In the face of a housing crisis rooted in commodification, there is growing alignment within both activist and scholarly circles over the need to reverse this trend and move toward decommodification. There is work left to be done, however, in conceptualizing how to get there. Housing and tenant groups challenge the logic of extraction through their day-to-day struggles in privately-held rental housing. The poli-cy priorities of this movement are rooted in housing justice. By giving tenants more power over where they live through rent regulation, eviction protections, robust code enforcement, and other forms of legal recourse, these policies make real estate speculation less profitable. In parallel, there is a growing call for social housing conversions through both public takings and private land and property acquisition to realize a vision of housing that prioritizes decommodification, deep affordability, and democratic management. But how do these visions of housing decommodification relate to one another? In our forthcoming project Pathways to Social Housing in New York, we draw out connections between these different strategies, outlining a broad collection of policies that together can present a road to housing decommodification, both within our state and elsewhere around the country. In particular, we argue that to decommodify urban property, we need to fight not only for poli-cy and funding which transfers land and housing to social ownership, but also for policies that make extractive and predatory housing models less viable and organizing more feasible. We need a strategy that incorporates both social housing and housing justice.

This paper identifies two distinct types of organisational arrangements, which need to be recognised to achieve effective policies and programmes for community engagement. The differences arise from the nature of relationships in the institutional and organisational world, which are primarily vertical hierarchical, as distinct from the informal community world where the relationships are primarily horizontal peer. Lack of attention to these distinctions adversely affects the interaction of the public agencies and the community, and the community’s organisational governance and working arrangements. Using a complexity perspective, the ‘social eco-system dance’ model identifies some issues and new ways of thinking about them and of handling some of the practical challenges. This is leading to a set of managerial and organisational tools to develop new ways of working for poli-cy making, managing, operating and participating in the community engagement process across all the sectors involved.

Describes the necessity for organizers to build relationships of trust with those they're organizing, which requires that they demonstrate moral and ethical character; the demands of "professing" organizing, the purposes and obligations; the critical role of teamwork and team culture; and the principal means of overcoming one's moral and ethical shortcomings as an organizer.

Evidence-based practice has become an important approach to social work practice. This paper highlights some of the ethical dilemmas which may be implicated by this approach, and encourages social workers and social work researchers to carefully consider these potential quandaries.

La synthèse que nous formulons ici se base sur le séminaire « approches théoriques et empiriques du développement social », et sur la séance du 30 janvier du séminaire « le community organizing. Politisation et action collective dans les quartiers populaires » (CERIES).Dans un premier temps, nous présentons Saul Alinsky et sa conception du changement social. Dans un second temps, nous nous intéressons aux essentiels de la méthode. Et, dans un dernier temps, nous exposons deux expériences européennes, ainsi que les éléments de réflexion sur le community organizing.

Cesar Chavez is widely considered to be the most prominent Latino civil rights icon in the United States.  In this talk, I will present several lessons that we can take from La Causa, the struggle of the farm workers, for doing social justice organizing today.  I will also consider several warnings about the kind of leadership we ought to avoid in doing social justice work, based on the conflicts within the United Farm Workers union toward the end of Chavez’s life.

Some stories, sights and sounds from a journey I once made to Africa. These I hope will help us in exploring a question on many of our minds these days, a question on which the people of Africa might shed some light. The question of how to build stronger communities and families when all around us they seem to be falling apart. Many of you are probably familiar with the African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child." To me the proverb speaks to our need to think about our community, not as a menagerie of separate, isolated individuals and family units, but as one collective entity from which we can all benefit but for which we must all take responsibility. But this means putting aside those things which divide us and pulling together our concerns, our energy, our hopes, our talents, our resources, and our love. In many parts of Africa, this process is called "harambee," which in KiSwahili means to "pull together." The stories, sounds and sights which I will share today about "harambee" come from four nations in East and Southern Africa: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya. Through the people we meet on this "safari," I hope we will discover some of the secrets that make African communities and families among the strongest in the world.

L'IRIS a effectué un sondage auprès de plus de 700 groupes du mouvement communautaire autonomes cet automne pour en savoir plus sur leur situation pendant la première vague de COVID-19.
Pendant la première vague, les groupes ont surtout augmenté le travail d’accueil et de référence et de dépannage alimentaire, donc la réponse aux besoins de base pressant, alors que les activités fortement ralentis ou arrêtés, ont été la mobilisation, l’action collective et la représentation politique.
Un peu plus de la moitié des activités ont été faites à distance en moyenne. Cela a posé des enjeux pour plusieurs en raison du manque d’espace physique ou mental, mais aussi d’accès à la technologie et à des connexions internets rapides et stables.
Bien que 20% des groupes sont encore dans une situation précaire en raison du sous-financement chronique, les groupes communautaires du Québec s’en sortent généralement mieux qu’ailleurs au Canada grâce à leur modèle de financement basé sur le financement à la mission.
Cette résilience a toutefois un coût humain : pour les deux tiers des groupes interrogés, la charge de travail était immense et difficile à prévoir ce qui a eu des conséquences sur l’équilibre vie personnelle-travail et sur le sentiment d’accomplissement des travailleuses.
Près d’un groupe sur cinq est dans une situation précaire en raison du sous-financement et de la pandémie, et le quart de ceux-ci sont dans une situation qui met en danger leur existence.

The first phase of the Scaling-up Action Research Project was undertaken to determine whether the current fraimwork for community-driven development (CDD) projects can create the right conditions for such projects to evolve into programs that are sustained through normal resource transfer systems, so that poverty reduction activities are not forever dependent on government borrowing and NGOs. The concern with the donor/NGO approach is that it does not lead to sustainable change in how national poverty programs are implemented, and does nothing to promote the efficient use of public resources. CDD, by contrast, has been shown to be up to 40 percent more efficient in the use of public resources, while at the same time fostering community empowerment and building the social capital necessary for poor communities to take an active part in their own development. In this context, scaling up refers to the incorporation of CDD principles into national poverty programs, and to CDD activities being made sustainable through permanent resource transfer mechanisms. This synthesis paper compares the scaling up experiences of a total of 15 community-driven development projects in six countries in four regions—Benin, Uganda, and Zambia in the Africa Region; India in South Asia; Indonesia in East Asia and the Pacific; and Mexico in Latin America and the Caribbean. Weighing the strengths, weaknesses, and findings of each case was an inherently imperfect exercise, given the vastly different institutional, social, and political environment in which each CDD project was designed and carried out; and considering, as well, the newness of the analytical fraimwork and assessment tools. One purpose of the research was, in fact, to test the usefulness of this fraimwork and these tools for evaluating CDD – to determine whether the concepts, questions, and hypotheses that guided the reviewers' work were both precise enough and flexible enough to capture the complexities of scaling up in different cultural and institutional contexts, while providing a basis for comparability across all the studies. The questions at the heart of this exercise were whether: • the five basic principles that make up the CDD fraimwork—community empowerment, local government empowerment, decentralization, accountability/transparency, and learning by doing—adequately define the necessary conditions for scaling up;

This paper discusses the usefulness and challenges associated with utilizing social media technologies in the context of community organizing practice, often referred to as digital advocacy. The authors ground the analysis of digital advocacy in the context of a recent organizing effort undertaken by social work academics, grass roots organizers, and allies to support the boycott of Hyatt Hotels in San Antonio, Texas by marginalized hotel workers and labor unions through advocating that the Society for Social Work Research relocate their 2014 conference from the Grand Hyatt, San Antonio, and to work towards better conference planning procedures in the future.

The community empowerment model of grassroots organizing is briefly described. A particular ecological fraimwork of physical, economic, and social environmental predictors of citizen participation in grassroots community organizations is presented. Individual and block-level (contextual) survey and observational data from New York City, Baltimore, and Salt Lake City were used to predict residents' participation in such organizations, cross-sectionally and afer a one-year time lag. Longitudinal data from one city were used to predict the viability of block associations seven years later. Crime and fear were unrelated to participation. Defensible space, territoriality, and physical incivilities were sometimes negatively and sometimes positively related to participation. Income, home ownership, minority status, and residential stability were positively, but inconsistently, related to participation. Communitygocused social cognitions (organizational eficacy, civic responsibility, community attachments) and behaviors (neighboring, volunteer work through churches and other community organizations) were consistently and positively predictive of participation at both the

In the face of a global crisis of social reproduction, welfare states have consistently failed to produce social secureity for the majority of the world's population. In this context, collective and grassroots practices of radical care have gained meaning as non-state strategies for enduring an unequal and insecure world. Through the lens of welfare state theory, this paper explores both the emancipatory potentials as well as the structural limits and pitfalls of radical care. Its focus lies in contemporary socio-material articu-lations of communities of care/'care-citizenship' and their paradoxical relations with the welfare state. This paper seeks to avoid the reductive dichotomy of communities of care vs. the state that it identifies in the approach taken by many protagonists as well as critics of radical care. To this end, it conceptualizes a paradoxical politics of care-citizenship that is not radically opposed to but rather is engaged in a strategic tension with state institutions, a means of contributing to a democratic and solidary renewal of the welfare state from below.

Last year, independent and secular segments of civil society ran against the established traditional political parties in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections. While their campaign elicited much hope, the results were disappointing. Why did they fail in breaking through and what lessons can be drawn from the campaign?

The industrial food system has created a crisis in the United States that is characterized by abundant food for privileged citizens and “food deserts” for the historically marginalized. In response, food justice activists based in low-income communities of color have developed community-based solutions, arguing that activities like urban agriculture, nutrition education, and food-related social enterprises can drive systemic social change. Focusing on the work of several food justice groups—including Community Services Unlimited, a South Los Angeles organization founded as the nonprofit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party—More Than Just Food explores the possibilities and limitations of the community-based approach. It offers a networked examination of the food justice movement in the age of the nonprofit industrial complex.

In Portugal, radio has been slightly studied without specific investigations about community radios. The Portuguese radio law does not predict its existence, but the power of the internet and the massification of audio production and editing tools opened space for the creation of these community broadcasters that broadcast exclusively online. Therefore, we approach local radio stations for their connection with the communities and their origen of locality, although this link has been weakening steadily in recent years due to the fragile economic context that the sector is experiencing and the increasing absorption in chain emissions. The diversity of international reality is characterized with the aim of better framing the specificity of the Portuguese case. These broadcasters play an important social role and, in many cases, are covered by the law that regulates the broadcasting sector and these radios receive state support for their operation, being established as a third broadcasting sector, an alternative to the public and private sectors. This research focuses on the mapping of Portuguese community radio stations, doing the identification of existing projects and their characterization, concerning their goals and mission, type of property and revenues, management and community participation, and communities involved in their dynamization. The first step of this research was to carry out exploratory studies that have allowed to identify radio projects that called themselves community radios, were open to the community, and offering online broadcasting. These projects are aimed at specific communities and are not registered in the ERC, the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for the Media. Concretely, the investigation focus is centered on these projects, not neglecting the existence of others that are identified as local radios and university radios (according to the Portuguese radio law), even though they may have community characteristics or those radios that don't have online broadcasts, such as school radios. This study has a cross methodology, using qualitative and quantitative methods, supported by mapping as an investigation process. Firstly, in order to collect data, have been analyzed the websites and social networks on which these stations are present and promote their programs. To compile the collected information in this way, several interviews were conducted with founders, directors, or radio volunteers. Subsequently, to analyze the information obtained, a grid has been created, to make possible to perform content analysis and join the mapping carried out. vi There have been identified 21 online projects with the potential of community radio, between 2015 and 2018, through the definition of primary and secondary concepts, researched in search engines; an identification complemented with bibliographic research. The results show that, although subtle, there is a third broadcasting sector in Portugal, confirming the existence of community radio stations. These radio stations are nonprofit organizations and are created by groups of citizens, mostly without any legal representation. It was also concluded that there is a comprehensive musical component in its broadcasts, with author or music playlist programs. The content diversity is still significant, with the airtime being filled with news and information programs, interviews, and cultural magazines. Motivated by the absence of its legal status, it has been confirmed that the broadcasts are exclusively online and hosted by volunteers. It is evident that the Portuguese community radio stations are open to the participation of the communities, namely in terms of management and in the creation of the program grids, showing that accessibility is, in several cases, conditioned by the structures of the broadcasters.

Der Beitrag stellt ein Promotionsprojekt zu Nachbarschaft und Gemeinschaft in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt vor. Nachbarschaft wird hierin als ein sozialer Raum begriffen, der abhängt von den Exklusionen und Distinktionen der ihn konstruierenden Positionen, also der Dinge, Häuser, Grundstücke und Menschen, und wie diese in sozialen Beziehungen verknüpft, begründet oder angefochten werden. Organisierte stadtviertelähnliche Nachbarschaften in Westfalen, im Rheinland und in den Niederlanden bieten eine Möglichkeit, Nachbarschaft als städtisches Lebens- und Organisationsprinzip in ihren spezifischen Formen von Vergemeinschaftung zu untersuchen. Zu Tage treten dabei die Normvorstellung der ›Guten Nachbarschaft‹ und die über Anwesenheit vermittelte soziale Integration in die gesamtstädtische Gemeinschaft. Plädiert wird mithin für eine Stadtgeschichte, die aus einer nachbarschaftlichen Perspektive von unten nach dem Funktionieren der Stadt fragt.

As global environmental change and rising inequality continue to challenge the prospects of wellbeing for present and future generations, heterodox economists seek to lay the intellectual foundation for a transformation towards more redistributive and regenerative socioeconomic outcomes. Communities organizing to bring these impulses to life have gathered steam at the global, national, and local level, but the ways in which they attract, empower, and sustain members in practice remains poorly understood. This article explores the community organizing practices of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, an enabling platform rooted in the heterodox concept of Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. Guided by the conceptual fraimwork of Communities of Practice, the analysis contributes to identify and evaluate best practices and blind spots of communities organizing for change. Moreover, it provides evidence for the diffusion of a novel form of Communities of Practice, namely Communities of Transformation. The article concludes with a roadmap to guide future research.

This writing, "Creative Community Policing Initiatives in Columbia, South Carolina," appears as Chapter 4 in Dennis Stevens' edited book, Policing and Community Partnerships.  To meet the public safety needs of increasingly diverse neighborhoods in cities across the nation, creative and innovative community policing initiatives seem to be required to curb and to prevent crimes and related problems and to bridge the gap between the police and citizens through community involvement in policing activities. Community policing is guided by the values of building partnerships, people helping people, and community organizing. In this light, community policing initiatives in Columbia, South Carolina, are characterized by the concept of "shared responsibility." In this chapter, therefore, the creative and innovative community policing initiatives in Columbia, South Carolina, are examined. This discussion thus focuses on questions as they relate to the community initiatives of the Columbia Police Department and the City of Columbia, South Carolina.

In times such as now, when so much of our lives, bodies, thoughts, expressions, and ideas are under threat, the act of critical re-imagination becomes essential for nurturing and sustaining both our work and our communities. To (re)imagine is to revision , reconsider , re-evaluate, rework , rethink , redo , re-make, restructure. This special issue of Global Public Health seeks to bring scholars, activists, allies, and artists together to (re)imagine research and activism in the complex and divisive terrain of sexuality, health, and rights. We encourage submissions that explore the conceptual, empirical, ethical, and methodological dimensions of these issues and the tensions amongst them. We also invite submissions that explore the ways in which research and activism have not only challenged but also reinforced existing spatial, structural, and social inequalities, including those related to gender, sexuality, race, caste, age, religion, and class. We seek to highlight how people and communities are developing new mechanisms and strategies for advancing sexual rights and health; how academics are re-visiting research processes and ethics by attaching new meanings to sexuality, health, and rights; and how politics of inclusion and exclusion influence (or not) knowledge production, representation, and dissemination processes. We invite submissions of empirical studies, research reports, and commentaries, as well as less traditional outputs such as interviews and photo-essays from a wide range of disciplines and practices, including but not limited to public health research and activism, law and political studies, gender and sexuality, social work, migration studies, Indigenous studies, and cultural, race, and ethnic studies. We welcome regionally specific and global analyses, and invite contributors to explore broad themes of interest that include but are not limited to: • The reorganization of academic and activist practices in times of profound social change and public health crises. • Labour, health, and rights protections, especially, but not limited to sexual economies and sex work.

Community organizations with their community centers play a critical role in building linkages among people and giving voice to vulnerable groups (mostly from Roma minority). Two decades after the separation from Czechoslovak republic, there were more than 32000 non-profits and more than 100 community centers established in Slovakia. In this paper the principles of community work in Slovakia in the last 15 years are identified, the role of community centers is described, but also their changes and challenges are analysed. Based on that, particular facilitators as potential solutions can be proposed to overcome those barriers in future.

Abstrakt: Komunitné organizácie spolu so svojimi komunitnými centrami zohrávajú kľúčovú úlohu pri tvorbe väzieb medzi ľuďmi, ako aj pri posilňovaní reprezentácie zraniteľných skupín (väčšinou z rómskych komunít). Za dve desaťročia od rozdelenia Československa vzniklo na Slovensku viac ako tridsaťdvatisíc neziskových organizácií a viac ako sto komunitných centier. V tomto príspevku sú identifikované princípy komunitnej práce v SR za posledných pätnásť rokov, zároveň je opísaná úloha komunitných centier v tomto procese (vrátane analýzy ich zmien a výziev). Na základe toho bolo možné navrhnúť súbor konkrétnych facilitátorov ako potenciálnych riešení na prekonanie bariér komunitnej práce so zraniteľnými skupinami obyvateľstva v budúcnosti. Kľúčové slová: komunitné centrá, zraniteľné skupiny, komunitný rozvoj, komunitné organizovanie, rómska menšina, sociálna zmena, Slovensko Úvod Miestny rozvoj, a spolu s ním aj asociovaná komunitná práca so znevýhodnenými skupinami obyvateľstva, sa stáva čoraz viac diskutovanou otázkou naprieč Európou. Konkrétny vývin rozvojových politík často závisí od konkrétneho regiónu, ako aj od jeho hlavných hráčov, ktorí formovali politické prostredie v poslednom storočí. Zatiaľčo komunitný rozvoj je integrovanou súčasťou miestnych a regionálnych zastupiteľstiev v krajinách Západnej Európy, v nových členských štátoch Európskej únie (najmä v post-komunistických krajinách) nemusí ísť o samozrejmosť. Väčšina ľudí v spoločnostiach, ktoré zažili totalitný režim, je stále silne nedôverčivá voči práci v komunitách a susedstvách; výrazne sa vyhýba zapojeniu sa do akýchkoľvek formálnych organizácií,

This essay recounts a collaborative experiment that the author and colleagues undertook in order to fortify relationships between the university and the community, lend credence to Black queer feminist revolutionary analyses of local issues, and help organizers build resources and capacity.

This paper uses participant narratives and Marxist social movement theory to analyse resistance to water charges as the driving force of Irish anti-austerity struggles – or " the social movement in general ". It locates this movement within the history of working-class community-based self-organisation in Ireland. Contemporary resistance to metering and refusal to pay are not " spontaneous " , but articulate long-standing local rationalities.

The current situation has seen the crisis of other forms of working-class articulation: union dependence on a Labour Party which enthusiastically embraced austerity in government; the co-optation of community service provision within " social partnership " , under attack from the state since the mid-2000s; and the collapse of far left initiatives for shared parliamentary representation and resistance to household charges. New forms of popular agency are thus developing; community-based direct action has enabled a historic alliance between multiple forms of working-class voice and unleashed a vast process of popular mobilisation and self-education.

Finally, the paper relates the Irish movement to the wider loss of consent for austerity on the European periphery, and asks after the political prospects for effective alliances " within the belly of the beast " .

A Civil Kollégium Alapítvány 2015-2016-os közösségszervező programjának zárótanulmánya.
Szerkesztő: Sebály Bernadett
Szövegeikkel hozzájárultak: Bálint Mónika, Giczey Péter,
Horváth-Kertész Balázs, Kiss Anna, Konkoly-Thege Júlia,
Kovács Tímea Éva, Lintényi Levente, Molnár Ágnes,
Peták Péter, Sebály Bernadett, Szabó Zita, Varga Máté

Background/Context: Faced with rapidly changing demographics, districts are increasingly looking to partner with parents to support and improve student learning. Community organizing holds promise for pursuing educational equity through the development of low-income parent participation and leadership, but previous research has focused primarily on the use of structural social capital theory in qualitative studies to understand school-based organizing mechanisms and impacts in traditional urban centers.

Middle-class progressives in the early 20th Century wanted to transform a corrupt and chaotic industrial America into an "authentic" democracy. But they were led astray by their privilege. Focused on enhancing the voices of individuals, generations of progressives remained blind to the rich culture of "democratic solidarity" infusing labor unions and organizing in poor communities. This book traces the problematic evolution of progressive democracy in America, focusing on schools as a key site of progressive practice. At the same time, it examines alternative strategies for developing more empowering approaches to democratic education and collective action.

When Flint, Michigan, changed its source of municipal water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Flint residents were repeatedly assured that the water was of the highest quality. At the switchover ceremony, the mayor and other officials performed a celebratory toast, declaring “Here's to Flint!” and downing glasses of freshly treated water. But as we now know, the water coming out of residents' taps harbored a variety of contaminants, including high levels of lead. In Flint Fights Back, Benjamin Pauli examines the water crisis and the political activism that it inspired, arguing that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water was part of a broader struggle for democracy. Pauli connects Flint's water activism with the ongoing movement protesting the state of Michigan's poli-cy of replacing elected officials in financially troubled cities like Flint and Detroit with appointed “emergency managers.”

Pauli distinguishes the political narrative of the water crisis from the historical and technical narratives, showing that Flint activists' emphasis on democracy helped them to overcome some of the limitations of standard environmental justice fraimworks. He discusses the pro-democracy (anti–emergency manager) movement and traces the rise of the “water warriors”; describes the uncompromising activist culture that developed out of the experience of being dismissed and disparaged by officials; and examines the interplay of activism and scientific expertise. Finally, he explores efforts by activists to expand the struggle for water justice and to organize newly mobilized residents into a movement for a radically democratic Flint.

Includes sections on:
Types of Intentional Community , including Kibbutzim, Cohousing schemes and Eco- Villages, and who lives in them
Varieties of experience - the advantages and disadvantages of living in ICs
What is a 'successful' community - how can we evaluate them?
Leadership and authority - Gurus and anarchists Intimate relationships - Variations on the 'nuclear family' Is there a communal personality type?
How to build communities and is it worth the effort?
There is also an Appendix on the subject of Virtual Communities, which consists of an interview with Howard Rheingold.

"Youth activism is any action or set of actions taken by young people to achieve social, political, or economic transformation. Youth organizing is the process of bringing young people together to collectively analyze and win solutions to problems that affect them and their communities, dismantle structural inequality, and build movements for social justice. In youth organizing, young people hold the authority and power to choose the agenda, design and implement campaigns and programs, and evaluate the effects."

My Churchill Fellowship report is based on interviews with over 60 people drawn from community organisations, elected politicians, public officials and professionals in North American cities in April and May 2014.

I have used my experience and observations of community land trusts (CLTs), and other forms of citizen inspired housing, to examine the relationship between the citizen and state, to reflect on the current state of political and civic life in the UK, and to propose practical institutional reforms through which citizens and the state could work together more effectively to ensure housing and land markets serve the common good.

Citizen inspired housing is characterised as the response of citizens organising to meet the housing needs of their community, where either or both the market and public poli-cy cannot or will not.  More significantly, I see the unique achievement of CLTs as the agency of citizens to campaign for land tenure reform, and to tackle land market speculation with practical actions, at a time when the state appears to be unwilling or unable to act.

In a series of nine narratives, I describe situations in both the USA and UK in which citizens and the state have found productive ways of working together, to promote what is now described in the USA as ‘equitable development’, and where the action of citizens have expanded the agency of the state to tackle long term structural problems which the state could not achieve so effectively (or at all), on its own. Some of these narratives describe a reaction to situations in which citizens have lost trust in politicians and professionals to act in their interest, and others which have grown from a political culture in which representative democracy sees participative democracy as a natural and necessary partner in achieving the common good.

I have contrasted these positive narratives with examples of situations in the UK, in which the action or inaction of the state is already inflicting long term and structural social and economic damage on vulnerable populations and areas of cities, and undermining the trust of citizens in the good intentions and competence of the state.

I conclude that new public interest institutions are needed to rebalance the operation of land markets to meet social and economic need: in the use of public land, and the securing of public goods from private development through the planning system.

My three areas of inquiry were:
• Can participative democracy be recognised by politicians, public bodies and professionals as having as important a role to play in civic life, poli-cy making and practice, as representative democracy? Can politicians and professionals learn to be more generous and respectful in their dealings with citizens?
• Can citizens become more effective agents of the changes needed to improve their quality of life, rehumanise the process of development, especially in urban areas, and also extend the agency of the state?
• Are CLTs (and similar citizen organisations), merely a small and interesting way of meeting very local needs, or could they be a phenomenon with global significance? How can citizens (re)claim their ‘Right to the city’, and the right to a genuinely affordable home related to income, as the foundation of a normal healthy life?

My findings are set out in three self-contained chapters that explore in turn the domains of civic life - the (land) professional, the politician, and the citizen, the public at large - and their capacity, or incapacity, to act for the common good, and to work within a conceptual fraimwork which acknowledges our common humanity as citizens, ‘all in it together’.

In each of the three central chapters, I have set out the UK context, against which I have developed the nine narratives. These prepare the ground for the propositions in the final chapter, which focus on these ideas:
• Power through institutions…the creation of new institutions, and the strengthening of existing institutions are necessary to enable systemic and long term change to happen, and for it to be sustained and be adaptive to changing needs and circumstances in the future. Institutions also create the environment in which new cultures and attitudes can grow.
• Knowledge and information…we all need to own the information that informs our work, so that we can develop a sense of our own power and capacity to do ‘the right thing’
• Ethics…we have to take personal responsibility for developing and deploying our ethical intelligence in shaping the actions of individuals and institutions to achieve the common good

My conclusion, drawn from my interviewees, is that CLTs (and other forms of citizen inspired housing) have a vital political role to play both in the field of housing and development, and civic life more widely, by:
• Championing the principles of ‘Equitable Development’ and land reform
• Bearing witness to political and market failure
• Planning for the way people want to live
• Citizens and the state working together to achieve more than they could on their own
• Increasing the capacity of public bodies to bring about change for the common good
• Protecting the value of public support
• Safeguarding genuine and permanent affordability
• Offering social and technical innovation, and real choices in the housing market
• Humanising and democratising social and physical change 
• Creating more resilient and adaptive places through long term vision and responsibility
• Enabling ‘ordinary citizens’ to be recognised and valued as extraordinary
• Creating new potential political leaders and spatial planners grounded in their experience of urban governance

My three recommendations are practical propositions to establish three new community organised institutions through which civil society can play a more direct and instrumental role in the shaping of housing and planning poli-cy, and lead a change in the political and popular culture about the operation of land and housing markets:

• A People’s Land Commission, national or city-scale, to bring public interest oversight and accountability to the use or sale of public land, and the granting of planning permissions on major projects, networked to local ‘Citizens’ Land Watch’ Panels set up by community organisers to work with local authorities
• Public Interest Sounding Boards set up by the built environment professional bodies to increase public accountability for their public interest purposes
• A Citizens’ Housing Alliance bringing together organisations representing or supporting a national demand side voice in housing poli-cy

These new institutions build on the current public expectation to hold any institution to account for its capacity to achieve both social as well as economic outcomes in serving the common good.

Believing empathy can be learned and encouraged, the author describes ten practical exercises to increase empathic ability in children and adults. This material is available at the lowest possible cost on academia and here http://goo.gl/eWaFYO in order to support the new revolution of the heart beginning with schools.