Neighbourhood Public Square: The Land Story So Far
“We must root ourselves back in the land; the way the land speaks to us; the way we build on the land; the way that the land can nurture us, and the way the land nurtures itself.”
— Abdi Hassan
This story marks an exciting moment that the past decade of our collective organising has been in service of, and that the next decade will be committed to; the purchase of land to hold in perpetuity, as the foundation for social and ecological stewardship, to repair, build, adapt, and maintain regenerative neighbourhood civic infrastructure together.
Following a Site Warming gathering on Friday 21st February 2025, coming together with many neighbours, peers, family and friends to share the good news of having acquired the freehold for the Neighbourhood Public Square site, give thanks and reconnect with the land beneath our feet, we invite you to join in this deeply significant milestone for us, our neighbourhood and ecosystem as part of a 10+ year story so far to here.
This comes with a deep recognition and gratitude for the immense leadership of revolutionaries before us, and those we are blessed to be alongside today. Recognising we are all only ever acting but for a brief moment in time, in a long lineage of ancestors and peers moving us towards liberatory systems conducive to life, safety, dignity, hope and joy, it is also true that we all have a clear responsibility, extraordinary gifts, and vision to bring during this limited time, to pass on to future generations.
“Who has the right to live on this land, to play and walk on it, to swim in the rivers and lakes freely without fear of trespass or contamination? Who can grow, cultivate and harvest the land, repurpose and reimagine it?”
— Lisa Palmer, What if we sought inspiration from the soil?
In this way, we simultaneously acknowledge the distance we feel from the language and mindsets of ‘acquiring’, ‘owning’ or otherwise having control or dominion over land, and this being a step within the current system that increases our collective agency to nurture the entangled conditions that are actually needed to decommodify that relationship, moving towards one of human and more-than-human stewardship.
We are now actively working on site to practically and tangibly co-build Neighbourhood Public Square as a significant demonstrator, orientating development and construction towards the many layers of redesign required for regenerative civic infrastructure at the heart of our neighbourhoods. With many people and partners, this includes reimagining land stewardship, finance, governance, deeply committing to ecological building design, bio-based material retrofit, and acting in an infrastructural capacity to enable wider built environment transition.
“Whenever we build, we either contribute to or counteract dominant processes of change. It is incredibly clear that the industrialised ways of making buildings with concrete, steel, and petrochemicals that came to dominate construction in the 20th century are changing the world in ways that are profoundly damaging, not only at the site of construction but across a vast network of sites through material extraction, processing, transportation, and storage.”
— Material Cultures
Together, we are a commitment to this land as a site of reimagination, reuse and repair; a place to learn, build, eat, grow, care and organise; a home for the capacities, skills and relationships we need to face the challenges and possibilities ahead together, held in common for the neighbourhood for generations to come. Over the coming years, we will practically co-build the many ways for this land to democratise access to the spaces, tools and resources for our homes, streets and neighbourhoods to be at the forefront of their own social, ecological, economic and climate transition in ways that are bold, imaginative and distributive-by-design.
However, there will be no one answer, no one way to act, and no single solution. The transitions that are needed ahead will be made up of the best of us all, trying, building, making, discovering, failing, practicing side-by-side through the rest of the time we have to travel together. Connecting all that we know, all we need to remember, and all that lies ahead will require a reimagination and reinvestment in our relationships with land, materials and each other towards nourishing, growing ecologies of practice.
As we extend our deepest gratitude, we hope that what we can contribute in our work at CIVIC SQUARE supports and complements many adjacent possibilities and the collective health of the transformations that are required of us all at every scale, as we step practically into the next stages of designing to distribute and demonstrate regenerative neighbourhood civic infrastructure together, right here in Ladywood, Birmingham UK.
We could start in so many different places with this story: the one about why we’re here on this land together today, in Ladywood, Birmingham UK. Despite being something we have worked tirelessly towards for over a decade of practice, co-designed and shared that journey in the open as much as possible along the way, we’ve been poring over how to share news like this, rich in all of its deep context that we know cannot come from snappy headlines or isolated parts of a story, or told within the framing of the current system only, but that can often get reduced quickly.
How do we embrace a moment that we hope will change what will be possible for organising towards changing climatic futures for many neighbourhoods, whilst honouring how much work it has taken by so many people to get to here, and how much work is still needed ahead; how we have tried to do every step of the work in an open source way to lay foundations for many others working in systemic neighbourhood transformation, and how much there is still to discover and enact?
Do we start from how we ended up as a city of this kind of diversity and demographic through the mass displacement of so many of us from our homelands, and how we’ve made our lives here?
Do we start with the state of our infrastructure, as we witness the decimation of our libraries, community centres, homes, front rooms, all the spaces where we come together — everything we thought we understood over and over again as the basis of a healthy, thriving society?
Do we start with so many incredible people organising for land, housing, social and climate justice; those in shared struggles and co-building interconnected possibilities; or every member of our team past and present who dedicated and continue to dedicate themselves to this work alongside us, and figure out all the stories of what led each of them here?
The answer is yes, and yes, and yes many more times over. This story has countless beginnings, with deep entanglements between the structural and personal at every turn. Countless tales of learning, fear, heartbreak, and the many woes of interfacing with impossibilities in the current system can be shared side by side with songs of hope, friendship and more joy, possibility and collective power than any of us thought possible. No single telling or vantage point can hope to encompass all of this, but you will all have lived your own stories too that intersect along the journey to here.
In March 2023 our writings on Refounding CIVIC SQUARE 2.0 framed the context of our wider learnings from the first three years at CIVIC SQUARE, and the pivots that COVID-19 required us to make. This was particularly true for our physical infrastructure demonstrator — the Neighbourhood Public Square. Since then, we reorientated and stepped into the next stages of tangible design from all we have been learning together with our peers and neighbourhoods, from the Neighbourhood Doughnut to activating on our streets to reimagine retrofit. Together with visionary collaborators, we are deeply committed to meeting the scale and breadth of the polycrisis, designing for future challenges and abundant possibilities ahead, including what climate predictions mean for the criticality of neighbourhood civic infrastructure, and this moment can be plotted onto that continuum.
The Next Revolution
Where this particular collective story can be seen to begin for us — building on so many before us, alongside us, in the city of Birmingham, the wider field, and generations more ancestors and teachers — is 14 years ago, when a small group of us gathered in Urban Coffee Company in Birmingham, brought together by TEDxBrum founder Anneka Deva.
Heralded as the youngest major city in Europe (with under 25-year-olds accounting for nearly 40% of Birmingham’s population) and dubbed one of the first “super-diverse” cities in the UK (where more than 50% of the population are Black and global majority people), we knew on the one hand that these celebratory city narratives were telling us we should stay, telling us we need to build here.
However, at the same time, it was clear that our ideas, our stories and where we’ve come from as people of colour, working class people, queer folx, and people of many faiths, were not being reflected in the discourse in our city, which was being led by those who didn’t look anything like us.
“We built this city
With broken backs
And heavy hearts
Bricks and cement
Hammer and tongue
Toiling with every inch of our lungs.”— Siana Bangura
The seeds were planted to host an event together, and many of us got involved in TEDxBrum as young organisers here in our home city. As many of you know who were there in that time, or from organising in your own places, it doesn’t take long to see the incredible power, imagination, creativity, energy, beauty and abundance that exists within our communities when people come together.
At the first TEDxBrum event at the MAC in Cannon Hill Park in 2012, suddenly there was this explosion of artists and musicians and neighbours and citizens telling us stories; sharing their hopes, dreams, ideas and generating connectivity and momentum. Once you see and feel that collectively, it’s something that you can’t forget; something that gives you energy to find the way forward together.
From here, many of us rooted into that spirit, stayed in Birmingham and started building, whilst many of our friends, family and peers left the city. We had no idea yet what the journey would lead to, but there were many wonderful visions for how we could reimagine our places towards social justice, housing justice, climate justice, with so many folks organising in countless ways across the city and beyond. However, that incredible young, creative demographic wasn’t the one making decisions, wasn’t able to access and build its collective power, and wasn’t able to structurally exert its imagination on the big challenges at the time.
We could also see the stark contrast between a city brimming with ideas, talent, passion, heart, grit, and youthful energy, and so many empty spaces and buildings. We’ve all probably walked down the road where we are at some point thinking: “I wonder who owns that patch of land, or that empty shop? I’d love to do something with it” and as we wandered around areas such as Digbeth, our high streets and neighbourhoods, these questions were live and shared between many of us, from many different walks of life.
At that time there was a new dawn of Community Asset Transfer and Community Land Trusts in Birmingham, with the publicly owned buildings of the city set to be transferred to community organisations for long term stewardship. This built on Birmingham‘s’ rich history of social housing dating back to the 19th century. Pioneers included the Afro Caribbean Association for Economic and Social Security’s self build scheme in Small Heath in the 1970s, where a group of young Black families built their own homes from the ground up. Unfortunately only a handful of buildings ever actually made it into the hands of the community through Community Asset Transfer in more recent history, with much of the vital work to protect our buildings, cultural sites, public parks and more ongoing now.
In 2024, as part of proposed cuts of more than £300 million over the next two years, Birmingham City Council were considering closing 25 of the existing 36 libraries across the city, leaving just one for every 100,000 residents living in Birmingham, causing urgent alternatives to be called for by Save Birmingham (led by Co-operatives West Midlands). Our deepest ongoing gratitude and solidarity are with all organising around Save Birmingham, Birmingham Loves Libraries and everyone campaigning and fighting for our vital civic and community spaces, in our city and beyond.
As a group of young volunteers, through 5 years of TEDxBrum unfolding, we were starting to think: if we can come together like this, what else can we organise around together?
“All the systemic crises and structural weaknesses — social resilience, health, climate, economy, democracy — are complex, and intertwined. But here’s the thing. Every single one of them has its roots in our land system.”
— Alastair Parvin, A New Land Contract (2020)
A key moment of illumination for us was in meeting Alastair Parvin, who articulated the conflation between whether we relate to land as the earth, soil, and natural realm beneath our feet, or the human-made relationship with that; the contracts and ideas that have been made to give control, dominion, ‘ownership’ over it; to commodify it, and extract all we can from it, here in the UK. At that time, the sense of having revealed that what many of us commonly refer to as ‘land’ was actually a set of papers and rules and that at some point had been made up, and could therefore be remade, has never left us to this day.
Through his work at Wikihouse and Open Systems Lab, Alastair continues to spend his career trying to rewire that relationship with land in the British context, and we remain deeply grateful for the ongoing relationship of unpacking this for and alongside many us, including A New Land Contract talk shared as part of Re_ Festival in June 2020, later written up and published here, and sharing the ideas behind Fairhold with many neighbours as part of our Regenerative Neighbourhoods Festival at Birmingham Settlement Nature & Wellbeing Centre in July 2022.
“The concept of diversity only exists if there is an assumed neutral point from which ‘others’ are ‘diverse.’ Constructed by a white establishment, the idea of ‘diversity’ is neo-liberal speak. It is the new corporatized version of multiculturalism… We don’t talk about racism, just ‘lack of diversity.”
— Kavita Bhanot, Decolonise, not Diversify (2015)
A whole generation of our city’s “young and diverse” population — as they had been badged — were deeply connecting to their displacement around the same time, situating in the longer and wider arc of honest stories around what colonisation had done; the separation, disconnection. The realisations of many movements of work like Decolonise, Not Diversify written by Kavita Bhanot (inspiring the festival of the same name by Art Against The Grain); Literature Must Fall; The Past Is Now exhibition co-curated by Abeera Kamran, Aliyah Hasinah, Mariam Khan, Sara Myers, Shaheen Kasmani and Sumaya Kassim; Europe’s first Black Studies degree starting at Birmingham City University by Dr Lisa Amanda Palmer and Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, and much more was meeting the systemic story that Alastair and others were helping to unpack, unfurling multiple dimensions to what was and had been happening in the city.
Collectively, the more we started to connect the dots together, the more we realised that we needed to get right to the root of this, and that the imagination and energy through 5 years of TEDxBrum needed to start being channeled into more structural organising. In order to do this, we were going to need somewhere to come together.
A Home For The Movement
“Following the contagious energy of events such as TEDxBrum and City of Colours, we couldn’t help but feel that what Birmingham really needs is a platform that can capture and support this level of imaginative collaboration every single day. A melting pot of ideas, Impact Hub Birmingham will be a space where knowledge can be freely shared, independent ventures genuinely supported and a communal vision for positive social change actively realised — day in, day out.”
From here, we built a home for the movement: Impact Hub Birmingham, a physical space to come together and organise around a fairer, more equal and just city. This was based in the Walker Building on Oxford Street in Digbeth, and powered by the Epic Brum kickstarter campaign, one of the biggest crowdfunders to have ever launched at that time, with 586 backers pledging a total of £65,095 in 2015, surpassing the ambitious £50,000 target.
At this time crowdfunders were rare, especially at this scale of ambition, and these early days were real testers of our mettle as young, hopeful, energetic organisers. Alongside the immense movement building and support for something positive, the scrutiny and downright mockery in parallel was also felt intensely, and taught us so much about how hard the years ahead would be, despite Birmingham as a city encouraging us to stay, and so many creative, passionate people being motivated by similar goals, some of whom we shared in the Epic Brummies run down at the time.
As we opened the doors of the Hub on the first day, one of the early founders for much of this work Indy Johar said words that would motivate any young team: “The Hub is going to fail, but you have to do it anyway.” This was another fundamental moment, because for all of the imagination, creativity and life force to come together within these walls over the next 5 years, with the place full day and night, countless relationships flourishing, and generating interest across the world, we knew it still couldn’t work.
Through the years, activity in the space was thriving. From the coffee shop and shared workspace, to festivals and Open Project Nights, we were packed. We were full of energy. In the same way, you may have felt the abundance of energy in any number of the thousands of incredible community projects in cities, neighbourhoods and streets where you are, of which there was no shortage, and which we always felt Kinship with. But no matter how well we did, every year the landlord would put up the rent. Relatively, we had a fair bit of privilege, and even we — a team on living wage, not receiving funding, but still generating £700,000 earned revenue a year towards the end of the Hub — could not keep up with the colossal, passive extraction of rent, regardless of how much value we were creating.
“It’s not that we can’t design more sustainable and equitable cities (or that nobody is trying to, it’s that this large, top down, centralised model of investment isn’t designed for making better neighbourhoods — it’s designed to treat land value as a way of capturing and extracting wealth (something currently being turbocharged by machine learning and property valuation data).
So instead of the local, adaptable and circular neighbourhoods we need, we get neighbourhoods of extraction, stagnation and loneliness.”
— Dark Matter Labs, A Smart Commons (2019)
This phenomenon wasn’t unique to us, it was systemic, as outlined in Alastair Parvin’s Housing without debt paper (2016): “a fundamental flaw in our economic model, arguably destroying any reasonable hope for sustainable, equitable urban development in the 21st century.” The publishing of Dark Matter Labs’ A Smart Commons in 2019 helped show this as by design, with huge amounts of private wealth being created from public goods. This was another pivotal moment in the revealing and unpacking of the systemic story that was bringing together a movement connecting more deeply with the devastating impact of separation in our relationship with the land, and us experiencing that even a world class, inspired, incredibly motivated and thriving space couldn’t outsmart or outrun this extractive system. So much of the Hub era for us was trying to build whilst revealing this literacy and connecting dots in the open together concurrently — with it all fundamentally coming back to land.
Democratising Development
”Pretty much everyone broadly agrees on what we want: beautiful architecture, generous, affordable, healthy, zero-carbon, circular homes and resilient communities living in green, walkable, prosperous neighbourhoods filled with a thousand small, local businesses. Places where children can grow up happily, where the elderly can grow old in good company, and where everyone has the chance to flourish and realise the best version of themselves. And to create all that, we want a booming, innovative design and construction industry.
But yet our land system is perfectly designed to never, ever give us that.”
— Alastair Parvin, A New Land Contract (2020)
During the time together at Impact Hub Birmingham we learnt even more about so much of the incredible ecology of work and resistance around the world, and across the city. We learned about the shared struggles we were all going through; we learned about emerging projects, and pioneers who had led for generations and never given up. Together, people had done so much to show the scale of organising and imagination and practice we knew was needed to meet the times we were in. Nestled in a growing, deeply plural local and global ecosystem, we understood the power of what we had, more about what needed to change, and our shared hope and possibility expanded, but simultaneously we saw the incredible difficulty for anyone to infiltrate and gain good structural power for the thriving of all people and their places.
Naturally many of us had looked at Community Asset Transfers previously and, through the DemoDev (Democratising Development) work of Impact Hub Birmingham co-founders Andy Reeve and Joyjit Sarkar, we went on to make the case for unlocking small sites of council-owned land across the city. We tried to look at the empty spaces in Birmingham. We tried to look at the libraries that were closing down, even trying to take the Hub onto one of the floors of Library of Birmingham. Of course we would’ve rather avoided paying a landlord £400,000 a year and be able to keep that money in the city and in our communities, but, structurally, despite Birmingham being publicly proud to be powered by young and global majority people, we couldn’t gain stewardship of anything. Much of the use of alternative tactics along this journey has been driven by a need to shape shift, and not being able to simply speak to the better nature of those in power, where unfortunately we were being laughed out of the room.
“How do we stay together as more pressure is put onto us? Who can we be under pressure other than who we have been?”
— Farzana Khan
We also learnt, at a range of scales, what it means to be a head above the parapet. And it was brutal. A few people from that time had to take time out or couldn’t come back to the work because of the weight of what it meant, particularly as a person racialised as Black or brown, to have increased their visibility and exposure. Heartbreakingly, there’s a lot of people that we know are still going through a lot across a wide range of organising ecosystems, feeling incredibly unsafe, dealing with harassment and more because they vocalised that we might be able to make our place, our city, our neighbourhood, the way we do our housing, or our infrastructure better for more of us.
“Individuals are pointing fingers at other individuals; battle lines are being drawn. Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.”
— Maurice Mitchell, Building Resilient Organizations
These are not just isolated experiences, and unfortunately not simply the result of interactions with vastly different ideologies to our own either, but often more proximate ‘small wars’. In Building Resilient Organizations (2022), Maurice Mitchell gifted us invaluable reflections on what is contributing to the organisational tensions under which our movements are operating, as well as common tendencies that flow from these wider conditions. A recent conversation: What it takes to heal between Prentis Hemphill, Marai Larasi and Farzana Khan as part of Healing Justice Ldn’s Movement Medicine programme also extended a range of rich offerings, including the importance of learning how we hold contradiction in our movements and make them less brittle, given that the (far) right has organised so many unlikely folks to construct what we’re living in now.
Our deepest thank you for everybody who’s been in the ring trying where they are, near and far, because without all of you, without a doubt, we would not be here today telling this story. We also want it to be heard as clearly and as widespread as we can physically proclaim that we need to look after each other. We really do. As challenges continue to compound it is going to get harder and even more destabilised and unsafe at every dimension for any of us, and we really, really need to show up for one another, and find new ways to work together beyond our differences to wage greater collective power toward the broader struggle, as we continue, humbly, ever imperfectly, always in earnest, towards liberation, together.
“No one way works, it will take all of us. shoving at the thing from all sides. to bring it down.”
— Diane de Prima, Revolutionary Letters
We knew we were going to have to find ways to rewire our relationship with land at every scale in this country, and return to a very different type of entanglement, beyond trying to build the deep power of community on top of existing extractive value systems, by hiring spaces from landlords.
We knew we needed to find and craft economic ideas to help value all the things that were happening in spaces like Impact Hub Birmingham and the whole range of ways people were organising up and down the country.
We knew we had to reimagine our relationship with how we were thinking about infrastructure, not leave this to leaders for whom a limited idea of the future and what is possible was driving no other ways to emerge beyond either active or passive extraction, control, speculation and commodification.
After all, there was just too much to lose from not doing so, and too much to crucially gain together from this reimagination, to go beyond this manufactured form of poverty holding back the force our collective will.
“We talk about property rights as a form of ‘wealth’ — but of course, in reality, it’s not. It’s a private sector tax; on every form of social and economic activity. Last year, in the UK, we spent £71bn on rent and £67bn on mortgage payments. That’s enough to run a whole second NHS. Imagine what else we could do with that if we were to re-inject all of it back into society and the economy — or simply leave it there in the first place.
In very simple terms, the more we are forced to spend on the cost of land, the less we have left to spend on the buildings and activities that happen on top of it. The cost of land is a tax on everything. Every form of human enterprise or progress.”
— Alastair Parvin, A New Land Contract (2020)
At the end of 2019 we enacted the necessary conclusion of closing the doors of the Hub after a really beautiful process over 18 months with you all. We shared this story, including the economics of it, to ensure those who come after us know that it’s not just a case of the people needing to do a little bit more, if we just work a bit harder, if we just put a few more weekends or evenings in, or if we just try with another space… It’s not that we, or anyone else, didn’t do enough, or weren’t the right kinds of people. Whatever we believe — whether they’re by design, by accident, by laziness, or through pure evil and extraction — if the rules of the game are fundamentally designed to ensure a different system of ideas — such as (put very simply) people and planet above profit — isn’t possible, it will never work.
Unless we change the fundamentals.
Organising together at Impact Hub Birmingham gave us a more shared and embodied understanding that, therefore, whilst beautiful and hopeful, it wasn’t enough for us to just live and rehearse these transformations, we were going to need to dismantle and rebuild every single one of the structural layers and relationships between ownership and stewardship, finance, governance and more to tangibly design and demonstrate other possibilities. This was what we would be grappling with in our next chapter of organising to keep mobilising meaningfully towards the infrastructure that we knew was deeply needed in our places, otherwise we would all just come up against the same things time and time again, ultimately unable to resource our homes, streets and neighbourhoods to meet the current challenges and opportunities we face, as well as the ones that lie ahead.
It Will Never Work
“We built this city, and we tore her down, and we built this city, and we tore her down and we built this city.”
— Friction Arts, Everything Must Go
In the final year of Impact Hub Birmingham, masterplans for the city were playing out around us, with discussion about their impacts audible at any given time in the space. Around the corner from Hub, many of us went to pay our respects to the historic Birmingham Wholesale Markets prior to their demolition in 2019 as part of the Smithfield masterplan plan, and in Ladywood consultation began on the Edgbaston Reservoir masterplan, with an alternative, community-led master plan created that summer in response to Birmingham City Council’s own, compiled by a community consortium and supported by members of our team.
When the Port Loop manifesto was first shared by Urban Splash in 2018 — printed and distributed as a newspaper — many of the ideas in it aligned more naturally (compared with other proposed developments sweeping the city) with much of the regenerative infrastructure and forward-looking decision-making inspiring many people in our city from around the world. Resonating authentically with our evolving plans growing organically out of Impact Hub Birmingham, manifesto points for Port Loop included green streets, playing out ’til tea, communal facilities such as composting, household swap shops, bikes, repair workshops and more. However, we knew, as with other schemes, that the same development model at its foundation would be skewed towards the extraction of profit, through luxury housing, and that this fundamentally broken model would not be able to build the future we actually need in its current form, regardless of more progressive shared goals at the surface.
“Just because it doesn’t seem to be happening the way you expected to doesn’t mean that something won’t happen, because it will. I have a personal dream that something will happen on the Loop and have for a long time, so don’t stop believing that something is there, and don’t give up on it.”
— Netz Derbyshire, On The Settee (2020)
We brought together the initial vision and strategy for transitioning from Impact Hub Birmingham to CIVIC SQUARE by channelling all the learning, experimentation, and movement building we had been part of towards a longer-term proposition of regenerative infrastructure at the neighbourhood scale. At this time we held regular town hall meetings and a special dinner at Impact Hub Birmingham as spaces to learn, share, understand, unpack and build this in the open together, welcoming elders and neighbours from Ladywood to reason about what the journey to neighbourhood stewardship of the Icknield Port Loop site might mean for local people, and ultimately whether to try and embark on that together by submitting a citizen-led proposal. We’re incredibly grateful for all the energy, care and deliberation from so many of you during this time, and throughout the journey to here.
In proximity, MAIA had been doing incredible organising through resource redistribution and building social infrastructure for artists towards Black thrivance for many years, leading them to interrogate and later establish Black Land & Spatial Justice. In the final year of Impact Hub Birmingham they hosted a Developers’ Dinner as part of The MAIA Weekender 2019, acknowledging the historical relationship between artists, placemaking and the built environment, particularly in the context of gentrification, displacement, social cleansing, cultural assets and community.
“ABUELOS is more than a building. It’s a right to stay, to declare our terms, to orient towards what we care about and to collectivise in order to sustain it.”
— MAIA, Organising ABUELOS
Amahra Spence first shared the vision for bold new cultural infrastructure in the form of an art hotel in 2016, laying the early foundations for what is now ABUELOS, a cultural centre with accommodation, as a site of radical hospitality and artistry. Since the early vision in this time, they have made incredible progress prototyping ABUELOS through YARD at Port Loop, and hosting an open collective enquiry to inform how ABUELOS becomes real.
We are deeply proud to continue building alongside them today as they take the next steps of making transformative cultural infrastructure tangible, moving land from a private commodity into a community entity.
In July 2019 we hosted Play Out ’Til Tea, a fun day of free family-friendly activity to mark the opening of the new public park, South Loop Park, at Port Loop. This was to mutually test working together with Urban Splash, looking at what it meant for us to make parts of the Port Loop manifesto a reality together with residents of Ladywood old and new, and ensure as many local people as possible were aware that this land was public; theirs. More than 1000 people attended the event from across the surrounding neighbourhood and beyond, with lots of warm and excited feedback, including ideas of what makes a good neighbour, and people’s early memories of play in their homes, street and neighbourhoods.
“The truth is, Ladywood contains the strongest sense of community I have ever witnessed. I have been raised amongst impossibly inspiring artists, environmentalists and caregivers; Against all odds, it appears that in times of economic hardship and oppression from all sides, what rises up above all is love.”
— Callie Derbyshire, Who said this was Ladywood? (2023)
This was a really big learning moment for us about how much shared possibility there was for this unused site at the intersection of incredible Ladywood and Summerfield communities organising, but also the inherent tensions; how many ideas, identities, beliefs, cultures and worlds we would need to bridge simultaneously in order to truly be deep in coalition together, to move from private ownership to neighbourhood stewardship. It signalled both how big the work ahead was for us and our city’s neighbourhoods over the coming years, and how much deep hope, creativity and possibility spanned it all in this incredible, energetic, passionate inner city area of our city, despite having nearly all community infrastructure — children’s centres, youth centres, libraries — decimated.
“We must learn how to synthesise lessons from the past and observations in the present. That means sitting in an awkward both/and place. We must call out fallacies that weaken us, even when it’s hard and we face criticism for it. And we must meet our problems with grounded solutions that are drawn from a sober assessment of the larger time, place, and conditions we find ourselves in. None of this, of course, will be easy. In fact, much of it will cause great discomfort. However, on the other side of the uncomfortable journey is an abundant, playful, and powerful home for our freedom, our dreams. Will we choose it?”
— Maurice Mitchell, Building Resilient Organizations (2022)
Thanks to the wisdom and generosity of so many people over time, our understanding of the land system and the rules, codes and norms that lead to gentrification of our places was so deep that we absolutely knew there was no ‘clean’ way to interact with the Port Loop site at all; that, on some level, every move we made would legitimise the development, creating value on private housing, even if our own commitments and ambitions were entirely different. There is so much that we know can happen when commercial developers use communities and artists to lift value, then move them on, retelling that story as progress and ‘giving people a chance’.
“In systems terms, we must all acknowledge that we are, for now, as Alnoor Ladna and Lynn Murphy describe it in their thoughtful book on philanthrocapitalism, still very much swimming in the soup of late-stage capitalism and therefore inextricably intertwined with neoliberal capitalist structures.”
— Jessica Prendergast & Sally Lowndes of Onion Collective, Resourcing Hope for Alternative Futures (2025)
We knew then, and we know now, that there’s no magic way to circumnavigate the business model of land speculation in the short term. This is not a new problem; as outlined in A Smart Commons, it’s something people have been trying to solve for almost 200 years. We deliberated on these contradictions with everyone we knew and still do daily, knowing it is crucial to keep some hard lines about the type of land deal we would be willing to enter into on the pathway to longer term neighbourhood stewardship, only going forward if able to acquire the freehold on the land, deciding what we would and wouldn’t take money for, and where we would always have to thoughtfully interrogate our relationship with a development model that ultimately is focused on extracting profit for a shareholders, no matter how many ‘good people’ are in the system.
For transparency, here is what we have benefitted from in the relationship with Urban Splash, developer and joint venture partners for Port Loop, alongside Places for People and Canal & River Trust, to date. We know this is minor in the grand scheme of things, yet feels important for us to share, and not pretend this story is written upon some utopia that isn’t riddled with inherent contradictions:
- All the money from Urban Splash towards Play Out ’Til Tea in 2019 went directly to vendors, infrastructure such as tents, staging, food for local people without charge that we helped to design, connect and co-ordinate. No money was put towards our own salaries or costs of doing this, despite earning living wage at that time.
- We also received 2 x £5000 contributions from Urban Splash towards The Big Lunch events in South Loop Park in 2021 and 2022, which were similarly put directly into local vendors and artists.
- We don’t pay Urban Splash any rent for use of The Barge on site, but we do pay to maintain it ourselves. We don’t get paid anything by Urban Splash to manage or activate The Barge or the wider site either.
- We have received no further financial resource from Urban Splash.
We know how much heat we have gotten publicly about this proximity, how much conflation between our own work and the work of Urban Splash, misunderstanding, and assumption can happen when this isn’t named, but are very happy to be transparent about any aspect of this process, what our hard lines have been, and grapple honestly with the complexity together, of us all being complicit in the current system, in our case whilst trying to redirect existing assets away from commercial interests in the present and towards neighbourhood stewardship in the future, using the best, most thoughtful, aligned, but inherently flawed options available to us.
This is held with the twin track of also trying to uphold the many layers of resistance, dismantling, reimagination and rebuilding required at every opportunity along the journey, recognising this as long, entangled, generational work that we remain committed to.
Whilst we outline this relationship quite clinically and clearly to recognise this wider reality, we also believe in broad coalition and are grateful for Urban Splash’s generous collaboration and treatment of us and our work throughout the years, even though we have different drivers.
“You are at the meeting point of community (existing and future), public sector (lost and ineffective) and private sector (desperate not to get bad rep but wants to make money). What is interesting is how you will navigate all that creatively to create a better future for Ladywood.
The challenge you are addressing is: how do incumbent communities benefit from the vast inflow of resources which comes with a development like this? What are the economic, ownership and governance models which allow distributive by design solutions (as Kate Raworth would have it) to work, flowing a fair share of the resources to public value and the least well off? That’s a big challenge.
If you can find a model that cracks that you are solving a problem that communities face around the world, so Port Loop could be a really valuable model. The other thing is whether or not you succeed in terms of your development and the team will be fantastic learning, out of which will come all sorts of things we cannot yet predict.”
— Charles Leadbeater, Paul Hamlyn Foundation Trustee (2019)
In neighbourhoods all across the country, there seemed to only be one conversation happening — “councils have got no more money, and the only answer is privatisation”. That’s it. Yet, we knew we couldn’t settle for this fixed idea that meant we were heading for so much social and ecological destruction at a time that called for the opposite to be true for our places. There had to be other ways, and if we didn’t at least try and figure out what else our civic economy could look like; an economy in relation with people and the planet, it would be a travesty to all we know about the ingenuity and incredible wisdom that exists within our communities.
Tower To The People
“In the UK we used to have millions and millions of acres of common land, and over hundreds of centuries of Enclosures Acts, almost all of that common land has been privatised, with forms of enclosure still taking place today.
That most of our land in the UK is now privately owned means we have lost sight of how it is cared for, and how it is maintained, and in that context models of stewardship for communal land like this are more important than ever.”
— Summer Islam, Material Cultures
Lots of you have been on your own journeys unpacking the relationship(s) we hold with land and its many interconnections. So much of the work before and alongside us has helped to guide how we began to approach orientating towards the ‘something else’ of reimagining, building and distributing together in a non-extractive way, from the ground up.
We are deeply thankful for all those who have openly gifted their wisdom, findings and provocations as talks, workshops, visits, writing, publishing, tools, and exchanges of all kinds for us to learn alongside our neighbours and as part of wider ecosystems of connected practice. These have included, but are not limited to, Alastair Parvin, Andy Reeve, Assemble, Black Land & Spatial Justice, Centric Lab, Claude Hendrickson, Dark Matter Labs, Down To Earth, ffin jordão, Grand Union, Healing Justice Ldn, Homebaked CLT, Land In Our Names, MAIA, Material Cultures, Privatise The Mandem, RESOLVE, Shared Assets and WeCanMake. We feel so incredibly lucky to be travelling in the same time as you all and so many others in the here and now, along longer arcs of multi-generational work with so many teachers, past, present and future.
As we have continued to learn locally and globally, the resilience of public and civic spaces depends largely on how we underwrite their relationship to the land beneath them. In our own neighbourhood context, we have learned directly from two very different stories of civic assets in the community, both located on the banks of the nearby Edgbaston Reservoir: Tower Ballroom and Birmingham Settlement Nature & Wellbeing Centre. The effects of these have been visible and live as we began working to establish the conditions for long term infrastructure at a site quite literally over the road in the last 5 years, informing our careful collective consideration and designing for how the transitions of our neighbourhoods are designed, owned and governed responsibly to meet the times we are in.
Tower Ballroom opened in 1876 and began life as a roller skating rink before converting to a dance hall in 1920. After closing its doors in 2017, The Tower was earmarked for demolition and housing development as part of Birmingham City Council’s Edgbaston Reservoir Masterplan. Despite strong campaigning and alternative proposals to retrofit the site, the Tower Ballroom was sadly demolished in 2022. The future of the site remains unclear and, as of early 2024, the land itself has been listed for private sale, with organising from residents to protect the social-ecological sanctity of the reservoir ongoing, with our full solidarity and support. The Tower Ballroom can be read as a cautionary precedent for contemporary civic infrastructure, one that informs us of the precarity of commodified land ownership without a long-term constituted provision for the future, as well as the importance of spaces and resources to not only organise and mobilise towards what matters to us, but also grieve together and honour what has been lost.
Located just across the reservoir from the former Tower Ballroom site, Edgbaston Reservoir Nature & Wellbeing Centre offers a vision of long-term resilience. The land was originally owned by industrial pen-maker Joseph Gillott who placed a covenant on the land to ensure it would remain in community use in perpetuity. Birmingham Settlement, one of the city’s oldest charities founded in 1899 by social reform activists, is now the sole steward of the land and has ensured the communal spirit of the site has been preserved through numerous social initiatives — from the community cafe to nature clubs — and the creation of the Nature & Wellbeing Centre. The Red Shed, built on site in 2021, also boasts energy-saving triple glazing, with thick walls made of a clay block that uses recycled newspaper as insulation and a ground-source heat pump, using low carbon materials around some of the timber sheathing and cladding, and clay-based plaster.
From the two very different pathways for these stories, we can tangibly appreciate the importance of establishing the Neighbourhood Public Square according to a progressive land contract, ensuring a continued and resilient infrastructural role in the neighbourhood in perpetuity, as well as maintaining a commitment to wider connected struggles and movements.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
“‘Local’, ‘neighbourhood’, and ‘community’ do not have to mean small or slow. They can be the infrastructure engines of a new big and bold kind of economic future, one that is collective, regenerative and cares about the long view.”
— Melissa Mean, What if the power and resources to build our neighbourhoods were in community hands?
Neighbourhoods shape our routine and quality of daily life in multiple ways, as places where you can bump into someone, connect, organise, celebrate and more. However, they aren’t just synonymous with the day-to-day. In his book Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg reiterates that outcomes and life expectancy can vary greatly depending on the services and social infrastructure you find in your local community.
Klinenberg gives the example of a lethal heatwave that struck Chicago in 1995. He asked how two adjacent neighbourhoods on the South Side, demographically similar and presumably equally vulnerable, could fare so differently in the disaster. The exploration goes deep into the differences in social capital, and the social infrastructure to enable that social capital to flourish. In the neighbourhood with few fatalities, people checked in on one another, and knew where to go for help. In the other social isolation was the norm, with residents more often left to fend for themselves.
As we know from many key transitions, although the challenges we face are vast, and nothing short of transformation is required, the transitions of societies was unlocked by creating democratic access to the tools, knowledge, spaces, creative confidence, and each other through social infrastructure. When we look at many of the radical precedence we are inspired by it was also in deep struggle, and needing resistance, courage, and creativity over long periods of time, rather than something that was given to us.
Just as neighbourhood GPs represented democratic shifts in access to public healthcare at the end of the war with the founding of the NHS, so is the significance of neighbourhood infrastructure in this time of deep transition and transformation.
↗ For more on the criticality of civic infrastructure at the neighbourhood scale, explore (Re)founding CIVIC SQUARE 2.0 and Endowing The Future.
A Role For Everyone
“Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanising education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other — at our highest natural glory — in order to get free.”
— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Whilst we understand many layers must be redesigned, time and time again along this journey we returned to the roots: the land and our economic systems. The transformation of these are needed to meet the needs of our neighbourhoods in the here and now, and unlock possibility to rise to future challenges ahead together and boldly demonstrate beyond our individual contexts as a necessity for interconnected wider local-global social-ecological thrivance, acting across multiple horizons simultaneously.
How we think and feel about land and our economy, and our subsequent actions, create and surface the many thousands of symptoms so many are now frantically working on — as described poetically by Thoreau in the 1800s: “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one, who is striking at the root.” The roots anchoring our world in social injustice and ecological harm are not simply technical problems to be solved by others such as the government; they are also challenges for culture and our own collective will as people — shaped by each of us, how we relate to our inner selves, our neighbours, society and the living world we are all a part of.
“Progressive funders talk more and more in terms of system change, recognising the depth of the challenge, and are driven to take bold steps by the obvious incompatibility of this economy with planetary survival and social and racial justice. Yet most funds continue to be directed towards work that in some sense provides the scaffolding to prop up the failures of capitalism.”
— Jessica Prendergast & Sally Lowndes of Onion Collective, Resourcing Hope for Alternative Futures (2025)
As in many other UK towns and cities, the gradual loss of economic opportunities and lack of retention of value within Ladywood will drive increasing social, financial and material precarity in the face of an uncertain world. The lack of preparedness in the face of climate risks feels particularly problematic — where many other cities are actively preparing, the financial crisis facing Birmingham City Council means that investments in resilience measures, essential for preparing for weather extremes and a shifting energy system, feel out of reach.
This leaves residents even more vulnerable than elsewhere, whether to flooding or energy price rises. Just when cities need to grow their investment to prepare for climate risks, Birmingham and others retrench further, leaving citizens exposed in the face of cascading impacts, while the able-to-pay market for private climate mitigation services grows.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
“Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems.
Start with this principle: don’t face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbours, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without.
Discuss what we confront, explore the means by which we might respond. Through neighbourhood networks, start building a deliberative, participatory democracy, to resolve at least some of the issues that can be fixed at the local level. If you can, secure local resources for the community.
From democratised neighbourhoods, we might seek to develop a new politics in which decisions are passed upwards, not downwards, with the aim of creating a political system not only more democratic than those we currently suffer, but which also permits more diversity, redundancy and modularity.
Yes, we also — and urgently — need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs.”
— George Monbiot, Non-Linear (2025)
The scale and scope of the crisis means that no single actor alone, no matter how well resourced, could address what is needed. We require the power of all of us, including neighbours, streets, grassroots groups, local private sector, local VCSE (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise) sector and local public institutions, in addition to structures operating at larger scales.
Adopting approaches grown from our neighbourhoods and finding ways to unlock land there for what we actually need to thrive is, therefore, not only a moral imperative, nor simply a “nice to have” or a way to consult on decisions that have already been made. Our neighbourhoods are a fundamental unit of change, without which we will render ourselves unable to meet the challenges of this century.
The following early design questions indicate what we began to grapple with in how to design potential routes for long term neighbourhood stewardship, commensurate with the scale of the challenge:
How do we first own the land and then put it into stewardship in perpetuity, for neighbours and the community and for future generations? How do we remove it out of speculation — a thing that you make money off from miles away — and move it into regenerative civic social infrastructure and spaces for us to come together to thrive, to organise, to meet?
How does this support us to deal with disaster, challenges, changing weather, and all the things that are coming, whilst growing our collective imagination of what things could be, and what that could feel like?
How do we demonstrate that in practice to show there is not just one story ahead that anyone knows the end of, but that we can’t just blindly continue to just absolutely decimate our community infrastructure, our libraries, the spaces we come together and all that matters in the heart of how places, people and communities have thrived for centuries?
How do we grapple with this whilst knowing that public money and public value is still being extracted through private profit, and we are still in systems that don’t value multiple forms of capital, and work to transform this whilst also not waiting until its too late to act?
How we grow together, how we eat together, how we come together, how we deal with crisis, how we support one another; how do we (re)build spaces for this and more in our homes, streets and neighbourhoods?
“It’s really important to remember the radical hope and intent that infused our places in the first place, because it’s those resources and that imagination that we’ll need to lean into again.”
— Melissa Mean
The Front Room
In real time in 2020–2022, the pivots that COVID-19 required us to make illustrated the necessity of adaptive, robust, resourced, robust neighbourhood infrastructure. The Floating Front Room — our on site neighbourhood cafe, operating from a canal barge — was designed as the beginning of an ambitious, long-term neighbourhood platform to meet, connect and co-design together, operating as an initial 3 year prototype designed to transition into the full Neighbourhood Public Square proposal. This became an unexpected site of mutual aid, food distribution, and a safe(r) neighbourhood meeting point as lockdowns, closure of services, and many effects of the pandemic played out live, teaching us more personally about the evolving role of our existing infrastructure in crisis. This included navigating how to be present, connected, and directly useful in the here and now, whilst designing for and making tangible what is needed longer term too.
“The existence of goals that helps people envision a future significantly different than present can be one often key difference between decision processes that pursue transformational as opposed to incremental change.”
— IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Chapter 17
Neighbourhood Doughnut
Through our Neighbourhood Doughnut demonstrator of work, we focused on downscaling and co-creating the Doughnut framework to the neighbourhood scale, inspired and in connection to Kate Raworth, the team at DEAL, and communities around the world reimagining regenerative economic systems that are distributive-by-design.
We utilised the Data Portrait of Place methodology to co-build the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait with many people over 3 years; resulting in a tool that our neighbourhood can use together as a compass for a shared goal, and also measure the progress and health of these together locally and in the context of our planetary challenges, including understanding our neighbourhood’s relationships to land use, land change, soil health and more.
This has laid the foundation for how the Neighbourhood Public Square will design for and measure multiple social and ecological co-benefits at a range of scales, when combined with Doughnut For Urban Development by Home.Earth, Cornerstone Indicators by Samhällskontraktet x Dark Matter Labs, learning from radical precedents and more. The Neighbourhood Public Square will also be founded upon a land agreement intentionally designed for regenerative relationships of all kinds: specifically a perpetual Doughnut Economics-inspired covenant that enshrines the social and ecological provision of the site, thus preserving its systemic value for future generations and ensuring its contribution to the commons.
“For a climate transition that is just and democratised, as much agency as possible should be devolved to the level of the community. This is not simply just a desirable principle, but it also builds a solid foundation for ambitious retrofit with a broad and deep scope through a process of co-design and trust-building.”
— Dark Matter Labs
Neighbourhood Transitions
Through our Neighbourhood Transitions demonstrator we began organising with residents at the scale of the street to create the conditions for the systemic demonstration of carbon, energy, ecological, and built transitions to be designed, owned and governed by the people who live there. This means going beyond a single household approach to retrofit and into designing from the starting point of our streets as living systems, where agency to meet challenges is highest.
Together with ACAN, Dark Matter Labs and zero carbon house initially, and later alongside Anthropocene Architecture School, BE-ST, HEAL, Knowle West Media Centre, Retrofit Balsall Heath, and WeCanMake, we launched Retrofit Reimagined in 2022 as an open movement that acknowledges the need for us rebuild our relationships to land, materials and each other, exploring the interconnections, bonds, flows and entanglements between these three dimensions with hundreds of people across the UK and beyond, from a series of national festivals to local street parties, co-builds and shared meals, organised together with residents.
Site As A Classroom
In 2023 and 2024 our practice deepened with regular spaces to rehearse, openly share, learn and co-design, as we reorientated and stepped into the next stages of tangible design for Neighbourhood Public Square from all we have been learning together with our peers and neighbourhoods. As we worked to start to take what we had been co-developing through the Retrofit Reimagined shifts, Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait of Place, into next chapters of tangible practice applied to the site itself, we hosted a Material Matter[s]: Skills For Transition Learning Journey with Material Cultures, Neighbourhood Public Square Co-creation Week, and Re:Builders: Routes to Regenerative Construction in the West Midlands, with these enquiries combining with regular, consistent neighbourhood organising at weekly Neighbourhood Trade School classes and monthly Neighbourhood Supper Clubs.
All of our hosting and convening, including open activities in the school holidays and the annual B16 Lunch became invitations through which to begin exploring this Site As A Classroom together, intending for every development phase to act as an open, inclusive, and collective space for our team, the neighbourhood, and wider national and industrial scales to learn from demonstration in real-time, including what we need to collectively learn, decide, and practice around how Neighbourhood Public Square is designed, built, stewarded and financed.
An enormous thank you to everyone for the 1000s of hours of dreaming, organising, making, doing, and co-designing with us over the past 5 years, and for all that lies ahead together too.
by Somewhere / UNIFORM Group
A System Demonstrator
Throughout 2024 we have begun sharing the proposal for Neighbourhood Public Square openly, situated in a wider ecology of transformation. The Neighbourhood Public Square will demonstrate regenerative civic infrastructure in the heart of Ladywood, Birmingham, co- building and democratising access to the spaces, tools and resources for a distributed and regenerative transition, held in the common for the neighbourhood. The proposal seeks to open source research, reflection and proposition about the time we are in, the urgency of our collective action, and blueprints for ways forward at the civic infrastructure and neighbourhood scale in collaboration with a range of visionary partners.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
3°C Neighbourhood
“Alongside confronting the consequences of a warmer planet we need to actively reimagine how our neighbourhoods and economies function. We invite you to hold these tensions together, as we become aware of and equip ourselves for the worst, whilst building towards a new, more hopeful future.”
—3°C Neighbourhood
The Neighbourhood Public Square will demonstrate the stewardship of assets towards 3°C futures, discovering the new public goods of what it means for us to build them, and eventually have them stewarded by people who live there in perpetuity for future generations. We not only need infrastructure to be in the hands of people, but that infrastructure also needs to start being orientated towards conditions for true anti-fragility in our changing climate.
Co-authored with Dark Matter Labs, 3°C Neighbourhood is a new piece of research on the risks UK urban neighbourhoods face due to climate and ecological breakdown under a high emissions scenario, likely resulting in +3ºC average global temperature. An increase of +3ºC by 2100 pushes us far beyond global tipping point thresholds, threatening food supply, energy security + destabilising the global economy.
Many would say talking about a 3ºC world doesn’t even bear thinking about because its effects would be so disastrous, but unfortunately this has become a necessary reality to understand, and to prepare for. However, this work is absolutely not an acceptance or endorsement of that future. Whilst immediate actions to adapt to the impacts of global temperature rises remain necessary, the focus on this alone risks only dealing with climate breakdown on a symptomatic level, and creating new industries of growth and extraction which exacerbate historic violence whilst feeding local and global injustices.
To avoid a new age of imperialism, or repackaged extractivism, we must make the deeper shifts to reimagine the fundamentals of our infrastructures and institutions together and begin to recode a transition with repair, safety and justice at its heart for all beings to thrive, on a thriving planet. Here we outline a direction of travel and a framework for measuring progress for a civic-led transition that is firmly rooted at the neighbourhood scale, as well as responsive to the planetary constraints of material consumption and energy use.
↗ Read the full 3°C Neighbourhood chapter: bit.ly/Neighbourhood3
Source: Dark Matter Labs and CIVIC SQUARE
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Endowing The Future
“Philanthropy must inhabit its potential to endow its resources, possibilities, assets and imagination, not only to avert the worst of the current trajectories, but to seed just, regenerative, and distributive futures that can invite the wisdom, creativity, energy and drive of us all.”
— Endowing The Future
The Neighbourhood Public Square calls for at least some of the wealth held by philanthropic institutional and individual wealth-holders being moved to ‘real-world endowments’. This involves moving endowments outside of extractive financial markets (which exacerbate the symptoms we are all trying to address) and into real world civic assets that can generate a multi-capital surplus (rather than purely a focus the financial returns) which can then be stewarded by community governance (rather than by institutions further from the problem space).
Co-authored with Dark Matter Labs, Endowing The Future is a call for (re)imagination, bold leadership and unleashing the abundant potential of our human and more-than-human world towards a mutually flourishing future. The scale and severity of the polycrisis is forcing us to systematically (re)evaluate the speed and scale of transition facing our built environment and the social fabric of our neighbourhoods, demanding an accelerated approach in order to shorten the discovery and proving period for public goods.
Here, wealth and philanthropy have a critical role to play, not to optimise the landscape on the assumption that financial capital is the only or primary capital that matters, but recognise its role alongside others to enable a supportive and thriving collaborative environment for all capitals to flow and regenerate, to meet this moment together.
As crises compound, philanthropy’s capacity to respond systemically will reduce, as crisis-management responses to emergencies will be the enduring norm. Every passing day makes future philanthropic investment less valuable as our societal challenges grow. We must invest in possibility now, knowing change won’t happen linearly with advance warning. As crises collide the Overton window can shift what is edge, unlikely or even impossible into being plausible and normalised. We then need just, regenerative models ready to adopt quickly.
↗ Read the full Endowing The Future chapter: bit.ly/EndowingTheFuture
Doughnut As A Compass
“For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world.
For the 21st century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet. Here’s the conundrum: No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one.”
— Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics
The Neighbourhood Public Square must be founded upon a land agreement intentionally designed for regenerative relationships of all kinds: specifically a perpetual Doughnut Economics-inspired land covenant that enshrines the social and ecological provision of the site in perpetuity, thus the land and infrastructure of Neighbourhood Public Square will be held in common with the neighbourhood, and designed to distribute many kinds of value.
Published in January 2023, the Doughnut for Urban Development was created as a tool to support the application and practice of Doughnut Economics with urban development* — the first manual of its kind for putting Doughnut Economics into practice at a sectoral scale. It applies the four lenses framework to more closely examine the interplay between local aspirations and global responsibilities — both socially and ecologically — *to identify possible opportunities for transformative action within a built environment context.
The transformation of a 20th Century industrial site into 21st Century regenerative infrastructure is a demonstrator for many layers of the deep redesign required, across areas of ownership, governance, ecological building design and avoidance of demolition and retrofit, with a wider intention for the Neighbourhood Public Square to innovate around financial instruments that unlock fair shares of value creation by and for communities and neighbourhoods.
The investment that has been and will be made into Neighbourhood Public Square is made of multiple forms of capital. Financial capital which is invested sits alongside knowledge, social, human, cultural, intellectual and other capitals, all of which are critical to manifest civic infrastructure. Alongside Emily Harris and Julia Beart, we are commissioning a study to look beyond financial return on investment and boldly demonstrate the multi-capital value that the Neighbourhood Public Square will generate, now and in the future (at least the next 50 years to 2075) such as social capital, human capital, infrastructural capital and natural capital.
Read the full Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait: bit.ly/DoughnutPortrait
by Somewhere / UNIFORM Group
Physical Infrastructure Design
“Infrastructure, at its most fundamental level, is not about roads and bridges, cables and concrete. It’s about who we are, what we value, and what kind of society we want to create.”
— Eric Klinenberg
The Neighbourhood Public Square will make 3ºC Neighbourhood and Endowing The Future tangible through co-building regenerative, distributive-by-design neighbourhood civic infrastructure at the heart of Ladywood, Birmingham, held in common for the neighbourhood for generations to come. We are working alongside visionary collaborators to build our design team and wider ecosystem, deeply committing to meeting the scale and breadth of the polycrisis, designing for future challenges and abundant possibilities ahead, including what climate predictions mean for the criticality of neighbourhood civic infrastructure.
Physical Infrastructure Design is a design manual primarily focused on the Neighbourhood Public Square as physical infrastructure, but at every layer we deeply acknowledge that an enabling, regenerative, distributive-by-design building is where every other aspect of our work, wider proposal, and the entanglements we reside in layer together, and cannot truly be separated. Thus, we present the design for the Neighbourhood Public Square from the ground up, acknowledging its nested, fractal scales, embedded within physical and social ecosystems.
by Caspar Gruetzner at Architecture00
“The trick with design principles is not to see them as if law, as if a set of un-bending, precise strictures which must be followed at all costs, or ticked off like checklists. I prefer to see them as ingredients, like the ‘staples’ that sit under the Masterchef kitchen benches: the oils, vinegars, seasoning, fats, herbs and spices that you can combine and recombine, challenged with new ingredients and contexts, to create many different kinds of dish, old and new.
These principles should provide a clear sense of direction, but they should also be broadly generative, and applicable to a variety of contexts.”
— Dan Hill, Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
Beyond its physical structure, whether or not Neighbourhood Public Square plays a continued and resilient infrastructural role in the neighbourhood in perpetuity is determined by how we get there together, the bonds that form between each of the many people and parts of the story, and how we distribute as many tools, resources, forms of infrastructure and learnings as we can along the way together, with a regenerative building one that, in the simplest terms, “generates more life”.
The following Design Principles have been developed to align and communicate the larger values, perspectives, and frameworks that underpin the collaboration of our design team, contractors, peers, neighbours and more as we establish the foundations for regenerative distributive-by-design neighbourhood civic infrastructure together.
Design With The Ecoregion
Understanding the regenerative ecological cycles of our place to guide which natural materials Neighbourhood Public Square may safely tap into without degrading ecosystems, and how waste streams may be coordinated according to social need and planetary boundaries.
Design For Reuse
Through new material reduction and an ambitious retrofit, Neighbourhood Public Square will prioritise the most significant reduction of embodied carbon and energy requirements throughout the whole life cycle of the building.
Design For Radical Reimagination
Consider how the design of Neighbourhood Public Square and our practices work to mitigate the stressors limiting our imaginative capacity, while simultaneously building infrastructures of agency to unlock possibilities in our neighbourhoods.
Design To Distribute
Taking a multi-economy approach that seeks to nurture a perpetual cycle of neighbourhood and civic wealth creation, as well as open-sourcing our learnings throughout the process, facilitating skills exchanges, co-design, and establishing our Site As A Classroom.
Design For Neighbourhood Stewardship
Establishing a progressive land contract and long-term governance structures grounded in social and ecological stewardship, ensuring Neighbourhood Public Square plays a continued and resilient infrastructural role in the neighbourhood in perpetuity.
Design For Adaptability
Embody spatial anti-fragility; not only in a material sense, but also in how Neighbourhood Public Square is used to support changing social, environmental, and economic conditions, embracing how the built environment may respond to a context of cascading instability.
Design For Social Ecological Regeneration
Measure our progress using appropriate tools and frameworks, orientated towards the collective goal of the economy as a safe and just space for humanity to prosper within the means of the living planet, guided by Doughnut Economics and other frameworks.
Design To Demonstrate
View design interventions as proofs of concept for radical systemic change, as ‘islands of coherence’ in a collective endeavour to secure a safe, just, thriving economy for people and planet, guided by the articulations and frameworks in Dan Hill’s Designing Missions.
↗ Read the full Physical Infrastructure Desgin chapter: bit.ly/PublicSquareDesign
by Somewhere / UNIFORM Group
Building Skills: A Material Strategy for Birmingham & West Midlands
“As we face up to material constraints, we’ll need to discover new immaterial abundances. The degrowth of material, energy and extraction could be accompanied by a growth in care, maintenance, participation, collective intelligence, new forms of logistics and other immaterial assets.”
The Neighbourhood Public Square will reuse existing structures, utilise biomaterials from our ecoregion, minimise energy consumption to cultivate circular regenerative supply chains and act in an infrastructural capacity to enable the wider built environment transition of the neighbourhood.
Building Skills is a new report by Material Cultures that situates social and ecological possibilities for the retrofit of the Neighbourhood Public Square site within the material and productive landscape in which it sits. This is the result of an ecoregional mapping study of Birmingham and the West Midlands, and a range of open learning collaborations between Material Cultures and CIVIC SQUARE, such as Material Matter[s]: A Skills For Transition Learning Journey, indicating key sites in our region that offer a variety of material opportunities to be explored together.
This report represents an essential next step in the design methodology of the Neighbourhood Public Square to meet this ambition through the mapping of materials, manufacturers and processes that can support our site to embody and work towards social, ecological, and material justice in and beyond our neighbourhood. These findings will directly inform the material palette, participatory activities and productive capacity of the Neighbourhood Public Square’s physical infrastructure — particularly the Neighbourhood Microfactory and Materials Lab.
Alongside our own work to take these findings off the page, onto site and into our neighbourhood(s), in commissioning this report we also extend it as a direct contribution to the commons for many people organising and building in our wider ecoregion. We acknowledge there are no perfect solutions, and we invite you to share in the tensions and contradictions surfaced here, alongside what feels illuminated and abundant.
Read the full Building Skills report: bit.ly/BuildingSkillsCS
“May we see the challenge, and be great enough to rise to it.”
— Indy Johar, Retrofit Reimagined
There is nothing across any of this research, grounded neighbourhood practice and wider methodology that tells us the work we need to do for the future is just marginal, or only about more community work, or a little bit of this, or that. This transition will be substansive, structural, and systemic, changing how and what we account for, how we interact with and use spaces, how we live and work. UK neighbourhoods grapple with a profound emergency unfolding across local, global, and planetary dimensions.
It would be difficult to overstate the challenges — and possibilities — that we collectively face at this time in history; only ambitious action can meet this moment. Wholescale transformation is urgently needed. At the same time, today we are equipped with technological, scientific and human-centred potential that is similarly unmatched in history; these capabilities underscore a deeply rooted hope for the necessary transitions we must make together, with this context informing how we go forward together.
The revolution required here is, therefore, both a boring and an irresistible one, meaning the dark matter and the dream matter of our systems must dance together, and they must be woven together tenderly in a way that is felt most acutely by many people in their everyday lives.
Only You Know If We Did It
Almost 10 years to the day since the Hub Warming party at Impact Hub Birmingham — as we co-built our previous home inside The Walker Building in Digbeth, after the huge risk of taking on the lease without a penny between us — on Friday 21st February 2025 we stood sheltering from the rain together at the Neighbourhood Public Square Site Warming to mark another exciting milestone. Side by side with many neighbours, partners, peers, family and friends — keeping as warm and dry as we could together — we shared that:
On Friday 21st December 2024 at 6.55pm — in the last working seconds before Christmas — we were able to take on ownership of the Neighbourhood Public Square site at Tubeworks, Rotton Park Street, Birmingham, B16 0AB.
It’s really important to say that ownership isn’t the goal, but ownership is the rule right now in this system, so we needed to do that first. We have taken on ownership of the full freehold, not the like freehold, not a long lease. That is substantial, because it means we get to put a covenant on the land that will mean it will be for future generations, for the ecology of the place, for young people, for whatever else we decide to do with that covenant together, in perpetuity.
“This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
— Andri Snær Magnason
That means we can not only take it out of speculation, but start to grow it into a site of real deep imagination and possibility. We can do things without permission of the current system that is not necessarily on that journey yet, and that was a really big thing that we had to learn a lot about the detail of this, so it comes with our thanks to everyone along the way.
“Many foundations are reconsidering their endowment strategies, reframing them away from extractive industries, making decisions based on social and environmental impact not just maximising returns. But even a carefully adjusted portfolio is still invested in the structures of neoliberalism and dependent on its continued dominance. Recognising this inherent contradiction adds weight to the argument that the vast wealth accumulated in endowments could be better used if spent more aggressively in the present, in helping the future into being, rather than sitting in investment portfolios, hindering its emergence.”
— Jessica Prendergast & Sally Lowndes of Onion Collective, Resourcing Hope for Alternative Futures (2025)
We extend our deepest gratitude to Good Ancestor Movement and Tudor Trust for helping us secure the freehold for the Neighbourhood Public Square site. We talked a lot about philanthropy, wealth and what it should do right now, how it can’t sit back whilst we still have the privilege and opportunity in the in the Global North to not only to avert the worst of current trajectories, but to seed just, regenerative, and distributive futures.
Opening up pathways to securing the future of the Neighbourhood Public Square site really did start with the people who responded to say ‘yes, let’s rewire that story’, and we know funders have their own stories to tell of the resistance and transformation in philanthropy of getting things pushed through within existing power.
Particularly, we acknowledge the bold and thoughtful leadership of those racialised as Black and global majority folks within funding who organised to make this happen, sticking their necks out to begin to shift the dial on so much of what we called for in Endowing The Future, with whom we couldn’t be more honoured to travel alongside. We thank you for working in regenerative, non-extractive, genuinely thoughtful ways that honoured what it means to turn up with wealth or access to wealth, whilst we also recognise the oppressive spaces this means being subjected to, and the hidden more violent layers of what it means to be brave and bold in this time in service of wider collective liberation pathways.
“I came across CIVIC SQUARE’S work during the depths of the pandemic, while the Good Ancestor Movement was still a mere blueprint for disrupting the way private capital flows. For me, CIVIC SQUARE has always demonstrated most tangibly what it would look and feel like to be in a regenerative economy; what it would look like for local communities to steward and govern life-affirming resources including access to land on which they can be permanently rooted and established, enabling them to flourish in the face of multiple ecological, economic and social crises. The compelling nature of Immy and CIVIC SQUARE’S leadership and practice presented an irresistible invitation to mobilise capital away from extraction and speculation towards regeneration and repair.
I am truly delighted that the Good Ancestor Movement played a part in supporting CIVIC SQUARE’S land acquisition — and all that it will unlock for Ladywood and beyond. The process in and of itself was a magnificent and audacious feat, yet it is imperative for me to foreground the work that began in the years preceding the acquisition. Cultivating deep relationship and building mutual trust created the preconditions that were necessary for us to practice radical imagination, organise boldly, and expend our labour towards a common goal with rigour, care and love. Together we harnessed our collective power, mobilised multiple forms of capital and liberated land. Together we enacted and witnessed solidarity as a practice. I am immensely grateful to CIVIC SQUARE for continuing to offer such rich, bold and visionary work to an ecology of practitioners, organisers, resource mobilisers, funders and many more working in service of a regenerative economy.
We demonstrated unequivocally that it is possible to move large amounts of philanthropic and private capital with urgency and in the spirit of abundance instead of scarcity. There is now a clear mandate for philanthropic funders to start redistributing the vast amounts of capital under their control to support the transitions which lie ahead of our social, economic and ecological systems. Now is the time to accelerate the redistribution of wealth and power to our communities.”
— Stephanie Brobbey, Good Ancestor Movement
Our humble thanks also to all of our core funders for the early development of CIVIC SQUARE, The National Lottery Community Fund, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Thirty Percy for believing in the bold vision and possibility ahead, understanding the conditions to cultivate that over the first 5 years of organising, including sticking it out together with us when COVID-19 brought so many curveballs into already uncertain and emergent work, with no existing blueprint.
“I was watching the weather here today, and thinking about how we came to construct means of control over the land. As you were talking about the journey to here, the rain kept coming, the water kept pouring down, and I was thinking that’s reflective of how many times the system snaps back. No matter how naively you think it must be possible to do the right thing, the system keeps telling you how hard it is. When you announced that you had purchased the freehold of this site, the rain stopped. And the wind stopped. And for a minute, it felt like the system was on your side, saying ‘we want you to succeed’.
I think it’s good to have a bit of naivety and assume that things can be done, so that when the system starts to snap back you’re there to go ‘that’s ridiculous, there’s got to be a way around it’, whereas if we already know how hard it’s going to be, we might not try.
We are really proud to have played our part in helping CIVIC SQUARE to purchase the land, and are delighted to be on that journey together.
The Tudor Trust is on its own journey. We had a longstanding family board and the chair and former CEO came to visit this space, and when they looked around they said: ‘yeah, this is possible.’ It’s such a nice thing that this is what the board were thinking when they gifted Tudor Trust to a new board that are more rooted in community, and so committed to the many kinds of work that are needed. We are very lucky, and it is their gift to us and their wish that we carry on supporting lots and lots of work like what is happening at CIVIC SQUARE.
Being here together with you all and Jemmar [Samuels] and Mariam [Radi] from our team, this place is absolutely fantastic, and I wish you all the best.”*
— Raji Hunjan, Tudor Trust
Whilst we’re incredibly grateful for what Tudor Trust and Good Ancestor Movement have been able to do — with it almost going beyond words what this means to so many of us near and far, despite the 16,000 words in this story to try and articulate just a slice of it — we know this news will also bring tensions and manufactured scarcity that pits us all against each other. We also know there is £138 billion held in the top 300 UK charitable foundations that could be liberated, plus the Great Wealth Transfer, and we need to be unlocking this for transformation.
“I created Good Ancestor Movement knowing that we were approaching a time where we were going to witness the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, that’s happening right now… Ladywood, may you enjoy your abundance and know you’re inspiring people far and wide.
And for anyone thinking, ‘I don’t know if this abundance is going to come my way, I’d love to see this in my community, all I can see is scarcity and things closing down’, let me tell you, with the amount of 0s that I see when I get into the affairs of wealth holders and philanthropy, there is enough out there for everyone; for all of us to experience shared abundance and prosperity.
For anyone working in philanthropy or resource mobilisation, let it be known that this is what wealth should be doing more of, everywhere. And there is more than enough for everyone, so don’t believe the hype about scarcity.”
— Stephanie Brobbey, Good Ancestor Movement
Over the coming months we will be sharing lots more about how bold the approach to funding and meeting the Endowing The Future principles are in how Tudor Trust and Good Ancestor Movement have come together, and under what terms. It is our direct intention and something that has kept us going over the years, of the system snapping back, of everything taking longer and being harder than we ever could have imagined, that stories like this one are able to open up for others to be bolder, and to be supported. Philanthropy needs to release more money to communities, and value must be possible to circulate in our neighbourhoods, not extracted out.
We don’t have time to work on one thing at a time, or simply tinker at the edges, but must take a multi-solving approach that designs skilfully and thoughtfully for maximum social and ecological co-benefits to co-build civic resilience and anti fragile infrastructure live in real time tangible demonstration. The reimagined fundamentals of 3°C Neighbourhood and the need for civic infrastructure are vital to regenerative our built environment together as part of a safe, just, noble, distributed transition.
“My message in the face of the recent IPCC report? Whether we are driven by rage or by theory, by creativity or by education, whether we are doctors, activists, authors, musicians, lawyers or mothers, there is a role for everyone in the climate movement.”
— Joycelyn Longdon
This requires us to simultaneously reimagine finance, governance, the idea of ownership altogether, shift wealth and philanthropy, and discover and demonstrate new public goods urgently. That’s why it matters that we get to the root to create new legal tenures and covenants for the time, redefine what value looks like in the 21st century. These will be rooted and built in our neighbourhoods, not in white hall, not in policy thinktanks, which have an important role to play, but cannot do what we can and must do together from the home, street and neighbourhood up.
As always, this requires a fundamental change of goal at every layer and scale of our thinking and organising, away from the mindlessness of endless growth, and consciously and intentionally into how to practically and tangibly act in service of human and more-than-human thriving.
At the Neighbourhood Public Square Site Warming, we were honoured to welcome guests and neighbours to share reflections to guide us through as we marked the moment together, and prepared for the work ahead, and are deeply thankful for thoughtful and generous spoken contributions to the Site Warming gathering from Amahra Spence (ABUELOS), Ayan Aden, Dr Lisa Palmer, Eva Bennett, Iris Bertz, Farzana Khan (Healing Justice Ldn), Karolina Medwecka-Piasecki, Kate Raworth (DEAL), Lorna Prescott (CoLab Dudley), Netz Derbyshire, Raji Hunjan (Tudor Trust), Stephanie Brobbey (Good Ancestor Movement), Summer Islam + George Massoud (Material Cultures) and Yvonne Field (The Ubele Initiative).
“I am born and raised Brummie. How many of us have stayed, even when our loved ones have left. I’m here with all of you because all of us had opportunities or were called to other places and, because we’re in a place where we’re told nothing like this is possible, the ability to dig down, and choose to stay, and keep fighting, and keep building regardless of what else is around us, it’s almost beyond words.
This is a city of enormous loss. We watched the loss of our youth centres, our art centres, our community centres, and we’re holding tight for our libraries but we’re losing some of them too. We know this story well. And somehow, some of us keep leaning in. We keep digging, we keep going. The magnitude with which we’ve lost our social spaces is devastating and I can’t express that enough. Not just because it’s an emotional attachment, or only about the bricks and mortar, it’s who we are in that space; the sense of possibility. These spaces are literal lifelines to people like us; when we’re in communities that are consistently contending with disinvestment, organised abandonment, systemic negligence by design, these spaces are key to how we survive.
We’re here to celebrate a momentous thing, I want to big up CIVIC SQUARE again, this is massive. CIVIC SQUARE are taking this land out of a speculation market, which means we don’t play part of this system; that something else is possible. Remember when they’re trying to make us believe this isn’t possible, that it’s already happening. CIVIC SQUARE have found a way for this land to stay in community hands in perpetuity, and we’ll work out the mechanics of what that looks like, because that is hard work ahead too.
It has been an honour to journey alongside CIVIC SQUARE and the team for a decade. Before CIVIC SQUARE, Impact Hub Birmingham was a special place to so many of us here. I met so many of you through this space, and it was a place that we all kindof grew up with each other, and we were all sharpening our politics, our practice, and our ways of showing up into the work together. So when Impact Hub Birmingham transitioned to CIVIC SQUARE and turned its attention to the scale of the neighbourhood, the synchronicity that they would be based in the hood that I was born and raised in was something that would not pass me. I grew up on Icknield Port Road, that you will all have come down on your way in here. My family were priced out of this community 20 years ago. To be back building in this place is something that isn’t lost on me.
Many of you know that MAIA have been organising to secure another part of this site and transform it into ABUELOS, a site of radical hospitality and radical culture, shaped in the regenerative economy and spirit of my grandad’s house. This work that we’re doing now called Hood Futures Studio is how we’re building resilient and reparative infrastructure for the hood commons. Collectively we are working to resist the threats of displacement by engineered violence by way of private development and climate collapse. As we look at the road ahead, we will not be moved on. This is why we’re unwavering about freehold. We’re envisioning a future where the hood and all its people share the value of what is created there, gathering the tools and resources for our own self determination, our sovereignty and our collective thrivance.
That the CIVIC SQUARE and ABUELOS sites neighbour each other is also not a happy accident. To be grounded in this scale of possibility, but also reality together, what this represents more broadly, what this entire site is meaning and what it will mean for generations to come, we’re moving away from our salvation being tied to charismatic leaders, we’re moving away from this idea that land is to be privately owned and extracted from, and returning land to the commons knowing that the very hard relational work of being stewards, preparing for what’s to come, is the work.
Revolution is not a destructive process, but a rigorous, strategic, loving practice of possibility. Malcolm X says “land is the basis of revolution”, and I think revolution is just how we honour life. It’s rare the kinds of challenges and the weight this work bears on the soul. And I say that because I personally want to thank Immy Kaur for being a peer as we have faced this road together, and we will continue to do so, but this has been incredibly hard, and will continue to be incredibly hard. So I have a plea:
Today is a big moment. It is the start of a massive journey ahead. I’m asking that you please continue to support CIVIC SQUARE in everything that is coming ahead, because nothing is done until it’s done. And this is going to require all of our ongoing commitment to each other. Most of that is not sexy work. Land is massive, and it’s only the start.”
— Amahra Spence, ABUELOS
Now that some bold people have stepped in and really believed in new economic possibility, bringing the ideas of Endowing The Future off the pages, we’re looking for the next group of wealth holders, funders and investors to bring the vision tangibly to life. Depending on the ambition of bold wealth holders and funders moving money to us and many like us quickly, Neighbourhood Public Square could be up and running in a few years, or it could take the rest of our lives; if it moves at the pace of the last 20 years, there might still be 30 years to go.
“We must deeply invest now, and invest in possibility, knowing that it is unlikely for change to happen linearly with advance warning. Rather, there may be moments where crises collide, possibilities open up, the overton window can be shifted or shifts and we need the readiness of just, regenerative models to be able to quickly ripen and be adopted.
As a society in the UK — and as a philanthropic sector — at many scales we are squandering time; time that we have stolen from other places from where our economic systems have extracted resources. This includes philanthropy if and where endowments have accumulated through extractive means. This gives a huge responsibility for the many crises we face, in line with the role that has been played in creating them.
As crises compound, philanthropy’s capacity to respond systemically will reduce, and crisis-management measures responding to ever more immediate emergencies will become the enduring norm.
If we were to calculate the current ‘philanthropic discount rate’, we would see that the value and impact of £1 in philanthropic funding invested in, for example, one year’s time will be significantly lower than the value and impact of that £1 invested today, due to the lost opportunity to invest in proofs of possibility that might occur in this period, as well as the diminishing adaptive capacity, the accumulation of multidimensional challenges, and the growing harm and pain caused within that year.
Every passing second, day, and month make future philanthropic investment less valuable as our societal challenges grow.”
We recognise that this represents a significant moment for our movements, and are very grateful to everyone for the joy and celebration they’ve brought so far, but we sit in solidarity with struggles here in our neighbourhood, from Edgbaston Reservoir to Tower Ballroom to the community centres, the libraries, to the huge decimation of our infrastructure across Birmingham, particularly in the last 15 years at a more accelerated pace in this country, and of course in unwavering solidarity with land struggles across the world past and present, from Ladywood to Palestine to Sudan to Congo to Haiti and beyond.
This is just one step of a long journey to here, and there’s no doubt there’s a long way to go, with only future generations truly knowing if we did it. Whilst there were countless ways and points to begin this particular story, it’s equally true that there are so many different endings we could package this moment up into, but, as we openly share in some of the story so far to ground and situate into what the next chapter means, what we really do know is that we need to keep building together.
We’re designing the Neighbourhood Public Square site into a classroom, and will be humbly and deeply opening out every part of the process ahead in many different ways, as we have tried to practice for the last 5, 10 years. Sharing every step along the way — every document, spreadsheet, strategic reference point, design principle, bit of news — is not for ourselves to win, its about anything that helps anyone else on this journey, in order to meet the deep urgency to orientate ourselves towards the scale of what’s needed.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
―Arundhati Roy
There is absolutely no way we can go through the thousands and thousands of names and projects and people and neighbours and communities who have helped to make this happen, but our humble and heartfelt thanks to everyone who puts their hat in the ring, and always believes that we can work together a world that is designed in the image of hope and joy and care and regeneration and collectivity, and that we’re not going to give in to all of the narratives of division, all the narratives saying there’s only one way, all of the narratives that continue to see the planet, the places we live as a dumping ground or an extraction site for all sorts of different stories that we might not align with; that are not the ones in our hearts, so that we can keep fighting for something better together.
Get Involved
→ If you missed the Site Warming and want to join us to ground in to what’s next and explore our Site As A Classroom, we will be hosting Spring Open Days on Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th April 2025.
→ If you are seriously interested in taking these questions, possibilities and work forward together with bold investment and re-distribution of wealth, reach out to us for the full Neighbourhood Public Square proposal.
Additional Materials
→ Full Physical Infrastructure Design Chapter.pdf — March 2024
→ Full 3ºC Neighbourhood Chapter.pdf — March 2024
→ Full Endowing The Future Chapter.pdf — March 2024
→ Building Skills: A Material Strategy for Birmingham and the West Midlands.pdf — March 2024
→ Neighbourhood Doughnut Workbook v1.2 — December 2022
This story is written by members of the CIVIC SQUARE team, with our particular thanks extended to the following people for their visual contributions included here, and throughout the story together so far:
- Angela Grabowska
Photography
angelagrabowska.com - Architecture00
Visualisations
architecture00.net - Carlos Peñalver
Illustrations
carlospenalver.com - Dark Matter Labs
Diagrams
darkmatterlabs.org - Paul Stringer
Film & Photography
paulstringer.co.uk - Somewhere / Uniform Group
Visualisations
wearesomewhere.net - Sonia Dubois
Illustrations
soniadubois.com - Thom Bartley
Photography
thombartley.com
