We at CIVIC SQUARE have been invited to be part of an evolving programme of interventions, workshops, and platforms to showcase the ways in which architecture might become part of the wider systemic change that puts the planet and people first, and will be contributing our activation of the space on Saturday 18th — Sunday 19th March 2023, 12pm - 5pm for anyone to join and contribute to.
The COVID-19 pandemic could be described as a warning: a living example that we have and continue to somatically experience together — not a historical record, relegated to archives of the past, but something we continue to experience in this very moment that highlights 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.
An image such as the Neighbourhood Doughnut acts as one of the first times we can succinctly and quickly see what the social and ecological health of our places is in a plural way.
There is so much knowledge available to us, so much potential for transformation and so much to gain from this being a collective process. What if this could inspire us rather than terrify or paralyse us?
What if we can unlock a role for everyone in the climate crisis — as described in the IPCC AR6 more clearly — to steward not only a technical transition but a joyful, creative, equitable, imaginative, intergenerational one? What if people build their own homes on micro sites using micro factories in their neighbourhood? What if neighbours learn the skills required for the deep retrofit of their streets? What if infrastructure was designed to be held in the common for the neighbourhood?
What if we understood scale, in a regenerative way, and shared the models, learnings, practice in a distributive by design, open source way? What if everything wasn’t focused on creating a market, and hoping that market will clean up the externalities later? What if we funded and invested in neighbourhood-scale demonstrators that could highlight individual, local, and communal benefits through experimentation and compound learning of how to finance, govern, organise, implement and maintain these collective models?