Episode 3: Reboot

Reboot means switching off a machine or device to update it, or get it working again if it's malfunctioning. With this episode of Regrowth we want to think about Rebooting society, focusing in particular on businesses, big tech companies, leaders, governments, and civic organisations.

As we come out of lockdown, we have a huge opportunity to Reboot our approach to sustainability and be on a more actively eco-conscious path that goes beyond individual actions. What does Reboot mean to us in this sense? What role do the organisations that form our society play? And just how urgent is it that we use this opportunity to address the climate crisis?

Speakers

Ben Smith is an environmental consultant working predominantly with local and city government administrations. He has led work focussed on energy efficiency, low carbon and renewable energy feasibility, climate change adaptation, urban resilience, smart technology and environmental / sustainable development strategy. Ben is the partnership director for Arup’s long-standing partnership with C40 Cities, and was a global judge for the 2019 Climathon, and for WWF’s One Planet Cities Challenge. He is a volunteer Founding Trustee of the National Park City Foundation.

Immy Kaur is focused on convening and building community, the role of citizens in radical systemic change, and how we together create more democratic, distributed, open source social and civic infrastructure. Immy is Co-Founder and Director of CIVIC SQUARE, a public square, neighbourhood lab, and creative + participatory platform focused on regenerative civic and social infrastructure within neighbourhoods. She is also part of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab Advisory Team, and was a founding director of Impact Hub Birmingham.

Mac Macartney is an international speaker, writer and change-maker. He contributes to diverse organisations and communities, including universities, schools, social enterprises and grassroots initiatives. He is the founder of Embercombe, a centre in Devon (UK) which seeks to explore and promote the profound regeneration of land, society, and people. Mac led a leadership development business in the UK, working with organisations such as Unilever supporting their Sustainable Living Plan, Vodafone, HSBC, and many others. Mac has also worked with Danone and sat on the sustainability advisory panels for Lafarge, Lend Lease, and Procter & Gamble.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:03

London National Park City is a large-scale and long-term movement to make London greener, healthier and wilder through a range of projects which, when combined, are impactful, inspirational and have potential to drive huge change across the capital. These projects are driven by a growing and diverse collaborative network of individuals, groups, organisations, partners, communities, businesses, and so much more. In July of this year, 2021, we'll be celebrating two years since the London Mayor awarded London its status as a National Park City, the first in the world. London National Park City is a way to rethink our relationship with nature and the expectations we share for our urban habitats. Most importantly, it's about taking actions that result in a better quality of life for people and for wildlife. My name is Emily Langston, and as well as working at Facebook, I am a volunteer ranger for London National Park City. The rangers are a network of passionate people with a wide range of experiences and talents. Together, we'll help make London greener, healthier and wilder, contributing to our shared vision to make London a city where people, places and nature are better connected. Rangers work in their local communities and across the capital on projects to tackle the climate and ecological crises, scaling greening initiatives and conservation activities. We've just onboarded our second cohort of Rangers, meaning there are 110 of us volunteering across London. Hello, everyone. This is the third and final episode of the Regrowth Project. This is a three-part podcast series hosted by the London National Park City Movement for Earth Week. The aim of the series is to inspire ideas and thinking about regrowth as we come out of lockdown. So looking back to the year that we've had, thinking about shifts in behaviour and perceptions and inspiring action in how we approach the future. It's wonderful to have you all here. Thank you so much. Can you tell us a bit about yourselves and your work to start us off. So we'll go in alphabetical order, starting with Ben.

SPEAKER_00: 2:31

Yeah, thanks, Emily. My name is Ben Smith. I've been an environmental consultant now for about 20 years, specialising in sustainable development, energy strategy and climate change. I've worked for some of the largest, almost well-known multidisciplinary engineering firms. I'm currently a director for Arup and I'm a founding trustee of the National Park City Foundation. And I thought it might be funny in this context to tell you that In 2019 for work, I think I went to sort of five or 10 international visits. And for the last 13 months, I've been sat in my garden shed. So that's been my lockdown.

SPEAKER_01: 3:05

Hi, I'm Emmy. I'm one of the co-founders of Civic Square, which is an organization based in Birmingham. We previously were the impact hub in Birmingham, but which derive from a people movement for what it means to build more, just more equitable, more civic-led and citizen-led places. And over the last couple of years, we've been really focusing in on what does it mean to build 21st century neighbourhood infrastructure that is social and civic and allows us to build transition through the times that we are going through and really stand up and face some of the challenges that we are facing with the impact that we as humans have had on the planet.

SPEAKER_03: 3:57

Hi, my name is Mac McCartney. I'm just wondering how to introduce myself really. I mean, I have been a leadership and OD consultant with various large organizations, Unilever, Danone, P&G, people like that. But I mean, I'm not really, I mean, I happen to be the gardener in the leadership center and interrupted a fight between two supermarket executives and overnight became a consultant. So I haven't exactly followed a traditional route, but I have been working with those kind of organizations for a long time. And one of my clients gave me the means to buy this 50-acre Devon Valley where I am now. And that valley and my work, speaking, writing, everything is dedicated towards how we might redesign the way we live on this earth and find a way that might meet the expectations and needs of all future generations, be they human or more than human.

SPEAKER_02: 5:10

Amazing. Thank you so much. So I'm going to recap on the theme just to kick us off. So reboot means switching off a machine or device to update it or get it working again if it's malfunctioning. So a bit of a technical term. With this episode of regrowth, we want to think about rebooting society. So focusing in particular on businesses, big tech companies, leaders, governments, civic organizations, pretty much anyone and everyone across the scope. So as we're coming out of lockdown, we have a huge opportunity to reboot our approach to sustainability, and for all of us to be on a more actively eco-conscious path that goes beyond just the individual actions that many of us are already taking. So I wanted to explore what Reboot means to us in this sense, the role that organizations that form our society play, and also just how urgent is it that we use this opportunity to address the climate crisis. So I'm going to let you take it from here.

SPEAKER_00: 6:09

Well, I'm happy to offer some thoughts from a business perspective. I think it's interesting. I think many businesses realized before the pandemic hit that they had to change the way they were doing things. I had been working in my business to put together a plan to reduce carbon emissions, and we'd already plotted how much we needed to reduce international travel. What we didn't know is that that was going to be forced on us overnight. And now we have a data point, so we are able to say, That in the last year, we've saved X many millions of pounds flying people around the world. And actually, we've done that with little or no loss of revenue. So I think now it's sort of the imperatives now to sort of think about, well, what does that mean going forward? So I think, you know, businesses have got some decisions to make about how they switch on travel to business as is necessary. But I don't know that from other sectors and other perspectives. I guess it's very different for different people.

SPEAKER_03: 7:07

So I can jump in here. I mean, you know, when I find myself when presented with these kind of questions, it takes me right back to, you know, what... what the point of a human life is really. And I, you know, there's a wonderful African American, very elderly gentleman I saw once take the stage at a conference I attended called Cordy Tyndall Vivian. And he advised about five US presidents during the course of his life around civil rights. And he sort of, so he's 90 something, he flows onto the stage and very gracefully gave the shortest of talks, the main piece of which was when he said, there are only two questions anyway. What do you live for? And what do you live by? And my hope, really, is that at a societal level, here in London, in Britain, all of these islands, Europe, and then all the way around the world, we actually ask those questions. What do we live for? The vision and the picture that we have of what we're aiming for, what do we live by, the guiding principles that might take us there? I think it's so huge, it's almost too difficult to comprehend, but it is the complete reframing of how we might choose to live on this earth.

SPEAKER_01: 8:55

Yeah, I guess that's so lovely to hear. And I think it's probably a good place where I can start to build some of the things I might want to share today. And I think that, first of all, that sort of fundamental reframe, the signs were all there in so many different ways from hundreds of years of history that the way we had decided to build govern over the world as uh the west the way we had decided to think about resource the way we had decided um particularly here in the uk what to humanize and what to dehumanize and when and when it was okay and what was okay when as a as a child of immigrant parents um You could go to school and have kids laugh at the smell of your lunch, only to then walk down the high street 20 years later and be sold that same food back to you at 10 times the price, right? So we had made all these rules about what we thought was okay and what we didn't. And I feel like the last year has really taught us that that sort of control, alt, delete is a moment that we can't squander. For those of us who might have in many, many different ways been talking about, actually there's something slightly rotten at the roots of what we're doing and we need to re-nurture and re-tend to that soil where we start to think about what really matters. what do we want to learn, for example, from many indigenous people from across the world who are living in relationship with their land, from many experiences of oppression and other ideas that have stepped up and might at the moment be coming back with a force that feels really uncomfortable to people and start to be really propositional about who and what we want to be. And so for me, working at the sort of neighborhood scale, I'm under no illusions that the small neighborhood and the few thousand people that we are working with on a day to day is going to transform this global story. But what I do believe really, really clearly is that we have to ask those questions that have just been shared so eloquently And then we have to kind of put a stake in the ground and be super propositional about it and say, actually, it is uncomfortable to say we're going to have to change this thing. It is uncomfortable to say we might have to slow down here. We might have to change what the goal is over here. But it's really, really important that we don't, those who can at every opportunity with whatever privilege and resources they have, that I continue to be sort of propositional about, yeah, plural, not a one way that we will walk our way through the challenges and the transition that we face, but to be really honest about what needs to happen and to start to really embody that on an everyday. And I think that the lockdown and COVID in a way does make that easier for me to, yeah, kind of like embody because you're starting from literally having been in your house, right, for 12 months. And I've been very lucky to have a job and to be relatively okay whilst my family's been hit by significant grief. I haven't been hit by the same economic challenges. And so now I'm literally thinking about that metaphor of how we literally put the bricks back on that we want to. and and watch and really watch what is taking us towards the excuses the things the the lock-ins because not everything is forced upon us some things we can actually like reject um and we need to when we're very good at building narratives as to why oh well we had to do that because of that because of that because of that and so i feel as someone kind of at the helm whilst we're not a very hierarchical organization we are gonna try our absolute best to pick back up the building blocks, the more regenerative, the slower, the deeper, the more relational, full of care, connected narratives, and try to see what it means to really build that. And I feel that for those of us who have that privilege, who aren't locked into massive multinational global systems that take a lot more to unwind, we have to start embodying some of what that might look like. Because for those who have been locked into and in loads of challenges around economic and others, it's very hard to have a conversation about issues like climate breakdown and other things when you're literally trying to survive day to day. And so, yeah, that's what I'm really interested in is how do we build a corner of the world that makes that future irresistible or at least gives us a new set of ideas to kind of disagree in that start from a more regenerative and a slower and a more connected, humane in relationship with the land point of view.

SPEAKER_00: 14:24

It's really interesting listening to you speak, Amy. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think there's a sort of perception people have that in order to make the changes that we might need to change, to look after the planet that we have to make sacrifices. But actually what you're, what I'm hearing coming through from the way you speak is that actually some of these things can actually have joy, you know, you can have joy too, you know. Some of those changes that you might make might actually be things that you want to celebrate, tell your friends about and start to build trends and movements around, you know, local holidays, allotments, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 14:59

For me, you know, it's a little bit like, I mean, I did live 15 years in London and, you know, now I'm fortunate enough to live here in Devon. But when a few years back we had an unusually high snowfall, it only lasted a few days, and the whole village became covered in snow. Suddenly, you know, you get little things like somebody comes skiing down the high streets of the village, you know, People are talking to each other, knocking on each other's doors, asking if they can help or if they need anything. And the same thing happened in the pandemic. There were suddenly all kinds of efforts made to care for people that we do not normally make when we're so comfortable. So one of the things that strikes me is that when we do have some level of discomfort or slight disturbance to our extreme comfort that many of us live in and by no means all. It stimulates that side of our human capacity for empathy and compassion and care for each other. And of course, everybody is the winner when that happens. I just, I mean, just say as regards climate change, though, I mean, the pandemic has stimulated this conversation, let's say. But I'm 72 years old, and I remember 55 years ago, the first conversation in my family around the dining table about what we were doing to the earth, what we were doing to the air, what we were doing to our rivers. That was more than half a century ago. And in that time, we have only made it worse and radically worse in the last few decades. So, you know... The question for me is with something, the pandemic has been big, but in my view is probably the first wave of succeeding waves that will be demanding. Well, saying to us basically change or, you know, throw your hands up in the air, so to speak. So my real hope is that we grasp this now, this wonderful opportunity. to do this work. And in that way, even though we may find inconvenience and difficulty in all sorts of things, we will, we have the chance, the opportunity of finding our way to a much, much better place, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 17:35

Yeah, and building on that, I do have to put a strong agree with the fact that I feel like the successive waves will hit us in many, many different ways. And the pandemic is kind of a warm up for us here. And why I say that is because I think, going back to Max's earlier point of the disruption to our comfort, I think this is where really for me, I think when I think about where do some of and I hate the word solutions, but I'm just going to use it for the sake of what I'm trying to say here. But where do some of the next steps and ideas and solutions lie is actually often in what we in sort of the Western dialect will call the margins, where survival and discomfort and finding ways to be together and being together I come from a family who were displaced multiple times during the partition, lost multiple things, had to rebuild multiple times. And there is a kind of global diaspora and many, many different people across many different experiences who discomfort and reimagination of what life could look like has had to happen multiple times. It's where ideas of mutual aid and relational living and saving together and buying homes for each other and finding a way to subvert the system to figure out what happens when someone won't give a man with a turban a mortgage and therefore the imagination of what life could be like in a place that feels deeply uncomfortable displaced from what we know or our histories often being erased this is something that again with the climate crisis there are many communities feeling the brunt of it across the globe that have not contributed as significantly to um the challenges we're now facing and therefore for me i think um just reframing that around it is it isn't just about sacrifice i do really i want to be honest and truthful about what has led us here because in that honesty and in that truth becomes a new collectivity becomes in the possibility to reimagine the future together I think without that truth you really struggle um around that and I think that's something that we're stuck in here in this country a lot um but it isn't just one of sacrifice and challenge um In many of those, for example, immigrant stories, there's great joy, there's great reimagination, there's a great focus on the future and what could be. And so I feel like this combination is really, really important that actually some of the most creative, most joyous visions for the future will come from some of what we term as the margins, because that is where that has always been a way of needing to be. An extreme level of comfort hasn't yet hit. And that's not an actually truthful, complete economic argument because there is lots of second-generation immigrants enjoying a very different life. But what I'm talking about here is this idea that if we want to think about this future, it's going to be a huge act of imagination, reimagination, collective purpose. And sometimes those whose lives are most uncomfortable and often at threat can understand what that means in a way that you can't when you're in extreme comfort. And so I'm really, I think what's going to happen and need to happen over the coming years is we're going to have to find a new sort of larger us where we are able to really come together and hear these very different points of view, points of understanding, points of ways of living, maybe face some truths together, maybe reconcile in certain ways and come together to reimagine what that could look like. Because it really worries me that actual divisions that are in the climate movement and some of the kind of, the sort of, we have no time, we have no time, And then we're just wasting time, very divided anyway. So let's just take a moment, maybe do a bit of truth and reconciliation, a bit of reimagination, a bit of coming together and say, yeah, this is going to be probably the lifetime's work for many of us. As Max said, 50 years ago, these conversations were happening by some means. sort of hope in the next 50 years. I hope we see a complete shift and change in all of that. But I would really urge us to kind of stop and listen a moment as a movement and really centre voices that are often decentred and just listen and try to find new ways to come together because so much of who and what we need to be has already existed in many, many, many different ways. And we come together in more creative, imaginative and careful ways of being together.

SPEAKER_00: 23:15

Yeah. And actually, I mean, just as you were talking there, I was reflecting back on the National Park City itself because, I mean, that's what inspired me about the project in the first place. It was to reimagine a city as a national park, which is a pretty out there idea back in 2014 when I first heard it. And to your point, you know, a lot of this is about you know, just the staying power, five or six years it's taken to sort of run a campaign, get people together across every ward in London, going to politicians, winning over businesses. And we're still growing. And we know that we're not maybe as representative of Londoners as we might be or we might like to be, but we're trying to build a movement pretty much just as you described, Amy. So I think you're absolutely right. And there's something very powerful when you, you know, as I have been recently, and Emily has as well, you know, join a Tuesday night call with 30, 40, 50 people just volunteering their time to write about the city that they live in, write about some of the things that are good to do on their doorstep that don't cost any money but you can get out and see wildlife or whatever. I think there's something really powerful

SPEAKER_02: 24:24

in that. Speaking about the National Park City Movement, do you think that it's reshaped in the last year because of lockdown? Do you think there are things that have happened that might not have happened or do you think more people have got involved? You were talking about being a bit more grounded and not being able to travel. And that's certainly the same for a lot of us. So do you think people have got more involved in some of these things and there's potential to harness that energy? I

SPEAKER_00: 24:47

don't know if people have got more involved, but certainly things have carried on. that we thought perhaps were only there because there was the physical meeting up of people, but actually that turned out not to be the case. Everybody's still working together around the same aims. And as you've seen, there's a number of new projects that have kicked off during the pandemic that hopefully will continue to grow as we come out. And there'll be new opportunities to do things when we are back meeting face-to-face and where we can do group walks and so on. But yeah, it's been... guess what i guess and i guess emmy can speak to this working at the neighborhood level but um you know at the moment you know at the middle of it is a movement it's a community of people that have probably helped to support each other through the through the pandemic and in you know we're all in lots of different communities perhaps with work and sport or whatever we choose to do but certainly this was one community that i was engaged with every week nice people yeah it was good

SPEAKER_01: 25:43

yeah and i guess like the the thing that excites me the most really is that the the whilst everybody hasn't at all had, you know, my mum works in the NHS, not everybody's had time and space to enjoy the lockdown in some like, you know, utopian way. What certainly I've seen everywhere in all different experiences, because the neighbourhood we're in is right at the heart of inner city Birmingham. Our parents live slightly more in the suburbs. And that reconnection with our green spaces, with our wild spaces has been like, palpable and have become kind of a source of life now I don't think that even just seeing how we're opening back up again I don't think we can take that relationship for granted I don't think we can just like say, because we had this year where people were really reconnected with that, that that means en masse in society, we're going to see some like new sort of huge societal rewilding. That's the bit that I now think we need to build on. I am interested in how, you know, those with outdoor space and green space and access to it, even as businesses and others now sit on a bit of a gold mine and are really capitalizing on that. So I'm, interested in what this means as we go forward as we start to rebuild what we value um how we understand um what it means to steward those spaces to rewild them to add to them to value them to not having to you know down down the road from us there's a small neighborhood crew who are constantly fighting for this small park not to be built over by developers. There's another group fighting to not see a building in the reservoir being taken over for flats. We're still in these fights. And what I think is really, really important is that we need to continue to build that momentum on the ground. And that's what we're really trying to do at a neighborhood level to not just make it like, remember that great year where We were all just around, but actually start to think about what are some of the rules and the codes and the norms of society that actually value those things. And there's a big caveat that I'll put over the sort of the economics of nature and putting a value on the natural world. But there's some really interesting work starting to emerge. Some of our partners and friends at Dark Matter who've just started. One of the Google Challenge prizes are doing a piece of work around trees as infrastructure and understanding their incredible value on the council's balance sheet rather than seeing it as a cost that has to be maintained and what it means to start shifting accounting norms, for example. So for me, I'm really excited and interested in all layers of this story. We're really interested at a neighbourhood level, literally with our peers, with our neighbours, using the green spaces effectively building relationship with them, doing work there, but also working nationally and internationally with partners and friends like our friends at Deal doing Economics Action Lab who are finding ways to engage communities in ideas of new economics to projects like Trees as Infrastructure by Dark Matter. that are looking at there's some real codes and rules and norms that are driving it you know goodwill is not going to be enough when your whole economy and the your policies are set up to make it feel like to a council a tree is a is actually a something they have to maintain on their balance sheet rather than something that's creating huge huge um amounts of value in terms of clean air and and many other things so i guess i'm just like i'm super excited about all of this um and have to say that I think the interplay between neighbourhoods and community movements and green spaces and these big ideas, they start to form the basis of some really powerful stuff. And I am incredibly hopeful about what will happen, but I just don't think that we can rely on the kind of... Remember that time we really relied on our green spaces to survive? I think we're going to have to do some real work on that. That's why just the big... reimagining London as a city park is such an incredible idea and concept because I think that's a scale we need to start going to. I'm curious as well just to hear a little bit about one of my colleagues at Dark Matter Indie has talked about for many years the kind of number of people that will start to move out of London and the sort of bubble that's been created and so you can't really tell that story because that property bubble will burst and therefore you have to keep pretending that no one will leave. And then in COVID, we've seen some of that happen. And so I'm just really curious because I actually think the re-imagination of London is down the lines of what you're talking about. And so I'm just curious to hear some of the other panelists' view on like the sort of interplay between the nice ideas we have, but then some of the big, shifts we need to make in some of that? And what really will a reboot actually take? And yeah, so I'll just pause there.

SPEAKER_03: 31:14

Well, one of the things, there was a period in my career when I decided that I'll put the main thrust of my effort towards my work with large organisations. And because of the immense power that they wield, And the feeling that if they did come behind wholeheartedly, not in any way cynically, but wholeheartedly behind some of the real big shifts we need, that we could see colossal potential for change. I have to say that at a certain point, I began to lose faith in this because... I'm not quite sure how you couple an organization's objectives for endless and ongoing growth and profits and margins and investor value, as it were, with the other objectives of not just minimizing but massively reducing all kinds of negative and harmful impacts on the world. This has led me to the view, really. I don't actually understand why we would wish to have any business organization that wasn't, first and foremost, a social enterprise. You know, and I think that comes head on, massive clash with our current way of thinking about these things. But just to put that aside for a moment, I mean, three years ago, I was invited to join the advisory board for Danone, North America. as they made this very courageous step to become a B Corporation. And if any of our listeners don't know B Corps, it'd be really good to search that B as in the letter, corporations. B Corporations, basically to become a B Corp, you have to meet a whole array of really deeply challenging thresholds, which take us, if not the whole way, a very long way forward towards the kind of organizations that we might feel that we'd like to have around and be safe alongside. When I, because I started by replying to them saying, are you sure you've got the right person? I'm not sure if you want me, but to check up my YouTube talks and things because I'm, you know. And she said, no, it's because we've done that and it's because you're saying what you're saying that we want you to join us. And also, you might like to know that the chair of the advisory board is Rose Macario, who at that time was the chief executive of Patagonia, who have, you know, who have been, who are just like, out there courageously in the front doing incredible things for the environment and all other kinds of stuff. They became a B Corp in one year flat. In one year flat, Danone, North America became a B Corporation. They completely shocked the corporate world that they'd done it so fast and immediately became the biggest B Corporation in the world in one step. I can't remember the last time I looked, but Danone overall are 50% now globally a B corporation. But even though many others are talking about it and some following suit, not that many. And so even now, I feel there's tremendous potential. but is such a big step to go from potential to actually courageous leadership that takes us in a different direction. And if we look at politically and our universities, which are more commercial, I think, than many of the organizations which graduates go to, all of these things need such a powerful review as to say what actually is the real point and how can we serve, as I say, people and nature, I think they're the same thing, really, because we're part of nature. And move ourselves in this

SPEAKER_00: 35:37

radical redirection. Yeah. I think what Amy said about there being so many layers to this conversation is so true. So just to pick up on the point Mac was making there about, I mean, there is a straight line relationship between GDP and emissions. It's really clear to see. And this constant chasing of growth is not, you know, clearly not sustainable. But then, as you also said, you know, there are different business models out there. I work for a company that's owned in trust for its employees, which gives it sort of potential to do things which perhaps other big corporates couldn't do. And I think there's a range of different models out there that different businesses can take, and I think they need to come around and they are coming around to sort of getting serious about a lot of this agenda. I was also wanting to pick up on the point Amy was making, which is a different one to the bigger sort of macroeconomic point about just what happens to cities in the case where everybody starts to work at home. And it was something I was thinking a little bit about before joining this call, because I think if you're sort of an environmentalist at your core, you know, obviously none of us wanted there to be a awful global pandemic, but lots of the things that arose out of that actually potentially could have some positive benefits for the planet. But I'm not so sure in terms of you know if if you take that to its end point our company i work for has just done a report for the greater london authority about what happens to the central economic zone in the case where most of the people who are there start working from home how many job losses might there be in that zone what might that mean for the look and feel of the city and what does that mean for our cultural industries and etc etc so personally when i reflect on that i'm not so sure that i'm I'm comfortable with the idea that we won't have these areas in the country and in cities where there is this kind of hub where everyone flocks into, where you have all your culture and your food and your face-to-face industries, which I think are attractive for many people to come to and catalyst for great ideas and so on. So I think for me, that's a personal one where I'm not quite sure how that plays out, but it's certainly one of the things which I feel like It's something we need to be a bit careful of and protect those, those, those hub spaces where, where all the great innovation ideas happen and where people flock to, to see great shows and so on. Yeah. So I don't know if any other people have had any thought on the reading on what sort of happens to the center of cities in the case where we all sort of migrate to home working. You know, there's definitely some environmental benefits, but what's the, what's the flip side? I'm not sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 38:06

Yeah, I guess this is a good time because I really enjoy these kind of like... Because this is what I mean about the reimagination of who and what we can be is, I think, going to be really central to this because absolutely as someone who's run a hub and who spent the last year without a building now because lots of things changed due to COVID and we've just been using the park to organise the sort of... polycentric nature of of cities is going to be super important uh hubs and spokes and places where people come together I guess what I'm really interested in is is just um probably wrapping that up a little bit in what Mac said around um Kate Raworth talks about these seven principles that um we need to start thinking about um for 21st century economics and um I really enjoy the way she plays with the ideas because she doesn't say, look, here's seven ideas to change everything. Here's seven things we need to start thinking about if we're going to transition from where we are and where we need to be. She talks about changing the goal. I think one of those things is linked to what Matt talked about in terms of changing the goal of organizations, changing the goal of our economy. There is no doubt in my mind that as a society that we won't want to come together and we won't want to think about the face-to-face spaces, the spaces where we are gathering, where arts and culture and where... What I am worried about, though, is that when... that quite clear line between GDP and emissions and the things that we need to shift start to create this kind of irresistible narrative about the fact, well, the centres have to get back to life because we need everybody to come into them because we have no other way of imagining that our economy our arts our culture um could start to be to work in different ways that we couldn't think about ideas about whether you think about its universal basic services or you think it's universal basic income or you think it's some sort of citizens dividend or you think it's some sort of shift in the way the working week um or some sort of combination this is idea that um the way that's co-opted is that actually we need everybody piling into the centre of the city and we know in London for example and in many of our cities the people who had to keep taking those journeys were those for whom there was no other option to make a living and we know the demographics of those people and so what I'm really interested in is how we can at least start to show pathways to a different future that doesn't mean I think that tomorrow or maybe even in two years we're going to wake up and suddenly the way we invest in welfare and people in humanity and what we see the purpose of our cities and commuting and work as is suddenly going to change but I am really passionate that unless we are starting to be more imaginative that there are different ways to be able to think about some of that, different ways to think about what work is, what care is, what infrastructure is, what centres. And polycentres, many centres, are actually full. It's just that what I get really frustrated about is that you end up with this kind of, like, the minute you start to say, hey, there could be a different goal, that you just get this pile on of economists who think that you don't understand how the economy works. But it is absolutely designed to be like that. And I think we can de-centre and change that. goals and at least paint a different future, which I think there is lots more of that starting to happen. So that's kind of where I sit on some of that.

SPEAKER_00: 42:20

Yeah, you're so articulate in the points you're making. I think it's really interesting. There's sort of two, it seems to be sort of two sorts of leaders at the moment or if you can call them that you know there's one body who's like everyone get back to the office as quickly as possible we need to have a meeting that you know it's free you can come in we've done a covid secure test and you know and then the other one who actually says no and they'll just spend the day ringing people and say how you doing how you feeling what do you need have you been busy have you been productive last week family okay you know and it's just really stark to me um i'm certainly in the latter camp

SPEAKER_01: 42:56

Well, yeah, because there is that point that I said at the beginning, wasn't it, really, that there is this kind of, if we say too many things, they might be real. And at that point, we might start to collapse some quite artificial bubbles that things are built on. And there are a few of those, right? And they're not all of them. I've got... Some of my friends, I'm sure people like Dominic Campbell and others will listen to this and will be like, London is a superpower and it needs to continue to be one in order for us to go forward. And part of me can really agree with so much of that. But what I'm saying is, is that we can burst a few bubbles and we need to burst a few bubbles. We need to burst the real estate bubble. We need to burst the idea that London's growth is just going to be exponential in one direction according to one set of rules that one group of people made about how we think the economy works and what wealth and value looks like. That doesn't mean that I don't think cities like London and cities like Birmingham don't need to be these wonderfully attractive, incredible places to come to. But it's actually starting to be honest about some of the things that are actual kind of the narratives that sit around the economics. that need to be maintained. And so when you talk about these two different types of leaders, unfortunately, there is a whole swathe of people for whom the rules, the codes, the incentives, the things that they work towards are based on an idea of kind of never-ending growth in paying back loans, that were created on a day back in history based on the economy never-endingly growing and you continually being able to meet those things like these are those incentives are powerful and then the lack of imagination about anything else that combination is unfortunately very rarely lots and lots of very bad people but just lots of people working towards a system that is nearly in conflict with everything we're talking about and so I think it's like that discomfort is gonna have to come at a macro scale. But if we are ahead of the curve, and if we really start to think about re-imagination, we can design different parts of this to work in ways that are less catastrophic, less forced upon us. Am I hopeful about that bit? Probably not. I just don't think that at the moment, politics, big business, the imagination of what the future could be like will come together and therefore I put more effort and time into the the opposites the opposite side of that but do I think it's possible I absolutely think think it is and I actually don't think maybe bar a couple of 0.001 percent that most people within that system are terrible horrendous you know um murderous planet but like looking for the planet to fall apart type people I think they're people who are just like well this is what I'm gonna do right like I've got it this is my goal this is the figure at the bottom of my this is what I've got to work towards and I think that is driving also some really serious challenges and when you combine that with a lack of sort of universality or generosity or imagination at the way in which the state is thinking about how to unlock people's capacity it is a bit of a You know, that's still on a trajectory, I think, too. But hopefully this is where people power really will start to fight back because people will hopefully, or at least those who can, can sort of vote with their feet and start to say, hey, like, we're going to go and try and be in a different future. And that might put some more pressure on. But if anything, the last year has taught me is not to worry too much about where the leverage is going to come from. Just know that it is going to come somewhere, whether it's a global pandemic or another massive challenge. Something's going to happen at that point. The rest of us need to be super ready with the most imaginative, regenerative ways forward and not worry too much about where the actual change is going to come from, because I think that's probably more unpredictable.

SPEAKER_02: 47:26

We've only got a few minutes left, but Mac, I wanted to just go back to this Danone becoming a B Corp, because I think when I first heard about the idea of a B Corp, I kind of thought about it as kind of like a small to medium business thing. But what does it take for a company the size of Danone and potentially other companies to become a B Corp? I mean, I know it's probably huge, but if you could summarize maybe some of the three areas, maybe the people power, infrastructure, like if businesses were to listen to this, where would they start?

SPEAKER_03: 47:57

I think it comes probably from several different directions. One thing I would say, those organizations are structured in a particular way, and they are obviously very hierarchical. But in the case of Danone, it was the courage and vision of a chief executive willing to put himself out on the line And also with the information and the fluency and the thought leadership to be able to present a very compelling case. Also with the social skills to be able to bring behind him a whole bunch of other people who are captured, whose imagination was captured. I do want to say, yes, I think, as Immy's mentioned a variety of times, this word imagination is is a huge one. The world we currently have is a sort of indictment, really, of the imagination that we have so far successfully brought. And yet we are, as a species, undoubtedly extraordinarily clever. It's just that wisdom is rather more elusive. If we could be wise and clever, it would be really, really magic. So I think the leadership piece comes in. But the other one is, You know, there are a whole variety of organizations now, which, of course, every year look towards the new graduate intake. And they want, of course, the brightest and the best. And they do their best to hoover them up. And to do that, to meet the expectations of many of those younger people, they advance the case of how they are progressively moving towards greater levels of sustainability and growth. regeneration, all these different thoughts. And then the young people join the organizations and then they find out the truth of the matter. And there's an equally large river of young people flowing back out of those organizations because they're not really living what they're saying. So I think the demand, I hope, will just keep rising from the ground upwards, from the sides, from every direction. We have to change. And then it will demand at a community level in every little corner and then all the ways up into our more traditional leadership positions, courage and vision and a willingness to actually ask some pretty difficult questions. And not least one of those has got to be, how can a society... function on the basis of short-term decisions to gain short-term gain. You know, when everybody knows that it is thinking in the long term to health and welfare of all of these things, because they are not separate. People who are environmentalists should, you know, it's like when environment and human rights and social justice and all these things come together, that we actually have a chance. And they are closer together now than they ever have been. Just a parting comment, by the way. National Park City. I hope that London National Park City and any other National Park City goes beyond the way Britain currently organises and defines its national parks. Because our national parks, in comparison to many national parks in other countries, are a joke. They're ecological deserts. which have been designed, again, without thinking necessarily of what is really best for the creation of regeneration. And so I hope National Parks, London National Park City and any other National Park City raises the bar and demands that the National Parks actually may step up to it as well here in the UK.

SPEAKER_02: 52:06

Wonderful. Well, yeah, we're out of time, but... I feel quite optimistic after this. I don't think it's going to be easy. I feel like there are a lot of challenges. We've certainly been on a bit of a journey in this talk. I kind of wish we had a bit longer because I feel like we're at the tip of the iceberg. But some really amazing thoughts to go away with. And thank you all so much, everyone, for your time. I hope we'll be able to have this conversation in person one day at one of these conferences. meetups that hopefully feel a bit more realistic in the coming months. So thank you so much, everyone.