Really good report out this week from an excellent acquaintance, Rachel Coldicutt, who runs Careful Industries.
It is possible to rapidly spark a culture of inclusive innovation across the UK, that begins in neighbourhoods and forms a golden network of locally rooted community incubator organisations, supported by long-term investment and clear success measures. As well as creating new innovation potential, this will strengthen social bonds and help build better places to live.
This resonates really strongly with the plea I make in the final chapter of God-Like for a ‘re-encounter-culture,’ and this being based at the meso-level of mid-scale human networks.
Well worth a read.
The question is what acts as the ‘glue’ for these networks. They don’t just happen – they have to coagulate around some holding force. That might be a ‘strong’ story like the gospel, or a commitment to workers’ rights as a trades union… or around a local geography of a street.
But this glue has been put into dissolution by tech… and the question of what replaces it is really not clear. It’s a very noble ideal to propose localism, but there has to be some kind of meso-narrative. I’m not even going to try to propose a meta- one as I think that that time has gone… even if Trump’s nostalgic populism is an attempt to return to some golden age of it. And… those pre-smartphone days in the 80s… they weren’t a golden age. Not unless you were part of the privileged strata of society that benefited from it – again, something I explore in the book.
Grab a copy here.
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