career decision making to support individual progression and development.
Website: Support finding work | Islington Council
Social: @IslingtonBC | @IslingtonLife
- CAMDEN COUNCIL AND CENTRAL ST MARTINS
Vision: Enabling employers to recognise a different set of skills that are not currently badged or valued. Diversifying employment and learning opportunities for Londoners, influencing future curriculum development and the skills landscape of the future.
New Ideas: To develop, test and build clearer learning pathways for Londoners to showcase transferable knowledge and skills (including designing and implementing a social action apprenticeship), helping learners to build networks and access opportunities within the social action space and broader good work employment.
Website(s): We Make Camden — Connecting the citizens of Camden to make the borough we want to see
Social: @CamdenCouncil
- CATCH 22
Vision: A strong society where everyone has a good place to live, a purpose and good people around them.
New Ideas: Support participants set up a side hustle (such as an eBay shop, a Twitch stream or an Etsy brand), to earn money and learn new skills (focus on digital).
Website: https://www.catch-22.org.uk/
- CAPITAL ENTERPRISE
Vision: To make the UK the best place in the world to start and scale a business.
New Ideas: To set up a body that provides unemployed Londoners with a guaranteed job and wide-ranging support to enable them to develop cross-cutting employability skills and access good work in tech startups.
Website: https://capitalenterprise.org/
A Green New Deal & High Streets for All
Green New Deal Mission Challenge: Tackle the climate and ecological emergencies and improve air quality by doubling the size of London’s green economy by 2030 to accelerate job creation for all.
High Streets for All Mission Challenge: Creating thriving, inclusive and resilient high streets and town centres, within easy reach of all Londoners. Promoting local employment and near home working, protecting existing community and cultural spaces and introducing new types of businesses and civic organisations.
COLLABORATING INNOVATION TEAMS -
- THE COMMUNITY BRAIN
Vision: To put power in people’s hands to shape and animate their local environment reflecting the desires, ambitions and cultures of local communities. Our digital solution will enable individuals to identify spaces, potential activity, existing licences, and other requirements to enable a more diverse range of people to use public spaces and revitalise the high street.
New Ideas: Creating a visual interface that helps people identify the type and scale of event they want to organise, increasing the capacity of local authorities and town centre partnerships to work with community groups and the private sector to deliver a diverse and thriving mix of high street activity.
Website: thecommunitybrain.org
Social: @thecommunitybrain
- SUSTRANS & LIVEWORK
Vision: Breaking barriers to childhood independence through making car-centric outer London boroughs people-centric.
New Ideas: Build a blueprint to create a 15 minute neighbourhood, exploring how we can make our streets, neighbourhoods and areas more accessible from a child’s perspective.
- DARK MATTER LABS
Vision: Making it easier to retain wealth and build agency across local communities in a world in which the power of landlords is balanced by the power of renters.
New Ideas: Increase participation in high street and local area development through the provision of a digital platform that will connect people and provide a range of supporting functions, including to help communities manage disputes.
Website: darkmatterlabs.org
Social: @darkmatter_labs
- LONDON BOROUGH OF NEWHAM
Vision: To develop a Circular Economy Construction Hub in Newham which will enable the reuse of construction materials at scale across London and beyond. It will offer research facilities to support innovation and offer jobs and training in this expanding sector for local people. The hub will help to dramatically reduce London’s carbon footprint and establish Newham’s Royal Docks as the centre of sustainable construction.
New Ideas: Build on existing research on the reuse of timber with a focus on sourcing materials, offering jobs and training.
- PUPILS PROFIT
Vision: To change awareness to action, reducing single use plastics on a large scale by empowering young people in schools to establish and run their own ECO Refill Shops. The engagement of school communities in active reuse will reduce single use plastic waste and consumption based emissions, and develop workplace skills in young people.
New Ideas: Refill Shops exist but are underused. This school based model will act as a critical enabler, creating a convenient way to refill by building it into the school routine, and engaging with the wider community.
Website: https://www.pupilsprofit.com
Social: @pupilsprofit
- PATTERN PROJECT
Vision: Create a network of neighbourhood micro-factories where patterns are digital and clothing is produced after it is ordered. Repair workshops, clothes swaps and community events held in the evenings.
New Ideas: A network of neighbourhood factories that operate on demand inventory, and the creation and development of an online digital pattern library.
Website: pattern-project.com
Social: @patternprojectuk / @patternproj
- THE HELEN HAMLYN CENTRE FOR DESIGN AND THE RCA
Vision: A publicly accessible toilet on every London high street to increase the time people spend in high streets and town centres. Provide as many people as possible with the confidence to leave home knowing toilet provision will be met.
New Ideas: Community ‘ownership’ of provision may build sustainable longer term solutions, providing a positive community use for empty shops and reusing existing spaces.
Website: hhcd.rca.ac.uk | pim.studio
Social: @hhcdesign | @pim_studio_
What’s Next?
Innovation teams submitted applications for funding at the end of 2021. Successful teams will continue on to Stage Two of Designing London’s Recovery Programme from April 2022. This will focus on prototyping and testing the ideas with Londoners, supporting the teams to measure impact across the recovery missions, to influence the wider system and scale successful ideas. The funded applications will be announced on 4th March.
Find out more about the programme here: Challenge London — Designing London’s Recovery Programme
