Funding Massive Small Innovation
From Big to Small
Our cities and towns are failing us. Once thought of as wellsprings of opportunity, they are not generating sustainable livelihoods, thriving community, equitable access to resources, and healthy living environments for all their inhabitants. As cities have grown, so too have a web of challenges. This includes environmental degradation, social marginalisation and dysfunction and economic stagnation and exclusion.Grand plans to improve our urban spaces have failed to adequately address these systemic issues that plague them. Urban master plans lie unrealised, delivering sterile dysfunctional environments for families and communities . Bulk infrastructure is straining to deal with changing populations, resource constraints, and the realities of changing climates. Our most ambitious efforts to reform and transform national or regional economies have not delivered on their promise of shared prosperity.It is the very bigness of these development interventions that leads to their undoing. Rolling out a large-scale, predetermined plan means you’ve made static assumptions about the dynamic reality you want to improve. It means you’ve ignored local nuance to use pre-existing toolkits and ‘best practice’ from elsewhere. As a result, these projects are not prepared to be adaptive to new information or major shocks.A lot of this ‘bigness’ is related to the way we fund development, whether for housing, other built infrastructure or environmental management. Finance comes with such significant barriers and red tape that dealing with small-scale work is often seen as not worth the hassle. (Think of how difficult it is for most governments to procure anything from a small business). Funding also usually comes with strict requirements to plan all deliverables in advance, in a quantified way, with non-negotiable boxes to tick and timelines to meet. These mechanisms are meant to build accountability between funders and implementers. Instead, they incentivise project teams to stick to plans that have stopped making sense, and to under-report failures to avoid losing the confidence of their financial backers.
Radical Incrementalism: a better form of development
When working in complex systems, such as the city, we are not always able to map out a straight path in advance between desired outcomes and a discrete set of actions. We find ourselves surprised by unexpected events or puzzling feedback loops. We are often frustrated at the inaccuracy of our sophisticated predictive models. This does not mean planning is not necessary, but in reality, some critical project planning has to be worked out as you go. You have to get a sense of your environment while you are immersed in it in order to make astute choices on what to do. Tried and tested models that worked well in one context frequently fail in other places and times. Small-scale development that is implemented and grown incrementally responds to the complexity of cities, towns, and villages. This is because its smallness perfectly suited to agile, adaptive, context-sensitive work. We are thrilled that small-scale, incremental, problem-driven approaches to issues of sustainability and resilience in cities are gaining traction. We see how these initiatives are working toward urban resilience through small-scale change-making. This is what we call ‘radical incrementalism’, and we are thrilled to support and grow this work.The Massive Small Collective is an international network of people imagining more inclusive, sustainable futures for the cities we love. While we are committed to sharing ideas and lessons, we do not advocate pre-cut solutions and templates for urban resilience. Instead, we are focused on specific interventions that respond directly to a particular context. We do this to help people make small, affordable, manageable changes, that, over time, can lead to massive impact.The Massive Small Collective is now working in partnership with the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University to accelerate learning for these kinds of projects. To do this, we are building a knowledge-base of radical incremental projects currently being implemented in cities and towns around the world. With this, we aim to do a few things:
- Make small-scale work visible to people and funders who want to support or do urban sustainable development differently
- Facilitate a dialogue on how best to understand, evaluate and improve this kind of work over time
- Accelerate learning through connection and exchange between projects
The response from the projects we have engaged so far has been full of enthusiasm. While we are drawing on the knowledge and wisdom of many researchers, urban development practitioners, and stakeholders, we are also experimenting with new ways of making sense of these projects. The CST has brought its expertise and resources to this work to be a part of this experiment, and to support urban resilience-building, from the ground up.
Supporting massive small change
While few funders recognize the importance of allowing grantees to be flexible with how funding is allocated, this is slowly changing. I could not have been a part of the Massive Small inception team without the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant, an award for social change makers. Shuttleworth uses these awards to support “social change agents, no strings attached”. The Foundation is a social investor that understands that the pathway to social change can be bumpy and twisted, and involve more than a few leaps of faith. This is especially true for new projects and organisations like ours.
My funding enabled me to build new relationships with small-scale urban developers and resilience practitioners in the USA, Europe, South America and Southern Africa. Building on our Executive Director, Andrew Campbell’s existing network in the USA, we are now part of a community of practitioners who are implementing and supporting small-scale and fine-grained urban development projects. This community includes exciting organizations like the Incremental Development Alliance, SuperNormal, and the Preservation Green Lab. My funding as allowed me to devote significant time over the past six months to growing our network, developing our theoretical framework, sharpening our ideas, and working with the CST on this innovative knowledge-base. The tide is turning for incrementalism and smallness. More and more, the importance of a massive small mindset is being seen. We are excited to build on our existing relationships to create a global platform to build legitimacy, connection and learning for radical incrementalism in cities and towns around the world.featured image: (C) Charlie Peel for the Greater London National Park Initiative.London Screenprint