The “Deleted City” project below reminds me that however many technology bubbles the economy creates, however many digital landfills of retweets and blog comments pile up in the internet cloud, we’ll be left with the handmade communities and the social “bricks and mortar” that embodied the behaviours that digital technology…

In my previous post, I talked about what the future looks like for people excluded from the economy and who weren’t able to influence change. In this post, I will focus on another group who are not benefiting from economic growth but who are able to help themselves and/or each…

As we move towards a post-Brexit economy, what will the future look like for our friends, families and neighbours? In a previous post, I talked about what we could learn from scenarios and what should councils look to do. As we know from previous crises or significant changes in the…

If we look back a decade ago, we thought the Arab spring, the election of Barack Obama and the arrival of social media would bring us a world with greater democracy and diversity. Move forward 10 years and we’ve got the opposite. …

As we move into the Autumn, I thought I’d share stories about my holidays. Not this year, but in 2019! That year, I managed to travel abroad almost every season, Spring to Paris, Summer to Sicily, Autumn to Crete. In Paris, we based ourselves at the border between the 3eme…

I’ve been looking at the trends over the last year and there’s an increasing contradiction between what people say they believe in and what they do. The ambitions of organisations are bolder than ever before where they want not just change but systems change, not just innovation but disruptive…

I thought I’d reflect on what I was doing 10 years ago. Ten years ago I had just moved eastwards from Battersea to Limehouse with a couple of friends and had started working in local government, initially to support asylum seekers across the country and then to help Kent County…

One of the trends that will continue to shape our world are the evolution of cities. What will the cities of the 2020s look like? Paul Mason listed “the 10 things a perfect city needs”, ranging from hipster economics to political unrest, but with no mention of public space. Other…

What could the next five years have in store for local government? I’ve mentioned previously what social trends we might see. Below are potential predictions for the wider landscape that councils is in: Gap will grow between those local areas that have the pre-existing infrastructure & investment to survive &…