Alan Selwyn, Chair of BelSoc writes:
Imagine how the Belsize area would be in 2036. Maybe not so very different from now but imagine, instead, if you’d had a blank slate to redesign a future-world. That’s what we were tasked with doing today at an event hosted by The Winch at the UCL Academy and run by ‘Town Anywhere’
Today, around 60 participants from all backgrounds and disciplines came together to imagine time-travelling to an idealised version of our future community.
The visions formed will feed into a Citizens’ Assembly, part of The Winch’s “Good Neighbourhood Project – Creating a Greener Neighbourhood’. This project which runs until Spring 2027 has a focus on making streets and shared spaces cleaner, greener, and more welcoming for all: mirroring many of BelSoc’s own aims. It follows the successful 2025 programme, ‘Creating a Fairer Neighbourhood’ .
The Citizen’s Assembly has 25 members and will meet from now until July and seeks to generate ideas for a greener Swiss Cottage and South Hampstead area. In turn it will feed into Camden’s forthcoming ‘Swiss Cottage Vision’, which will be launching soon.
Today’s event asked some of us to take on the identity of members of the ‘beyond human’ natural world and to speak for them in the discussion, so we had representatives of hedgerows, bats, earthworms, oak trees, soil, foxes and so on. We got to know each other through personal stories and we began to engage with each other to plan our environment, respecting and accommodating life in all its diversity, starting with our immediate street neighbourhood and expanding gradually to build a new town.
A huge number of ideas were thrown up, recorded on blackboards and wall-charts and finally we got to build our imagined futures out of cardboard, paper, sticky tape and twigs. If this sounds rather like ‘Blue Peter’ it was but having spent some hours talking about the issues – climate change, degradation of the environment, intensive food production and all the other things we contribute to despoiling our beautiful planet, we desperately sought solutions to give us a brighter future.
And we did it! The amount of creativity displayed was exceptional but also notable was the commonality of thought, feelings and purpose. This was a wonderful contrast to the angry demonstrations taking place in London at the very same time.
Though our group was massively diverse it seems we all want the same things – to live in harmony with each other and with nature, maximising opportunity for all and creating spaces where we can express ourselves individually and in groups, meeting our needs for relaxation, recreation, learning, making and just being. And looking after each other. We all demonstrated ambitious dreams and great ideas.
The need for working in harmony with the natural world was at the forefront of our planning and greening the environment with appropriate energy, water and waste solutions was a given, as was healthier food production. And giving voice to all, even the trees and the bees.All very utopian but many practical strategies were explored to help achieve our goals, even debating suitable governance structures. And many of the ideas could be directly implemented today. In fact, there are small examples near to us – community gardens and allotments, local energy micro-generation, food banks, community housing projects and so on.
A report of the day will be coming in the next couple of weeks and we’ll follow up the work of the Citizens’ Assembly and Camden’s ‘Swiss Cottage Vision’ as it unfolds.
