In a world that feels as if all the certainties are breaking down, how can we build the communities of place and of purpose that will give us the resilience to bridge from the old structures to the new? Exploring deeply practical ways to build community with Charlie Fisher.
Charlie Fisher is a co-founder and director of the Co-operative Architecture Practice, Transition by Design. He's a researcher and urban-instigator working on regenerative land use approaches and more collaborative forms of city-making driven by the belief that to unlock collective imagination for equitable societies we must remove structural barriers that are preventing people from connecting with one another.
His role over the past decade has been to build capacities within land-based organisations, primarily around urban affordable housing and mechanisms for holding land in the commons. He writes about, and runs workshops on, group dynamics, decision-making, housing finance, incorporation approaches, legal structures, stakeholder mapping, business planning, and visioning.
In 2020, he was developing the Oxygen Fund, a £5m revolving equity fund with the Oxfordshire Growth Deal, which led him to explore how regenerative land use can be supported through Distributed Co-operative Organisations (DisCOs🕺) and web3 Regenerative Finance (ReFi) projects.
He is in the core team of regenerative blockchain-based property developer Oasa, a Swiss Association, which bought its first piece of land in 2021 at Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal. In building this ecosystem together, he is the interface between various thematic working ‘circles’ and has led the design of our sociocratic coordination system.
He is an adviser to the Center for Community Land Trust Innovation, and in 2023 he’ll be running a cohort-based course, Unearthing Common Ground, with 50 land trusts globally and 50 regenerative web3 projects to support exchange between traditional land trust projects and web3 practitioners.
In this conversation, we open up the key question of building communities: what does it take to create the connections between people that make communities work? What questions matter and how do we know which things we can leave till later? How do we move from consensus to consent so that things move forward at the speed we need as our material supply chains falter? How can we engage the best in human creativity to build communities that will have the flexibility, heart and coherence to survive? Charlie is deeply embedded in so many of these questions, and finding ways through that work in the real world. With any luck at all, we'll be moving onto a 2nd conversation when a couple more of our hundred day segments have passed - so if you have questions, let me know.
Charlie's super site https://charliefisher.super.site/
Transition by Design https://transitionbydesign.org/
Community Land Trust network https://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/
Garden City Principles https://tcpa.org.uk/garden-city-principles/
Nabeel Hamdi: Small change: Intelligent Practice and Practising intelligence https://uk.bookshop.org/books/intelligent-practice-and-practising-intelligence/9781844070053
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/garden-communities-set-to-flourish-across-england
LILAC in Leeds http://www.lilac.coop/
Oasa Earth (which incorporates the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal) https://oasa.earth/
Accidental Gods