Financing the Commons

This AA symposium focused on local economies and alternative financial systems is a partnership with the Centre for Applied Research in Empowering Society (CARES) at London Metropolitan University.

Our urban environments within neoliberal politics are shaped today by monetary values as a major driver of how buildings look, how land is used in our cities, and how this in turn impacts our behaviour. As urban practitioners or citizens, we are not equipped to engage with this and creatively re-design out its limitations. This symposium will bring together creative and innovative economic thinkers, and those making projects using alternative financial structures in the city.

How can urban practitioners lead in redesigning economic value that could re-imagine neighbourhoods, high streets and civic infrastructures? At the heart of this symposium is how local social infrastructure, framed as the commons, can become financially viable as a movement, a discourse and practice. The symposium hypothesises that if grassroots organisations make up a legitimate political sector, that impacts who political decision makers are and what the role of the neighbourhood becomes. This has macro ramifications on critiquing the current problems with representational democracy and looking at how the neighbourhood as the locus of political decision-making can become a way to implement deliberative democracy. This also has ramifications on what constitutes contemporary civic spaces in the city outside its historic conventions.

This symposium is organised by Torange Khonsari (Unit Tutor, Diploma 2 and Director of CARES).

Schedule

11am Welcome by Ingrid Schroder, Director of the AA
11.15-11.30am Introduction by Torange Khonsari
11.30-12.30pm Keynote by Bronwyn Williams - The Price of Value (Online)
12.30-12.50pm Sue Bell, Credit Unions and Local money
12.50-1.10pm Ivo Schmetz, Solidarity economy (Online)
1.10-1.30pm Discussion and Q&A chaired by Mehrdad Seyf

1.30-2.30pm Break

2.30-3.30pm Keynote by James Quilligan - Distinguishing Private Property, Public Goods and Commons Resources
3.30-3.50pm Louise Haagh, UBI
3.50-4.10pm Greg Fisher, Complexity Economics
4.10-4.30pm Nick Almond
4.30-4.50pm Hilary Powell, The Bank Job
4.50-5.10pm Discussion and Q&A chaired by Torange Khonsari
5.10-5.30pm Closing remarks and summary

5.30-7pm Drinks reception

Bronwyn Williams - The Price of Value
Bronwyn Williams is a polymath who will challenge your assumptions about the present and the future. She is a Futurist, Economist and Business Trends Analyst. Part economist, part strategist, Bronwyn’s particular areas of expertise include fintech trends, alternative economic models, and sustainable futures design. She co-authored The Future Starts Now published by Bloomsbury UK and Rescuing our Republic. She is a columnist for leading business and technology publications and is a sought-after media commentator on future trends and economic trajectories for network channels, including CNBC Africa and eNCA in South Africa. She is a partner at Flux Trends and an associate at Futurist.com. The clients that she has worked with include Top 40 JSE-listed companies, the South African Reserve Bank, the Dubai Future Forum, various African government departments, and global business leaders. She also lectures at leading business schools, such as Duke, GIBS, Parsons New School of Design, UCT and the University of Johannesburg. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, a volunteer with the Millennium Project, an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation and a Strategic Foresight Advisor with the UNDP.

Sue Bell - Local Money/Economy: Lived experiences of exchange and trade
Bell will present her lived experience and learning about health, education and finance within, private, state and community contexts. This includes within UK, Scandinavia, Europe and North Africa. In the 1980s she began to explore the relationships between poverty and health. Her research demonstrates the need for finding ways to exchange and trade beyond the colonised financial systems.
The intention of her presentation is to consider some of the issues in enabling local exchange schemes alongside our present financial systems. Real experiences and learning, from some examples in the UK, will be presented. The core issues of relationships between people and systems will be explored. This is particularly important as we focus on local exchange to beyond corporate and state, which creates rules and regulations, into the commons ‘ownership’ that requires rights and responsibilities. The presentation will conclude with a reflection on present potentials that are available for moving forward with the intentions of developing ‘the commons’.

Ivo Schmetz moved to Amsterdam after graduating from art school in Maastricht. By accident he rolled into the squatting scene and was involved in squatting the OLVG hospital (1998-1999) and the OT301 (1999-now). Living and working in these experimental free spaces have inspired him to not only work on an individual level as a graphic designer and video maker but also explore collective projects. Besides still being involved in the OT301 as a board member, music/cinema programmer and designer he is co-founder of Basserk records (2005-now), co-founder of design agency 310k (2003-2023) and one of the initiators and driving forces of Amsterdam Alternative (2015-now). Besides publishing a bi-monthly free newspaper (since 2015) Amsterdam Alternative is an online platform and collective organizer of lots of public discussions, music events, docu screenings and other small scale, non-commercial events. Under the umbrella of Amsterdam Alternative Ivo has also developed a project called Vrij Beton (for realizing new, collectively owned free spaces) and created the extended, multimedia webdocu about collective ownership. Ivo is always in search of ways to combine his interestes in graphic design, music, free spaces, writing, activism, video making, autonomy, interaction, experiment and collectivity. Not only because he enjoys it but also in order to create with a purpose.

James Quilligan - Distinguishing Private Property, Public Goods and Commons Resources
With MAs from Kent State University, Michigan State University and University of Pennsylvania, James Quilligan began his career as a program evaluation supervisor with the United States Labor Department in 1976. In the 1980s-90s, he served in various roles as monetary analyst, researcher, publicist and speechwriter for the Brandt, Palme, Brundtland, Nyerere and Carlsson-Ramphal commissions, making presentations to committees at the United Nations, US House of Representatives, UK House of Commons and Council on Foreign Relations. During the 1990s-2000s, Quilligan was a manager and speechwriter for several NGOs, including Brandt 21 Forum, Center for Global Negotiations, Globalization for the Common Good, Global Marshall Plan, Commons Cluster at the United Nations and WANA Forum. With his experience in energy value analysis, he became a monetary consultant for governments in South America, the Middle East and Africa during this period. In 2000, he began using carrying capacity metrics to calculate the thermodynamic value of monetary currencies within specific bioregions. Over the past two decades, Quilligan’s work in biophysical economics has led to positions in management, research and communications with Majlis El Hassan in Amman, Jordan; Economic Democracy Advocates in the United States; and Center for New Critical Politics and Governance at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is a trainer in carrying capacity measurement, husband and fitness enthusiast.

Professor Louise Haagh researches and writes about problems relating to the democratisation of human development, economic justice, modalities of institutional change, and social transformation. Louise is also known for her advocacy for a broader humanist, democratic defence of basic income that sets this reform in the context of a human development perspective on freedom and the problem of democratisation of the public sphere. Louise has conducted a series of surveys on the function of developmental institutions and on sources of human motivation in the context of different welfare systems. Her comparative empirical work has focussed on labour market institutions, welfare systems and developmental transformation in developing and mature economies, including Chile, South Korea, Brazil, Nordic states and the Anglo-liberal economies, primarily Britain. In the context of her work on economic security she has acted as expert for a range of international organisations and public bodies, most recently the Council of Europe for a period of three years. Her work on basic income has featured in a range of public fora and media. In 2016 she was key-note speaker at a public debate held in the Danish parliament on basic income, and in 2017 witness to an inquiry into the subject held by the Work and Pensions Committee of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Her recent work focusses on drawing out a different account of varieties of capitalism in terms of the role of public sector development, institutional change and democratisation, as exemplified in Policy and Politics; Polity, and Basic Income Studies.

Greg Fisher - Complexity, Institutions, Money, and the Commons
Dr Greg Fisher is a Complexity Science expert with a background that spans the public sector (The Bank of England), the private sector (he was Chief Strategist at a macro hedge fund), the think-tank world (Chief Economist), and academia (he has a PhD in Complexity Economics). His current focus is on transforming the financial system to be more sustainable and helpful to the whole of humanity.

Hilary Powell - The Bank Job
Hilary Powell is an artist working across multiple methods of ‘thinking through making’ to create and invite others into joyful, anarchic visions of possibility. Together with Dan Edelstyn she is co-founder and director of Optimistic cic. They make art and film and music and books, working with solar technology and sunflowers, printing money and setting off explosions – whatever is needed to create contagious stories of people powered action on the crises of our time. Recent work includes a ‘Bank Job’ setting up a rebel bank HSCB (Hoe Street Central Bank), printing banknotes and bonds and cancelling and literally exploding £1.2 Million of local debt. Now, they are working on social/imagination infrastructure - building a renewable POWER STATION challenging economic narratives to create creative practices and communities of abundance.

Image: Financing the Commons, Torange Khonsari

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk