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Building With Common Purpose: Reinventing the Building Society for New Towns

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:20:03 GMT

Reinventing the Building Society Model for the 21st Century

The creation of new towns in the UK presents a unique opportunity to build not just homes, but vibrant, resilient, and healthy communities. To reimagine what it means to live together now, and create spaces where people can connect, grow, and thrive. By learning lessons from successful community-building approaches and the mechanisms needed to implementing them, reframed for 2024 context, the New Towns Taskforce can help ensure new developments meet the diverse needs of their residents and stand the test of time. The success of these towns will ultimately be measured not by the number of houses built, but by the quality of life and the strength of social fabric in the communities that call them home. How can we achieve this in the context of New Towns? For too long we have expected the community to manifest as an outcome of development. Time to put community first as the purpose of development. Time to start with the social. I propose that reinventing the Building Society or Mutual model for the 21st century, especially within the context of new town development, is not only timely but also a powerful way to promote community ownership, retain wealth locally, and support sustainable development. I call this approach Building With Common Purpose.

Building With Common Purpose

Building Societies in the UK were originally established in the late 18th century as cooperative financial institutions with the primary purpose of enabling working-class individuals to save money and borrow funds to purchase homes. These societies emerged during a time when access to homeownership was limited, particularly for those of modest means, and traditional banks did not typically offer mortgages to working people. Sound familiar? By pooling the savings of members, these societies provided a way for people to gradually accumulate the necessary capital to secure a mortgage, which was otherwise inaccessible to many. Building Societies operated on a mutual model, meaning they were owned by their members rather than external shareholders. This model ensured that any profits made by the society were returned to the members, either through better savings rates or lower loan interest rates, rather than distributed as dividends to shareholders. By enabling more people to own their homes, this model played a significant role in community building. Homeownership was seen as a means to encourage stability, responsibility, and investment in the local community, which in turn fostered stronger, more cohesive neighborhoods. Early examples were often closely tied to specific communities or groups, such as workers in a particular industry or residents of a particular town. This local focus helped ensure that the benefits of the Society stayed within the community.

Restoring the Social Heart of Development

Reinventing the Building Society model for the 21st century is not just a nod to the past but a strategic move toward creating resilient, inclusive, and sustainable communities in new towns. By establishing a new form of Building Society, we can empower local people to invest in their future, ensure that wealth remains within the community, and support a just transition to a sustainable economy. These societies could become the financial impetus of new towns, driving both economic growth and social equity in ways that traditional financial institutions cannot. Establishing a modernised Building Society for each New Town—let's call it a Community Building Society (CDS) - could operate as a locally-focused financial and social value model, based on its original frame, but with a more modern-looking jacket on. So, residents and local businesses could become members of the CDS by purchasing shares or making deposits. These funds would be pooled to finance community projects, home loans, and small businesses within the new town. The model would encourage residents to invest in the growth and development of their own community, rather than relying on external financial institutions. The CDS could offer low-interest mortgages and loans specifically tailored for first-time buyers, affordable housing projects, and sustainable home construction. By prioritising local borrowers, the Society would ensure that profits and interest payments stay within the community, fostering economic resilience. A portion of the funds could be allocated specifically for climate-related projects, such as renewable energy installations, green infrastructure, and energy-efficient housing. This could be aligned with the principles of a just transition, ensuring that the shift to a low-carbon economy benefits all residents, particularly those who might otherwise be disadvantaged by economic changes. The Society could directly finance community-led development projects, such as public spaces, co-working hubs, or social enterprises. By providing grants or low-interest loans for these initiatives, the CDS would empower residents to shape the future of their town according to specific local needs and priorities. It could support local businesses by offering tailored loan terms, fostering a vibrant local economy that provides jobs and services to residents. This focus on local economic resilience would help to create a self sustaining community less dependent on external economic fluctuations. By keeping investments and profits within the community, a CDS could prevent the outflow of local wealth to distant shareholders or corporate entities, something we see happening amongst UK pension funds. This wealth retention strengthens the local economy and can be reinvested in further community development. This approach empowers residents by giving them a direct stake in the development of their town. This sense of ownership can help foster a deeper emotional connection to the community and encourage active participation in local governance and decision-making.

Mission-Driven Place-Making

However, the crucial and fundamental benefit and purpose of this is to provide access to affordable housing. Ultimately a CDS must be able to help people access and participate in the local housing market and address major structural housing inequalities and ensure that all residents benefit from the town’s growth. It can also prioritise funding for projects that address social needs, such as community centres, affordable housing, and health services. Working with local authorities, it could ensure that essential services, such as healthcare, education, and public transport, are affordable and accessible to all residents by subsidising the cost of services or supporting the development of community-based service providers. This purpose and mission-based approach is gaining ground, see Mazzucato’s (et. al.) recent work on mission-driven government as an alternative theory and practice of statecraft. (UCL Institute For Innovation And Public Purpose, 2024) The CDS can play a critical role in promoting sustainable development and climate resilience by prioritising financing renewable energy, green building practices, and public transport initiatives that reduce the town’s carbon footprint, and infrastructure to enhance flood resilience. This includes funding for flood-resistant housing, natural flood management systems, and emergency preparedness initiatives. By creating a new locally focused financial institution rooted in the local community, its decision-making can be more responsive to local resilience needs.

Making it Happen for New Towns

New legislation or amendments to existing laws would be needed to establish and regulate this new generation of Community Development Societies. This includes defining their structure, governance, and operation. The legislation should ensure that CDSs can operate ethically and soundly as mutual organisations and provide a clear framework for their financial activities. The government could facilitate partnerships between CDSs and public institutions to leverage additional funding and resources. This could include collaborations with local authorities, existing housing associations, and educational institutions. The private sector could provide funding, resources, or expertise as part of Social Value or ESG programmes, giving them more of a place basis. It will be critical to build trust and transparency with communities to ensure the Society truly delivers on its purpose – to build community. Each Society should therefore have a “Community Client” - an advisory board made up of community representatives to ensure that CDSs remain aligned with local needs and values. These boards can provide ongoing feedback and help shape the direction of the society. There is enough knowledge, skills, transferable frameworks, and mechanisms that could enable this model to be set up quickly and for this model to enable multiple policy objectives and benefits in one. The question is: what is the appetite for this and for taking the opportunity for new towns to be more than bricks and mortar but the building of new communities too?

Considerate Urbanism: the revolution will be emotional.

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 16:20:19 GMT

The Considerate Urbanist Blog #2 14th December 2022

Considerate Urbanism is an alternative philosophy and way of thinking about cities and urban life; to make this is a kinder experience but also a kinder future for our people and planet. We know that we urgently need to adapt and transition to a different model of living, existing, and producing on our planet. A more considerate form of urbanism recognises cities are more than bricks and mortar, they are an experience, a philosophy, a mode of production and a lifestyle. And this can either be a positive for you, or it can hold your health and life chances back in ways that fundamentally make the city nasty, brutish, and short.

I’m interested in how we can create better lived experiences and everyday life in cities for everyone. When I think about cities, I see them as being social networks - and streets, spaces, parks, buildings are social media. They operate through behaviours, interactions, and relationships. To understand how a place works we need to understand the networks and flows within it, and the activities, behaviours, decisions, actions that govern them.

We’ve had the physical city; growing from a need to be close to resources, easily defendable by its physical setting, catering for basic survival and human need. We’ve had the economic city; being spaces of mass capital accumulation and growing upwards exponentially to signal power and wealth. Urban space becomes a commodity to be traded and coveted for its value and abstract transformation into capital. I am convinced that the future of the city and our understanding of its growth, potential, and processes of change, will be governed by more overtly humanised and social drivers. I think we are moving into the age of the social city.

This age of the social city comes at a time of major flux. Climate change is showing us that our lifestyles and systems are fundamentally unsustainable. Economic disparity and persistent poverty is showing us that our economic system is unjust and inequitable. Social Justice movements show us that people still feel unseen, unheard, and unvalued. The seeming emergence of Industrial Revolution 4.0, Web 3.0, Blockchain 2.0 has profound implications for prevailing social and economic models, and means citizens are gaining agency over the macro things that have governed us before; access to work, access to assets, access to currency.

It feels like this transition to a new way of living, working, and doing business will necessitate a dismantling of the systems, structures and processes we had before. And we need whatever comes next to enable the massive changes needed for us to adapt successfully to a more socially, economically, and environmentally resilient world. Like any transition it could be difficult and messy, exhilarating and emancipating, uncomfortable for some and not others. As we navigate this new and emerging world, now more than ever, we need to be kind and considerate to each other.

Because what will hold us together will be social glue: our relationships, our shared affinity, our common ground, mutual trust, shared aspirations, empathy and care for ourselves and our communities. A knowing and a feeling that we are all going to face change to some extent; so our fate is a shared one.

And because our survival rests on our capacity to live successfully in a community of other humans. Millions of years ago, that meant life and death. Today the challenge facing us is how we can, all muti-millions of us, live together day to day – on a micro level in our neighbourhoods, at school, in work – and on a macro level, as citizens, as shared cultures, as nations, as a civilisation.

What comes with this transition though, is an explosion of new ideas, ways of thinking, ways of engaging, ways of living and organising society and our economy, ways of learning and doing that will turn our existing systems on their head. This explosion needs to be driven by a key question – how will humans live on this planet next? And a profound shift in mindset - how can we live on this planet better together? As more of us will live out our lives in cities; cities will become the thing most of us will share and have in common. City life. This means we need to make cities the solution and not the problem. Use cities as the fundamental basis for creating that new baseline for living.

So for me, the key battle for our adaptation is not technology or funding – it is a battle for our emotions. We can have solutions if we want them. We can have funding if we want it. We can change the world if we want it. But we have to want it. And we need to collaborate, share and be more considerate of how people will be affected and impacted. This means setting aside individualism, excess, materialism, short-termism, selfishness, and greed, for more concern and care for each other as a global community.

I see more and more of this mindset emerging in how we talk about finance, how we approach design, how we shape services, how we think about transport, how we engage people in our decision-making, and how we grow our organisations and leaders. There is a humanising emotional revolution going on. And the time for the Social City is now.

Considerate Urbanism: Why now?

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 16:33:48 GMT

The Considerate Urbanist Blog #1 - 7th November 2022

My interest and work is on the social future of cities and how we live in and experience urban space. I am interested in people’s emotional attachment to place and how to ensure we have strong and resilient social fabric in our communities. That's partly about making people more aware and interested in their places, but also engaging people properly in the placemaking process. Underneath this is an even more core interest about the urban experience; from the exciting and inspiring to the challenging, obstructive, and unwelcoming ones.

I’m on a mission to make urban experience and urban life better for everyone. This shouldn’t be a lottery or anything to do with who or how old you are, what you look like or where you come from. I believe everyone has the right to have a positive urban experience.

Our culture and society is changing and evolving, as it does with every generation and we are seeing the effects of that in generational attitudes to work, the economy, the environment, and politics.

We've got a growing climate change emergency, an ongoing global pandemic, the fallout of Brexit, ongoing political instability, and numerous social justice movements demanding change from our pernicious and stubbornly ingrained lack of social justice and inclusion.

I feel there is a general feeling of society being under immense pressure and flux. We feel anxious, mentally fragile, and emotionally exhausted and it shows in our places. We wear our hearts on our streets as well as our sleeves. I’m left wondering if we all need a break - to know we matter, we are valued and cared for?

We’ve seen a shift towards greater responsibility and transparency as citizens and consumers. An urge to strip away the sheen and the façade; to see the realness and integrity of things. With products, we want to know where they come from, how they were made and if that was an ethical process. We have cruelty free, fair trade, locally produced, and ethically sourced goods. We want our food to be clean, honest, better for us.

We want to connect emotionally and value the authenticity of a product being what it is, and not something it isn’t. All of this is powered by consideration - of user needs and wants, of emotional connection and meaning, of impact on people and planet. I see this transfer to other aspects of our lives; business, personal wellness, organisations, and institutions. But what about urban space?

I’m left wondering if we all need a break - to know we matter, we are valued and cared for?

We live in the spatial manifestation of ideas people had years, decades, and sometimes centuries ago. Capitalism. Modernism. The Car. Are they really fit for purpose now in the changing times we are in? What urban ideas will we make real next? They need to be the kind of ideas that make cities work better for people and our planet. Ideas for a fairer, more ethical, and human-friendly form of urbanism that cares about what we need and how we want to live and feel in urban space.

That invites us to imagine the type of future city we need to start emerging now to meet the pressing social, economic and environmental challenges we face.

For me it needs to be a “considerate urbanism”. This is about making urban environments, urban life, and urban experiences more considerate
of people and our diversity, needs, behaviours, emotions, and our relationships with our planet and each other.

It is considerate of the sensory, emotional, and psychological dimension of urban space and urban experience. It is mindful of the impact of change and the way we design has on ourselves and others. It is sympathetic to our urge to create and communicate meaning, identity and belonging through the built environment. It empathises with a wider spectrum of people and their needs and lived experiences. So, people can tangibly see and say that they and their needs have been seen, acknowledged, and accounted for in their experience and use of the city. It fosters kindness, empathy, affinity, and caring urban behaviours to help bind our social fabric together.

It's urbanism that likes you - and is like you.

Considerate Urbanism: Journey across the Seven Cs

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 13:57:40 GMT

The Considerate Urbanist Blog #3 13th March 2023

Considerate urbanism is a human-kind approach to urbanism that invites us to go beyond the 3D physicality of space, to consider how we experience, feel and connect in urban space and cities.

It is sensitive to the spectrum of different lived experiences and needs in cities and recognises the complexity of everyday life and urban behaviours. This focus on the human dimension of cities is badly needed. The very shape our urban fabric takes seems to accommodate vehicles much better than it accommodates the needs of people and our environment. This is because we have been building our cities primarily around the needs of the car.

Are we really going to base our urban future on the needs of the car too?

It feels like we need to rethink the fundamentals of what we base our urban form, lifestyles and functions on. And if we were not to base our cities around cars – what would it be instead? Considerate Urbanism is about just that. Prioritising human interaction and connection as the key fundamental. Asking questions like, what do people need to live successfully in a city or place? How can we care for everyone’s needs and wants? What do we need to do to ensure we are looking after our environment so it can look after us? Can we all feel good in urban environments, not just some of us? Creating urbanism for all. Centring care, empathy, affinity, emotion, and human experience to move us from car-based urbanism to care-based urbanism.

The world is socialising and in previous blogs I’ve talked about the time for the social city being now. The social city is predicated on the quality and power of connection, interconnection, relationships and community. Where capitalism feels like it’s about separation: humans and nature; business and society, resources and value; Considerate Urbanism about how these things are interconnected and reliant on each other. It is the antidote to separation and instead focuses on reintegration.

So, we bring together a broad range of topics and disciplines under Considerate Urbanism’s three tenets of social justice, economic inclusion and environmental resilience; with an overarching focus on enabling the future “next city”. This includes health, equality and inclusion, dignity and social justice, accessibility and engagement, identity, belonging and culture, regenerative and inclusive economies.

Fostering considerate urbanism is a systemic and emergent approach that needs to happen on multiple levels, across multiple disciplines and stakeholders, with a variety of lenses and timescales. It is a process, a state and a mindset. Universal and specific. Material and theoretical. It won’t happen by itself and it won’t happen alone. That is why we are building Considerate Urbanism as a:

Movement: unifying ideas, connecting people and propelling action.
Mindset: growing a different mindset and behaviours for decision-making and commissioning.
Method: learning, developing and applying the concept of considerate urbanism in practice.

Our Seven C’s framework helps to weave tangible activities and action from this complexity. The framework is flexible enough to allow the Seven C’s to be explored when considering anything from a project or a space, to a whole city or its infrastructure:

Considerate Framing: this provides the focus for Considerate Urbanism application – it helps understand why we are doing something and what Considerate Urbanism means in this context.
Considerate Process: helps to ensure the process itself is considerate – this could be in terms of how you are engaging, who you are engaging with, and the narrative and the tools you are using.
Considerate Results: this concerns what outcomes, outputs, legacy, objectives and deliverables you are seeking to generate and to what extent they are considerate.
Considerate Experience: this focuses on the experience that is generated and created for people, what does it feel like, how are people using and engaging with it.
Considerate Behaviours: this explores what kind of behaviours and interactions are fostered by the experience; how can this create resilient and healthy communities and strong social fabric.
Considerate Future: this asks us to explore and imagine what kind of urban future are we creating and how it can enables a transition to the next city, expressed through the measures of social justice, economic inclusion, environmental resilience.
Considerate Impact: this asks what the overall impact of the project to different stakeholders is, over different spatial and temporal scales and the different types of value (beyond monetary) it creates.

As our structures and systems change to address the challenges we face together, our cities will bear the strain of their development, form and function being built on concepts and ideas (i.e., cars, capitalism, materialism) at the point of concept fatigue. Time to use our collective imagination and skills to socialise our cities and build a new and more considerate basis for our shared urban future.