There's so much demand from communities to use land sustainably and creatively. Liverpool's Mayor wants to respond
Land politics is increasingly at the base of the kinds of community power we promote and amplify at A/UK (see our major presentation on one form of shared assets—community development trusts in the new context of peer-to-peer and commoning—on this blog).
There’s a conversation—between the rising culture of volunteers, activists and place-makers, and the municipalities and councils that possess large tracts of public land and buildings—that has needed to be more fruitful, particularly on the latter side.
Even if austerity, and now COVID-depression, tightens local council budgets, is the solution always to parcel off or extract rent from land, at the most commercial rates? Isn’t there a different idea of social prosperity and community wealth that could be pursued with this land - particularly as climate and pandemic puts huge pressures on business-as-usual?
So it’s exciting to see that Steve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, has just announced the establishment of England’s first Land Commission, specifically established to review the use of public land for community wealth building (in association with powerful local economy advocates CLES).
In Steve’s own words:
The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, with all its economic consequences, make it even more important for us to ensure that we can wring the maximum possible community value from our land assets to encourage sustainable economic recovery.
I’ve brought together a Commission made up of senior figures from the worlds of academia, property development and planning. I have challenged them to think imaginatively and come back to me with radical recommendations for how we can make the best use of publicly-owned land to make this the fairest and most socially inclusive city region in the country.
Through success stories such as Baltic Creative we’ve already seen alternative, socially-conscious approaches to land management in the city region. I can’t wait to hear the Commission’s recommendations for how we improve the management and use of land to deliver the greatest benefit for the people of the Liverpool City Region.
Neil McInroy, Director of CLES, said:
We are very excited to be working with Liverpool City Region on this important community wealth building project. Far too often, land use in the UK has ended up being dominated by the pursuit of corporate profit, rather than serving the economic, social and environmental needs of the whole community.
It’s fanciful to wait for things to ‘go back to normal’ after COVID-19 – instead, we should seize the moment to do things differently. The Land Commission is a pioneering step in this direction, that will serve as an example for other city regions across the country.
Excitingly, they aim to explore “innovative processes and ownership models (e.g. Community Land Trusts and Public-Commons Partnerships)… The commission will be action-oriented, with the aim of generating ideas for concrete projects, rather than only general recommendations”.
More here. And here’s our own archive on commons forms of ownership and enterprise.