How to Save Democracy: Neighbourhood Power

Jon Alexander meets Imandeep Kaur of Civic Square and Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, to ask what it might look like – and what it might take – for neighbourhoods to be truly in the driving seat of their own transformation.

We are now living in a democratic emergency. Autocrats, authoritarians and outright fascists appear to be on an inexorable rise, while few politicians seem capable of charting a credible path forward in the face of today’s immense challenges.

Yet just beneath the media radar, another story is taking shape: a story of democratic renewal and reinvention, with citizen participation, deliberation, and defiant joy at its heart.

Nowhere does this situation apply more than in the Ladywood neighbourhood of Birmingham, where green shoots of community power push stubbornly through, despite all the odds, in ways that are admired and followed across the world.

Imandeep Kaur, co-founder of the Civic Square initiative that is at the heart of much of this, likes to quote Adrienne Maree Brown in talking about “inch wide mile deep change, that schisms the existing paradigm.” Join Jon Alexander, author of Citizens, to get under the skin of this approach, what’s going on in Ladywood, and what it could mean for the rest of the country and indeed the world. He’ll be in conversation with Imandeep and renegade architect and thought leader Indy Johar, who has been advising from behind the scenes from the very beginning, among his many contributions to framing the civic potential of our time.