Speakers
Description
In our research, we started looking at community ownership as specifically geographically defined communities having democratic control and ownership over land and buildings. In line with their long-term stewardship role, community landowners manage properties and dedicate their surpluses for the benefit of residents, other occupiers, as well as the wider community, and the environment. Community ownership and stewardship activities have been linked to affordable housing, or social infrastructures. We were interested in looking at the larger scale community ownership of a range of assets beyond land and housing, interested in deriving a set of principles for community ownership.
In doing so, we learnt about the value and potential community ownership has for postgrowth planning. Both through direct decommodification, there are important secondary effects in terms of community organizing, a focus on community health and wellbeing, generation of local employment, as well as climate change resilience. If we consider postgrowth to be the decoupling from market-based paradigm, along with the decoupling from carbon emission as well as reduction of throughput of resources along with the addressing of social and ecological (Savini 2022) then community ownership of a large range of different assets can be considered both as a set of prefigurative practices to inspire and replicate, but also able to generate the institutional infrastructures for scaling up.
Our paper presents the cases we looked at across the UK including the community ownership or land, housing, energy, transport, data, town centres, community centres, pubs, forests and agricultural projects – which spanned a large and diverse range of land-uses as well as activities. Through interviews with groups as well as umbrella support organisations, we developed a set of common principles for community ownership based on the notions of community being articulated and used, the sense of place, the diversity of scale, role of finance, importance of business models and revenue generation, forms of governance, value generation, and the policy as well as regulatory frameworks. What we would like to explore in this paper is the role these principles have in formulating community ownership as integral to postgrowth planning framing the relational and place-based approached needed for community ownership as part of a broader set of spatial planning and regeneration practices.
| Keywords | community ownership stewardship postgrowth planning |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
