Starting with the ‘big ideas’

Hydrock’s recent report A vision for the 2020s provided early inspiration for the Creating Communities Together Project. The report highlights many of the issues we are facing and responds with ‘big ideas’ for the next decade and the need for shifting mindsets.

However, engineers like architects and other design professionals work within an established framework, where short term value calculations create a landscape that constrains possibility. Change happens slowly, and most projects inevitably and understandably following tried and tested pathways. Innovative solutions are expensive and, even ones seen as desirable, are often costed out of projects struggling with viability.

Hydrock’s report makes it easy to imagine what real change might look like and, for the Creating Communities Together team, it raises a key question – ‘how do we start big?’.

As Buckminster Fuller wrote: ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’.

What would happen if we started with the big ideas and worked with local communities to create bold new visions for struggling high streets, for affordable housing, for transport, for places that benefit the people that live there and the planet. If we started differently, how close could we get to that imagined future? This is the challenge at the heart of the Creating Communities Together Project.