Towards a NEW MUTUALISM

Slow repair for me is about designing new communications: in the words of John W. Gardner, the founder of the U.S. citizen's organization Common Cause, "cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community."

All across the world citizens and social entrepreneurs are answering a call to 'stewardship'. They are self-organizing, sharing information and finding new ways to resolve complex community problems.

This call has been accelerated by the collapse of land values, the capacity of the internet to encourage networking between people and the push towards mutuality and localization that is an emerging answer to the indebtedness of the western economies.

In the U.K., I've been involved in several initiatives that exemplify this new mutualism.

In the former coal-mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire, this beautiful bridge was created by exceptionally close working between the community as client and the project architect, Renato Benedetti.

In the former steel-making town of Middlesbrough, North East England, a $15m investment by the authorities in urban agriculture and other action supporting the improvement of healthy living in the town, was triggered by a thousand people deciding to grow their own food in public places of their own choice.

Just now in the former docklands area of Butetown, Cardiff Bay, Wales, I am working with local people to find ways and means in which social relations can be improved by networking existing online networks of local people and triggering the new production of digital content.

And in a project in Moscow later this year, we plan to bring communities together to start a process of improving their physical environment and a small army of digital enthusiasts will turn digital reporters, go out in to their city, find out what needs to be repaired in their city and feed their observations back online and in mobile applications.

Slow repair is about active involvement of citizens in the revival of the places in which they live and work; and especially useful to communities that are fragmented, disempowered but share an industrial heritage, inheritance or identity.