Attachment economics - prioritising place, relations and history - asks for “tilting the field” towards communities, not “levelling them up”
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
We featured the Onion Collective last week, as a particularly exciting and dynamic example of what we are calling CANs (citizen action or community agency networks). Part of the reasons for this might be the kind of deep thinking and wide frameworks that are at the heart of what they’re doing.
Witness this Medium essay by Jessica Prendergast, a member of the Onion Collective, which is a wide-ranging and conceptually powerful account of what she calls “attachment economics”. These attachments are to:
PLACE
“…Place-based attachments are a near universal feature of the human experience — giving us roots, directly connecting us to the environment in which we live and grounding our experiences in territory that we call home. Although the notion of attachment to some form of place is simple enough, explaining attachments in terms of scale is unhelpfully complex. In the UK, it is layered through with competing ethnic as well as emergent socio-civic alternative national forms of identity”
THROUGH TIME
“In hundreds of consultations up and down the country over the last ten years, we have asked people from diverse backgrounds and in very different contexts, what motivates them to contribute to the community.
“Despite the assumption of Nimbyism, parochialism, nostalgia as incentives, by far the most commonly cited reason for community action is not to hold things back but to create change, to build a better future for generations who will follow.
“This commitment across time in both directions — an attachment to descendants not just ancestors, connected to place and nature — offers a mechanism for widespread action on climate — a stewardship of the places we love for future generations.”
PEOPLE [or relational]
“It is this attachment that animates and personalises our experience of place and through which it evolves. Place is not static, it is ever-changing, constantly updating, endlessly refreshing — and it does so primarily through our connections, attachments and relationships with people.
“These three attachments taken together create community — nothing more complex than people in a place through time. It is through community that we feel rooted and secure; through community that we belong.”
The essay takes many fascinating turns through sources and theories, informed by the Onion Collective’s actions and development in Watchet. At the end Jessica comes up with some usefully specific suggestions whereby policy and governments (local and national) could amplify this “attachment economics” rising from below;
There is a gentle impetus towards bringing community more into high street revival, with even absentee landlords seeing the immediate benefit of engaging as a way to fill empty properties — but a meaningful shift would mean moving say 30% of high street properties into community ownership over time, so that gains can be secured for the long-term.
Potential levers exist — every private sector beneficiary of the string of regeneration and ‘levelling up’ funds that are in the offing could be required to give up some equity to the community in exchange — an entirely normal transaction in equity investment, and common in recent bailouts by national government.
Such a move would attach communities to the businesses that affect them and give them a long-term stake in the relationship, as well as providing ongoing financing for improvements in their areas.
Government tax rules could prioritise rather than penalise social enterprises and community businesses — cutting corporation tax to zero for companies that are purpose- rather than profit-driven.
In all such prescriptions, the intent is to root economic decision-making and economic benefits more locally — ownership structures, management cultures, social impact and profit distribution become ‘closely knitted to host communities’, as in foundational ideas.
But in this, neither the sector nor the prevailing conditions should be the determining factor in the reframing — this is not a prescription for just providential parts of the economy or places where the current model is failing.
Companies operating high tech or R&D intensive work can be as much a part of an attached economy as any other, and that attachment does not have to come with any ‘peripheral’ connotations.
The example in Watchet is instructive here. When the Mill closed, we wanted to avoid the slide into decline of so many other places that had lost their defining industry. Through a period of intensive research that asked the community what they wanted for a new future and explored possible industrial but environmentally-sustainable futures, we looked for options for a new community industry to replace the one lost.
In partnership with London-based biotech start-up, Biohm, we are now co-creating the world’s first community-centred bio-manufacturing plant — using mycelium (the roots of a mushroom) to turn local waste into new carbon-negative products to sell to the construction sector, just as we once turned rags into paper.
What is powerful is how this model embraces a circular approach to community. It attempts to put the people most affected at the heart of industrial innovation, and to ensure that their needs are centre stage in the economic relationship so that it cannot become exploitative or extractive of them as individuals, or as a community.
This also means finding a way to get ownership into community hands — away from the real estate asset bubble that values property not in terms of its service or productive use but as an asset class, with investment driven only by the prospect of future financial gains.
To tackle this, we are seeking to protect and reintegrate industry and economy by means of community ownership and stewardship of our assets. The profits from the facility will be split 50:50 between Biohm and Onion Collective — with our part reinvested in the kinds of social and cultural infrastructures that have been stripped away by the impoverished state but that support and enrich our lives — from educational work, to art and culture, to public space for local people to meet.
This is about reprioritising the productive economy locally: creating a more resilient, more effective model which combines an emphasis on low-carbon circular, regenerative resource use with one that is also regenerative of communities, as the first line of defence of the vulnerable, and as a vital building block in a distributed, local and participatory economy.
Undoubtedly, in all this, it remains the entrepreneurial spirit, a core foundation of the capitalist narrative, which characterises many of the most vibrant community enterprises.
But what is also evident is that innovation in communities can be as much driven by a concern to maximise social impact as to maximise profit; questioning a central tenet of the traditional narrative that profit primarily drives innovation.
Against this backdrop, community enterprise emerges as a part of a ‘radically more inclusive and democratic way to run local economies’. The need to reframe the national economy is not merely in terms of an everyday economy, but also about the everyday entrepreneurs.
They can and are playing a role in building a brighter, distributed, attached economic future in places all across the UK, no matter what the conditions of their present reality.
They have often been ‘ignored’, or ‘forgotten’ or perhaps, thankfully even, ‘left alone’ by the prevailing system, but they have thus become more boldly independent, more innovative, and have more deeply embedded community values. These are the places that point the way forward, where there is real drive to address inequality and environmental crisis.
The playing field does not need to be ‘levelled’ for them, it needs to be ‘tilted heavily’ in favour of a more distributed, more attached and more inclusive economy that reflects a different perspective on ‘progress’.
A narrative of many more of us as everyday pioneers for a more socially and environmentally just future can create an antidote to division and illiberalism — based on belonging, connection and hope.
