Financing City Transitions

Dark Matter Labs provide some radical thinking about how we might develop more holistic approaches to community finance.

Hypothesis: To enable the critical transitions needed, cities must urgently crystallise both the rights to the social surplus and the stewardship of collective liabilities. This will only be possible by definitively identifying themselves as the legitimate holders of societal financial agency and collective decision making. Critically, this will enable them to coordinate equitable multidirectional value flows between next generation assets and liabilities, at an aggregative place-based level.

“How do we finance the future – not based on the predictive capacity of capital allocators, but instead allocate to support the generative discovery of value led by communities.”