Images: Kaye Song
Common Treasures is an organisation dedicated to creating and implementing practical tools and processes that enable and empower communities, landowners, housing providers and Local Authorities to realise better shared outcomes for rural places and the people that live and work in them.
It brings together people with a broad range of different skills and experiences who are committed to a form of rural development that prioritises communities over profit, promotes agriculture and land stewardship, and generates lasting economic, ecological, and social value.
Ambitious thinking about the future of rural places requires connecting traditionally separate disciplines: architecture with agriculture; planning law with land workers’ livelihoods; food systems with local economies; community resilience with land ownership; and housing development with regenerative forms of land use.
We do this through several interconnected strands of practice: developing built examples to demonstrate better ways of developing, owning, managing, and sharing resources; supporting existing organisations to realise such examples through capacity building and skills exchange; primary research on land-use, resource management, food production and building; and dissemination of this work and the work of others through publications, films, podcasts and papers.
Common Treasures began as a series of conversations between members of the architecture collective Assemble, community wealth builders Wessex Community Assets, the arts organisation Common Ground and others, exploring alternative approaches to rural housing — rethinking how it is developed, designed and built.
Vol. 1 & 2Available now (More info)
Our first project is a book series - Common Treasures - that brings together practical responses to contemporary challenges in rural communities. The collected essays come from practitioners who are working on the ground - often literally in the field - in communities and rural places across the UK. Many of the contributors are directly engaged in the practical work of systems change, whether at the scale of a single small holding or at the scale of a regional planning policy or food system.
Rejecting the city-centric discourse that often surrounds issues related to emerging and pressing contemporary issues, including climate adaptation and mitigation, inequality and access to good-quality housing and food the book instead collects input from an extraordinary collection of people working on these questions in rural contexts. All of the practitioners in these books share an understanding of the centrality of land use and access to land in solving the most challenging problems we face.
Contributions feature representatives of the Ecological Land Cooperative, Evolving Forests, Falmouth Food Coop, Tinkers' Bubble, Straw Works, Wessex Community Assets, ReSet, Material Cultures, Local Works, Fordhall Community Land Initiative, Roots to Regeneration and Transition Towns. Together, they give a snapshot of the incredibly wide and diverse network of imaginative, tenacious groups and individuals dedicated to building viable futures by working on and in the UK countryside.