Projects and partners Archway Cultural Commons Research and knowledge exchange

Archway Cultural Commons is a four-year research project in partnership with London Borough of Islington and the Architectural Association. The project is developing collaborative methodologies with local community organisations and public sector to understand how Creative Enterprise Zones allocated by the GLA (Greater London Authority) can be developed as a public-commons (community) partnership. This is to raise the level of impact at local level in line with government’s Levelling Up agenda where the starting point is the local and then scaling-up. The project has in its first year actively engaged with five community organisations and three departments within Islington such as: Homes and Neighbourhoods, Community Engagement and Wellbeing, and Community Wealth Building. This is intended to expand in its second year to Environment and Climate Change and Public Health. Internally our partnership is with Community Wealth Building who lead the cross-authority partnership.  

In its first year the project aims to listen and understand the obstacles cultural organisations face locally and map obstacles and potentials for grassroots led CEZ development.  

Our research in year one has revealed:  

• Major problem with land and access to affordable spaces for small and medium enterprises and embedded cultural and design organisations in Archway.  
• A neighbourhood scale project can be the mechanism to bring together partnership between grassroots organisations and public sector as well as collaboration between local authority departments. This is particularly important to ensure solutions and services are not designed in silos and thus can have effective implementation and impact.  
• Labour to deliver meaningful community led projects is consistently seen as volunteering which is a problem in terms of inclusivity of who can get involved and have a voice. The commons or community sector requires a sustainable economic model.  
• The grassroots do not have an economic governance and resilient system giving them agency to deliver policy which the public sector is not resourced to do. 
• Diverse capacity building at both public sector and grassroots needs to be designed as an ecosystem of formal and informal learning programs that will be the focus of year two.  

Stage 1: Finding Out  

Desktop research mapping:

This includes physically engaging and meeting with organisations that run rabbit farms (not killing rabbits) but harvest hair, and water habitats. This phase also includes literature reviews and theoretical reading 

Intention:

The activities being proposed are critically approached from both the perspectives of the humans involved in the research and imagined from the non-human perspective to map the overall intention of the work from plural positions and worldviews. The needs are explored as multiperspective  perceived problematical situations using both SSM methods and behavioral psychology. These include qualitative conversation analysis, semi-structured interviews, and discursive discussions. 

Mapping plural world views:

Everyone has a different worldview based on their life experience and this effects what they value and normalise. We intend to initially map these plural world views to understand how behavioural systemic change can occur. 

Stage 2: Model Building  

Design Intervention:

Soft system methodolgy (SSM) is action based and through intevening in the real life situation that brings out multiple relationships be they human - human,  human-nonhuman and nonhuman - nonhuman. These relationships reveal acute systemic blocks which SSM calls Rich Pictures of behaviour of system. 

Embedding Relational Ethics of Care:

The project focuses ethics of care on the relationships rather than on entities. Everyone and everything within the system has an ethical duty on the quality of the relationship created through the design work. 

Stage 3: Analysis 

Reflection ‘in’ Action:

During  each design intervention the informal knowledge gained which may be about  types of relationships produced, perceived values, social norms and ecologicval behaviour are noted. 

Reflexive Action:

This is reflection based on the research team of Principial Investigators and Co-Investigators based on both theoretical and design intervention to reflect also on the role of the designer in a situation as part of the relationships being created. This leads to collective reflection ‘on’ Action with communities. 

Reflection ‘on’ Action:

This is collaborative and collective reflection to ensure plural worldviews including the non-human is accounted for which leads to  designing new design interventions as part of the methodological research cycle, creating structured discussion and debate with all involved in research, looking at feasible change through the next design intervention.  

This research will provide a comprehensive model and series of interdisciplinary socially engaged methodologies to capacity build local and grassroots organisations who are committed to a place rather than dropped-in experts to implement government programs and policies. 

1. Feasibility and viability study for a grassroots led cultural quarter in Archway to be architectural implemented.  
2. Web 3 website as a platform that is linked to crowd-funding platforms, donations and other funding mechanisms.
3. A co-produced festival design and concept.
4. Resource infrastructure mapping and coalition of public sector and local organisations.
5. Coalition of cultural organisations working together with Islington council towards a space of operation.
6. Proposal for a grant application for textile commons in Archway. 
7. An exhibition in Archway.