Where the old maps and mandates fail: civic work in the spaces between
- James Lock
- Jan 9
- 10 min read
Updated: Jan 13
When we look at complex problems, they often fall outside any one remit – but if we're to overcome them, that needs to change.
1. Introduction: a different kind of problem
In Sheffield last year, I kept finding myself in rooms where the request on the table was clear: we need cross-domain solutions. The problems were too entangled – mental health braided into housing and retrofit, ecological degradation tangled with economic strategy, river health and flood mitigation inseparable from urban planning, poverty embedded in transport, infrastructure, education and food systems. The urgency was real. The willingness was present. But in almost all these rooms, when we looked around the table, something was missing: no-one had the remit to hold it all.
We weren’t failing to act because we didn’t care. We were failing because the structure itself couldn’t hold the complexity. The system had no place for it.
And the difficulty wasn’t just institutional – it was relational. Even when those actors we might traditionally assume were the ‘right people’ (i.e. people with high levels of institutional power, expert knowledge, trusted networks in communities, or influence over particular systems or sectors) were in the room, we found ourselves speaking from different logics of responsibility, urgency, and legitimacy. As Indy Johar has described, this is the collision between three postures:
Defending the built life: seeking continuity, safety, and recognition for what has already been built, often misunderstood as mere privilege defence.
Delivering the possible: acting within current constraints, with a practical ethic rooted in implementation, feasibility, and institutional authorisation.
Insisting on the necessary: naming the thresholds, biophysical or social, that must be met regardless of institutional readiness.
Each posture contains its own theory of seriousness. And each, when pushed to its edge, invalidates the others. This is why the room doesn’t converge. The arguments don’t resolve. And coordination becomes less about compromise, more about veto.
What I’ve come to understand is that this isn’t a local issue. It’s structural. And relational. What I’m seeing in civic work – especially in entangled, place-based practice – is the emergence of what I’ve started to call legitimacy vacuums: spaces between domains, where the problems show up most clearly, but no actor or institution is authorised, mandated or legitimised to respond.
And these vacuums aren’t administrative gaps. They are legitimacy failures produced by an ontological system that struggles to perceive entanglement as real.
2. Naming the crises: Meta-, Poly-, and Perma-
Our failure to navigate the vacuum has intensified three overlapping crises. Each describes a different facet of what happens when complex systems interact without structural capacity for relational response:
Polycrisis: Multiple systems in crisis at once – health, housing, ecology, governance, social cohesion – intersecting in unpredictable, reinforcing ways. In a complex system, interventions don’t have linear outcomes: actions in one domain reverberate across others. This means that approaches designed for isolated problems become ineffective or even harmful when applied to entangled conditions.
Permacrisis: Crisis has become chronic. The intensity and frequency of disruptive events – climate shocks, public health emergencies, cost-of-living pressures – has outpaced institutional adaptation. Instead of moving through waves of challenge and response, we are submerged in a near-constant state of reactivity. Urgency becomes the ambient condition.
Metacrisis: Beneath both the above types of crisis lies a deeper pattern: a collapse of shared meaning, a breakdown in our relational infrastructure, and a system of generator functions that reward extraction, separability, and short-term gain. The metacrisis is produced by these generator functions - for example perverse economic logics such as: a dead tree is worth more than a live one; cooperation is punished in rivalrous markets; commons are enclosed or degraded in ‘races to the bottom’; and ‘progress’ (as defined by modernity) is oriented around narrow-boundary goals that optimise locally while externalising harm across the wider system. These logics aren’t accidents – they’re baked into our organising forms. This framing has been significantly developed by Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Consilience Project, who understand the metacrisis as the meta-condition generating all other crises – an entangled failure of sense-making, coordination, and response at a civilisational scale.
All three crises reflect a fundamental misalignment: the complexity of the world has outgrown the architecture of the systems designed to respond to it.
3. Orientation: two modes of navigation
In this landscape, orientation becomes central. Without it, we are stuck in reactivity or nostalgia. With it, we begin to re-enter into relationships with the world.
There are two important forms of orientation at play that I’ve seen:
Orientation through relationships is a way-shaping practice within complexity. It happens through participation in systems: slowing down, co-sensing, taking a step, observing the feedback, and iterating. It’s less about control and more about resonance and attunement to the environment or context. This kind of orientation becomes possible when the things we navigate with – rivers, institutions, datasets, cultures – are treated as subjects in motion, not passive or static objects. Without subjectivity, relational orientation collapses.
Orientation through direction is about shared intention. It’s the kind of orientation practiced by bioregional transitions and civic moonshots. Regen Melbourne’s EarthShots, such as their call for “a swimmable Birrarung”, offer a collective compass. Sheffield’s City Goals do the same: these aren’t ‘targets’ in the narrow sense, they are wide-boundary direction-setting devices that align action across difference.
Importantly, we must also name capabilities as civic outcomes requiring intentional collaboration:
The capability to co-sense into complexity
The capability to coordinate across difference
The capability to act without ownership
The capability to generate legitimacy relationally
These are not simply means to other ends. They are necessary conditions for inhabiting complexity relationally and without capture or extraction.
4. The modern inheritance: why the gaps exist
Modernity teaches us to divide the world into parts: domains, sectors, silos. It gives each part its own logic, legitimacy, time horizon, and authorising environment. For example, public health works in years and audits. Economic development works in quarters and growth. Community organisations work in stories, trust, and need.
Each is internally coherent, but none can stretch to meet the whole. So when a problem appears that moves across these logics, the system doesn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It simply doesn’t respond – it doesn’t see.
This is what I mean by vacuum. Not absence, but disrecognition. The problem is there, the urgency is there. But the system has no structure through which to act.
These separations are not neutral. They are the deep code of coloniality, which, as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective reminds us, is not simply a historic event but an ongoing structure of separability – the reduction of the living world into extractable parts, legible only through control, ownership, or narrow regimes of economic value and progress.
The postures Indy Johar names – defensive continuity, constrained feasibility, and material necessity, shaped by biophysical and social thresholds – don’t just arise from individual psychology. They are products of this inheritance. Each posture is a survival strategy inside an organising system that cannot metabolise entanglement.
5. The vacuum as an ontological space
The vacuum isn’t empty. It’s dense with unmet need, overlapping crises and emergent potential. But the system can’t perceive it, because it treats complexity as something to be broken down, solved, and reassembled.
To perceive the vacuum, we have to shift how we see. We have to accept what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti calls the factuality of entanglement – the idea that interdependence is not a value or an opinion but a structural feature of life.
This shift changes everything. Once we accept entanglement, we stop treating the world as a collection of objects to fix. We begin to relate to it as a field of subjects. And that means orientation becomes relational.
The vacuum is not merely a governance issue. It is the space between systems, stories, and selves. It is the place where modernity’s illusion fractures and the entangled world begins to shine through.
6. Who can move in the vacuum?
Not everyone uses the language of “meta-relational actor” – and (fortunately for all involved) they don’t need to. This isn’t about labels. It’s about how we work.
This is what I mean by vacuum work: work that takes place in legitimacy vacuums, outside mandate, beyond sectoral logic, and without pre-existing authorisation.
Those who can move in this space are the ones who:
Refuse to be captured by a single logic or silo
Hold multiple truths without collapsing them
Build trust across difference without requiring agreement
Sense into systems without needing to control them
Whether they’re called facilitators, systems conveners, civic weavers, organisers, elders or simply neighbours, they’re doing vacuum work.
The Many-to-Many architectures being developed by the Beyond the Rules team at Dark Matter Labs show how this work can be held at scale. These systems don’t centralise power; they coordinate entanglement. They re-code governance so multi-actor action can remain adaptive, mission-led, and legitimate without a single authorising centre.
7. Re-subjectivising the world
But even relational actors can’t move if the field remains objectified.
To orient within entanglement, we must re-subjectivise the world. That means recognising the agency and sovereignty of what modernity sees as passive: rivers, soil, housing, data. These aren’t background elements – they are participants.
As Indy Johar has explored, this involves agentification – treating housing not as a product but as a living ecology; recognising the river not as infrastructure but as a sovereign actor within a relational field.
This isn’t about granting ‘rights’ in the legalistic sense – rights still imply a modern, often anthropocentric, logic of control and permission. It’s deeper than that. It’s about recognising participation as innate. Rivers don’t need to be granted the right to flow: they are already in relationship. Here, sovereignty is not about autonomy from, but co-agency within.
When everything remains static, we cannot co-orient. When the world is agentic, orientation becomes possible.
8. A new form of organising
In Sheffield, it is at the scale of place that entanglement becomes visible. This is evident both in the bioregional mapping work emerging through the River Dôn Project – a multi-actor collaboration involving communities, researchers, artists and civic institutions — and in the neighbourhood mapping work developed across South Yorkshire and in more detail within Sheffield itself by Tom French at Data for Action Sheffield, and Dr Simon Duffy at Citizen Network. Together, these mapping efforts surface how social, ecological and economic dynamics overlap at human scale. The poly-, perma-, and metacrises do not appear here as abstract trends, but as lived conditions: flood risk, housing precarity, deteriorating mental health, and degraded ecologies. It is also at the scale of place that actors—across sectors, institutions and roles—often discover there is nowhere else to go to resolve these issues in isolation. Place, then, becomes both a practical container for coordination and a site of possibility: holding the potential to reimagine commons-based practice, not as a given, but as something that could be intentionally stewarded and negotiated.
Some of the cooperation that emerges here is unconscious, driven by necessity. Some is more intentional - through city goals, civic missions, or shared outcomes. In our work, we’ve been trying to build collaboration infrastructures that recognise this: from neighbourhood-level participation and care structures, to city-scale decision-making, to new forms of civic financing infrastructure that reshape how value, risk and legitimacy are held and shared, and on into bioregional coordination for water, energy and land health. Each scale reveals different expressions of the crisis, and requires different capacities of response.
Without the connective tissue – shared sense-making, co-ordination mechanisms, legitimising frames – these efforts remain isolated. But when stitched together, they begin to form a new kind of collective intelligence. One not centred in market competition or state control, but in relational ecologies that can think, decide, and act from within entanglement.
We’re seeing early signs of this organising logic across geographies and domains:
Dark Matter Labs and Beyond the Rules – Many-to-Many Systems , Radicle Civics and Planetary Civics Inquiry
Personal and relational accountability, somatics and embodied trauma healing (Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, Nkem Ndefo - Lumos Transforms)
Poly-solving collaboration infrastructures (Sheffield City Goals civic infrastructures, CIVIC SQUARE, us here at Opus, We Can Make, Onion Collective, Hastings Commons, Healing Justice London, Green Estate, Plymouth Octopus to name but a few (and there are many, many more)
Participatory sensemaking and Digital/AI-supported collective intelligence (Dave Snowden - Cynefin SenseMaker, Norah Bateson – Warm Data Labs, Audrey Tang – Digital Democracy)
The recognition of non-human sovereignty and agency (beyond rights frameworks - Regen Foundation, River Dôn Project Joe Brewer - Bioregional Earth)
Earthshots and bioregional transition thinking (Regen Melbourne, Mariana Mazzucato, Bioregional Learning Centre, Bioregional Financing Facilities, Bioregioning Tayside)
These aren’t fringe experiments: they’re some of the emergent infrastructures for post-separability organising – shared humbly, knowing this list is partial, situated, and far from capturing the breadth of work unfolding across different geographies and lineages.
9. Closing: the vacuum as a beginning
The vacuum is not empty – it’s a call, a pressure point, a “crack “(Bayo Akomolafe) in the surface logic of modernity where another kind of sensing starts to emerge.
It shows us what can no longer be separated. It invites us into forms of coordination that cannot be owned but must be stewarded with multi-party and multi-capital commitments. It reveals that the next organising principle is not control but relationship.
In Sheffield and beyond, what’s growing now is not a new masterplan: it’s a compost of practices. We are learning to host what has long been denied legitimacy: interdependence, subjectivity, sovereignty without domination, care without transaction.
And while no one actor can hold the whole, together we can learn to orient from within it – place by place, layer by layer.
The vacuum, then, is not what’s missing. It’s where the old maps fail. And the work now is not to fill it, but to learn how to orient, discern, and act from within it.
Because the vacuum is not absence. It’s where the factuality of entanglement is made visible.
This piece sits inside a field of shared inquiry and inherited labour. It’s been shaped by many conversations, collaborators, communities, and lineages – some named, some unnamed, some no longer traceable. The ideas here are not offered as original or proprietary, but as contributions to an ongoing collective effort to make sense of complexity, to metabolise modernity’s habits of separability, and to orient within the vacuum where old maps and mandates fail.
While some threads are cited directly, others live in the background – braided through systems practice, civic work, Indigenous and decolonial critique, relational theory and place-based experimentation. This is not an attempt to universalise or abstract, but to acknowledge that the thinking offered here is partial, composted over time, and entangled with the work of many others. Any clarity that arises should be understood not as authorship, but as participation – momentary alignment in a much wider field of effort, care, refusal, and remembering.