Our communities face unprecedented complexity. Climate change, housing crises, health inequalities, and fractured social fabrics demand responses that move beyond traditional top-down planning. Yet many of our current systems remain rooted in linear thinking, assuming we can predict outcomes and control change through prescribed pathways. This disconnect between the challenges we face and the tools we use to address them creates a critical gap, one that calls for fundamentally different approaches to how we design, implement, and evaluate community transformation.
Through the Togetherhood model, we propose developing the knowledge, skills, and infrastructure needed to shift from extractive, predetermined interventions toward generative, adaptive approaches, and the central practice of co-design, that honour the complexity and wisdom already present in our communities.
Emergence describes how complex systems generate new patterns, structures, and possibilities through the interactions of their parts rather than through central control. In nature, we see this in flocking birds, forest ecosystems, and weather patterns. In human systems, emergence manifests in how movements grow, how neighbourhoods evolve, and how culture shifts. Understanding and working with emergence isn't about abandoning intention; it's about recognising that the most meaningful change often cannot be fully designed in advance but must be nurtured as it unfolds.
Traditional approaches to community development frequently impose solutions designed elsewhere, failing to account for local context, existing relationships, or the adaptive capacity of communities themselves. These interventions often create dependency rather than empowerment, measure outputs rather than transformation, and privilege expert knowledge over lived experience. The result is initiatives that may look successful on paper but fail to generate lasting change or address root causes.
Emergent strategy offers an alternative. By attending to patterns, fostering connections, building from strengths, and remaining responsive to feedback, emergent approaches create conditions for communities to discover and enact their own solutions. It requires deep skill, careful facilitation, and robust frameworks for accountability. It demands that we develop new competencies in holding complexity, navigating uncertainty, and building the trust required for genuine collaboration.
At the heart of emergent community work lies co-design: the practice of designing with rather than for communities. Yet co-design itself is often misunderstood or implemented superficially. True co-design redistributes power throughout the design process, centring the agency and expertise of those most affected by decisions. It recognises that sustainable solutions emerge from collective intelligence rather than individual brilliance.
Meaningful co-design requires more than good intentions; it demands specific skills in facilitation, conflict navigation, power analysis, and participatory methods. It requires frameworks for ensuring accountability to community members rather than only to funders or institutions. It needs tools for capturing and communicating value in ways that honour both tangible outcomes and intangible shifts in relationships, capacity, and hope.
Our aim is to create sustained infrastructure for developing, refining, and sharing this expertise. We need spaces where practitioners can experiment, fail safely, learn collectively, and build the confidence required to champion emergent approaches within systems still oriented toward control and predictability.
TOGETHERHOOD BRISTOL aims to hold spaces that deepens understanding and application of emergence in shifting systems toward equitable outcomes, contributing to and strengthening the participatory ecosystem through developing confident and knowledgeable co-design practices. Our foundational outcome is understanding how we foster more emergent approaches to co-designing projects (particularly in neighbourhoods and with communities), including how we commune, connect, capture, and evaluate change initiatives at a community level.
Through our activities, we aim to develop the skills, practices, and models for how emergence can be held and nurtured through effective co-design. This means going beyond seeing co-design as a set of techniques and instead cultivating a body of knowledge with its own principles, methods, and ethical foundations.
We will explore questions such as: How do we design processes that remain open to surprise while maintaining clear intentions? What does accountability look like when outcomes cannot be predetermined? How do we build capacity for emergence within communities while acknowledging existing power dynamics? How do we apply emergent strategic principles to develop holistic and equitable community action that respects the interconnected nature of neighbourhood life?
This work not only involves creating learning and reflective spaces, but involves practical experimentation across real neighbourhood initiatives in housing, health, education, and environment. Through these explorations we will develop frameworks, case studies, and learning resources that make emergent co-design accessible and actionable for a wider range of practitioners and communities.
One of the greatest challenges facing emergent, participatory work is demonstrating value within systems designed to measure predetermined outcomes. How do we capture the impact of strengthened relationships, increased agency, or shifted mindsets?