Community-led transformation and retrofitting for climate change
About Civic Square
Civic Square is a community group working in Ladywood in inner-city Birmingham. The area faces issues of deindustrialisation, deprivation, and privatisation. The aim of Civic Square is to enable community-led transformation and transition. It is about reimagining how people can live in a different, more sustainable, and resilient way, retrofitting existing places and spaces in a manner that ensures community participation and ownership.
How is Civic Square making a difference?
The work of Civic Square is organised into three key demonstrators:
- The Neighbourhood Doughnut: Civic Square has been working to reimagine doughnut economics at a neighbourhood level. In 2022, it produced the First Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait, co-created with the local community, to showcase the story of Ladywood and the opportunities and challenges faced when working to transform the economy for the benefit of people and the planet.
- Neighbourhood Transitions: This demonstrator explores how to retrofit our homes, streets, and neighbourhoods to meet society’s changing needs. Civic Square’s Neighbourhood Trade School aims to democratise access to the skills and knowledge needed to manage the climate transition and retrofit our surroundings.
- Neighbourhood Public Square: The focus of this demonstrator is co-building and democratising access to space and resources in the Ladywood neighbourhood and how to ensure this is secured in perpetuity for the local community.
Civic Square works to create flourishing lives by organising at the scale of people and ensuring its work is democratic and participatory, devolving as much as possible to the community. Intertwined with this is its work to reimagine how the economy works for the community, including ensuring money and assets remain in the community’s hands, as well as creating a more cyclical and sustainable local economy through the Neighbourhood Doughnut. At the core of all Civic Square’s work is nature, as it is vital to protect the ecological health of the Ladywood neighbourhood, as well as working to adapt and mitigate against climate change.
Our job is to create the bridge between the everyday entry points, from a cup of tea to a sewing group, all the way through to getting involved in our most complex redesigning the economy work…
Imandeep Kaur, Co-Founder & Director, Civic Square
How did they do it?
Civic Square has evolved over the course of the last decade, originating from the TED x Brum movement before transitioning into Impact Hub Birmingham and then into Civic Square in 2020. It took ten years and a significant amount of work for Civic Square to get to where it is now. Originally financed through crowdfunding, Civic Square began receiving core funding in 2020 due to the success of its project. It arranges its key contracts to ensure that money is retained within the community. It does not have volunteers but it has a team of core staff who work with a range of freelancers.
One of the major challenges currently facing Civic Square is the compulsory purchase of the Ladywood Estate, which will affect over 1,000 households. This will have a massive impact and cause significant displacement within the local community. Additionally, people are really struggling due to economic issues, lack of civic and social infrastructure, privatisation of spaces, and the impact of the ecological crisis.
However, working in the community offers a plethora of opportunities. You have the chance to work with communities that have a massive amount of generational knowledge and wisdom. Working in and with the community can be incredibly transformative, not only for the community but also for the community group’s staff.
There is an incredible amount of wisdom, knowledge, experience and proximity to the real impacts of complex challenges at the neighbourhood scale.
Imandeep Kaur, Co-Founder & Director, Civic Square
Three things to unlock Civic Square’s potential.
- Funders need to be braver, more courageous, and more trusting of communities. There needs to be more transformative and patient investment that is not looking for massive returns.
- More land and community assets must be moved into community and neighbourhood hands so they can be secured for the community’s good in perpetuity.
- There needs to be a more acute and focused appreciation of the impact that climate change will have on communities. There needs to be a more focused and honest approach from all sectors on how we are going to tackle the issue.
Civic Square’s advice for new community projects:
- Go where the energy is.
- Follow the needs of the community.
- Build trust and relationships, and everything else will follow.
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