Sheffield Demonstrators

Demonstrating the Transformational Capabilities of Cities in Sheffield 

 

Today, humans are facing a complex entanglement of economic, social, environmental and health crises. The coming decade will be oriented by our collective ability to face up to the gravity of our transition as a species. We are required at a moment like this to reflect deeply on the worldviews and frameworks that have brought us to this point and to navigate the practicality, imagination and the urgency of the transitions required of us. 

 

Increasingly, places and municipalities are at the vanguard of facing the cascading crises. They are the locations where the energy crisis becomes a health crisis, where the health crisis becomes a social and economic crisis. Places are also at the intersection of being able to demonstrate the multiple and intersecting transitions required of civilization over the next two decades. They are also networked enough that meaningful engagement with critical institutions, communities and citizens is possible for shared sensing, shared sensemaking and shared action with legitimacy, and they are significant enough that results from demonstration into the transitions ahead are relevant, replicable and transferable. 

 

Increasingly it is clear that at the ‘delivery’ end of centralised policy making we are failing to build the pathways for legitimate transition. There is a growing discomfort within municipalities, citizens and institutions that current approaches and provision are insufficient and disproportionate to creating the necessary conditions for deeper and faster transitions. 

 

Ensuring an effective, just and fair transition will require a new approach to mass participation and deep democratic transition. It will require bold and adaptive experimentation, co-development of new institutional infrastructures alongside and in parallel with distributed learning and deployment of demonstrator projects in place. It is only through ‘doing’ that we will generate the inclusive and empowering ‘everyday politics’ of transition, alongside the insight and strategic knowledge to scale up towards a whole system transition. 

 

Demonstrating this future effectively and at pace requires us to operate in places where the conditions for multi-sector, multi-stakeholder alignment and alliance are possible and have already been nurtured – places where at least some institutional partners are open to connecting with entirely new ways of working, but also where an existing civic appetite and supporting infrastructure for cultural transformation, renewal and change is present. 

 

We believe that Sheffield is one of a handful of places in the UK where conditions could enable effective demonstration of the new ecological, economic and participatory frameworks required of societies to meet the transitions ahead.