Community wealth funds as a system for Communal Luxury. (2019)
Introduction.
The world today is divided between those who can and cannot afford luxury. We have on the one hand, luxury coffee shops and wine bars, and on the other, the destitute. The proposal ‘communal luxury’ puts forward a case to use advanced techniques at the bleeding edge of the public-commons discussion to rebuild Sheffield’s welfare state and put sheffield at the forefront of the most important international dialogue of our generation. The plan starts humble, to use a commercial opportunity to instead to democratise luxury as public good. Ensuring all businesses are partly or wholly owned by the council through holding shares in a new social wealth fund, . This means that businesses can operate co-operatively run fairly and equitably by the workers. This rejects the privatisation of all financial opportunity, instead restructuring how public, private deals are done, helping build new assets for the public sector. Responding to the political will of the city of Sheffield.
Space and place
The political sensitivity of castlegate, as a highly contextual site with and a part of sheffield’s memory and place, demands innovation which relates to the politics of the city. Using it as a testbed for new left theory sets the wheels in motion for a community paradigm in public service provision. And utilises the opportunity to kickstart the development of a new form of welfare state, which has citizen participation at it’s heart and at every level.
The built proposals are ‘pop up’ prototypes of new public assets and services using segal, wikihouse and other novel self build models, ‘democratising the means of producing public space’ and allowing the new facilities to be collectively built. Half of the assets proposed on site will operate commercially, and another half of will be public and free, This spearheads a radical change in polemic and afford all citizens a chance to co-create new luxury public assets, being rewarded with sophisticated methods of incentives in the process.
What is a social wealth fund?
A social wealth fund is a publicly owned pool of money and other assets, such as stocks or land, that can be used for socially beneficial purposes.’ founded on the principals that ‘ownership of economic assets should be distributed more equitably throughout society and that, the public, collectively, has the right to share in the benefits of owning such assets; and certain goods and services in society should be provided without cost or without concern for people’s ability to pay.’
They have achieved sucess in countries like Norway. Prototyping at a small scale with the businesses in castlegate allows financial and therefore, governance modes to develop fairly and provides a safe space to test ideas in an agile way. The idea builds on existing efforts in castlegate by the creative community to build a new commons. in a recent Guardian interview one shop owner said about castlegate; “As more spaces open up, the scene has really come together to form more of a community that identifies with certain economic values, as opposed to just taste.” In the future, connect to other initiatives such as the community land trust, by using multiple streams of compounding revenue as capital leverage.
Social wealth funds and community land can mutually democratise the production of new affordable housing for the city, by ensuring the dividends of prime city center assets are utilised for public benefit, which supercharges the economy, rather than private accumulation which actively dismantles it.
A community wealth, works exactly like a shareholder model. The fund holds shares in assets and businesses, but instead of private control, there is common control of decision making around where dividends are invested and what the voting looks like. It also means It allows a more open democratic role in shaping the businesses that exploit public opportunities for commerce.
Castlegate, the birthplace of sheffield, is a fertile ground for experimenting with new public ownership, and lowers the risk by testing in a small and experimental way before a larger rollout. co-operative models of governance ae grown around business for social wealth. By developing social ownership models here we can set the stage for the democratic and sustainable economy of the future. temporal installations, it is envisaged, will inform the longer term use of public space. by rejecting the ‘socialise the risk and financialise the reward’ paradigm of the market era today, we open the opportunity to pioneer a new era that favours public-commons partnership..
Why now?
The renewed fight for the commons is timely because the economy is failing according to all of its own indicators. a fifth of all shops in sheffield have shut down in the past five years. The voluntary economy in contrast, has risen, with the state of sheffield report signalling there are 3400 voluntary organisations in the city alone.
Today, is estimated that half of all global work is unpaid today indicating the limit of capital and GDP’s ability to identify and reward real value. This leads to money being an ineffective device to distribute value. Inequality has risen with the latest UN report saying the issue is ‘barely believable’. We are the fifth richest nation yet the report reveals that 14 million people in the UK — a fifth of the population — live in poverty.
Rising inequality in Britain means it could join the US in becoming one of the most unequal nations on earth, according to the Nobel-prize winning economist, Sir Angus Deaton. He is leading a landmark review of inequalityin the UK amid fears that the country is at a tipping point. With Economists such as thomas piketty advocating a ferocious global tax on capital and increased spending in the public sector.
Mary Mellor reveal that all environmental, domestic labour ’womans work’ and voluntary activity is disqualified from GDP. over-accumulation has meant a rise in race and hate crime. Public financial support for the commercial sector is also rising . Corporate social responsibility being waived at any opportunity and tax evasive structures are easier than ever, further lining the pockets of commercial shareholders.
Because of this, Sheffield like many other Uk cities, is eating into emergency reserves for housing and healthcare, in a developed economy this should never happen — and we sit in direct contrast to countries like Denmark — who have reserves to cover all public services for the next fifty years. And adopts a more strategic approach to developing public services.
Community wealth funds are a radical and necessary solution, A society divided needs community, and this can only be done by reinstating communal luxury, as the foodhall project has proven. it falls into the civic responsibility to provide for those workers and people where the economy of sheffield has broken down. Change is on the horizon, and sheffield should lead the way, with leading economists signaling that wellbeing will be introduced as an alternative means of measuring GDP, and solutions to solve climate change.
‘Capitalism does not just create unpaid environmental externalities on a planetary scale. It relies fundamentally on unpaid work and the wealth of the public realm to drive the unequal expansion of private wealth. Challenging these inequalities will require expanding a social commons that decommodifies the building blocks needed for a good life. ‘
This would lead to the flourishing of beauty in all shared spaces. This is done through the artistic production of public space as a collective project, building on Exchange streets drive to democratise the means of production “if the painters and sculptors were free, there would be no need for them to shut themselves up in Salons”. Through the liberation of public space, art can be embedded in every aspect of daily life, shared as a collective possession rather than a commodity that few can enjoy and partake in.
Many of the music spaces set out with aim to create common access to arts and culture,“to rewrite a lot of the social norms that are embedded in traditional music and drinking establishments”. Not serving alcahol and a ‘nobody turned away due to lack of funds’ policy across the board with Other establishments like Girls with drills building this economy.
This is more than a trend, with micheal Hardt destinguisng that open an equal access and genuinely democratic management are foundational principals of the commons. “ it’s a collective where everyone has an equal say,” mellenials and subsequent generations value ‘access rather than ownership.’ this is tiered with a ecological awareness that social issues and class issues are directly related to climate issues.
We propose luxurious interventions in four areas of ‘social deficits’, Skills, through open access education, and democratic means of production. Health, through the integration of wellbeing and healthy interventions and social gardens. And social security through the increased accessibility to vital needs. Care, through the experimentation of social eating spaces.
