Our Ideas in Progress format is a space to collect and share thoughts, visions and ideas from practitioners in the ecosystem. They invite us to dream collectively and learn to explore what it means to build in community.
We all love someplace, somewhere.
The neighbourhood that raised us. The city we fell for. The mountain that held us steady when everything else fell apart.
Yet it can feel hard to find the love these days.
Third spaces dwindle as youth clubs, pubs and places of worship shutter.
We’re priced out of the neighbourhoods we grew up in, with fear replacing pride as populism takes hold.
Landscapes that cared for us slip away — a ‘solastalgia’ — as waterways are privatised and polluted and greenspaces contested under housing pressure.
And the structures meant to prevent this?
Emotions rarely fit into government policy or planning frameworks — yet how we feel about a place remains a determining factor in whether it lives or dies.
If we can’t articulate these feelings, we can’t begin to form lasting relationships with places. Words matter. As writer Tim Dee points out “without a name made in our mouths…a place struggles to find purchase in our minds and our hearts.”
What might sound nostalgic is fundamental to facing the future.
We’re told to skill up in AI to prepare for tomorrow. But, I’d argue the most important skill is learning to make the love language of place legible to those in power.
We need a kind of place literacy that enables us to reflect upon our relationship with places we are part of, and that are part of us.
Or indeed to build that power ourselves. We need a kind of place literacy that enables us to reflect upon our relationship with places we are part of, and that are part of us. And to articulate that in ways that transform our beliefs and actions.
The strength of those relationships becomes the foundation for a regenerative future that will see us through both tough times and glorious days ahead.
And, it’s happening. Through extraordinary experiments across around the world, people are re-writing their relationships with the places they care for.
In the North East of England, JRF is backing communities reclaiming their stories — Redhills rising, Horden writing its own narrative. In Adur & Worthing, West Sussex, people are imagining a future in their hands through the Thriving Together programme. In St Neots, The Big Listen laid out one table and 200 seats, welcoming the town to sit, talk about what they love in this market town and have a say in their future.
Wherever we work with local people who feel something for their place — from the Isle of Wight, to Parma, to New Mexico — the pattern repeats: give people’s emotions weight and communities act.
Each project builds a vocabulary. Yet these local projects rarely find other. We need platforms that connect the dots around the world. A large language model, if you like, of place relationships could build a system that truly knows how to value places that are important to our lives.
In times of upheaval, it’s not just where you live that will determine whether you survive the future — it’s how you relate to it. Your street will matter more than your salary. Place is about to become the most important relationship in your life.
