What if the power and resources to build our neighbourhoods were in community hands?
Using community-owned tech to create a different kind of future
This blog is part of the Reimagining Economics Possibilities series. This series accompanies the Neighbourhood Doughnut portfolio of work in which CIVIC SQUARE, along with many neighbours, researchers, partners and visionaries have since 2019 been exploring large and small scale ways to reimagine economic possibilities.
The series brings together 15 commissioned works by visionaries who are reimagining economic possibility from a number of different angles. We are deeply passionate about Doughnut Economics and recognise the wealth of possibilities it unlocks, as well as its limitations. As Kate Raworth has said, quoting British statistician George E. P. Box, “all frameworks are wrong, but some are useful.” Therefore, we want to be able to stretch as far and wide as the Doughnut Economics Action Lab invites us to, seeing it as a platform to organise, whilst also encompassing a plurality of bold visions.
In this article MELISSA MEAN, founding director of WeCanMake, outlines why the task of creating new economic futures should be put in the hands of neighbourhoods and communities who stand to be transformed by them.
WeCanMake is a neighbourhood test-bed for imagining and making new ways to do housing that build community wealth. It is a Community Interest Company and part of art and tech collective Knowle West Media Centre.
“What if we chose to invest in the power of community-owned tech to create a different kind of future?”
In many neighbourhoods, both old and new, there grows a critical gap between the intentions and capabilities of the top-down “masterplan” and the changing hopes and needs of people and places over time.
It is in that gap that abstract challenges, such as the loneliness epidemic, climate emergency, and escalating inequality, become daily lived realities. But, what if the power and resources to make and re-make our neighbourhoods were in community hands?
WeCanMake is working with the neighbourhood of Knowle West in Bristol to imagine, explore, and test out potential responses to this question.
One aspect we are tentatively excited about is the role for new digital design and construction technologies to help create more adaptable neighbourhoods. Could tools like this help local people and communities to directly shape, adapt and re-make their neighbourhoods in real time, on their own terms?
Here we share some of our experiments and learnings. Through sharing we hope to demonstrate how Knowle West, and many places like it, can better navigate new waves of economic and technological change, in ways that don’t just add to their economic precarity and sense of being left-behind.
Past, present and future neighbourhood
Knowle West is a working-class neighbourhood in South Bristol. When first conceived — almost 100 years ago — Knowle West was seen by many as the future of how we could live well, and a much-needed remedy to the cramped and poor condition of much inner-city housing at the time.
The design of the council-built estate was informed by the principles of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement, which proposed new towns and suburbs set in the countryside, providing people the health benefits of extra space and access to nature. In Knowle West this was interpreted to mean solid three-bedroom semi-detached redbrick homes set in generous gardens.
Dubbed “the five thousand island forest” by the workers who built it, Knowle West sits upon a hill surrounded by wild green space, and comprises one hundred streets, five thousand homes, and fourteen thousand people.
The rigidity of that inherited architectural form and spatial structure have contoured and constrained the neighbourhood through its hundred-year life. Today, Knowle West is in the top 5% of areas for multiple deprivation. The growing pains are clear to see, and they are growing pains that will be familiar to many other places.
- With changing demographics and lifestyles, that standard Knowle West three-bed semi is increasingly one size that does not fit all. Stretching capacity at both ends, there is both a high level of overcrowding, with multiple generations squeezed into one home, and a high number of elders living alone in homes that are now too big for them but no other local options available for them to downsize and stay close to family and friends. Over 75% of people on the HomeChoice council house waiting list in Knowle West are searching for a one-or two-bedroom home.
- The estate was built at very low density, just 25 dwellings per hectare, well below half of the average density new developments are built with today. Such low densities, combined with new internet shopping patterns, make it hard to sustain local shops and services — many shops, the swimming pool and the cinema have all been lost. At only 44.7 people per hectare, Knowle West falls far short of the 100 people per hectare required to sustain a regular bus service.
- With their poor insulation, solid wall construction and high reliance on gas, the homes are ill-equipped for the climate crisis. Even before the latest cost of living crisis nearly a third of families in Knowle West were experiencing fuel poverty. These 5000 homes — and the other 3.3 million identikit homes like them built in the interwar period — are in desperate need of retro-fit.
Outsiders often look at Knowle West, with its high level of multiple-disadvantage and underinvested public realm, and deem it a place that needs to be “fixed”, “transformed”, or even demolished and started again.
We take a different approach. Rather than wholesale demolition or transformation, we believe Knowle West already has most of the assets and knowhow it needs. Scratch the surface and Knowle West bristles with stories, characters and a rich living heritage, all rooted in the accumulated wisdom and knowhow of people and place. For example, Knowle West Media Centre, an arts and tech collective embedded in Knowle West for over 20 years, worked with the community and artists to create “The University of Local Knowledge”. This alternative knowledge hub contains over 900 videos of community knowhow, with people sharing everything from how to catch and skin a rabbit, to how to set up your own cloud computing system.
The creative challenge is how to tap into these collective resources: how to surface, connect and remix assets and knowhow; identify the specifics and possibilities of what’s missing; and then develop the means to make together what is needed to fill the gaps, adapt and grow what is already there.
Power tools in community hands
“Modern Methods of Construction” is a catch-all term that covers a lot of different kinds of products and technologies. It broadly means factory-based manufacture and assembly of standardised parts for homes, which are then transported to site for final construction. Given that construction is currently the second least digitised industry in the world just above hunting, there is plenty of scope — if used right — for MMC to shake things up.
The usual pattern for roll-out of new tech is that of “winner takes all”, whereby one or two players quickly dominate the market, create barriers to entry for others, and concentrate benefits in the hands of the already powerful and wealthy. The danger is that the arrival of MMC tech forges a development industry that is even more consolidated, centralised, and distanced from the needs and aspirations of diverse people and places. Certainly, so far government enthusiasm for MMC has focused on its potential to deliver homes “faster” and “cheaper” by reducing labour costs through requiring fewer people and less skilled labour for on site.
But what if we chose to invest in the power of community-owned tech to create a different kind of future? What if these new tools could be distributed, diverse and in the hands of communities? What if local people were able to use Modern Methods of Construction to directly design, make and adapt their neighbourhood on their own terms? What if communities were able to use MMC to retain more of the value of development- in the form of local skills, jobs and neighbourhood infrastructure?
Our own adventures in putting MMC kit in community hands illuminate that this kind of diverse and distributed future could be possible.
Neighbourhood micro-factory
WeCanMake’s community-based MMC starter factory comprises an 80m2 fabrication space, a CNC machine, nail and glue guns, wracking, and some traditional wood-working tools. With this kit, we’re able to make timber cassette MMC systems.
The parts, which fit together a bit like Lego, are small enough to be made in our modestly sized community factory, and can be delivered and assembled on site without the need for large lifting machinery or cranes.
We’ve sought to develop the fabrication space as a “system agnostic” factory. This means we are able to fabricate a range of different MMC products, and then in turn match them to a wide range of different build projects.
“WeCanMake is part of a growing movement of neighbourhoods, communities, SMEs, and innovators that are embracing the democratising and diversifying potential of new digital and design tools to build community agency and wealth.”
So far, we have tested four MMC products through the system agnostic factory process — BlokBuild, Automated Architecture, Mass Bespoke and U-Build. Working together, we identified and mapped out some of the core capabilities, kit, and approaches that can support a distributed MMC production process, including part tracking and quality control.
Local residents have been trained in the fabrication and assembly process, testing the different systems with demo builds. Overall, this has helped build up a community capability to design and build with different systems, and importantly, the knowhow to repair and adapt them over time.
Making social infrastructure
Local people, artists, architects and technologists have been invited to explore what kinds of homes, spaces and places are missing in Knowle West and what kinds of shared infrastructure they could imagine and make to begin to fill the gaps. The crew, aged 17–76 and more than 50% female, have been trained to use a digital design and modular construction kit called Block Type A. Designed by Automated Architecture Labs (AUAR), the system uses a fixed set of plywood building blocks which are lightweight so they can be reconfigured into different designs over time without the need for specialised tools or expertise.
The result is BlockWest — a community pavilion for hosting gatherings, artist performances, community events, and informal hang-out space. All imagined, designed, fabricated, and assembled by our Knowle West crew.
“Robots, augmented reality, Modern Methods of Construction. All this stuff is a completely new world for me. I’m a bit of a luddite really. But now I’m not scared. I can do this stuff. And now I feel a massive amount of ownership.” — John, local resident
“We are literally building our community from the bottom up. That’s the most important thing to come out of this. It’s giving people different choices, better choices about how things can be. And it feels like only the beginning.” — Don, local resident.
Since making BlockWest, we have used a similar co-creation approach to explore how the digital design and fabrication kit can help adapt, hack, and enhance the existing built environment, creating and inserting micro spaces for social infrastructure. This has included a group of young teen women who co-designed a Wi-Fi Bench where they can access the internet after-hours when their youth club is shut; and a growing family of social furniture that is popping up over the neighbourhood in people’s front gardens, streets, and public spaces.
From pop-ups to homes
WeCanMake has begun to produce homes locally, completing our first two homes in summer 2022, using the BlokBuild MMC system. Designed as an alternative to conventional “demolish and densify” tactics of top-down urban renewal programmes, using localised MMC tools has enabled us to instead “adapt and densify” by unlocking tricky micro-sites and creating new homes precisely where people need them most.
Young mum Toni and her daughter Amancia had been living in overcrowded conditions, staying in the spare room of her parent’s council house. Using part of her parent’s large back garden, Toni has helped design, fabricate, and make a new low carbon home for herself and her daughter to live in. The home and land are held by WeCanMake in its community land trust, and the home is rented at Living Rent, no more than one third of net average household income for the neighbourhood.
People and place-led innovation
WeCanMake is part of a growing movement of neighbourhoods, communities, SMEs, and innovators that are embracing the democratising and diversifying potential of new digital and design tools to build community agency and wealth — including Open Systems Lab, Raise the Roof, Automated Architecture, Mass Bespoke, BlokBuild, PulpBuild, and U-Build among others.
Our use of MMC tech in Knowle West is less about producing specific products — whether they be homes or benches- faster and cheaper. It is much more about using the tools to grow an infrastructure capability for our community to be able to adapt and grow the social and physical fabric of our neighbourhood over time as needs change.
“This is where the craft and graft of imagining and making new economic futures is best situated — close to the action and very much with the people and places that have a stake in those better futures.”
This represents part of a much wider need for far greater recognition of the neighbourhood as a key site for social and economic innovation. This is where the craft and graft of imagining and making new economic futures is best situated — close to the action and very much with the people and places that have a stake in those better futures.
Currently, however, people and place led innovation exists only in the margins — the cracks and anomalies in mainstream development initiatives and government policy and funding priorities.
There needs to be a radical shift at local, regional and national level in perceptions of what constitutes economic value and how it is created, how investment and procurement are geared, and what it means to scale. “Local”, “neighbourhood”, “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.
The WeCanMake model for unlocking micro-sites for community-led homes has been designed to be open for other neighbourhoods to adapt and adapt for their own context. A new film and playbook is due for release later this year. Get in touch to find out more.
Reimagining Economics Possibilities also builds upon CIVIC SQUARE’s Department of Dreams portfolio of work, a site to imagine bold new futures that weave together the dreams of many.
Whilst understanding, investing, and unpacking the dark matter of large scale system change, we have learned quite deeply through the practice, inspirational movements, and from imagineers and pioneers that came before us that we must also invest in the dream matter — the artists, writers, designers, dreamers and creative visionaries — those who dare to dream up bold new futures for humanity, and have the capacity to stretch our imaginations further than we ever thought possible.
Thinkers, doers and makers dreaming beyond our existing systems have played, are playing and will continue to play a central role in crafting collective visions that transcend our current reality, and radically illuminate the responsibilities we hold to future generations. This is particularly driven by practices of imagination and identity, and, when woven together with dark matter findings and interventions, has the power to create a supernovae of transformation; the thinking, relating and behaving differently required to usher in a new reality that becomes irresistible, that we can all build and craft together.
Find out more by exploring the following materials from Department of Dreams 2020–2021:
Initial Dept of Dreams Blog — May 2020
Watch Back Re_ Fest Talks — June 2020
Dream Library Launch — November 2021
The Matter of Dreams: 2020–2021 — December 2021
