Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore and discuss the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in our rapidly changing world. Today I’m joined by my usual co-host, Shruthi Prakash, hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody!

 

Simone Cicero 

And we are thrilled to welcome our guest for today, visionary community leader and social entrepreneur who has dedicated her career to reimagining how we build and regenerate our cities, Immy Kaur.

 

Immy 

Hi everyone, thank you so much for having me.

 

Simone Cicero 

Hello, Emi, it’s great to have you. Emi is the co-founder and co-director of Civic Square, a Birmingham-based organization focused on participatory civic and social infrastructure. She’s also a founding member of Project 00, a London-based architecture and strategic design practice. Among other achievements, Immy also serves on the advisory team of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab.

 

She works towards sustainable and equitable urban development. I met Immy more than 10 years ago and I had the chance to invite her on a couple of occasions, at some of the conferences that I used to lead in terms of program. And I remember there was quite a lot of enthusiasm for an emergent perspective of how community-led innovation was bubbling at the moment. 

 

Immy, you have been at the forefront of this pioneering space for building new models for civic participation, urban regeneration, emphasizing, of course, how important is collaboration, inclusivity, and sustainability for a discussion on organizing that is in line with the times.

 

And a few weeks ago, I was engaging with some of your recent posts and projects, and I thought about finally asking you to join us for a conversation to discuss essentially the role, the potential, the constraints, and the quite sometimes unimaginable effort needed to rebuild civic society. In cohabitation, complementarity, antithesis, sometimes subsidiarity with what we could call the industrial and even the post-industrial economy. So I would say as a starting point for this conversation, we would really like to ask you to kind of look back at your experience, your incredible experience in civic innovation, and tell us a bit how do you stand today and what are your main learnings from the latest? I know it’s a big question, your learnings from the latest 10, 15 years of your work.

 

Immy 

Yeah, well, that is a huge question. Thank you so much for having me. And it’s lovely to be back as well and to chat with you again. It’s quite strange to think that it’s been 10 to 15 years. Well, I guess like a good place to start is I know you’ve done quite a few of these podcasts or at least one recently with Indy Johar. And I guess a good place to start is like I was getting on with my life, you know, building import like nice things in my city of Birmingham, convening people around interesting ideas, you know, when I was in my early 20s back in 2012, until literally and quite metaphorically, and Indy tapped me on the shoulder at an event in Birmingham when I was fairly young.

 

And he said to me, do you recognize what you’re building here? And I was like, well, I’m in the middle of an event right now. So, I mean, quite literally, yes, I do recognize what we’re doing, because I’m slightly busy right now and who are you? But what he meant really was a much broader question about the, did I understand or recognize the power of the civic economy at the time, the compendium for the civic economy by 00 had just been released.

 

It was a completely different political era in the UK. And I had some understanding, lived and learned experience from what we were organizing at the time, which was, you know, an exciting and convivial and very diverse TEDx event that was quite different to many others that I’d seen. 

 

But I hadn’t really understood this idea of the power of the civic economy, the power of communities, the future that would lie ahead for us. And so that very quickly led me to, if any of you have ever met Indy, it very quickly led to me leaving my job and joining 00 and learning quite quickly. 

 

Actually, and really unlearning very, very quickly from a range of incredible people such as Indy, such as people like Alastair Parvin from Open Systems Lab and Wikihouse, from a whole range of people at that time that were kind of leaving their industries as were typically understood, such as architecture and starting to look at the architecture of systems, starting to look at what Indy would now talk about as the Dark Matter, starting to look at this more transformational role of people in their places. 

 

And for me, like a really big moment in that was, I said unlearning before, because actually, you know, as an immigrant, kid of immigrants, you know, I’d gone to school and I had worked hard, I had worked hard, and I had passed everything in all the ways in which you should. And I’d done every degree and every experience as you should. 

 

But one thing that got completely obliterated in that. And I hadn’t realized until I walked into the office at 00 was this idea of like, I didn’t understand as a 25 year old that we as people build our systems and processes and to change them, you don’t need permission. I hadn’t understood this, right? It was such an obvious thing to every single person in 00. I remember saying to Alistair Parvin, who’s doing a lot of work on housing, technology, land system, planning system, open systems, dab and wiki house. I remember saying to him just over 10 years ago, who said, who said you could do this? And he was like, what do you mean? It was like, who said you could just decide that the housing system needs to change or planning system or the land contract needs to change. Who said that you could do this? And he was like, I think he thought I was joking at first.

 

And I was like, no, no, I’m being really serious. Like here I was wandering around watching these people building incredible things. And I was literally asking like, how do they know that they are allowed to do this? And I say this now because it really showed me how little my education in all its glory had even prepared me or had even helped me to understand that we make and remake our worlds. And how are they made and remade? 

 

And another critical moment from that time that just set that whole journey into the flow that I’ll talk to you about now was like, I remember Alistair also saying to me, we were outside somewhere and he was like, what is it under your feet? And I was like, what do mean? He was like, what’s under your feet? And I was like, Earth? Land? Like, I couldn’t understand the question.

 

And, you know, he asked it a few times again and he was like, no, but what is it under your feet? I was like, soil. And he was like, cool. And this thing that he went on to tell me basically shaped everything that I’ve done ever since and built this confidence that has now gone on to like shape the story of impact to Birmingham and Civic Square. Which is he was like, you’ve got to always remember that the what’s under your feet is the soil, the soil and the earth. What’s under your feet isn’t land. And when he unpacked that for me more, I understood something really important. He was like, land is the human set of papers and contracts that we’ve made with the soil underneath our feet. And the soil is the natural part of the Earth’s resources. And everything that we’ve made, we can remake. 

 

And suddenly, as a 25 year old and I’m I guess too many people listening to this podcast now you’d be like well that’s pretty obvious but actually it really wasn’t and I don’t think it’s really obvious to a lot of people and so what I started to go on to this journey was this this incredible interplay between the systems the cultures the norms the stories the contracts the dark matter as Indy would talk about under the surface that drive everything we see and we do and how we act and the rules of our economy and how we contract and relate to land and to materials and to all of this. 

 

And at the same time was amongst this incredible movement of thousands of young and young at heart people in the heart of Birmingham wanting to be part of a story of making and remaking their cities. And it was not a romantic story. It was brutal. And it took loads of unlearning. I remember the first day that we opened Impact Hub Birmingham or the first few months where we were thinking about it, which I’ll share a bit more about in a second. Like, I didn’t even understand that that involved me making my own company. 

 

Like, for me to make the thing that I wanted to see in the world, I had to make the company, make the rules, figure out the new organizational design, figure out how we organize, how we come together, how we interplay these complex systems under the surface with the everyday reality of people and people’s needs and their imaginations, and starting to really understand how to situate that in a rapidly changing democratic and climate and ecological societal surroundings.

 

So this was a really important part of this story. It was critical for us in, and it was critical for me because it was like someone dunking your head in cold water really quickly and saying, the world, there’s all this possibility, but you’re going to have to roll your sleeves up and you are going to have to really fundamentally understand the power you have in making and remaking. so that was, that’s like the background to how we got here.

 

From there, we went on to build a crowdfunding build Impact Hub Birmingham, which was like this first prototype into this story. It was understanding, like, again, I’ll mention Indy a few times in this early story, but like, you know, again, he was like, you know, the Impact Hub is going to fail, but you’ve got to do it anyway. And I was like, what do you mean? 

 

It was like, there’s no amount of brilliance and civic energy and community energy that can outsmart a system and rules that are designed to extract all the value out of the civic economy. Like currently, where all value is created and who is able to capture it is not weighted in the direction of the work you’re doing. But you have to build this place. You have to build the soft and hard power. You have to learn how to organize. You have to understand deeply how the hardwired codes and rules of our land system, of our economy, of all of these different things, how they play out in reality. And so we crowdfunded this incredible space. We co-built it with open source furniture. We ran it together. It was, you know, back in 2014, 15, this incredibly convivial, beautiful, diverse space in the center of Birmingham that was using co-working and event spaces to keep its business model working, but it was trying to show what is this future, which I know Simone, when we talked years ago, this idea of like moving beyond social enterprises as a bullet and towards as a silver bullet of how we’re going to, you know, tackle these large entrenched social issues towards how we organize for systemic change. It was right in the heart of that moment. 

 

And so we ran this incredible, very popular, very successful space, both you know, as a model, but also in how it was organizing around convening decolonially convening communities to think about land and housing injustice, climate injustice, and all of these sorts of things. But lo and behold, after two or three years, we learned very clearly that no amount of incredible socially focused work on the surface could outsmart a system that extracts all the value that the civic economy creates and captures it into private good, right? And I know Indy’s told these stories, you might’ve told it on your podcast, but in many other places, you know, the value of a house is not the bricks and mortar. You pick up a house from the centre of London and you go and put it in a field, no matter how beautiful it is in the middle of Wales, and the value of that house is going to decrease because the value of a house is made up by all the public goods it has access to. The schools, the tree-lined streets, the healthcare, the high streets, the things that make that a desirable place to live. And this is true of work like ours, right? So, we created incredible value, in this case, fairly good financial value, but that was captured through the increasing of rents every year through landlordism. But all these spillover effects of capitals beyond financial, social, natural, know, many, many other types of capital. Those are all captured by house prices, by private development. They’re captured by the landlords. They are captured in all sorts of different ways. And even if they’re captured, they’re really struggled to be valued in a way that is meaningful. And so you got to the end of five years at the Impact Hub Birmingham and you, we realized really clearly that this is not just an accidental by-product  of a system not working well. This is absolutely how it is designed to work. Fundamentally at the heart of this is going to have to be a rebuilding of a relationship with land contract, with the rules of our economy, with where value is created and where it’s captured. 

 

What then that that work is situated within because we were getting more and more of a very, very clear understanding about the severe impacts of climate and ecological emergency and how it would show up and how the poly or meta crisis, whichever way you want to, what it would look like in the global north, even though if you’d been in the colonial organizing, you’d really understood that quite deeply from what was already happening in the global south. 

 

And so that led us to Civic Square, which was like, okay, there’s so many layers of this. Like we, it is not true that we can work sequentially one thing at a time. We sort this one problem out, then we’ll do that. We’re going to have to work in these really creative, thoughtful, broad, systemic ways that look at many different types of people, ways of thinking, many different codes and everyday practices are going to have to play together. 

 

And one really critical learning I had at the end of that, which just is the thing that I just want to share to give the foundations for Civic Square was, okay, we’re going to have to look at all the different layers of this from how land is owned and stewarded and understood to the rules of the economy to how the site is that these sites are financed, how we understand business models, how we organize. But one of the things I learned really clearly from Impact Hub was that almost like there was three sort of layers of matter. If we’ve talked about the Dark Matter, everything under the surface, codes, rules, norms, economic ideas, land contracts, legislation, policy, all the things that you would have heard from dark matter labs, there’s this “Dark Matter”.

 

That’s not the only work that I’d seen was playing out here. What we were understanding was that there was this, there’s also this “Everyday Matter”, how that plays out in people’s lives in the everyday, how you organize around people’s everyday experiences and their connections to these huge challenges, injustices, re-imaginations, and how that plays out and how you organize around that. And then there was this “Dream Matter”, the space that you have to activate that goes beyond any understanding of our current system and is able to imagine possibilities far beyond our current ideas. You can see that in lots of people’s work, know, in Dark Matter Labs’ work around homes that own themselves, rivers that have their own rights, ideas that are, future-tive, but also return to indigenous ideas from many centuries ago that have been erased and co-opted. 

 

And so there’s this piece where we were understanding these three matters playing out together – Which is you stay in the dark matter too long and everyone’s like, okay, you’re telling me we’ve got to completely redesign the economic and land system before we can do anything. And it feels really demotivating. You stay in the everyday matter too long. People are, they come together and they’re empowered and they’re like, but it’s not just, just like our learnings at the hub, it’s not just how much good work we do. It’s not just how many good civic and community ideas there are. 

 

The rules of the game aren’t in aren’t working for us. And so people then have a thirst to want to dismantle those systems. You stay in the dream matter too long and people are like, okay, that radical imagination is amazing. And I can see and taste and feel ideas that I’m returning to or ideas in the future, but how does that play out now? And so for us, what we really, really learn about more deeply was this interplay between the Everyday the Dark and the Dream where you have to, it’s like a recipe all the time. Different pieces of our work start in different places, but actually it’s when they’re all playing together that you start to understand how that plays out in the everyday, in places, in tangible and practical ways of our taste. you can taste and see and feel now, but are also redesigning that dark matter, but are also not losing our imagination about what could be just because of the tyranny of now. 

 

And so that’s what really laid the groundwork for Civic Square. Civic Square, just to give a really brief introduction to it, and then I’ll hand back over to you. Civic Square is really focused on that deep demonstration of the different layers of what will unlock a civic economy where people are at the forefront of their climate and ecological, social economic transition. And we can talk a little bit about what I mean by that later on, because I think we’re in a very particular time. I think the civic economy has a very particular, this civic and socially focused work has a very particular role to play in this time. It isn’t just generic and like important in it’s like just in a, a beautiful and moral moral sense, which I think we all understand intuitively, but I think it has a very strategic and important role to play. 

 

So Civic Square is very much focused on building and demonstrating, deeply demonstrating the neighbourhood infrastructure, social and civic, that puts communities at the forefront of their climate, ecological, social, economic transition, and what it would mean to unlock that in a time of deep crisis and and furling emergencies. And so I’ll talk a bit more about that in a second, but I’ll just hand back over to you. That’s kind of like the history of how we got here and some connections to some other podcasts that I know you probably have already done with Indian Dark Matter Labs.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yes.

 

Yeah, we’ll have them linked in the notes. Shruti, do you want to jump in? Because I wanted to echo some of the pieces of your question that we discussed with some other elements.

 

Shruthi Prakash Yeah. So, I mean, for me, the question is right at the beginning, right? So what, let’s say, defines communities or civic bodies, cities, neighborhoods, and so on. Where are these applicable and who and what defines the boundaries therein? 

 

So when you, let’s say, start a project, essentially, where does the base begin? you let’s say operate with existing systems and why is it also the best way to implement multidisciplinary practices to approach it from a civic city, neighborhood, urban space sort of point of view?

 

Immy 

Yeah, so I guess like this has been a question like right at the heart of our work forever, right? how, cause it’s the golden question, like what scale is a scale to organize at? And so I’m gonna share some thinking about how we’ve approached it and why for us now, the home street and neighborhood is a very powerful scale. It’s not the only scale, but why for us it is a powerful scale. 

 

So early on, it was very much about around organizing, like starting where you are and starting where the energy is. And for everybody that will be different, right? For an entrepreneur, it will be like the people within the organization that are moving in that way. I’m guessing for like Indy and  Alistair 15, 20 years ago, it was like architects saying no to what was happening at that time, which was, you know, a complete obsession with the hero architect and the most like fanciest, highly expensive building that they could attach their legacy to rather than something more meaningful for architecture. 

 

So like right at the beginning of this work, I don’t think there is a panacea. I think you have to start where you are and convene where the energy is and where it’s in some ways that dissenting against the status quo. That’s what I’ve seen across so many of like how it Tedx Birmingham was organizing at the time, how I saw 00 come together at the time. 

 

And then, and then from there, all these like other like theories I started to have access to – like the power of organizing at the scale of the city, the power of organizing at the regional scale, the power of organizing at the nation state, right? All of these things which have like, natural layers that we can have affinity to, but also many things that are like troubling, for example, like the nation state and the challenges that has. 

 

So for me, like early on, I was just really experiencing all of this. The beginning of TEDx and Impact Hub was very much, like I said, start where you are, organize around a community. At that time, it was really like social entrepreneurs, social change people in the city of Birmingham. So you could have kind of said those two layers brought a whole group of people together. What I experienced from 00 was like a community of people saying no to their industries and coming together in a different way. And so you see this like across lots of different things. And then, and then for us, you know, what I can say is that absolutely every scale from, you know, the household to the nation, nation state, you can see very different roles for it, very different types of working very different ways in which it can influence and can’t influence. And I have like a lot of respect for many different layers of that. 

 

I think some interesting things started to happen for us though, as we got further into this journey 2018, 2019. The re-understanding and the re-socialization of ideas that I know go back thousands of years, but the idea of eco and bio-regionalism, this was really interesting to me as a scale to understand ourselves in relation to resources and to materiality, which started to break the bonds of like the traditional you know, home street, neighborhood, city, region. And this was a really interesting way for me to really learn about what it means to return to being in relationality with the land in a way that was actually organizing around some very natural boundaries. And then the other other layer of that was like, how did we like really land on the home street and neighborhood scale? 

 

Well, for us, it was like a natural conclusion. And, you know, lots of us who were working together at that time from across 00 are like spread out working over very different scales, right? Like you could, you could see Dark Matter Labs working at this global and planetary scale, and can see Open Systems Lab working at this kind of national, national scale in terms of the planning frameworks, in terms of the land contract, and then this international scale with things like Wiki house. So it isn’t really to say that there’s a right scale.

 

But what we really understood about where do we need to go next was that what is the scale that’s both big enough and small enough to deeply demonstrate? And this really came from Dan Hill’s Designing Missions book, which I really, appreciate because actually what he started to do is build an incredible, tangible and practical story about how demonstration at the home street and neighborhood scale can show you like, deep layers of system transformation in practice and what that might do in terms of the organizing of your economy, of showing what could be possible in terms of like showing how much of these transformations from land ownership to materiality to so on could be demonstrated at that scale and then could be used as really tangible, deep examples of the level of transition and transformation we need. 

 

Because a lot of our work is like, you know, we really are pushing, we’re pushing beyond what is like acceptable in the current Overton window or window of possibility. And so how do you do that? Right? You can’t shift a whole city there or a whole country there or a whole region there quickly. 

 

But what you can, what you can start to do is show deep demonstrations of completely different ways of interacting. Now it’s not utopian, right? Because those boundaries very much still have to interact with many other things. But the other layer, just to pull it right back to where our work started, which is in that deeply participatory layer, was that what we are getting to is a layer of severity and interconnection between our social challenges that are so almost abstract for the everyday person to be able to understand. And it’s like theoretical complexity that actually the home street and neighbourhood starts to become a really powerful site for reimagination and for liberation, which is what our work is really connected to. So imagine we take, and this has really been the learning over the last five years and hugely accelerated by COVID. 

 

Because if you look at the scale of the home and the street. Even if you’re having a terrible time and living in poor conditions, it’s a layer that you really interact with, understand, and for many people have probably the greatest sense of agency, right? Like right in front of your front door or in the walls of your house or on your street. And so when we’re talking about huge, like big ideas, like the energy crisis or what is happening with like our biodiversity or our carbon emissions or so on. The everyday person is not walking down the street thinking in those terms, but they are able to interact with the energy crisis by looking at the impact on their bills in their home. They are able to interact with thinking about, for example, carbon emissions and retrofit through the fact that their home is cold and damp and leaky and affecting their children’s health and affecting their health and creating all sorts of other challenges. So they might not be thinking in the way that a lot of the theorists think about that, but they can deeply understand it. And what I’d found was this massive like infantilization of people in their places as if somebody was going to come along and sort this out and then tell them to sort that out. 

 

And in the UK for us, it was really triggered by the UK’s retrofit, national retrofit strategy going so poorly, low uptake, low trust, lots of work returning to, lots of money returning to national government, poor quality work, completely out of sync with the scale, out of sync and not commensurate with the scale of challenges we are facing. And what you started to realise was that here’s a story of carbon emissions, of housing stock, of housing fabric and all these things and people aren’t connecting to that.

 

But nobody anywhere that I know is saying, I don’t want a home that is cheaper to run, that is warmer, that is better for my health, better for our children’s health, that is better for the planet. No one’s actively rejecting that. And so for us, what we started to really realize is that the home street and neighborhood both in Dan Hill’s framing of this strategic site of transition and transformation that you can show new economies, new stories, new ways of organizing in a depth that is small enough to really do that and big enough to really show something that could spread, whilst connecting to how do you really unlock the participatory power and agency of people. 

 

And I’ll pause there to see if you want to share anything back. But what I was going to say was that piece about the unlocking of the civic and participatory capacity for me isn’t just a nice, moral, lovely story. There is deep precedence all through society, especially in UK history, that whenever we’ve needed to go through large scale transitions, it has never worked from a simply a top down policy or legislative approach – it has had to involve such a wide range of actors in that story. And it has had to involve a real unlocking of civic capacity. And I’ve got a few UK examples of that, that our work connects to. But I’ll just pause there if you want to ask me any questions. But I think the critical piece for us is where those two stories meet the scale of transition and transformation we need to step into and how you know, we’ve got so many historical precedents of why that is so critical.

 

Simone Cicero 

I was thinking, I mean, of course, you said a lot of fascinating and important things and I can see also resonance, of course, with other conversations we had with Indy on this podcast and other players. 

 

So just to try to make a little bit of recap also for our listeners. So what I see, so our question essentially originally was why the neighborhood, why the house, why the home or the street or the neighborhood as the primary context of articulating a response or a creative act in front of the changes we are seeing. 

 

And I think it’s fascinating because basically what I captured is that working at this scale makes it tangible for people. makes them, it’s their reality, essentially. And I think it’s fascinating because so far, especially in the industrial age in general, we have worked a lot to separate the organizational problem and the product design problem and the service design problem completely disconnected from people’s realities. So it was like an abstract practice. 

 

And most of the value we used to consume or produce in the economy was mediated by the market. So you kind of have this idea of the economy in the industrial age as something that happens somewhere and then your life happens somewhere else, which I think the work you’re doing instead is trying to revert, is trying to recognize that life happens at those scales and there are different economies. And at the same time, I must say that I see that very interesting at the moment today, and maybe also you talked about that. We are seeing a lot of focus now coming back into scarce resources, scarce assets. 

 

So for example, there are theories of startups now that tell, know, digital startups are no more interesting. We need to make, you know, startups that leverage on tangible resources and and recreate value intangible assets that we mobilize or we own actually. For example, Sam Lessin’s Slow Ventures talking about the growth buyouts and, know, basically telling people, know, software services is no more an interesting business. have to integrate supply chains, otherwise your venture will never have any value, especially in a world of AIs that know, basically commoditize knowledge work. 

 

I think it’s interesting because essentially what we have to capture also as designers and entrepreneurs is that there is a large possibility now for, you know, cooperative structures that maybe can actually, you know, operate in this space, you know, in this more tangible local space.

 

Another question that I wanted to ask you is about value, you know, because of course, to rebuild this economy, we need different perceptions and theories of value. yeah, of course, when you move into this relational and small scales like home, street, and neighborhood, you kind of end up in a space where the economy is much more relational, much less transactional. 

 

So it of tells me that we didn’t need a new organizational agreement because the organizational agreements that we have are mainly based on a transactional economy. So when we move into a relational economy, the organizational agreements we used to have don’t fit very well. And Indy speaks about this idea of economies of care. And of course, the need to have also new and different thesis of human development and this connects with what I was saying before, that they need to look at value in a different way. 

 

Because otherwise, if we don’t look at value in a different way and we look into, for example, just financial value or maybe making money that they can put into a bank account, all that happens into your neighborhood or home or a street doesn’t really count much because you cannot really make money into and put money into the bank if you work at that level. 

 

But maybe there are different perceptions of value that should be factored in. And so just to close this up and push, pass it back to you. So what are the frameworks, tangible frameworks, patterns that you have seen emerging in terms of how people reconsider value and maybe what kind of metrics can be used to measure the success of initiatives in the civic economy that are no more, know, be seen anymore into the top now managerial economy that you have clearly identified as failing in terms of, for example, the retrofit initiative that you mentioned. So what are the new metrics, new frameworks, potentially also new institutional forms and agreements that you have seen successfully creating value for people that people have really considered impactful, meaningful for them and not classified as a nice thing that I can do in the weekend or maybe a corner shop side initiative that will never really have an impact on my life versus my corporate job or my typical other organizational agreements I’m involved in.

 

Immy

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Simone. I guess like, so yeah, I mean, you you already have like this big picture thesis about the reorganisation of our economy, of how we understand value of human development that I think Indy talks about like really eloquently. And I guess like what I’ve been sort of trying to battle with or try to understand is what next in what direction and how to start to bring some of those like really big ideas into form and in practice. I’ll talk a little bit about like some of the frameworks and tools that we’ve been working with and some of the things that I’ve learned that you basically have to build what you need and then socialize it. It’s this thing I’ve like very little has been able to be picked up off the shelf and just feel like, okay, like I can see how exactly what we need to do, how we get there. 

 

And so a couple of just like all that frameworks and tools type of piece. We’ve been working really closely with the concept of the donor as a compass, right? Like it hasn’t got all of the answers to how you get there. And I think it’s really important. Like when you’re considering a framework, a powerful framework that has now got really socialized into our everyday conscience of the fact that the challenge of our generation is really simple. Unless we build an economy that sits within the safe space between our planetary boundaries and our social needs, we will, as Indy talks about, walk ourselves into self-termination.

 

And then that is very much connected to what you talked about at the beginning, Simone, around like, it’s okay to talk about the tangible economy and the fact that we need to build in place and in ways that transcends that transactional economy. 

 

But the reality is also is that we have a great amount of deep scarcity in our physical and material resources and in the work that we’ve done recently with dark matter labs called Three Degree Neighborhood. We really talk about the extent of what that looks like for the rich Western countries who have taken far more than their fair share of material resources for centuries. And so there’s this really complex piece now where the doughnut situates for us as a really strong compass. This is the direction we need to move into.

 

But like that very deep understanding for me that, wow, okay, like every interaction and agreement and there’s so much work to get us there that that’s the work that we’re gonna have to really commit to. And so, you know, in terms of that and Designing Missions by Don Hill, these are two like guiding frameworks for us around the power of system demonstration and the kind of economic direction that we have to head in. 

 

From there, then we’ve been doing quite a lot of work. There’s some work in Denmark by Home Earth that have broken down the doughnut into the context of the built environment and helped to start look at what that looks like across the physical built environment and the work that we’ve been doing. So what we’re starting to see is this emergence of then you know, these big frameworks starting to play out in a level of technical and granular detail. 

 

There’s quite a lot of really interesting work Danny Hill Hansen, who’s also part of the Doughnut Urban Development crew, has been looking at like roadmaps for deeply like honest transitions about where we’re at with materiality in the built environment. 

 

What’s interesting is the built environment helps to really make those shifts real for people as well, because it’s what you see, feel and experience around you. And connected to that home street neighborhood layer, we found that to be really powerful. Hence why I focus really on things like retrofit and the building or the retrofitting of civic infrastructure is a really tangible way to land that story between your physical and your material transition.

 

and then the tangible and intangible economies of care and all the other capitals beyond finance that matter within that. 

 

We’ve been doing work with Emily Harris at Dark Matter Labs on starting to show this multi-capital economy in the balance sheet and in the spreadsheet. It’s very developmental work at the moment. We know there are things that tried to do things like that in the UK, like social return on investment and all of these sorts of layers, but they just didn’t go – far enough they were quickly co-opted and greenwashed as ways to save every pound that you’re spending in the economy, you’re creating all this other value. But the truth is, is that this was easily co-opted and not value that was really playing out in people’s lives. 

 

So we’ve been starting to play with some of that, like the balance sheet and the counting work with colleagues at Dark Matter. And you’ll know that a lot of them are working on many different versions of this from trees as infrastructure, trying to look at how you value all of the different layers of value that a tree brings, not just have it as a cost on the balance sheet, which a council then sees as something that is, you know, too much to maintain and can justify chopping down instead of seeing it as all the values that it creates beyond that. 

 

Then what I’ve learned over the last four or five years is well, the last 10 years really, is how much that part of the work is critical in terms of the tools and being able to show models that go beyond that. But very practically, I think the biggest thing that shifted like many, many people’s understanding of this entanglement at a neighborhood scale or in the work that I see with many neighborhood demonstrators, because Civic Square where isn’t the only one. Like there’s so many people working in this way across the UK now looking to deeply demonstrate at the neighbourhood scale what could be possible for a different story. 

 

It was actually COVID. It was COVID that showed the interplay between all of these different things, right? It showed the fragility of our supply chains. It showed the power of the last mile. It showed the massive difference in outcomes in places depending on a range of other conditions around racialization, around poverty, around quality of the built environment, around connectivity in some places that were materially suffering from far more poverty than other areas. Actually, the social capital meant that there was much higher rates of better outcomes than in places where isolation and loneliness had kicked in despite more material resource. 

 

And so there’s all these layers that happened in COVID that started to blow open that story of like different forms of value and capital and where we needed to understand and rewire some of that. And so, you know, that as a practical has really, really helped us.

 

I think layering on, and so what that also does is really show all of these other entangled layers of the quality of your housing, the quality of your social capital, the quality of care capital in the place, the connectivity between people, the infrastructure that enabled certain emergency responses or didn’t. These started to show all these other forms of capital beyond.

 

financial that is often the one that we transact over playing out in a way that we could really start to tangibly talk about and surface and show this story. I think what has come since then though, and it’s really been socialized by many people across Doughnut for Urban Development, Dark Matter Labs, think the built environment industry is coming to terms with this more quickly, is then this understanding of like that material scarcity how these stories you’ll hear in the UK, we need to 300,000 new homes, but we don’t have the carbon budget for that. We don’t have the materials for that. 

 

So what’s starting to interplay and what I think is starting to happen is this story where, you know, Indy will talk about it far more, the intangible, the role of the intangible economy, the role of humans in craft and in care and in creativity in the things that only humans can do really well – and then what the role of technology in this kind of like wider story that we’ve, you know, for many of us have had to be kind of like tech will save the world story that we’ve all been stuck in for the last 20 years has been, you know, organizing around what is the appropriate role for that technology. 

 

Currently we know what it’s driving in terms of misinformation and so many other things as well. And so I don’t think that I have a clean answer from how we get from here to there. But what I do think we’re starting to see is a material scarcity meeting the increasing understanding of like the power and role of humans, meeting the story of like many other capitals. Intuitively, we know this, but actually you’re starting to see the people working on the institutional forms, the balance sheets, the accounting and starting to show this at a scale that is interesting. But I think we have to elongate out how quickly we think some of that transition is going to happen. And personally, and this is a very personal view, I think that some of that is going to accelerate by more crisis. I don’t think we’re going to get pushed there or we’re going to start to adopt or understand these other ways of organizing without more crisis forcing us into some of the stories that just aren’t working. Because at the moment we can see the late stage of those stories holding on more than ever, right, in a way that is quite terrifying as well.

 

Simone Cicero 

Just maybe a quick point before the closing, would like to ask you, you spoke about this idea of starting to work on a balance sheet and new institutional forms. Do you have any, maybe any example or directions or new experiments being done? in terms of collaboration between, for example, existing corporations and civic players or government and cooperatives. So what is the most interesting institutional agreements that are emerging?

 

Immy 

Yeah, yeah, so I guess what’s most interesting for us is, you know, what at the heart of the work that we’re doing, we’re trying to, we’re currently building or retrofitting a large, old industrial site into what we’re talking about as the neighbourhood public square. Examples of civic and social infrastructure at the heart of the neighbourhood that supports putting communities and the natural world right back at the forefront of the transitions and transformations we need to make. It’s very much built on this idea of like other times of large-scale transition in the UK, social housing, the NHS, the education and library system. A lot of these new public goods of the future at that time were developed by the cooperative working class organising that happened on the ground. So many, people might know the NHS has its roots in cooperative medical aid societies in South Wales that organised around the possibility of universal healthcare through cooperative organising nearly 40 years before we saw the NHS, which was then a whole melee of actors coming together and spurred on by crisis and the need to rebuild – albeit in a very imperial backdrop as well in the UK. 

 

So for us, we’re trying to build that infrastructure in the image of showing the sorts of retrofit and reimagination of our built environment and our spaces for the civic and social economy to thrive and to co-lead that transition. At the heart of that then, we need to do many things, right? We’re innovating at the scale of the land contract, looking at how we first of all, you know, even get land into civic and community hands. From there, looking at what new forms of stewardship look like, and that’s connecting to work in Dark Matter Labs around many work, much work that they have around this idea of land owning itself or Open Systems Lab, new types of tenure in fair hold. And so we’re looking at that layer. We’re then looking at how the site is financed. So what type of money comes in? What sort of value can they look for beyond financial? And so that’s where the multi-capital accounting and value piece is coming in. 

 

Now, of course, that means at first we have to work with foundations, philanthropy, wealth, social investors that are actually interested in that. We’re not going down to the high street bank right now and saying, hi, will you look at these other forms of value as a return or a relationship? So we’ve got a range of funders and philanthropic investors and high net worths that are interested in that layer of looking at the value created by at a site like this in many different ways. 

 

That’s connected to the work that Dark Matter Labs released in 2018 called Smart Commons. If anybody wants to go back to some of that early thinking about how you then build and understand these other forms of value. And then, you know, at the heart of the operating model is the building of a real world endowment at the heart of that. So looking at what it means to create distributed endowment mechanisms, and this is more a near future thing rather than long term one, because we have these massive accumulations of capital in UK philanthropy and in UK wealth. So that’s a that’s like a first step to try and distribute some of that and look at what those distributed endowments can create. 

 

All the way to like the design where we’re working at many different layers on ideas of reuse and disassembly. So that’s changing relationships around demolition and material flows. We’re looking at waste streams in the city to look at how that can be reorganized to create a new possibility. We’re working with natural and bio-based materials to look at what that can reorganize in terms of our material economy. So what happens is like as you’re looking up the stack of of City Square from the rules under the surface to the physical infrastructure and then the way in which people and the more than human world are relating with it. What we’re trying to do is reorganize at every scale. So our work is like full to the brim of partners across the built environment, across the city, across philanthropy, foundations, across other demonstrators, across organizations like Dark Matter Labs. And so what makes our work incredibly complex, right? Because if you went and stood in the middle of our work, what you’d say is intuitively, this feels great. Communities have the access to the infrastructure they need. We are seeing all sorts of forms of capital play out here in terms of care, creativity, craft. 

 

The sites are fit for the future, they’re focusing on adapting to the climate emergency and so on and so on, right? So like, the thing is when the story of our work is working really well, you intuitively feel it because you are cared for, you are resourced, you can see it and feel it tangibly in your home street and neighbourhood. You can tell that your children live in a comfortable home that is not giving them illnesses, they’re going to a school that is well resourced and, you know, connected to their neighbourhood, they’re walking down a street that is tree lined and, you know, you, the thing is, like, intuitively, people really deeply understand this and you know when you see and feel it. But the reality of building that to be the norm is a huge, huge, like, undertaking that I 15 years ago at the beginning of this podcasts that I talked about could never have understood like how this is going to take the careful and meticulous redesigning of what we account for, our relationship with land, our relationship materials, our relationship with one another, all these different layers of the deep detail, how you contract with your team, how you, you know, like every layer we are having to build the contracts, the codes, the relationships, the balance sheets, the funding asks, the image. We’re having to build every single thing that we need. And I guess I just hadn’t really imagined that. 

 

So when you imagine this work really practically, it feels very human. But in reality, the complexity comes at not just the scale of everything that’s coming down on us. It’s also at the amount of layers of redesign of relationships of systems, of process, of contracts, of legislation, of policy, that you need to, and at every turn when we are trying to do something intuitively human, for example, use natural and bio-based materials in our retrofit rather than petrochemical materials, you realise there’s a legislation there stopping that from happening and you’ve got to redesign all of that. So the nitty-gritty work of the home street and neighbourhood really allows you to see that wider system in practice and start to convene partners and yes, to go back to your original question, Simone, that involves a serious amount of partners who are innovating so many different layers from land contracts to material realities to accounting possibilities to how we finance regeneratively and so on and so on. 

 

And so most of our work is situated in a deep ecosystem of many different adjacent possibilities. And that is without even like the, you know, I’m in a city where the city council has just announced bankruptcy. We’re in a wider context where we know how much is happening in a political and sphere of democracy around. And so these things are, you know, all interacting with one another. And so, so for me, the way that I work through all of that is that those tools, those demonstrating of possibilities, those other ways of being, we’re trying to move through them as quickly and as thoughtfully and boldly and as ambitiously as possible so that no doubt continue to experience the impacts of the poly crisis in more obvious ways in places that there are these other ways of organizing that can be picked up. 

 

So there is a reason for our pace. It’s actually quite counterintuitive because much of the regenerative world that we want to build involves completely removing that pace from the way in which we’re working in our economy. But we’re trying to do that because I want there to be more things that can stick when we no doubt experience what we did in COVID where we weren’t ready in our context, philanthropy snapped back, wealth snapped back, so many things that we had started to make deep progress on, people kind of just snapped back because they saw COVID as a one-off, one-off instead of as a real deep example of the scale of reorganisation that we’re going to need.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. I mean, there’s a lot for us to process and gain from a lot of this. Yeah, it’s very inspiring to hear you and I hope that it sort of goes in that direction. 

 

So in our closing of our podcast, we ask our guests to share something called breadcrumbs. So essentially suggestions on maybe movies, books, podcasts, music, anything that inspires and motivates you in your journey.

 

Immy 

Yeah, so I think I’ve mentioned a few as we’ve as we’ve like, headed on through. I think fiction wise, Amitav Ghosh’s – Nutmeg’s Curse. I would really encourage people to read that. It’s an incredibly terrifying, moving, thoughtful piece of work. And connected to that, anything that Amitav Ghosh has written, I would thoroughly, thoroughly recommend.

 

And I would also, in our work, point you to the Three-Degree Neighbourhood research in collaboration with Dark Matter Labs, which tries to look at some of these really complex, knotty challenges and problems and looks at what a transformative approach to our neighbourhoods could look like working within the means of everything that we already know is possible.

 

And finally, Maurice Mitchell’s writing on organizations. If you’re in the thick of actually running something and all of the possibility and imagination that people like me or Indy or other people come onto this podcast and say, well, all of this is going to need to happen. You know, one of the things I would say is that I am also in the midst of working within this economy, within the rules that we are currently sat within trying to build and run something, which is incredibly difficult because we have so many like material, social, ecological, psychological layers pouring down on us, on our teams, on all sorts. And actually the building of the work and organizations that are trying to do this work is not easy.

 

When you’re on a podcast like this, can make it, it can sound like, okay, so you’re just doing all this work when actually we all know it’s that huge personal and collective cost. You know, all of us talk quite openly about what that looks like. But Maurice Mitchell wrote a really beautiful piece a couple of years ago on building organizations. And I would thoroughly recommend that. And I’ll share the links with the team as well so they can be in the bottom of the article.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. I mean, I’m just offering a little bit of a final remark to our audience. I think what I bring home is that, of course, there is such an interlocking of lock-ins that make it quite unlikely that we’re going to solve these conundrums starting from the big systemic lock-ins, but rather your approach seems to be very much about prototyping modular solutions that can be also reused and reconnected and trying to keep these solutions, let’s say, framed into the, for example, the Doughnut model and framework so that we at every context where we prototype solutions, we keep in mind that there are constraints that need to be put in place when you move away from an abstraction economy into a situated economy, much more into the space, into the context, into the community, the materiality of our experience. 

 

I think overall, feels like really we have to recast our idea of what does it mean to organize, what does it mean to create services and products into a much more material and relational reality. That’s the overall message, I think. So thank you so much for the conversation. I think it’s going to be very, very interesting for our listeners. I hope you also enjoyed some of the questions today with us.

 

Immy

Yeah, thank you so much, Simone and Shruthi. It’s lovely to have a conversation. And yeah, in your wrap-up, I fully agree. It’s really important that we don’t both lose the integrity of the worlds that we know are more possible and the stories of injustice that we have overcome in different ways, particularly as someone who is in the UK as a result of much of that. But at the same time, is the utopia can sit and thrive within understanding and being honest about where we are. 

 

And I think things like the Doughnut helps to remind you of that, right? They help to remind you that there isn’t limitless material, there’s limitless imagination, there’s limitless intangible care, craft, creativity, all of that but the future is not limitless. You know, stewarding of a new age of imperialism, where we extract and we extract and we extract and we understand that those impacts happen to other people somewhere else. We can see it and we understand it more than ever. And so to really unleash creativity and possibility within those boundaries and not see them as constraints that are completely ruinous of our ability to have agency and to work in liberatory ways. That would be the main thing that I would say to people. 

 

But you’ve got to be honest about it. Without being honest about those constraints, we will just steward into a new era of imperial extraction and an economy that the global north can justify at any cost. We have to hold that those constraints are about us building a safe and just world for everyone. And I recognise that to say that in a time like now can feel really, really difficult, but it’s important that we don’t lose our humanity in that.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, I would say that the concept of limits and therefore constraints and the innovation that needs to happen inside those constraints is really the mark of future of our work, I think. To integrate this idea of limits, which has never been really integrated into products and organizing so far in the industrial age, it’s a really new thing that we have on the table and you’re working the context of the home, the neighborhood, the city, and the doughnut. They are all manifestations of limits and enabling constraints into calling us to give our contribution to thinking about product, services, and organizations in a definitely new way, which is not just a remix of the old way of thinking. So thank you so much for making it clear at the end which I think is a massively important thing. 

 

So thank you so much. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Shruthi, for the questions and for the participation.

 

Immy 

Thank you.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Thank you. Thanks, Immy.

 

Immy 

Thank you, everyone.

 

Simone Cicero 

And for our listeners, as always, check out boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find in this conversation with all the transcripts or the excellent resources she pointed out and all the previous podcast episode that you should be looking into. 

 

And until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.