📫Letter 10 — To Professor Paul Chatterton (with reply)

Community-led housing and the climate transition

Date: 22 October 2025
Recipient: Professor Paul Chatterton, Professor of Urban Futures — School of Geography, University of Leeds

Context

Mid-week, One Letter a Day turns to activism and imagination. Professor Paul Chatterton’s work bridges research, community building and lived practice. As a founder of the LILAC low-impact co-housing community in Leeds, he demonstrates how climate and social values can take physical form through collaboration and shared ownership. His work challenges market-led assumptions about the transition and shows how communities themselves can model new urban futures.

Letter

Dear Professor Chatterton,

I am writing as part of One Letter a Day: a year-long public correspondence that aims to reopen grounded conversations about the climate emergency. Each day I write to someone whose work shapes how we think and act on this crisis, and publish both letters and replies to encourage wider dialogue. This week focuses on climate-engaged academics and leaders here in Leeds.

Your work has long stood out for bridging scholarship, activism and everyday life. I have had the chance to visit LILAC a number of times and was always awed by its vision. Projects like LILAC prove that it is possible to turn research into lived experiment — to build housing and community models that embody the social and ecological values so often only discussed. They remind us that transition is not an abstract goal but a practice of living differently, together.

Much of the public climate debate still revolves around technology or markets, as if the transition could be engineered from above. Your work directs attention instead to housing, land and civic infrastructures. If communities are to be central in the transition, what governance reforms or institutional changes would you prioritise to empower community-led housing and urban cooperation at scale?

I ask because the most convincing examples of change now often come from below — from places that have chosen to act as if a fairer, lower-impact future were already here. Yet these remain fragile, reliant on personal effort and uncertain support. I wonder what it would take for our institutions to catch up with what communities are already proving possible.

With appreciation for your work and the hope it offers to those trying to make the future tangible,

– Vivien Badaut
Founder, one-letter-a-day.uk
Headingley / Hyde Park resident

📨 Reply from Professor Paul Chatterton

Received Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 at 09:26

Hi Vivien,

Thank you for your informative and engaging email.

I believe the current top-down governance system is unable to support solutions that deliver real climate resilience for communities. What I suggest instead is that we strengthen the middle ground — by developing robust civic institutions such as cooperatives and community-owned businesses.

This is not a simple binary between top-down and bottom-up approaches. What’s missing is the middle layer between the two, which I call civic thickness. These organisations — cooperatives and community-owned enterprises — harness grassroots innovation from below and connect it with top-down processes, governance and finance.

For me, this is how we can create community-responsive transformations that are both resilient and adaptive to converging crises. Crucially, we must also build a shared sense of crisis — not only in relation to climate, but also ecology, politics and social issues, especially inequality. If we fail to address inequality and racial injustice, any climate gains we make will not be meaningful for many people.

I hope that’s useful.

All the best,

Paul

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Comment below or share your thoughts with #OneLetterADay.

Tomorrow’s letter continues Week 2 with Professor Milena Büchs, exploring how post-growth welfare and sustainable wellbeing might return to public debate — and what it would take for “enough” to be treated as a serious civic idea.