🌱 Week 3 — Building the Ties That Make a City Resilient
From neighbourhood action to creative collaboration, exploring how Leeds’ communities turn climate concern into collective strength.
How everyday institutions make resilience real
Date: 27 October 2025
If last week turned to science and governance, asking among other how knowledge and institutions can act under uncertainty, this week turns outward to the living fabric of society itself.
Resilience is not only a technical or political goal; it is a social practice. It happens in the spaces where people share food, make art, fix things, grow together, and learn to depend on one another again. In those acts, I believe Leeds already contains the outlines of a climate-ready city.
This week’s letters explore that middle layer of change: the dense weave of community organisations, cultural networks, and local enterprises that turn intention into capability, which Prof Paul Chatterton calls civil thickness (letter 10). They are the places where adaptation becomes tangible and co-creation becomes a powerful habit.
We will begin in neighbourhoods such as Headingley and Armley, where residents organise around energy, transport and justice. Mid-week will move to the creative and civic networks that connect these efforts: Imagine Leeds, Sustainable Arts in Leeds, and Leeds Love It Share It; each showing how collaboration and imagination strengthen public life. We will end on the land itself, with the Permaculture Association and the community farms of Kirkstall Valley and Meanwood, where the work of regeneration is quite literal: soil, compost, and care.
Taken together, these letters will explore how we can renew the civic ties that keep a city cohesive, and how that renewal might help us relearn the art of living resiliently: with one another.
– Vivien