- Category A, Connecting and brokering
Discipline 3. Civic space-makers and space-holders
Maturity of support
- 2Codification
- 4Institutions
- 2Training
- 4Communities
- 3Academia
- 3.0Overall, mean of the five
These practitioners create and hold open spaces in which communities can form. This work is often central to the work of community asset development organisations – bodies that acquire, restore and run buildings and land on behalf of a community, such as the Old Fire Station in Gipton, Leeds or intoBodmin. They often hold a building in community ownership and use it as a base for wider community-building activity.
This work is distinct from the more general role of community anchors, tending to focus on a particular space, often one or more community-run buildings. Civic space-makers and holders do not ‘deliver programmes’ or ‘services’. As one interviewee described their work: “I try to make our space feel like a mix of a club and a service”. There is an emphasis on the space being welcoming and safe; a place people can go, outside of the state, with no judgment and no expectations.
Space-makers and holders include people stewarding physical assets but also people who focus on the more relational aspect of the work: people who hold gatherings, convenings, and engage in everyday civic hospitality, whether part-paid or unpaid.
Examples
Assessing the supporting architecture
The aspect of this work that relates to buying and refurbishing assets is reasonably well served. There is a vibrant sector of institutions working in and around community-led development, and codification related to property management, finance, and governance (e.g. see ACRE’s Hallmark quality standard for community buildings and Locality’s guidance on community asset transfer, the accreditation scheme for community-led housing advisers run through Community Led Homes with the Chartered Institute of Housing, and the Community Land Trust Network’s State of the Sector report, and detailed operational guidance for community shops and pubs from Plunkett UK). Training follows the same pattern: there are many workshops available on issues like asset transfer, the governance of community spaces, and community share issues, fundraising. Peer learning is also on offer, with a growing number of study visits to pioneering sites of community development, such as those Stir to Action runs through its ABCs of Community Assets programme.
There is much less support for the relational aspects of this work. Holding a space open – being present in the space, without running a service or programme, letting a room fill with conversation and connection, judging when to intervene and when not – is demanding work, particularly in communities that are divided or where trust is low. The skills involved in this work are largely unwritten. The nearest analogue we found in our research is the Restorative Justice Council’s Practitioner Registration Framework, which describes levels of skill in holding difficult conversations.
Although there is a case for this work receiving better support, several practitioners also told us there are risks to codification. A competency framework for an idea like ‘civic hospitality’ would clearly undermine the intuitive and informal spirit that makes this work valuable. There might be a case for seeing relational space-holding more as a practice – something many disciplines do – than as a discipline in its own right. Nonetheless, the practitioners we spoke to were clear that they wanted more time to reflect on their work and learn, better security of tenure, and the chance to learn from people doing similar work.