Building possibility

If you ever find yourself in Helsinki, and walk through Ruoholahti, you will find sleek office buildings, corporate headquarters, a mundane infrastructure of what passes for urban life in the twenty-first century. What you might not know, and certainly I didn't when I first arrived here, is that in the 80's this same district meant something else entirely. You could visit Lepakko, a squatted warehouse that had become a significant cultural centre for Finland, almost by accident. Inside, you would find band rehearsal rooms, Finland's first commercial radio station Radio City, the Viirus theatre company, a dance school, and even a wood-heated sauna (ok, this is Finland, no surprises there). The building had been a paint warehouse, then an emergency shelter for homeless alcoholics called Liekkihotelli. In 1979, young people and the Live Music Association ELMU occupied it and negotiated with the city to make it a space for youth and culture. For twenty years, it served as a hub where punk bands, theatre groups, and motorcycle clubs prefigured community from the ground up.

The existence of these places enabled a certain kind of political subjectivity to form and reproduce itself. For example, when different groups shared the same rooms, argued over who buys and makes coffee, negotiated who got to use the meeting space on Tuesday evenings, they were building something more important than any single activity. They were constructing what David Graeber called the "constituent imagination": the capacity to envision and enact alternative forms of social organisation. This capacity couldn't exist in abstraction because it requires physical instantiation. It requires a space where people come together.

Lepakko was demolished in 1999 to make way for an office building for the insurance company Ilmarinen, despite protests that it should be preserved as an institution of independent Finnish youth culture. At the same time, fast forward to today, even Finland's network of 'työväentalot' (translated to 'people's houses, or 'workers' houses') that once provided meeting spaces for labour organisations across the country, has contracted. The radical bookshops have largely vanished, replaced by chains. This evacuation of space is usually discussed as a logistical problem (where will we meet? How will we find each other?), but the loss runs deeper than logistics.

Exhausting third places

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third place" to describe the cafés, pubs, barbershops, and community centres that exist between home and work. The decline of third places has been documented for decades. But what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic was something qualitatively different.

When the lockdowns began in March 2020, organisations scrambled to move their activities online. Conferences became webinars. Meetups became Zoom calls. Community events became Discord servers. For a moment, this felt like adaptation, even innovation. Companies discovered they could run their own "online conferences" without the expense of sponsor packages to communities. They claimed they could reach more people and that their carbon footprint was smaller. What they did not mention was that they had also stopped supporting the community-led conferences that had previously brought practitioners together. Many of these events, dependent on sponsorship and venue partnerships that evaporated overnight, went bust and never returned. Even staple design events (and communities), once something to look up to every year, went poof.

The consequences of this shift have become clear only in retrospect, when everyone has been clinically online for work and everything else. The spaces that had previously provided a professional community outside of employment lost their appeal. The Slack channels and Discord servers where designers, developers, and other practitioners had gathered to share knowledge and build relationships began to empty. People were already spending eight or ten hours a day in digital communication tools for their jobs. The prospect of spending their remaining waking hours in similar interfaces, performing community rather than experiencing it, became intolerable. Burnout was not confined to work, but it extended to every domain.

What remains now is exhaustion with workers who have returned to offices, often unwillingly, finding themselves with less time than ever for activities outside of work. Those who remain remote find themselves without the incidental encounters that once led to collaboration and friendship. The physical spaces where community events might happen have either closed or become prohibitively expensive to rent. A generation of younger workers has entered professional life without ever experiencing the abundance of conferences, meetups, and informal gatherings that once constituted the social fabric of their fields. They do not know what they are missing, which is perhaps the most effective form of deprivation.

When community gatherings happened in physical space, they created what the urbanist Jane Jacobs called "eyes on the street": mutual awareness, shared context, the slow accumulation of trust that comes from repeated encounters. Digital platforms tried to replicate this at scale, but what they actually produced was a kind of serial isolation (along with just plain ol' digital surveillance). You might be in a Slack channel with a thousand other people, but you are still alone in your flat, staring at a screen and communicating through text that strips away tone, gesture, passion, or presence. The medium does not permit the formation of the bonds that physical co-presence enables.

This, of course, is not nostalgia for pre-pandemic life saying "ah things used to be so much better before 2020". The conditions that made community fragile were already in place before 2020. But the pandemic accelerated a process of atomization that might otherwise have taken another decade. It revealed how dependent we had become on physical infrastructure we had stopped noticing. And it demonstrated that digital tools, however useful, cannot substitute for the embodied experience of being together in a room. Today, conferences have thinned, with few of them surviving, relying heavily on the fewer sponsorships that also end up driving the content inevitably (think about design conferences and how many subjects relate to AI). The physical spaces where we need to rebuild what was lost, nowadays require a lot of money we do not have. The third places have been vanished, and we have not yet begun to reckon with what this means for our capacity to organise, to imagine or to resist.

The birth of held places

Of course, the evacuation of third places is only half the story. The other half concerns what has replaced them, or rather, what has not replaced them. Walk through Helsinki city centre, and you will encounter a specific kind of absence: buildings that exist in formal, legal, property terms but have been subtracted from social use. These are not Marc Augé's "non-places", the airports and motorways and hotel chains that erase local particularity through transience. These are something more specific: spaces that could serve as third places but have been deliberately withheld from that function. We might call them held places.

We may name held places using the "negation" to describe how capitalism operates through subtraction and denial: something is being actively negated, not just absent. For example, a bank owns a building and the building sits empty. The community has needs: groups that want to organise, young people who need rehearsal space, and movements that require meeting rooms. But the building remains locked. The owner pays property tax, factors the holding cost into broader investment calculations, and waits for property values to rise or for a sufficiently profitable tenant. The space exists as an asset on a balance sheet, not as a location where human activity might occur.

What makes held places different from simply "empty buildings" is the power relationship they encode. An abandoned factory might sit empty because ownership is disputed or because demolition costs exceed the land value. That emptiness creates opportunity for occupation, and converting it into something like Lepakko. But a held place is different. Someone owns it and has sufficient power to keep it empty despite community demand. The vacancy is enforced.

Commercial property owners in city centres factor vacancy into their business models because a building might sit empty for two years while the owner waits for a corporate tenant willing to sign a ten-year lease at premium rates, rather than renting month-to-month to a community organisation at lower cost. The two years of lost rental income matter less than maintaining the building's market positioning. This is rational from a cold business perspective. It is also a form of social negation.

Here I need to pause to say that it would be unfair to suggest that Finland (or any other country) offers no possibilities for gathering at all. Public libraries still provide meeting rooms that community groups can book without charge. Across Finland, public libraries have studios, 3d printers, sawing machines, and a lot of amenities provided for their citizens. Schools sometimes make their facilities available outside teaching hours. These remnants of the welfare state infrastructure persist, and they matter so so much! But the limitations are there, and visible. The rooms are small, suitable for a reading group or a committee meeting, not for the kind of gathering that might build a movement. Once your needs exceed a certain scale, the price tag appears. Want to hold an event for a hundred people? You will likely have to pay. Want to use a university lecture hall but you are not affiliated with the institution? You will pay. These spaces permit gathering but not growth. This is not nothing, but it is not enough.

The held places are, in the end, the spatial expression of Mark Fisher's capitalist realism. It is the physical manifestation of the principle that property rights supersede social need, and financial calculation overrides community use. The logic says that spaces can and should be subtracted from collective life if doing so serves accumulation. The vacant bank-owned building is not just sitting there. It is being held against a community that needs it. The difference in this detail is everything.

Building towards possibility spaces

So what is to be done? This question sounds quaint, even embarrassing. We have grown suspicious of programmatic answers and been trained to dismiss anything that smells of prescription as naïve or authoritarian. But this suspicion is itself part of the atmosphere that makes genuine political imagination appear impossible. If we cannot even articulate what we want, how can we hope to achieve it?

The answer involves taking space seriously, but this does not mean that we should simply try to rebuild the specific forms of the 1980s that made third places possible because we don't live in such an era anymore. What it means is understanding that the erosion of radical infrastructure was not incidental to the neoliberal project but rather central to it. And it also means that we need to recognize a few fundamental points before we move further: reconstruction begins with ourselves, extends through our immediate surroundings, and ultimately transforms the larger structures we inhabit.

Designing ourselves otherwise

The futures and speculative design communities understand part of this, that imagination must be materialised, and that possible futures need to be given form if they are to become thinkable. Tony Fry has warned that the conventional design practice is complicit in what he calls "defuturing": the negation of possible futures through the unsustainable consumption of resources and the foreclosure of alternatives. Before we can design differently, we must become different kinds of designers and before we can build new spaces, we must become people capable of inhabiting them.

This of course requires learning and unlearning. We have been shaped by decades of neoliberal politics, trained to see ourselves as individual consumers rather than collective actors, conditioned to treat competition as natural and cooperation as exceptional. Undoing this conditioning is not a preliminary to political work; it is political work. The personal is the site where new capacities for collective action must be cultivated.

The systems that produce held places and evacuate third places are not sustainable. They depend on endless growth, the extraction of resources that are finite, and the exploitation of labour that is increasingly exhausted and commodified. To recognise that these systems are failing, that they will continue to fail, that their failure will accelerate, is not pessimism but a reckoning of a different kind. It opens space for asking: what comes after? What skills, what relationships, what infrastructures will we need when the current arrangements can no longer hold? And they are already crumbling before our eyes.

The Transition Towns movement, which began in Totnes, England & Ireland in 2006 and has since spread to over 1,200 communities in more than 50 countries, offers one model for this collective learning. Transition groups begin by asking what it would mean to live together sustainably, then work backwards to identify the skills and relationships required. They emphasise "re-skilling" with different skills like recovering capacities for food growing, building, repair, and mutual aid. These are not new skills, but they have been lost to specialisation and commodification. Equally important is what they call "inner transition" (the psychological and emotional work of letting go of attachments to unsustainable ways of living and developing new orientations toward the future).

Prefiguring new economies

The work of personal transformation connects directly to the work of economic transformation. The businesses and organisations that currently dominate the production of space operate according to logics that are fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing. They must be phased out. But phasing out requires phasing in: the construction of alternative economic forms that can eventually replace what exists.

The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain demonstrates the possibility when this principle is applied over decades. Mondragon was founded in 1956 by a priest and six workers under Franco's dictatorship, and it has now grown into a federation of over 80 worker-owned cooperatives employing nearly 70,000 people across manufacturing, retail, finance, and education. Worker-owners elect their managers, vote on company strategy, and share in profits. The pay ratio between the highest and lowest earners is capped really low, compared to ratios of conventional corporations. When a cooperative faces difficulties, others contribute to a solidarity fund to support it. When the appliance manufacturer Fagor went bankrupt in 2013, 95 percent of its workers were relocated to other cooperatives within the network. Mondragon is not a utopia. It operates within capitalism and faces its pressures. But it demonstrates that worker ownership at scale is possible, that democratic governance of enterprises is possible, and that solidarity across organisations is possible.

A workers' cooperative that owns its premises cannot be evicted by a landlord seeking higher-paying tenants. A consumer cooperative that operates a community centre can cross-subsidise free meeting space with revenue from other activities. A social enterprise designed from the outset as a community hub, with gathering space built into its business model, can provide what purely commercial enterprises cannot. These models are not new, but they have been marginalised by decades of policy and culture favouring conventional corporate structures. Reviving and adapting them for contemporary conditions is design work of the highest importance.

Prefigurative businesses exist within a hostile environment as they must generate enough revenue to survive while resisting the pressure to maximise profit at the expense of their social mission. Many will fail. But failure in this context is not simply loss; it is also learning. Each failed attempt teaches something about what the next attempt might do differently. The point is to build imperfect alternatives that can evolve, rather than build a perfect alternative and get it right from the get go.

Thinking hyperlocally

The third dimension of reconstruction concerns our immediate surroundings. We think about change in terms of policy, legislation, and government action. But waiting for governments to act is its own form of paralysis. The hyperlocal offers a different scale of intervention: the street, the building, the neighbourhood, the block.

How might we design our immediate environment as if community mattered? The question is not abstract. It concerns the specific spaces we move through every day. The vacant shopfront on the street: who owns it, why is it empty, and what would it take to use it? The community centre that charges for room hire: could a group of residents negotiate different terms, or establish a fund to cover costs, or pressure the municipality to change its pricing? The library meeting room that must be booked weeks in advance: could relationships with librarians create more flexibility, or could overflow gatherings happen in someone's flat, or in a park, or in the back room of a café?

The community land trust model offers one framework for thinking hyperlocally about property. Land trusts remove property from the speculative market by placing it under community ownership in perpetuity. Buildings on trust land can be sold or rented, but the land itself remains common. This breaks the logic that converts potential third places into held places. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston's Roxbury neighbourhood demonstrates what this can achieve. In the 1980s, the area was a dumping ground, abandoned by the city, its vacant lots filled with garbage and toxic waste. Residents organised, formed a community land trust, and became the only community organisation in the United States to be granted the power of eminent domain over abandoned land. Today, the trust stewards over 30 acres, with 227 units of affordable housing, community farms, greenhouses, and parks. Four decades later, the community that built this infrastructure still controls it. The land cannot be sold to developers, and the housing cannot be converted to luxury condominiums. The community's future is not subject to the speculative calculations of distant investors.

Similar models have spread globally. The Community Land Trust Brussels, founded in 2012, has developed permanently affordable housing in a city where prices doubled in the decade prior. In Kenya, community land titling is being used to secure tenure in Nairobi's informal settlements. In Puerto Rico, following Hurricane Maria, land trusts emerged as a mechanism for communities to control their own reconstruction. The model originated in the American civil rights movement, when African-American activists in Georgia established New Communities Inc. in 1969 to secure land for Black farmers. The principle has remained constant across these variations: community ownership of land as the foundation for community control of space.

Establishing a land trust is not easy. It requires organisation, fundraising, and legal expertise. But it begins with a group of people in a specific place deciding that they will not allow that place to be taken from them. It begins hyperlocally.

The Work Ahead

This is the work that our moment requires. The difficult, material, embodied work of transforming ourselves, building new economic forms, and reshaping our immediate surroundings. Design, understood broadly as the practice of giving form to possibility, has a role to play at every level: in the cultivation of capacities for collective being, in the prefiguration of economies that serve human needs, in the hyperlocal reconstruction of gathering.

The Museum of Care that David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky envisioned points toward the horizon: spaces that "do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space for communication and social interactions nourishing values of solidarity, care, and reciprocity". Such spaces do not yet exist at scale. But they can be designed, built, and they can flourish. The architecture of possibility spaces is not given. It must be constructed. But the tools for its construction are available to us, if we choose to use them and find the capacity and the right people to pursue the quest.

We can collectively build new infrastructures of solidarity. So this is really a design brief. The question is whether we have the will and the imagination to take it up. But that imagination cannot develop in a vacuum. It needs places, rooms and possibilities.