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A Focus On Ladywood brings together the findings of our Neighbourhood Doughnut demonstrator 2020—2022, including the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait of Place and Good News of B16. This forms part of the Neighbourhood Public Square proposal to contextualise what impact the findings of 3°C Neighbourhood may have on our neighbourhood specifically, and what some of the most significant social and ecological co-benefits we can design into Neighbourhood Public Square are in the face of these.
Protestors Gathered Outside Birmingham City Council’s Chambers on 6th March 2024 | BBC News
Since publishing the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait in 2022, the increasing cost of living has further intensified the challenges faced by our neighbours. Concurrently, Birmingham City Council has grappled with extreme financial strain, declaring bankruptcy in September 2023. This led to the implementation of drastic cuts across essential services throughout the city, from child and adult care, to waste collection, libraries, arts and culture, transport and vital infrastructure such as street lighting.
We know this situation to be typical of cases around the country. Following shortly after Birmingham in November 2023, Nottingham City Council issued a section 114 effectively declaring bankruptcy and one in five councils anticipate bankruptcy over the next 15 months.
Despite deep untapped vision, energy and passion in every corner of the neighbourhood, the Neighbourhood Doughnut Data Portrait of Place (2022) paints a stark picture. The findings indicate how severely our neighbourhood is falling short on meeting the social foundations of those who live here and thriving of people around the world, whilst overshooting both local and global ecological boundaries.
However, the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait isn’t the end of the story; it’s the platform from which to act. When combined with the findings from 3°C Neighbourhood, the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait indicates where our neighbourhood is the most vulnerable, as well as what is already strong and resilient.
In the wider scope of the Neighbourhood Public Square design process, visualising social-ecological interdependencies and trade-offs using Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL)’s Four Lenses Framework has proved essential to make sense of the complex interplay and interdependence between human and beyond-human flourishing in our neighbourhood, indicating opportunities for social, civic, and climate infrastructure to build the regenerative capacity both of Ladywood and the wider systems it sits within for generations to come.
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More granular data, such as that surfaced in our Neighbourhood Doughnut Data Portrait of Place paints a picture of how neighbourhood infrastructure has been overlooked in the context of austerity, how pockets of extreme deprivation go unaddressed, and how the built environment separates Ladywood residents from nearby areas of wealth, resources and investment.
View the Neighbourhood Doughnut Data Portrait of Place: 4 Lenses Rerolled (2022) in a larger format here.
Ladywood has a Biological Inequities Index (BII) score of 16 out of a possible 20 (with 20 the highest). This means that when measuring a range of interdependent environmental stressors, including air, noise, heat and light pollution, combined with measures of deprivation (Index of Multiple Deprivation), there is significant presence of systemic factors associated with a range of long term, negative health outcomes from dementia, diabetes and respiratory diseases to mental health disorders, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
This inequity is also reflected across a number of other indicators. Ladywood constituency is ranked the 7th highest for multiple deprivation across England, which is also the second highest of Birmingham’s ten parliamentary constituencies. Within Ladywood itself, 63% of its LSOAs (Lower Layer Super Output Area) are within the top 10% most deprived areas in England, highlighting the multifaceted inequities both within the neighbourhood itself, as well as compared to Birmingham and England more broadly.
The portrait’s many dimensions capture how this manifests more specifically within lived realities — for example, over 23% of Ladywood’s constituent households experience fuel poverty, highlighting also the inadequacy of the existing built infrastructures with 63% of homes in Ladywood having an EPC rating of D or below.
The social context here presents just one lens as to the scale of necessary transition that Ladywood and neighbourhoods like it represent. Whilst the needs of people in our neighbourhood are not being met, our portrait shows that neither are those of the local ecology that underpin our neighbourhood’s health and resilience. Coupled with the exceedance of the six planetary boundaries, at the city scale it is clear our existing systems and consumption patterns are falling far short of our global responsibilities to people worldwide.
Given the scale and interdependent nature of the polycrisis, Ladywood’s story of social shortfall and ecological overshoot is not unique, but rather outlines a clear trajectory for the necessary systemic transition for neighbourhoods across the UK.
Despite pressing issues, Ladywood has been a hub of 20th-century pioneering models of industry, creativity and community: the resourcefulness and creativity of our neighbourhood has been documented by us, and many others.
As in many other UK towns and cities, the gradual loss of economic opportunities and lack of retention of value within Ladywood’s areas of deprivation will drive increasing social, financial and material precarity in the face of an uncertain world.
The lack of preparedness in the face of the climate risks outlined in 3°C Neighbourhood feels particularly problematic — where many other cities are actively preparing, the financial crisis facing Birmingham 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 to fend for themselves, while the able-to-pay market for private climate mitigation services grows.
