Learning from EFF: Re-imagining land and housing
From the outset of the Emerging Futures Fund, the theme of inequality has been striking. The impacts of the pandemic have both made visible and exacerbated the inequalities that many civil society organisations have been grappling with for years.
The issues of land and housing - who owns it, who designs it, who gets to use it and how - underpin some of the structural inequalities that have surfaced over the past year. Within the Emerging Futures Fund cohort, a group of projects explored these in depth and their insights provide important pointers for how to create a more equitable future.
Shared Assets have built on their research into the narratives that lie beneath our relationships with land with practical workshops. They found the entrenched views people have about land - that it’s the settled outcome of history and a scarce resource that must be competed for - are extremely hard to overcome in practice. People on the ground cannot necessarily relate to this narrative framing and there is not an obvious opening for beginning to build new stories about land.
This contrasts with the experience of Community Land Scotland where attitudes towards land have shifted significantly in recent decades. Community land ownership is no longer seen as a ‘radical’ option and of the more than 400 community land holders in Scotland, spanning urban parks to major rural estates, none has collapsed or gone bust. Instead, community landowners in Scotland found that during the pandemic they expanded their roles, quickly creating responsive services for their communities.
Although this experience points to the success of the community ownership model, it also poses a dilemma for community landowners - at what point are they taking on service delivery that should be the preserve (and responsibility) of local authorities? Through their EFF funded projects, Community Land Scotland worked with artists embedded in five communities across the country to explore how community landowners can help deliver local people’s aspirations for the future. They found that introducing a creative approach widened the participation of their communities and brought new people into the community land ownership conversation.
South of Scotland Community Housing’s ‘Model for Post-Covid Living’ has considered how societal impacts around the pandemic have influenced housing and related space, working towards a house type that allows affordable, community-led housing. Like Shared Assets, they found people struggled to think beyond their ingrained habits and expectations, although lockdowns had forced people to reimagine their own living spaces and repurpose them for work and homeschooling. Lockdowns have sparked a wave of people relocating from cities to rural areas and the pressure on housing for local people is urgent. The group is keen that the ideas that have surfaced through the project can find an immediate practical application.
Across all these projects it became clear how land and housing are systemic issues that expand beyond neat pigeon holes of either policy or funding. Lemon Leopard’s ‘Nowtopia’, a prototype of a collaborative care community, found the intangible aspects of their project - the relationships and learning that grew through the work - held some of its greatest value, and yet external engagement focused on the tangible, capital elements of the work, limiting the potential for it to develop.
In Scotland, land use is an established, mainstream policy issue, and the Emerging Futures Fund work can provide a useful impetus to develop this with the newly elected Scottish Government. The establishment of the UK government's £150m Community Ownership Fund also creates an opportunity for communities elsewhere to draw on the thinking that the Emerging Futures Fund has surfaced, take community ownership mainstream, and begin to turn the tide of how we consider our relationship to land.
Land and how we live in it are - quite literally - the foundation of our society. Imagining alternative ways of how we use land can profoundly shape our future. The Emerging Futures Fund has opened up a space for communities to articulate that future and it’s important to continue to share these ideas, and bring new people into the conversation to make sure that people are in the lead in driving that forward.