DM Note #6 — Building the Spatial Justice Mission
This is the sixth in a series of DM notes, in which we write about insights from our work on the ground, following internal learning sessions called DM Downloads that are organized every two weeks or so. The aim is to make our practice more legible, for us as well as for you.
As some of you might know, Dark Matter Labs emerged from the interest of revealing and transforming the forces dictating our built environment. The Spatial Justice mission formalises this intention that still drives us: understanding institutional innovation, systemic challenges, and social justice through built form and lived spaces. In partnership with communities and governments around the world, we aim at developing the open systems for tech enabled, democratic and sustainable urban futures.
Why Spatial Justice?
Spatial justice is not a new term. It references an established body of academic work and activism that frames social justice not just as concerned with distribution of wealth and power amongst individuals or groups, but one that shaped and driven by the geography and place in which it takes place. How we organise and experience space can lock in injustice and ecological degradation, or can accelerate equity and agency, a good economic recovery and support climate transition.
One of the first steps in understanding this area of work is to delineate a set series of scales of spatial justice: from the discreet materials that make up our buildings, through to scales that are in themselves complex systems, like cities or bio-regions.
Over the past few years and across many initiatives and geographies, we have been working on building a mission around spatial justice that recognizes that the intimate spaces of our homes and the community spaces of our neighbourhoods have become the minimum viable units for systemic change.
The second step is to focus heavily on the invisible layers of design that shape those physical scales; centring heavily on contemporary bureaucracy, financial incentives, and governance structures (eg. planning policy, urban use licenses, property laws, etc.) — and investigating these as active sites for creating spatial justice.
Focus areas:
Out of this framing we have landed on four focus areas of work, and seek projects, initiatives, and willing partners for advancing this:
Socializing the value of land
- Equity in access and affordability
- Civic ownership & governance
- Linking land value to civic and social infrastructure
- Linking land value to civic outcomes (eg. air quality)
Locally-led Just Climate Transition
- Building community capacity, collective ownership and resilience
- Developing models that support additional long-term investment
- Changing the dynamics of finance and local places
Material circulatory and self sovereignty
- Beyond human asset ownership and extraction
- Indigenous law and legal sovereignty of materials
- National material passports and performance registry
(performance based) Contract innovation
- Focus on performance rather than objects
- Live energy use intensity contracts
Projects
Supporting greater equality and transitioning our urban economies beyond carbon will require unprecedented levels of intervention and investment, and in turn, a new model of democratic and collective ownership and management. The following projects, being developed across North America and Europe each explore various possibilities on how to rethink our relationship to the land and how we use it.
Smart Covenant / Smart Commons
Public investment in shared infrastructure results in disproportionate private profit through land value uplift. This problem which underpins our current model of urban development, fuelling land speculation and creating unequal and unsustainable neighbourhoods. We need to find ways to redesign our land economy.
In collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC and Centre for Spatial Technologies, Dark Matter Labs are developing a platform that brings together smart contracts, property value data and distributed ledgers to more fairly distribute this public value, by creating a mechanism to invest in building more sustainable communities.
Since the publication of Smart Commons on Medium, we built on the feedback we received to better understand the technical and cultural barriers in the realization of that vision. We then further adapted these proposals to other areas we are working on to further develop them, such as micro-contracting for the retrofit of buildings.
Partners: EIT Climate-KIC and Centre for Spatial Technologies
Open Whole Community Retrofit Ecosystem
To meet our current climate targets almost every home and neighbourhood in the UK will need to be retrofitted to reduce energy and resource demand, reduce flood risk, urban heat island effects and manage and reduce associated liabilities. This is also a massive opportunity to create better and healthier homes and neighbourhoods as well as a whole new sector of the economy.
Previous approaches to retrofit have failed dismally. This is often because government has assumed that the best way forward is to create subsidies for individual measures for individual households.
Furthermore the UK remains a deeply unequal and highly centralized society and current proposals around ‘levelling up’ remain poorly articulated, governed and resourced. More than ten years of austerity have significantly damaged local capacity and resilience.
This project seeks to use new investment logic (transformation capital), to create positive change and support the tangible and intangible assets in our communities (community capital) by using new forms of contracting and better understanding of spillover value flows (civic value) and changing the dynamics between financial institutions and local places. Rather than an atomized approach, we are exploring how locally accountable climate transition organisations can support collective change, and how this might be replicated.
Transformation Capital is the deployment of capital to fundamentally change dynamics of the (real-economy) system, setting it on an environmentally and socially sustainable footing, as well enabling the continued multiplication of capital in the long run. This will go way beyond small shifts being currently assumed through ESG investment paradigm.
When this is aligned with places and communities in a way that, rather extracting their value, generates compound, multiplying value (for both private and public actors) and invests in the networks of trust, deliberation and agency at local level alongside climate transition projects themselves, this marrying of transformation capital and community capital can establish a new model for systemic, non-extractive investment logic.
Partners: Working with Thirty Percy, Lankelly Chase, EIT-Climate KIC, TransCap Initiative, and Civic Square, the project is currently engaging residents on a street in Birmingham, to help the residents envision potential street-scale propositions, such as street retrofit, and rewiring and integrating their value flows.
Healthy, Clean Cities EU CINCO
Healthy, Clean Cities EU CINCO is a two-year initiative, supported by Laudes Foundation, which focusses on accelerating efforts to minimise embodied carbon in new buildings, supporting circular practices and increasing uptake of bio-based materials. Acting in the cities of Madrid and Milan as the two initial testbeds, Dark Matter Labs is working with a consortium of European design partners, coordinated by EIT Climate-KIC, alongside implementation partners who include: City of Madrid, Commune di Milano, AMAT, Redo, Distrito Castellana Norte, Arup, Politecnico di Milano and itdUPM. The testbeds are two of Europe’s largest urban regeneration projects: Madrid Nuevo Norte and Milan’s L’Innesto.
The consortium is working closely with local partners to identify and develop innovations which could support greenhouse gas neutrality of a development over its full lifecycle, considering opportunities throughout the value chain, including: policy and regulation; financing; citizen engagement; digital tools and data; and materials and processes. Dark Matter Labs is specifically focussing on the areas of policy and regulation, contractual innovation and digital and data infrastructure.
Partners: Design partners — EIT Climate-KIC, Bankers Without Boundaries, Democratic Society and Material Economics + Implementation partners — City of Madrid, Commune di Milano, AMAT, Redo, Distrito Castellana Norte, Arup, Politecnico di Milano and itdUPM
Material Registry / Performance-Based Contracting
Material Registry is a concept for an open registry of embodied impact data and in-use performance data for buildings and their constituent components, that could enable performance-based contracting and regulation in the built environment. If implemented it would enable better decisions on building retrofit, material circularity and minimizing environmental impacts.
The registry would provide open access to standardized and reliable data on embodied carbon, materials, processes and labour; component condition, location and performance such as air quality, temperature and humidity.
In collaboration with the Centre for Spatial Technologies, Dark Matter Labs has been developing an animation to illustrate the lifecycle of a self-sovereign window that describes the matter, processes and the embodied impacts it contains as well as the possible futures it could become part of.
Self-sovereign objects are are self-executing and self-owning; capable of determining their own lifecycle to maximise material utility and performance whilst minimizing negative environmental impacts. Augmented by sensing capabilities and the ability to autonomously execute smart contracts, material objects could continuously monitor their own performance and contract for their maintenance, repair or recycling.
Partners: Centre for Spatial Technologies, EIT Climate-KIC
Community Wealth / Perpetual Affordability
In Canada close to 79% of wealth is invested in real estate both directly through home ownership but also through our investments, pension plans and education funds for our children. There is a similar situation in many other countries.
This leads to our economy, our money and political systems being locked into unsustainable policies and paradigms of ever increasing land values (and the attendant housing affordability crises) and new construction (and the challenges around material use set out above as well as possibly social costs).
Community Wealth focuses on systematic change in the ways we view wealth and its purpose by transitioning away from a dichotomy of private and public property ownership towards portfolios of community assets, jointly owned and governed. We believe this would better allow us to address the affordability gap that is breaking apart our social fabric, as well as create solutions for climate crisis.
One of the pathways towards this long-term horizon goal is through creation of a parallel housing market that would focus on the ‘missing middle’ of the Canadian residential real estate market. By aggregating capital at a national level through a fund and deploying it locally to participatory districts, first-time home buyers as well as existing home owners would be able to transition towards a new model of “perpetual stewardship”.
We are focusing on specific components of the long-term horizon and prototyping the following connected proposals:
- “Free House” where smart perpetual bond meets self-sovereign house meets stewardship contract;
- “Community wealth portfolio” which consists of: affordable homes (via Free House and other models); Renewable energy; Shared Transportation; Local small businesses (via retail real estate); Natural assets; and Co-sharing working space (via office real estate);
- “Smart Perpetual Bond” — long-term instrument for capitalizing the community wealth portfolio;
- “Participatory District” — a new type of intermediary that holds all above-land assets; jointly owned and governed by: residents, community foundations, community groups (social enterprises, not for profits working to meet community needs) and government;
- “Smart Community Trust” — asset holder of all land in perpetuity.
Partners: United Properties Resource Corporation, CMHC, Watershed Partners, Third Space Planning and Generation Squeeze
Key Questions, Lessons and Challenges Moving Forward
- Getting to the right mission framing: Spatial Justice encompasses a very broad range of topics. What are we missing or overstepping the line with the framing to better organise internally around the key platform components that we want to build for the just climate transition of the built environment? How do our projects interact?
- Understanding real estate as a system: How do we understand ‘real estate’ as a system for spatial justice? How can we address materials (build quality, lifespan, carbon, maintenance), supply chain (labour rights, skill level, regenerative), ownership (power, legal setup, governance), finance (liquidity, value) and data (behaviour, technology, openness) in that system?
- Lack of quality information on materials: Currently, we lack of good quality information on buildings. We lack open, verified data on: Supply chain (Materials; Processes; Carbon; Labour practices..), Performance of components (Air tightness; Thermal insulation; Condition; Reuse potential…) and Performance of spaces (Indoor air quality; Temperature; Humidity; Light…). What are the best ways to change that?
- Various horizons are important: At least 3 horizons are key to the mission’ advancement; Horizon 1 teaches the sequencing in the pathway, Horizon 2 constructs a macro solution within existing system, and Horizon 3 illustrates the possibility of the mission and creates an alternative system. We needed to advance on all three horizons simultaneously in order to move towards a possibility of the solution.
- Moving towards longer term mission-wide funding: Carefully crafting partnerships and prototypes takes time and resources; we needed to strike a balance between allocating our capacity and ensuring that we are eventually getting paid for the work we are developing, or better developing mission-wide funding support.
- Building financial models can be fun and visionary: Building a financial model is extremely important and fun; it forces us to look carefully at numbers, decide what connections and correlations made sense, and establish where are the gaps. Once that work is completed, we could replicate the model to other prototypes in other initiatives across our portfolio.
- Recognizing the tensions behind the numbers: Much of this work hypothesises that monetizing intangible co-benefits — such as the value of heritage, wellbeing, access to nature, and so on — will drive different investment flows and result in better outcomes. Most current investment decisions are justified through quantitative analysis and therefore developing better systems for this is of significant benefit. But there are dangers in this approach: Even an evidence-based process of quantification is compromised with assumptions and can be corrupted and opaque. The numbers should support open, transparent and democratic conversations about values and trade offs — for example, do we want to give more weight to heritage or nature? There are some values which are beyond quantification e.g. The spiritual value of a tree. Furthermore financialization should be complemented by Effective and genuine participation, better regulation and reformed political systems for example.
- Addressing uneven power dynamics between capital and community: One common thread was about here seems to be unequal power dynamics between finance and the places where some of the projects operate, and how local actors with what feels like enormous scale systems. Existing systems create certain rules and paradigms that have to shift to make it more equitable. How can we ensure that the terms of engagement be fairer (security, returns, scale, etc.).
- Imagining land trusts beyond discounted capital: Land trusts are a powerful tool that have shown immense potential, however they generally work on the basis that somebody has to write off some or all of the price of the land at the outset. In other words, it requires discounted capital to operationalize itself, which can limit in part the scaling of the model. What we are trying to achieve in some of the emergent models we are working on is to trying to acknowledge the current value, and then create a deviation from it, in a way that can work as a more universal mechanism. How can we build that not in opposition but with or in support of the existing land trust movement around the world?
Get in touch
If you enjoyed this 6th DM Note, you can read all of our previous notes here, follow us on Medium for more to come and clap the article to show appreciation. And please feel free to reach out and share your thoughts on this as we continue to grow a community of interest/ practice/ impact around the world.
Jack Minchella — Spatial Justice Mission+ Smart Covenant
jack@darkmatterlabs.org
Dark Matter Laboratories UK
Calvin Po — TransCap/CommCap
calvin@darkmatterlabs.org
Dark Matter Laboratories UK
Oliver Burgess — Material Registry+ Healthy, Clean Cities EU CINCO
oliver@darkmatterlabs.org
Dark Matter Laboratories UK
Anastasia Mourogova — Community Wealth
Anastasia@darkmatterlabs.org
Dark Matter Laboratories / Laboratoires de Matière sombre — Canada
