Looking back 50 years is an intriguing prospect. Most people in this 50^th reunion were quite young in the 1970s… including myself, naive, chaotic, restless. Now we are 70-ish, maybe slowing down, maybe on the spectrum of retirement?

I’d like to share some ideas that have taken 50 years to come into focus, if that. But then the question arises: what of the next 50 years?  Many would say, “Well, actually, 5 years is a very long time in politics and climate change – and in the tech sector 5 days or least 5 weeks, is actually a long time”. However, the offspring of people in this room may hopefully be around 50 years from now, and that in itself is enough reason to at least imagine ahead (if not to forecast or plan in any kind of serious way).

So this ‘think-piece’ (with help from my transcription app) is really a small attempt to explore some further creative connections, between past, present and future…

RETROSPECTIVES

In 1974 I arrived in London from a year of hitchhiking around India ‘seeking enlightenment’… in a few days found myself on Euston Street with no electric or water, with holes in roof & floor, feeling completely at home.  The Tolmers community was a perfect vantage point from which to plot the transformation of the education system (UCL in particular), and then the collapsing of wider society from its own internal contradictions. We could see multiple philosophies all coming to a head: the practicalities of living a low-impact, sustainable lifestyle: new forms of cooperation and social economy to enable this: and the social / cultural transformation to mobilise such cooperation….

What made this possible to flourish at such a time and place was a concatenation of forces: the deindustrialization of London and flight to the suburbs, and the result of large areas of empty or underused housing. Even then, the Gulf money was beginning to flow in, long before any deregulation of the City (the Big Bang, etc., of the 1980s), and there were strange frontiers, such as Cornwall Terrace in Regents Park, between scruffy squatters at one side and the newly enriched Sheiks with their security forces on the other side.

Intrepid scenes

It’s natural to frame such events as heroic and adventurous… It came to a head, for example, in the squatting of the Palmerston pub on Hampstead Road: the day after it was closed and sealed up, our intrepid squatter activists entered through the roof, abseiled down, unblocked the barriers from inside, and proceeded to make it a classic des-res of the squatting movement. (There’s a subplot – some other residents of Drummond Street came banging on the door in the middle of the night, demanding a place to live – but from the organized activist point of view, these were unreliable drunks and addicts, and so we refused entry to this alternative contingent)….

Meanwhile there were forces of empowerment and cultural liberation, tides of change pressing at the door, later summarised as ‘sex and drugs and rock and roll’… and many of us were somewhere in that experimental zone.

Opening new doors

In particular the ‘psychedelic generation’ was empowered to try opening powerful doors of the mind, to see possibilities that were not visible before, to enter such doors and experience reality from very different angles. To be fair, there were many casualties of such psychedelic experiments, and most of us still here were lucky to not get stuck in such ‘unreality traps’.

What makes this especially critical for me is that 10-20 years later, I began more organized engagement / research in the Global South. I realised that large sections of the global population (depending on how they are measured, at least half of the 5-6 billion people at that time) were living in conditions which we could describe as ‘squatting’: insecure, home-made shelters with no tenure, very few services, and with grassroots organisation of livelihoods, community and public services.

Planet of squatters

So what was more or less, a lifestyle choice amongst relatively educated people in London, was then equated to an inescapable trap for half the population.   And the reality was far from romantic in the slums of Mumbai or the favelas of Rio: rampant disease, crime, corruption, gang warfare, political colonisation and gentrification in brutal form. It was only later, through the efforts of colleagues with Slum / Shack Dwellers International, that I fully appreciated the reality in analytical terms as much as lived experience.  (I did spend a week in 1973 living in a slum in Mumbai, with firsthand experience of giant rats and cockroaches, extreme generosity of the people, within deep hierarchy and patriarchy, along with the brutal tactics of organised crime, police corruption etc).

Even in the 1970s, there were major tensions: e.g. people on the Camden waiting list versus the squatters who, in their eyes, seemed to be getting preferential treatment.  This was then replicated on a bigger scale in Liverpool in the early 80s: and other demonstration projects in what was then framed as ‘community architecture and planning’ also highlighted the contradictions between state provision and self-help by certain groups, over and above others.

This is why it seems important even now, to learn from what was going on in the 1970s and 80s, and distil the ideas which may take us forward.

PROSPECTIVES

As for 50 years into the future, there’s a big industry in ‘foresight’ and thinking on futures, transformation, social innovation etc. Even major organisations, OECD, World Bank, etc don’t attempt to predict beyond 5-10 years at the most. Only the steady tides of population can be projected with any confidence, and anything else is conjecture, hypothesis, what if??

Apocalypse anytime soon?

First we can say there are global forces of change which are extreme, destabilising, disrupting, even catastrophic…

• Climate change and nature extinction is the primary dynamic. Apparently, it is beyond the capacity of mere humans and their governments and their corporate bodies, to do anything serious to alter this trajectory of self-destruction.
• Technology, in particular AI, is another existential threat, bearing the promise of liberation from ignorance and servitude, along with enslavement, alienation and potential extinction….
• Many social and economic effects spring from this: mental illness & alienation, displacement & migration, polarization & intolerance, unemployment – all serving to fragment and possibly destroy society as we know it. The economic side: the replacement of workers by machines could lead to universal unemployment, displacement, social stress, etc. In the meantime, the extreme reliance of the financial system on the same AI, along with breakdown in geopolitical cooperation, all of this points to a very rocky road ahead.

Pathways for transformation?

So then the question comes up – in the face of existential challenge, what could be the forward pathways – and what can these learn from the experiments in the heady, chaotic squatting communities of inner London of the 1970s?

• Pathway 1 is about the person – the individual, empowerment, creative energy, and how this can be unlocked and set free (given a certain combination of circumstance, space, connection, purpose, etc.), all of which happened for some, to some degree, in the 1970s.
• Pathway 2 is about community – the co-operation system, the ‘village’ where we live, work, have fun, find meaning… Again, in the 1970s, the tasks which we set up were quite bounded and mainly practical: to set up a wholefood cooperative with bags of rice or beans; recycle building materials found on the street; envision new architectures beyond the normal boundaries of walls and roofs.  In doing these things, we managed to experiment with many failures (and learn from some of those failures), to set up socio-ecological enterprises, think tanks, learning and experimental zones, etc.
• Pathway 3 is about society – the bigger picture. In other words, what of the the transformation the socio-political-economy, its institutions and power structures, which even then were seen as redundant, oppressive, and about to collapse under their own contradictions? In this, the 1970s message was possibly most compromised and least effective, with various hybrids of anarchism / social ecology, post structuralism, welfare socialism. In hindsight, we lacked a single clear socio-political-economic agenda, apart from a general intuition on self-determination, cooperation, empowerment of ‘communities’ against ‘big bad’ global forces of neo-liberalism and financialization.
• Pathway 4 – ‘collective intelligence’? This is a general theme which occurs at all levels, from the individual to the world at large.  In essence, this is the capacity for collective groups, large or small, to communicate, to learn, to create ideas, to co-produce action with a wider group of actors or stakeholders, with deeper layers of value and meaning.  In particular, it looks at the progression, the transformation from functional systems to evolutionary systems (where winner takes all), towards co-evolutionary systems where winners are all. This, of course, is the essential principle of cooperativism, social ecology, and thereby the underlying ideas of the squatting movement, such as it was. I have tried to elaborate this over the last 20 years, (still at it), but it seems a very powerful way to gain insight for 50 years ago, where we are now, and the pathways into a further future.  Our Mind Lab, or Laboratory for Collective Intelligence, has a set of projects, programmes, and open meetings where these ideas are demonstrated and explored further.

So to sum up the 100-year view, we can say yes – all things are possible: the future prospect contains existential catastrophe, along with extraordinary potential for transformation. Insights from the 1970s can help to guide us through that maze, through the coming storms, and help to nurture the seeds of human empowerment, equality, justice etc – all in full flow 50 years ago!

SUB-PLOT – ‘Phoenix@50’

In 1975 I organized a 4-day conference of ‘self-directed learning’ on the theme of Future Cities – (which counted 20 course credits!) – with help on organization & communications by Paul Nicholson, and advice from Ches Chesney & other 3^rd / 4^th year students & ex-students.  (there was also practical help organizing dinners for 60 people from Suzanne Zeiger a.k.a. Suzy Creamcheese of the Mothers of Invention, then student of R.D. Laing…)

It could be very interesting and topical to follow up those  speakers and experiences, which all came together in a very intensive 4 days (but many are no longer with us in this world. Others have gone off in many directions. The forces of combination at that particular moment are really now scattered to the winds.)

As it turned out, I’ve spent 50 years following this through – organising forums, panels, think tanks, walking tours, anything which brings people together, to explore the connections between different ideas and experiences, and for mapping and design of practical and visionary ways forward.

This partly explains why I’m not a high-flying professor, simply because such visions which fire my imagination don’t fit easily into the academic format of 7,000-word peer-reviewed papers in high-ranking journals.  But maybe different kinds of outcomes and rewards have also come up, for which I am very grateful.

Contact

Joe Ravetz FRSA,

Mind-Lab / Laboratory for Urban Collective Intelligence

Urban Futures & Governance Lead, Manchester Urban Institute,

University of Manchester

1. +44 (0)7719 233115:

joe.ravetz@manchester.ac.uk

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-ravetz-4ab2915/

https://www.samiconsulting.co.uk/

Source text: Deeper City – collective intelligence

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