3ºC Neighbourhood
3ºC Neighbourhood is co-authored by CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs as a new piece of research that seeks to understand the current risks UK urban neighbourhoods face over this century due to climate and ecological breakdown under a high emissions scenario, the likely result of which will be a rise in average global temperature of 3ºC.
3ºC Neighbourhood is one chapter of the Neighbourhood Public Square publication, co-authored and co-built by CIVIC SQUARE.
The Neighbourhood Public Square seeks to demonstrate regenerative civic infrastructure at the heart of Ladywood, Birmingham, co-building and democratising access to the spaces, tools and resources for a bold, imaginative, distributed transition, held in common with the neighbourhood.
Within our wider work it represents a significant demonstrator for many layers of regenerative redesign around land stewardship, finance, governance, as well as building design, construction and retrofit. The focus of this is to discover the capacities and capabilities required for neighbourhood transitions in an ambitious, emergent and participatory way.
At the heart of this, the fundamental enquiry that we are continually seeking to build out, experiment with, prototype and nurture the possibility for remains, for us to answer courageously, boldly and tangibly together in the here and now:
What if the climate transition and retrofit of our homes and streets were designed, owned and governed by the people who live there?
In March 2023 our writings on Refounding CIVIC SQUARE 2.0 framed the context of our wider learnings from the first three years at CIVIC SQUARE, and the pivots that COVID-19 required us to make. This was particularly true for our core physical infrastructure demonstrator — the Neighbourhood Public Square.
Over the last year, we have reorientated and stepped into the next stages of tangible design from all we have been learning together with our peers and neighbourhoods, from the Neighbourhood Doughnut to activating on our streets to reimagine retrofit. We are working alongside visionary collaborators to build our design team and wider ecosystem in this demonstrator. Together, we are deeply committed to meeting the scale and breadth of the polycrisis, designing for future challenges and abundant possibilities ahead, including what climate predictions mean for the criticality of neighbourhood civic infrastructure.
Co-authored February 2023 — March 2024, this new publication reflects our progress, learning and insights at this time, and seeks to:
- Open source research, reflection and proposition about the time we are in, the urgency of our collective action, and some blueprints for ways forward at the civic infrastructure and neighbourhood scale in collaboration with a range of visionary partners. We also recognise the risk of this, and offer principles to engage with the work respectfully.
- Situate CIVIC SQUARE within a wider ecology of practice. Whilst we focus specifically on our work, starting with humility from where we are, we invite and recognise we can only thrive when there is collective investment and plural approaches beyond one organisation. We must acknowledge the scale of discovery, momentum, collective resistance and propositional demonstration requires all of us.
- Answer a number of key questions rigorously that are cyclically requested within philanthropy and we believe keep us all stuck. We hope to push us all collectively beyond these, and towards transformative practice, together, in order to actively and thoughtfully meet the moment.
- Invite a range of investments in CIVIC SQUARE’s Neighbourhood Public Square demonstrator from those looking to redistribute wealth into deep skills, curiosity and knowledges needed to build out the bold ideas within this proposal. This sits alongside complementary existing work, and understands that physical infrastructure is foundational to unlocking and nurturing the wisdoms, capacities and capabilities that already exist in our neighbourhoods, as well as cultivating new ones.
We warmly welcome you to follow along with this publication, through which we will be humbly and actively sharing everything that we can in the open as we go over the next few months, working out loud wherever possible along the way. This is an open invitation into conversations that require many of us, from many vantage points, and we hope you will build upon, discuss and share this as an open and generative provocation, and one that is designed to be distributed.
We are witnessing the acceptance of +1.5ºC or +2ºC global average temperatures becoming more commonplace to discuss, but these changes would already have huge impacts for millions of people’s lives, and are not something we want to further normalise through this work.
Many would say talking about a 3ºC world doesn’t even bear thinking about because its effects would be so disastrous, but unfortunately this has become a necessary reality to understand, and to prepare for. However, this work is absolutely not an acceptance or endorsement of that future.
Whilst immediate actions to adapt to the impacts of global temperature rises remain necessary, the focus on this alone risks only dealing with climate breakdown on a symptomatic level, and creating new industries of growth and extraction.
“We can ultimately control how much warming the world experiences, based on our choices as a society, and as a planet. Doom is not inevitable.”
We firmly believe that every effort and action in structurally and systemically reducing GHG emissions is urgently needed. Alongside confronting the consequences of a warmer planet, we need to actively reimagine how our neighbourhoods and economies function, and we invite you to hold these tensions together with us in this chapter, as we become aware of and equip ourselves for the worst, whilst building towards a new, more hopeful future.
To inform this approach, alongside the current context and risks for neighbourhoods such as our own in Birmingham, we outline a direction of travel and a framework for measuring progress for a civic-led transition that is firmly rooted at the neighbourhood scale, as well as responsive to the planetary constraints of material consumption and energy use.
This is to not only shield neighbourhoods from the severest impacts of resource and economic volatility, but for them to be at the heart of boldly, creatively and joyfully co-leading the social, ecological, economic and climate transition of the 21st century that we know is possible.
Where We Are Now
At the time of writing, global mean surface temperature (GMST) stands at +1.3ºC, and is on track to break +1.5°C permanently by the end of this decade. 1.5ºC, the agreed threshold in The Paris Agreement, and the basis of almost every net zero plan, represents our most ambitious climate goals, yet it’s already a temperature limit at which millions are at risk and beyond which dangerous warming will be hard to contain.
Source: IIPC, IEA, Tim Lenton, Met Office
Last year was the hottest year on record and likely the warmest in at least the last 125,000 years, temporarily breaking us through both the +1.5ºC and +2ºC global average temperature ceilings.
That means it’s now more than likely that those born today will experience a +3ºC planet (at minimum and if we ignore tipping points). Without hyperbole, this is the basis for societal collapse. Flooding will happen more often and cause a greater degree of damage. Storms will be stronger and more frequent, damaging power lines, homes and transport links, with each occurrence making it harder and more costly to rectify. Summers will not just be ‘hotter’ they will be dangerous, and represent one aspect of a new global climate, the result of which will be the loss of predictable seasons and food security.
Figure 2 shows large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable at +3ºC, with the UK relying heavily on many of these regions for food, energy and other basic supplies. Also located in many of these areas are some of the planet’s most vital ecosystems that keep the globe’s climate stable; the Amazon, central Africa and South East Asia. These are also some of the geographies predicted to be worst hit by land temperature rises.
How Did We Get Here?
We are living through what feels like the peak of a self-destructive economy; with climate breakdown, ecological collapse, geopolitical tension, and rising food and energy prices all interconnected. The retreat from globalisation fuelled by a resurgence of reactionary politics, all set to a backdrop of wildfires, drought, food security and floods, is the lived reality of the polycrisis, and together these strands are locking us into a future of greater uncertainty and risk for millions.
What’s brought us here is a global economy founded on the energy ‘dividend’ of fossil fuels. Unmatched in their energy density, a single barrel of oil is the equivalent of 5 years of human labour, with the average UK person consuming around 2,700 barrels a day. This invisible ‘workforce’ upon which our current lifestyles and neighbourhoods are built has paved the way for the rapid consumption of energy, material extraction, and biodiversity depletion at a planetary scale. GDP, material extraction and energy have a new 1:1 correlation.
If it wasn’t already clear, the early 2020s have shown that the energy windfall the UK has relied on for the past century is borrowed from both the lives of future generations and a liveable planet.
The scale and speed of action needed to address this means shifting rapidly away from our carbon economy, laid on the foundations of fossil fuel dependence, material extraction, and exponential growth, as the minority world’s route to social progress. That economy is now at an end.
UK Neighbourhoods At +3ºC
An increase of +3ºC average global temperature by 2100 pushes us far beyond the global tipping point thresholds, threatening food supply, energy security and destabilising much of the global economy.
A +3ºC average warming means a +5ºC average land temperature globally. For the West Midlands this means that the maximum summer temperatures will be about 8ºC higher than today’s. This represents a modelled area of 25km, meaning that localised impacts are likely to be much greater in their extremes and relative to the most vulnerable people.
“Our research shows that the poorest people and people of colour are disproportionately impacted by extreme weather across the UK and internationally. The communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis also have the lowest carbon footprints — they have contributed the least but are being hardest hit by rising global temperatures.”
— Friends of the Earth, University of Manchester
If we’re already experiencing the global impacts of climate breakdown and temperature rises, and we’re becoming gradually more cognisant of our intimate entanglement with the fossil fuel economy, then how does this play out at the neighbourhood scale? And what does it mean for how we might adapt and transform the places we live?
+3ºC Birmingham: What Are The Risks?
Overheating
The most obvious impact of a warming planet is higher summer temperatures and heatwaves, which are intensified by urban heat island effect (UHIE). Heat islands produce unequal impacts, and profoundly accelerate existing inequalities; people living in deprived areas, peoples of colour, those with underlying health conditions, as well as those with limited access to green space will face the worst adverse outcomes.
In the UK, by 2080, the chances of exceeding 40ºC will be similar to today’s chance of reaching 32ºC. By 2030, Birmingham’s summers will consistently exceed 40ºC, hugely increasing the risk of hospitalisation and death, as well as the failure of basic services and infrastructure. To address this we will need to implement neighbourhood sites for dealing with heat-related emergencies, to adapt our homes, as well as create greater access to and quality of green and blue infrastructure.
Heat Vulnerability
Birmingham has the greatest number of neighbourhoods of any local authority in the UK identified as priority areas for adaptation on the basis of a 3ºC scenario.
Source: Natural England, Uni of Manchester/FotE, UK Gov, BBC/4EI
Figure 5 outlines the current heat risk and locations for UHIE in Birmingham. By 2030, heatwaves will be hotter and more frequent, putting more people at risk. By 2080, heatwaves are expected to be five times more frequent and be 5–7ºC hotter on average, making peak heats well over 40ºC.
Figure 6 is a composite showing access to green infrastructure and Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). There is a loose overlap with the indices of deprivation, yet a more detailed study is needed to highlight different data points that constitute the index. People of colour in the UK are four times as likely to live in areas at high risk of dangerous heat.
Drought
At +3ºC globally, the likelihood of droughts in the UK becomes almost 2.5 times more frequent. Droughts in the UK are already chronic — not only reducing the availability of water for drinking and agricultural use, but also increasing the risks of wildfires, encouraging tree disease, and undermining the ability of forests, wetland and peatland areas to store and sequester carbon, and in some cases turning them into carbon sources.
Drought has a big knock-on effect on food security, by limiting both the ability of the UK to import food (on which the UK is heavily reliant), as well as threatening home-grown food production. Addressing drought will require a much greater use and reuse of rainwater, as well as a bias for local food produce and creating habitats for pollinators.
Flooding
For every 1ºC of temperature rise, air can hold up to 7% more moisture, making rainfall and flash flooding much more likely across the UK in the future. The chances of what is currently considered a ten-year flood increases in the West Midlands from 10% each year to almost 20% a year at a +3 rise. This puts just over 1 in every 5 homes at risk of flooding in England by 2100, with little evidence that current property developers are adequately planning for our current or future risks of flooding.
Source: BCC
Figure 7 outlines current flood potential risk. Flooding will follow a similar pattern as depicted, yet localised flooding will be hard to predict.
Figure 8 shows potential sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) sites in the Edgbaston, Ladywood and Hall Green areas of Birmingham.
Food Shortage
The world is already experiencing a food production and affordability crisis, with the UK food prices having inflated by almost a third in the last two years, and the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimating that GMST rises could increase food price inflation by a further 20% by 2050.
In 2020, the UK’s wheat yield dropped by 40% due to a mix of heavy rain and drought. Biodiversity loss and species extinction are further degrading the overall soil health needed to grow food.
Food shortages and food inflation will exacerbate our existing inequalities in food security and access to a nutritional diet. Droughts across the globe will exacerbate food insecurity, particularly the price and availability of fresh food needed to sustain a healthy diet.
Climate Migration
Over the next three decades the combined impacts of environmental migration (an estimated 1.2 billion people by 2050) and predicted global population rise (we expect an increase of 20–25% by 2050) will place more responsibility on the UK to resettle and shelter millions of climate migrants and refugees. The UK’s historical and per capita emissions disproportionately impact areas of the world that are likely to experience extreme heat. By 2050, the number of people suffering from a month of inescapable heat could further grow to a staggering 1.3 billion.
Cost Of Living
The cost of energy (particularly heating over colder months) will remain a problem for many homes in the UK, driven by old, poorly performing homes as well as rising gas and electricity costs.
On a more macro level, drought and flooding will make trade and access to our current energy and food supplies more difficult and expensive, further exacerbating the price of energy and its health and social care costs.
Droughts and harvest failures already account for 30% of euro-area inflation volatility between 1961 and 2016.
The Paris Agreement commits the UK to limit warming to +1.5°C, meaning lifestyles would need to be reduced by 80–90% in the next 30 years. Current policies which aim to do that are widely regarded to be insufficient.
Read more about the details of the UK’s current net zero strategy:
→ Full 3ºC Neighbourhood Chapter.pdf
The Bigger Picture
The Current Energy Transition Isn’t Viable
Many of our most optimistic climate targets are still built around projections of transitioning to a clean energy system, yet much of what’s embedded in both committed policy and net zero goals doesn’t address the systemic extraction and overuse of natural resources.
This is a problem embodied by the material demands of shifting our energy system. Climate activist Nate Hagens refers to this as our ‘energy blindness’; as global GDP is almost entirely tethered to the energy we use (99%) and the amount of materials we consume (100%), a global energy transition without a decoupling of growth and material consumption, and developing a meaningful circular economy, will only give us clean energy for one single generation, and ignores the wider systemic environmental destruction this creates.
Current economic forecasts predict a doubling of our energy and material use every 25 years, meaning our material use would be up 60% by 2060.
Despite impressive technological and efficiency gains, what’s known as the rebound effect (improvements in technological efficiency prompting increased demand and greater resource consumption) means that absolute decoupling of GDP from energy on a global scale is yet to materialise. Studies have shown no evidence that technological progress will lead to a reduction of material use.
When we talk about a clean energy transition, what we’re actually talking about is a rapid increase in the supply of a number of critical minerals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, which are crucial for batteries; rare earth elements, used in permanent magnets in wind turbines and electric motors; copper and aluminium for electricity networks.
By 2030, demand for lithium could reach fifteen times current levels. By 2050 it will require a 600% increase in copper production. This, alongside other transition materials, will require a historical increase in mining and processing, one of the most carbon intensive activities on the planet. Even meeting net zero targets by 2050 would require six times more mineral input over the next two decades than today.
Production and processing capacity of these materials are predominantly located in areas of instability, corruption and conflict. What’s more, their locations often overlap with Earth’s most vital carbon sinks and where the need for restoration is greatest.
The geographical concentration of lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements means that three-quarters of global output comes from just three nations. Alongside this, complex global supply chains increase the risks of disruption, trade restrictions or other geopolitical tensions associated with extraction. Yet most crucially to the question of accelerating our energy transition, whilst there may theoretically be enough materials for our transition, the average mine takes 16.5 years to move from discovery to production.
Overall, our material economy is the main cause of environmental damage globally. 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress are caused by resource extraction and processing. These same activities contribute to about half of global greenhouse gas emissions.
+1.5°C Is A New Age Of Imperialism
Our agreed global climate target of limiting average temperature rise to 1.5°C fundamentally sacrifices billions of lives to conflict, trauma and deadly climates. Yet even the sum total of current global policies and policy commitments means we are locked-in to surpassing +1.5ºC within the next decade.
Embedded in the global north’s most ambitious climate action plans, from net zero commitments to The Paris Agreement, are contemporary structures of colonialism. Successful outcomes in the pledges laid out by governments in the global north (including the UK) rely on extractivism, externalisation of ecological impacts in key decision-making processes, and the ongoing dehumanisation and violence against the global south either being maintained, or made even more extreme.
The growth mandate that defines western democratic economies doubles down on the accumulation of wealth rooted in our colonial legacy. The existing form and discourse around climate commitments therefore exacerbates historic violence, whilst feeding local and global injustices.
The UK’s current national strategies are centred around decarbonisation (e.g. mass retrofit and energy transition) and are undertaken from a green growth, carbon-centric and material consumptionist mindset. This de-facto way in which we can understand and rationalise the UK’s climate action plans, and its role in a wider just climate transition, makes its current approach problematic for two reasons:
The first is that if we attribute the emissions of colonised nations during the years of colonialism to the colonising nation, the UK has one of the highest per capita emissions rates in the world, already blowing its remaining carbon budget by 230%.
Source: Jan Ivar Korsbakken
This matters because it represents the stolen time and carbon budget from countries that it has historically oppressed and impoverished, all of which fall well below the per capita carbon allowance for limiting global temperatures to below +1.5ºC. To start to understand each nation’s responsibilities through the lens of our historical and present day emissions, Figure 14 shows the carbon consumption since 1850 split between all living people and mapped back to GMST.
Cumulative CO₂ allowances shown here are for a 50% chance of staying below a given warming, distributed equally to all currently living people, with China and India still having some way to any of the limits. Meanwhile, it’s clear the minority world nations have not only already well overshot their own carbon budgets, but have also already consumed the vast majority of the rest of the world’s.
Mass retrofit and energy transition strategies ignore the vastly different inherited and present day emissions that different countries are responsible for.
“We can only tackle all elements of sustainability when we reclaim it as a social justice issue, instead of the narrow idea of emission reduction.”
— Thilagawathi Abi Deivanayagam & Rhiannon Elizabeth Osborne
The second is that we are already seeing greater emphasis being placed on energy security, and the importance of securing the critical minerals and raw materials needed to make that a reality. Most materials and minerals essential to the transition, such as cobalt, lithium, and other rare earth minerals, exist in their highest concentrations in global south nations with ongoing conflict, fragile governance, or that rank highly on the corruption perceptions index, with these challenges directly linked to colonial oppression and western interference past and present.
For example, the mining of cobalt, on which many “zero emissions” scenarios rely, gravely abuses many human rights and is entangled with political instability, corruption and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that maintains European corporate influences in the region, contributing to a contemporary form of imperialism.
October 12, 2022 | Source: Junior Kannah / AFP via Getty Images
Often these modes of extraction are justified as a means of maintaining (GDP) growth at a macroeconomic scale, yet they directly and indirectly impact countries that already are and will be most impacted by climate breakdown. These effects include diminished resources, destruction of existing infrastructure and lack of aid, and deepen existing vulnerabilities further. The Pakistani floods in 2022 are just one recent example, with The British Red Cross estimating that 33 million people were impacted and 8 million people directly displaced; over 15% of the population.
This level of devastation should not be held in abstraction or removed in any part from our everyday lives here in the UK, not only for the millions of residents with connections to the lands most impacted by climate breakdown who are directly facing loss and trauma. Recognising our interconnections in humanity and deep global solidarity with all peoples also connects to the practicality of collectively reckoning with realities of climate migration, impacts to food and energy supply chains, as well as the fundamental necessity of understanding and acting accordingly within our entangled planetary interdependencies.
The countries and regional areas facing highest climate vulnerability are in need of regeneration, not only to enable the future thriving of those that have been profoundly exploited historically, while seeing little or no regeneration in return, but to rebalance earth’s vital ecosystems following historic and ongoing overextraction and exploitation by the global north. This should concern and unite all of us as a vital part of our collective global efforts to stabilise the climate and ecological systems that support all life.
Climate breakdown and global temperature rise are symptoms of a problem, not the problem itself. Regardless of our decarbonisation efforts, we need strategies that can address the root causes of climate breakdown and environmental destruction. We need ideas and practices that change how we, as humans, relate to the world around us; to land, materials and each other
“We are here in the consequences and the wake of being out of proportional size with the planet, with each other. How do we practice moving into being right-sized?”
— Farzana Khan
Relating, practicing and designing beyond and outside of exponential extraction at the cost of inexcusable social and ecological harms, and into deep relationality, solidarity and acknowledgement of our local and global interdependence, isn’t a new idea.
The lands paying the price for the disproportionate actions of other nations are predominantly stewarded by peoples who have been in mutual symbiosis and Kinship with the land; a far cry from the relationship based on extraction for profit that is now shaping their impending inhabitability.
To avoid a new age of imperialism, or repackaged extractivism, we must make the deeper shifts to reimagine the fundamentals of our infrastructures and institutions together and begin to recode a transition with repair, safety and justice at its heart for all beings to thrive, on a thriving planet.
The Doughnut, taking us beyond GDP growth, is one example of the kinds of intersectional frameworks to help guide us. However, we recognise there is no single answer, but rather that there will be many plural pathways through which safe and just futures are crafted together.
A Radically Different Built Environment
As it stands, the UK’s carbon budget is 2.32 GtCO₂e, meaning we will need around a 20% reduction each year between now and 2050. This is based on The Paris Agreement global carbon budget, and with a 83% chance of remaining below +1.5ºC, and meeting 2030 reduction targets. This is a more ambitious target than budget calculations often based on 50% likelihood, but one we are advocating for.
The embodied carbon emissions alone for the UK’s new build housing is approximately 16.7 MtCO₂e/yr meaning, based on an average dwelling size of 90m² at 800 kgCO₂e/m², at current pace we have 5 more years of carbon budget for building new homes at their average current embodied carbon.
Even today’s lowest carbon, bespoke new build homes have a footprint of around 150 kgCO₂e/m2, more than fifteen times what every new home will need to be in 2030.
Source: ARUP, LETI, Carbon Budget Calculator, SBTi
If we are to meet our most ambitious climate targets, in the built environment sector alone we will need to drop that footprint to 6.3kg, a fraction of even the best performing house today.
Without profoundly transforming how we design, build, use, re-use, and live with the built environment around us, the +1.5ºC threshold is only a few years away. To make this transformative shift, we must understand the carbon impact of different materials, alongside their capacity to support intangible capitals of many kinds.
Concrete, for example, has a high carbon impact, but lasts a long time. Bricks and mortar, whilst we can reuse them, are also still relatively high impact so we would need to be consistently making them last for hundreds of years to balance their carbon costs. With low carbon materials such rammed earth64, and even carbon positive materials like hempcrete, there are precedents for them lasting for 1000s of years. However, in their modern modular form their longevity is yet to be fully understood, based on renewed processes of building with them in the last 20–30 years.
Sources: AR, ICE Database, Construction Material Pyramid
To compare the carbon footprints of more materials, and view a range of their different impacts, see the Construction Material Pyramid by Centre for Industrialised Architecture.
This is only part of the story, of which there are countless layers to be understood locally, globally, socially and ecologically. For instance, to meaningfully design for the material realities ahead we must consider the amount of time different materials take to be made or grown, and the knock on impacts of these processes. Designing to use materials for a long time if they sequester carbon as they grow enables them to be kept as carbon banks, helping to reduce CO₂ in the atmosphere and slow global warming. On top of this, there are the wider co-benefits beyond carbon that they create and nurture, and the range of intangible capitals they are optimised for, such as health, care, and attention, going beyond financial efficiency paradigms.
zero carbon house in Balsall Heath, Birmingham is an example of the role retrofit plays in the reimagination of our built environment. It was renovated 14 years ago, and to this day is still considered a low carbon retrofit and renovation; using unfired clay blocks, bricks from demolished buildings, recycled newspaper insulation, lime plaster with ground recycled glass, rammed earth floors and reclaimed 200-year old timber.
Despite using a lot of recycled, upcycled and low carbon materials, zero carbon house will hit net zero by 2030 after 21 years of operational savings, demonstrating the level of creativity and transformation required to rise to the challenge of meeting ambitious climate targets by learning from the best examples around us, taking them even further, and into more widespread applications across our homes, streets and neighbourhoods.
Strategic Approach & Frameworks For Neighbourhoods
Whilst immediate actions to adapt to the impacts of global temperature rises remain necessary, the focus on this alone risks only dealing with climate breakdown on a purely symptomatic level, and in some cases risks creating new industries of growth and extraction.
Alongside confronting the consequences of a warmer planet we need to actively reimagine how our neighbourhoods and economies function.
We need to be aware of and prepare for the worst whilst building towards a new, more hopeful future. What would it mean to reimagine our climate transition together?
01 | Adaptation
Sites for civic emergency
- Adaptable space (sports halls, religious buildings, schools)
- Community warning systems and support networks
- Civic infrastructure (kitchens, workplace, care)
- Accessible blue and green infrastructure nearby
- Protective infrastructure (e.g. temporary flood defences)
02 | Transition
Everyday
- Circularity and reuse of materials
- Bio-based retrofit
- Densification and mixed use
- Civic energy infrastructure
- Neighbourhood farming
- Community events and programming
- Neighbourhood knowledge building
03 | Transformation
A metabolic neighbourhood
- Civic assets provision
- Regenerative regional supply chains for building materials
- New comfort standards for buildings
Addressing climate and ecological breakdown with the speed and scale it demands will rely on climate adaptation and mitigation crossovers at a local level. This is what’s known as the ‘climate mitigation-adaptation nexus’, however in order to be most effective this needs to be both firmly rooted in neighbourhood level, civic society as well as be responsive to the planetary constraints of material consumption and energy use.
This civic-led climate transition will need:
A direction of travel
Reimagining Neighbourhood Fundamentals
A framework for measuring progress
Doughnut for Urban Development
Reimagining Neighbourhood Fundamentals
Following on from work by Dark Matter Labs outlining the foundational shifts needed for a future regenerative economy in the built environment, together we propose six Reimagined Neighbourhood Fundamentals that look to highlight possible ideas for shifting how we build, organise, and own our neighbourhoods.
- Regenerative Resources
Rewiring neighbourhood resource flows to encourage longevity, bio-materials and reuse as a default - Renewable Energy Systems
Building the physical and institutional infrastructure for just local energy transitions - Retrofit & Densification
Supporting neighbourhoods to maximise the space and materials that already exist - Recoding Comfort
Creating the civic infrastructure and building standards for a hotter and wetter climate - Rewilding The Neighbourhood
Finding opportunities for supporting civic-led blue and green infrastructure - Re-infrastructuring
Rebuilding the social and organisational networks for a more unpredictable world
Regenerative Resources
Materials, water and nutrient cycles will need to shift to be bio-based and circular in their production, consumption and reuse as far as possible. This is a reimagination of our neighbourhoods as metabolic systems; with the resource flows already present and active within it needing to become as self-sustaining as possible, and for their maintenance to be regarded as paramount.
Reimagining nutrient and water cycles will build capacity for local, low-carbon and nutritious food systems supported by local water systems and practices. At the scale of our homes, the bricks, steel and timber in existing buildings should be treated as carbon and material stores that need to be reused as much as possible.
We need to collectively rethink what it means to live regeneratively in our neighbourhoods, by establishing alternative ownership and stewardship models for buildings and their materials, and using policy to increase specification of long-life and bio-based materials.
It also means that civic and public spaces need to be geared towards supporting this reality and helping to make it happen; creating the spaces, infrastructures and new commodity flows for dealing with bio-based production and circular resource use.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
Renewable Energy Systems
An energy transition through full electrification will need to be married with a strategy of reduced mineral and material consumption in order to fully transition away from fossil fuels. This will mean changing how local energy demands are managed, and by whom, through new energy services and leasing contracts as well as demand reduction.
Community-owned, and distributed renewable energy systems and heating and cooling networks will build neighbourhood agency around the transition, developing a universal basic energy provision.
We should move away from renewable energy existing as a luxury for only the ‘able to pay’ market, and instead use community energy schemes to lower bills for those most in need, reducing inequality in our neighbourhoods.
We can expand this reimagination to shared ownership models for zero-carbon mobility networks and last-mile logistics, transforming our streetscapes into urban green corridors to reflect this reimagination
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
Retrofit & Densification
In the UK we already know that our current yearly housing need would eat through our entire national carbon budget in the next five years (not factoring in the historic bias built into the UK’s carbon budget, suggesting that our allowance should be much lower, as discussed above). The status-quo of how we deliver and build new homes is, for this reason and others, untenable.
Campaigns such as ‘RetroFirst’, with the design and construction industry, promote the necessity of biassing the adaptation and extension of existing buildings and infrastructure in order to make the most effective use of resources (both past and present).
In alignment with this, in reimagining our neighbourhoods, new build housing and infrastructure, as well as site demolition, will become an exception and the creation of housing will need to be designed to become carbon positive and fully circular by design.
This transformation can be influenced at the governance level through policy and regulation to support densification and vertical extensions of building, while limiting new builds. In our communities, we’ll organise and design to normalise space sharing and the fractional leasing of spaces, to make the most of the buildings we have.
These processes contribute to a revaluation of our built surroundings to treat them as a further form of shared community infrastructure to be cared for and made to last longer.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
Recoding Comfort
As we can see through the heat vulnerability study (Figure 5) that the future risks of a warmer planet will be huge accelerators of existing inequalities in society. People living in poor quality housing, who suffer from poor air quality, and have little or no access to green space are already indicators of the structural wealth and racial inequality in British society.
This means resilience will need to become a core driver of how we look to adapt our built environment and social networks in response to the future risks of a warmer planet. On the physical upgrade of our streets and buildings, this means the fabric of the UK’s neighbourhoods will need to deal with flooding and overheating as primary objectives, as well as catering for the knock-on impacts these may create.
At the street scale this means investing and building things like solar shading; from urban trees to temporary covers and shelters. It means looking at how those same infrastructures can double up as sites for urban flood protection and water retention. It means developing neighbourhood-based and regional warning systems and emergency response sites as a key part of responding to more localised climate events.
Norms will have to change, too: our expectations around convenience and comfort, which rely upon consumption patterns rooted in imperialism and ongoing extraction, can be reconfigured at a neighbourhood level to reflect sensitivity to this moment.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
Rewilding The Neighbourhood
Rewilding urban neighbourhoods is a primary strategy for maximising overlapping co-benefits associated with adapting to a 3ºC scenario.
Targeting indicators like improving biodiversity, soil health and air quality, we can bring about a huge range of cascading, positive outcomes associated with thriving blue and green infrastructure, while reducing critical risks associated with floods and urban heat islands.
This will mean adapting private green space into shared allotments and green social space, as well as opportunities for community planting and care of urban trees and vegetation that will make up a street forest with increased canopy cover and permeable paving surfaces. In existing parks, wildflower meadows and bioswales support the entangled benefits of biodiversity and mitigation of the direct impacts of climate breakdown.
Rewilding the city will support neighbourhood-scale financial health in the long-term, but its benefits will be felt, too, in improved physical and mental wellbeing and growing practices around neighbourhood care.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
Re-infrastructuring
Central to reducing our overall demand for resource consumption and building our capacity for further reimagination of neighbourhood fundamentals is the reintroduction and sustenance of communal spaces and social infrastructures, as well as the civic networks and hosting organisations that bring them to life.
This kind of re-infrastructuring, which operates on a definition of ‘infrastructure’ that looks far beyond the physical, will empower our neighbours in the governance, decision-making, and investment processes involved in the transition.
Community institutions and ways of organising can expand access and learning to those who may feel shut out of existing ways of participating, using digitally- and socially-enabled tools.
Adapting our existing local infrastructures–our homes, streets and civic spaces–to play host to communal dining, caring, growing, and working is a fundamental shift for reducing further resource extraction and waste.
At the same time, neighbourhood learning and upskilling programmes will ensure that our neighbourhoods and next generations are not left behind in future transition phases and crises, but rather are equipped with important skills for living and working in a 3ºC, or other, world.
Illustration by Carlos Peñalver
Doughnut For Urban Development
In formulating these six reimagined neighbourhood fundamentals, and to understand how to measure the success of our neighbourhoods in avoiding a 3°C future, we are using the Doughnut for Urban Development framework to outline how we can categorise and measure what matters for the quality of our urban space and buildings, building upon the work of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) and our Neighbourhood Doughnut demonstrator, including the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait of Place.
The Doughnut offers a compass for the 21st century, setting us the goal to find a way for the economy to thrive in between two concentric circles; a safe and just space for humanity to prosper within the means of the living planet. The Doughnut for Urban Development, co-authored by an extensive multidisciplinary team, builds upon this specifically to explore the question: what does the vision of the Doughnut mean for the urban spaces and built environments within which we live, work and play?
Source: Birgisdóttir, H. et al. (2023)
Source: Birgisdóttir, H. et al. (2023)
Below we highlight just some of the dimensions of this framework that become more critical given current predicted global temperature rise, and pose the 3°C implication for each.
These have been considered and are presented at the following scales:
- building
- street
- neighbourhood
- ecoregion
Whilst each dimension of the social foundation and ecological ceiling has its own direct implications for our possible futures, their co-benefits not only intersect, but compound one another.
Shared Co-benefits Examples
- Enhanced biodiversity and green space wellbeing, including plants, insects, microorganisms and other wildlife
- Community engagement and social cohesion: building a sense of community, promoting learning, and offering opportunities for sharing knowledge and resources, while fostering ownership and responsibility and increasing uptake of local initiatives
- Improved water quality by absorption of pollutants and dust, alongside improved water retention and filtration
- Greater community resiliency and adaptation in the case of short-term extreme weather conditions like drought, and long-term adaptive needs
- Improved livelihoods of people who depend on growing activities (like farming)
- Public health improvement, and decreased pressures on public health spending
- Savings for households and local authorities
Through elucidating the specificities of where the systems of the built environment intersect and are entangled socially and ecologically, locally and globally, the Doughnut For Urban Development becomes a tool to help discern the strategic interventions that will have the most multi-layered and generative co-benefits.
As such, we are using this framework to form the basis of a quantified dashboard, activating its dual functionality not only as a guiding compass for the scale of wholesale transformation required for our built environments, but also to provide a comprehensive set of transparent metrics, visible to all, to which we can be collectively accountable.
This represents the transformative potential of a collaborative, distributive-by-design approach and just some of the new worlds of adjacent possibilities that can be unlocked when working in this way, across our neighbourhoods and broader generative ecosystems of praxis.
Find out more in our forthcoming ↗ Doughnut As A Compass chapter.
Investing In A Civic Economy For Climate Transition
Implicit in all of these fundamental shifts is a transition away from an economy reliant on growth, consumption, inequality and exploitation, and towards a more democratic, just and civic economy founded on a new abundance of the intangible asset of care, maintenance, collective intelligence, play and imagination.
This civic economy already exists, yet only at the margins. What we’re learning through understanding the current trajectory of global climate action, and its resultant climate and ecological impacts, is that radical transformations at a much more granular, local level are needed.
The consequence of this is an imperative to systematically shift the scale at which resources and infrastructure sit. In order to make an economic transition a reality. new actors and organisations to come to life.
Investing in Capability
Enhancing neighbourhood decision making and co-action, as well as building the capabilities and capacities of neighbourhoods to sense, interpret, collaborate on decision-making, and jointly implement solutions is crucial. These competencies are vital assets in navigating volatile conditions effectively.
Investing in Universal Basic Infrastructure Systems
Investments should be channelled into innovative models of neighbourhood-level universal basic infrastructures. These include community energy grids, food forests, repair labs and will form the backbone of anti-fragile infrastructure.
Such systems are instrumental in not only shielding neighbourhoods from the severest impacts of resource and economic volatility, but boldly, creatively and joyfully co-leading at the heart of social, ecological, economic and climate transition of the 21st century.
Call To Action For Those Stewarding Wealth
As crises compound, philanthropy’s capacity to respond systemically will reduce, and crisis-management measures responding to ever more immediate emergencies will become the enduring norm. CIVIC SQUARE are seeking ambitious financial investors as part of a multi-capital approach, interested in providing transformative finance to a neighbourhood scale demonstration of social, civic and ecological infrastructure in service of community led and stewarded transitions.
At heart of the operating model is a multi-economy approach, that seeks to nurture a perpetual cycle of neighbourhood and civic wealth creation, collective governance frameworks, and ongoing neighbourhood-led granting pool.
Our investment ask places financial capital as a key enabler of unlocking this work moving it out of financial markets and into communities directly, situating it equally alongside multiple capitals that nurture and sustain neighbourhood work. Financial capital that is distributive by design, regenerative and reparative is sought, from investors who seek to work alongside a team, wider ecosystem and vibrant neighbourhood to meet this moment in time, and the challenges we collectively face, with hope, dignity, honesty and hands on practice in place.
Read more about this in ↗ Endowing the Future.
If you are interested in taking these questions, possibilities and work forward together, reach out to us for access to the full Neighbourhood Public Square proposal.
Additional Materials
→ 3ºC Birmingham: Strategies for urban neighbourhoods in a climate emergency and beyond Slide Deck — March 2024
→ 3ºC Neighbourhood Co-benefits Matrix — March 2024
→ Full 3ºC Neighbourhood Chapter.pdf — March 2024
↗ 3ºC Neighbourhood Case Studies — Coming Soon
↗ Ladywood Climate Study — Coming Soon
Wider Proposal
3ºC Neighbourhood is a chapter of the Neighbourhood Public Square proposal co-authored and co-built by CIVIC SQUARE, alongside named partners, collaborators and neighbours, in March 2024.
Further chapters of the Neighbourhood Public Square proposal will be shared over the next few months. These include:
↗ 01 | An Invitation
↗ 02 | Key Principles
↗ 04 | Ladywood Climate Study
↗ 05 | Doughnut As A Compass
↗ 06 | Our Track Record
↗ 07 | Physical Infrastructure Design
↗ 08 | Radical Precedents
↗ 09 | Endowing The Future
↗ 10 | Investment Ask
↗ 11 | Team & Governance
↗ 12 | Call To Action
Get Involved
→ Material Matter[s] Skills For Transition Learning Journey
29th May — 5th September 2024
Applications Now Open
→ Site As A Classroom Launch
28th — 30th May 2024
→ Timber Festival
5th — 7th July 2024
→ The B16 Lunch
7th — 8th September 2024
This article is proudly co-authored together with Dark Matter Labs, with our particular thanks extended to the following people:
Text
- Indy Johar
- Jack Minchella
- Emma Pfeiffer
Diagrams
- Jack Minchella
- Eunji Kang
We also give our deep gratitude for the following additional contributors:
- Prateek Shankar
Diagrams
prtk.xyz - Carlos Peñalver
Illustrations
carlospenalver.com
