Birmingham’s Civic Square, so inspirational to many seeking to strengthen community power, is “refounding” itself
We are fellow travellers with, and supporters of Civic Square (see our archive), the next stage from the Birmingham Impact Hub, led by the constantly inspirational Immy Kaur.
They are currently going through what they call a “refounding” of their project - currently titled as a “Public Square / Neighbourhood Economics Lab / Creative + Participatory Ecosystem”. (Get a sense of their vibe and culture from the 2022 embed video above).
But it’s throwing up some powerful overviews and perspectives on where many civic organisations are, wrangling with the legacies of Covid, and the challenges of climate (and economic) crisis.
We’re cross-posting this section of their refounding below, where they grapple with definitions of the wider crisis. But it’s an epic sweep of a Medium essay, which we’d urge you to read if you’re in the business of designing communities for a better future.
Perma + Polycrisis
“If we consider the pandemic in the context of growing global risks posed by the environmental breakdown — from air pollution and plastic contamination, to the extinction of species and destruction of the oceans and biodiversity — the return to pre-2020 governance systems and economies is not only increasingly unlikely, but would be structurally negligent.”
— Millie Begovic and Indy Johar, A Way Forward
Our 2019 roadmap and foundational ideas around transition, described more deeply here, helped us understand that we find ourselves facing a series of interdependent strategic risks that are complex, connected and not possible to treat in isolation. We described the scale of change urgently required in the decade ahead in this document, and it formed the backdrop of the next three years of our work and our key milestones to date.
In practice, COVID-19 revealed to us in the UK, more quickly that we have predicted many things we knew in ways that none of us could look away from: the global interdependence and mutual vulnerability of our 21st Century challenges, existing and accelerating injustice and inequity, and the many related cascading impacts.
This was, of course, not new knowledge to the thousands of neighbours and communities organising throughout the last decade of austerity or our families and kin all over the world, already facing the stark realities of deep injustice.
The stripping of vital social infrastructure, which was holding up the last mile of everyday life, and the impact of the pandemic on their life and work became painfully clear. We celebrated, nationally, the role of key workers and communities, saw the best of who we are and could be, and the worst systemic injustice and inequity too.
The pandemic could be described as a warning: a living example that we have and continue to somatically experience together. This is not a historical record, relegated to archives of the past, but something we continue to experience in this very moment: highlighting the structural weaknesses of our existing systems and the utter futility of insisting on 20th Century models, methods, and institutions for the scale and breadth of 21st Century challenges.
We are facing challenges that can’t be merely responded to at one horizon alone, with Kate Raworth and others calling this H1 — the necessary but limited horizon of simply responding to crisis. We are at the heart of an era where we urgently require 21st century missions and goals that centre more fundamental shifts, such as in the foundational role of our economic and land systems.
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
— Milton Friedman
In the years since, we have continued to see and feel how multiple globalised systems are entangled in ways that have cascading impacts on society and the natural world we rely on. This global ‘polycrisis’ affects every aspect of our lives, and is experienced most viscerally as multiple impacts begin to converge on the places we live, play, eat, rest, learn, love, heal and grow.
‘Permacrisis’ (a portmanteau of ‘permanent’ and ‘crisis’) was the Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2022, with the managing director of Collins Learning, Alex Beecroft, quoted as saying that it “sums up quite succinctly how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people”.
From sky rocketing bills and the soaring cost of living, to the amount of energy lost in heating poorly insulated homes, and the strain on the NHS, we know all of these intersecting crises are at breaking point. In addition, we know the scale of the challenges we are facing is large. So any routes out of this that are more regenerative and future facing need to recognise these cascading impacts of our built environment. They need to design strategies that take these impacts into account with social, climate and energy justice firmly at their heart.
These systems-made-visible are viscerally lived in our everyday. They insist that we scaffold an ecologically safe, socially just transition, rebuilding our social contract, our relationships with one another and the natural world around us. This calls on us in the Global North to recognise the role we must play in this future.
We must undo the repercussions of centuries of extraction, resource and supply hoarding — which accelerate deep injustices — and instead, moving towards a radically reparative, restorative, interdependent future, We must humbly be learning from, resourcing, and raising up those who aim to restore our natural ecosystems, and who defend the land from further extraction at this most crucial of times.
We know from our own home, Ladywood in Birmingham — an inner city neighbourhood archetype of many, both the challenges and opportunities are significant. From looking at the Data Portrait of Place and qualitative and quantitative research co created in the work of the first phase of CIVIC SQUARE, we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that we are not meeting the needs of our own place, our collective responsibilities to each other or working within ecological boundaries.
Whilst this can feel alarming, it’s also a chance to deeply and honestly look at where we are, and where we need to get to. We know that we might have to oppose a lot and, more importantly, propose and demonstrate a lot more, but that together we are able to do so.
Overwhelmingly, the Community Portrait of Place revealed deep, untapped vision, energy and passion in every corner of the neighbourhood, at a scale that the climate transition and the bold vision of moving into the safe and just space of the Doughnut requires of us ALL.