Reflections x Invitations: London 2022.
I hope you all had an amazing and deeply recuperative New Year and holiday. I hope you spent time in health and happiness.
I wanted to start by thanking you all for bearing with each other and with us as a team all together this last year. I know it has been a demanding year for all of us in Dm, in terms of the work we do and the world we’re interdependent with, but it is increasingly clear the work we are engaged with is more vital than ever.
I wanted to share some reflections of our journey together last year and some tentative invitations to us all.
Last year, in my view, was a year of transition, a chrysalis year if you will, a year between growth and transformation, which is likely to continue into 2023. These years feel like the bridging years between the start-up phase - requiring high personal investment and momentum from all of us to establish our work, reputation, direction, opportunities and intentions - towards a steadier state of being, where we might reach more of an equilibrium (in terms of focus areas, metabolism of our projects and the organisation as a whole, and economically) and have more space to deepen our work with care and detail. Getting towards this place has required, and still requires, a collective investment, particularly as we choose together not to take on external investment to enable our autonomy. We have been investing our time, our energy and our purpose - and with this we have been achieving extraordinary things, but at this stage transitioning towards a different form of momentum feels crucial.
During this transition, our work has started coming into its own. In 2021 we increasingly saw this higher level of definition form, with the different layers of our work being developed simultaneously. We were evolving and deepening our inner focus and capacities, from large scale system change at a city and national scale to building system demonstrators and infrastructures – from TreeAsInfrastructure to WholeCityRetrofit and CityMentalWealth to building the organisational means, structures, protocols and capacities for this sort of discovery work and some of the strategic frames such as radiclecivic.cc.
Simultaneously, the work started to touch the ground more (in full recognition this is just the beginning) as we are beginning to learn in the craft of building – be it the FreeHouse, Birmingham street retrofit, or Glasgow and TreesAI, or Daegu City and the Permissioning the City platform, the Terres Noires work and RegXMontreal, zero embodied carbon procurement frameworks in Madrid, Amsterdam Machine Learning-assisted Policy Navigation Instrument, the Neighbourhood Climate Contract in Leuven, the Madrid Sandbox network, Beyond the Rules, or radically deepening our cities transition work for Net Zero Cities and Viable Cities.
Further, we started to meaningfully deepen our civic finance capabilities, capacities and inquiries – addressing the structural challenges of centralized capital production, short term investing, and portfolios for risk management (this is just the beginning). We also explored new pathways, protocols and instruments of funding and financing critical civic infrastructures, such as urban nature based solutions, whole city retrofits, and more.
Finally and perhaps most critically, we picked up the pathways opened by Civic-Indigenous 7.0 and started to explore more deeply this critical domain of our work, upon which much more of it will rest – how we remake trajectories of governance beyond control and ownership to a world of mass self sovereignty in relationships of interdependence and mutual care.