How we work

Cultural co-creation towards revitalising and protecting your community

How we work

The Community Chartering Network (CCN) seeks to integrate community processes and agreements into a foundation for enacting and protecting sustainable local development.

We aim to achieve this in two ways:

  1. Through enabling community-led processes which help residents to articulate and continuously manifest their shared lived experience of where they live and work.
  2. By supporting communities in putting this shared experience at the heart of decision-making related to local planning and development in ways that meet a specific local purpose or need.

Therefore, in addition to helping you to facilitate your local community initiative, CCN also explores mechanisms by which outcomes can be used to protect your community, by interfacing with existing UK planning and legal frameworks. An example of this is given in the Case Study below.

In this respect, our approach was been inspired by the “Community Bill of Rights” movement in the United States led by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).

Community Charters: a Case Study:

The Falkirk and St Ives Community Charters are designed to take effect through the planning process by four ways:

(1) They declare the sum total of the communities’ collectively-agreed intangible and tangible assets to be its ‘Cultural Heritage’ for assessment under the EU Environmental Impact Assessment Directive. It asserts the basic right of the community to have agency over those assets.

(2) On the basis, that communities agreed these assets to be fundamental to their health and wellbeing, the Charter and the collective decisions it enables are presented as a “material consideration” that the planning authority needs to take into account in its decision-making.

(3) They recognise Nature has intrinsic value, and is not merely property. As such, it invites local authorities and corporations to engage in participatory planning processes that give recognition to this intrinsic value.

(4) In invoking the Precautionary Principle of “First Do No Harm” it aligns itself on a local scale with the proposed international law of Ecocide.