Discussion and Q&A chaired by Mehrdad Seyf. Bronwyn Williams, Sue Bell, Ivo Schmetz.
This AA symposium focused on local economies and alternative financial systems is a partnership with the Centre for Applied Research in Empowering Society (CARES) at London Metropolitan University.
Our urban environments within neoliberal politics are shaped today by monetary values as a major driver of how buildings look, how land is used in our cities, and how this in turn impacts our behaviour. As urban practitioners or citizens, we are not equipped to engage with this and creatively re-design out its limitations. This symposium will bring together creative and innovative economic thinkers, and those making projects using alternative financial structures in the city.
How can urban practitioners lead in redesigning economic value that could re-imagine neighbourhoods, high streets and civic infrastructures? At the heart of this symposium is how local social infrastructure, framed as the commons, can become financially viable as a movement, a discourse and practice. The symposium hypothesises that if grassroots organisations make up a legitimate political sector, that impacts who political decision makers are and what the role of the neighbourhood becomes. This has macro ramifications on critiquing the current problems with representational democracy and looking at how the neighbourhood as the locus of political decision-making can become a way to implement deliberative democracy. This also has ramifications on what constitutes contemporary civic spaces in the city outside its historic conventions.
