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Current Context

In this section we’ll further discuss the particular layers of our current global and hyper-local contexts — contexts that inform our experiences, emerging inquiries and our work at a neighbourhood scale. We’ll also explore the blueprint for the work ahead and the nurturing of the ecosystem and partners we work with locally and nationally.

This dashboard and wiki is our current synthesis of work, asking the question: what does it mean for our neighbourhood to get into the safe and just space of the Doughnut? We ask this question in the context and against the backdrop of global challenges, the many scales of transition required, and within wider work across the scales of homes, streets and neighbourhoods that we and many others have been exploring.

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Global Polycrisis

Our 2019 roadmap and foundational ideas around transition, described more deeply here, helped us understand that we find ourselves facing a series of interdependent strategic risks that are complex, interconnected and not possible to treat in isolation.

We described the scale of change that’s urgently required in the decade ahead in this document, and it forms the backdrop of the next three years of our work and our key milestones.

COVID-19

The pandemic exposed the limits of our current institutional infrastructures in their ability to deal with the scale, scope and nature of the risks that lead to big, catastrophic events like these.

COVID-19 revealed many things we knew, in ways that were now visible to us all: the global interdependence and mutual vulnerability of our 21st Century challenges, existing and accelerating injustice and inequity, and the many related cascading impacts. In our particular context, COVID also highlighted something else: the unique ‘layer’ of our homes, streets and neighbourhoods — not as isolated concepts, places or communities; but instead as a crucial layer of resilience (and fragility).

This of course, was not new knowledge to the thousands of neighbours and communities organising throughout the last decade of austerity. The stripping of vital social infrastructure became clear, if you were looking closely enough. Exactly who was holding up the last mile of everyday life also became clear, as did the impact the pandemic on their life and work. We celebrated, nationally, the role of key workers and communities, we saw the best of who we are and could be, and the worst of systemic injustice and inequity too.