Where is innovation underway in the built environment?
Introducing the Building Transformation StoryMap
Answer: everywhere!
A new StoryMap from It’s Material and IHRB shares stories of socio-economic innovation in the built environment from around the World.
Many of the challenges in the built environment, from climate and environmental impacts, to a lack of affordable and adequate housing, to exploitation of construction workers, can be traced to business-as-usual economic models. The map will be updated over time, contributing momentum towards new economic thinking in the built environment.
Innovation in the built environment is hard. Vested interests, complex value chains, budgets and timeframes can stand in the way. But innovation is happening in all regions.
The map shares “signals of change” that indicate shifts in three areas:
1. Transparency and accountability
The map features initiatives that shed more light on who owns and finances land, buildings and infrastructure: in cities from Cairo, to Prague, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Nairobi.
By intention and unintentionally, there are multiple barriers to information on who owns what in the built environment. These stories make the case for greater access to information on ownership as a key stepping stone for accountability, and for informing innovative policy on housing, climate, transit and more.
2. Agency and participation in decision-making
Expanding who gets to shape decisions can fundamentally change the outcomes. The map includes examples of widening whose views and experiences get taken into account: from construction workers in Mauritius advocating for the expansion of green transit infrastructure, to an initiative to bring the perspectives of people experiencing homelessness into high street design in Eastbourne, UK.
3. How value is defined
A narrow focus on economic growth overlooks pressure on the planet’s finite resources, and how benefits and burdens are distributed. The map features initiatives that are re-thinking value in the built environment, including: “Asset-Based Community Development” in West Africa; the Scottish Land Commission and Dark Matter Lab’s collaboration on “Land Governance Futures: Towards Common Relationships”; and Australia’s beyond-GDP “measuring what matters” framework, in which one measurement is the proportion of households' gross income that goes to housing costs.
The map also features collections of innovation stories from specific cities as part of the Building for Today and the Future project, including Melbourne, Prague, Athens and Valparaiso.
Directly and indirectly, many of the signals on the map connect with the idea of a rights-based economy, which is grounded in the cross-cutting human rights principles of transparency and accountability, meaningful participation, and non-discrimination.
Each story on the map is a “signal of change”. The Institute for the Future defines signals of change as “concrete and specific events, stories, innovations, or news that are at the peripheries/sidelines, which make the observer get a sensation that that a signal, if scaled or mainstreamed, can take us in an entirely different direction in the future.”
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Do you have a story to propose for the map? Or perspectives on the three categories above, and other socio-economic shifts that are needed? Share them here.
And visit the map here.