Prosperous Places: creating thriving communities

With regional growth at the top of the agenda, it is vital that we create thriving communities across economic, social and natural perspectives. The RSA’s Chief of Staff introduces Prosperous Places, a suite of interventions aimed at responding to the unique ambitions and challenges of places.

Place matters. Everyone deserves to live in places with a vibrant community that offer opportunities to thrive in a flourishing natural environment. For policymakers, regardless of whether the aim is economic growth, social cohesion, or combating climate change, it is critical to understand where change takes place, who owns it, and how it affects the people living there.

Too often, however, where you are born determines where you end up. Stagnant local economies, poor job prospects, poverty, deprivation and lack of trust all interact in vicious, reinforcing cycles. This has consequences not only for local people but also for surrounding areas and at the national level.

There is growing recognition of the importance of place as a lens for making policy choices. For example, in the UK, the diagnoses of drivers behind regional disparities presented in the Levelling Up White Paper have survived a change in government. The new government’s commitment to devolution of powers and monies confirms there is broad consensus on the importance of place as a policy contour. While in the US, President Biden has reignited industrial policy that explicitly targets less prosperous areas, $80bn of spending explicitly allocated based on the characteristics of recipient places and countless billions of dollars more ending up there.

Yet, for leaders in place across the public, private and civil society sectors, as well as local people, and even those on the outside with a keen interest in a place thriving, it is less clear what deploying this agency effectively looks like. There are complex questions concerning what ‘prosperity’ means for places, who gets to decide, and how to marshal stakeholders and resources to deliver against a vision. This is amplified by a plethora of competing national and local priorities, unique local challenges and limited capacity.

Prosperous Places

Prosperous Places is a set of practical ‘interventions’ from the RSA designed to be undertaken in partnership with places, to help navigate these complexities and deliver lasting impact for communities. It is a core part of our Design for Life mission, and is shaped around two central principles:

1. Place-based work means taking the unique characteristics of a geographic area as our starting point and partnering with those closest to the challenges being addressed.
2. Our ‘nested systems’ approach recognises that economic, social and natural systems are interdependent. Therefore, defining what prosperity looks like for a place, and designing initiatives to achieve it, needs to take account of all three systems.

The interventions are innovative, targeted programmes of work designed to achieve three specific aims:

1. formulating local strategies and plans
2. nurturing education and skills, and
3. improving social connections and cohesion.

Local strategy and plans

Clarity of purpose and objectives, alongside well-defined ways of delivering them, are the golden threads running through the strategies of successful places. In recognition of this, the new UK government has asked all local places to draw up Local Growth Plans. The RSA has a framework for doing so that is at the frontier of best practice.

We work alongside local leaders and residents to develop 'Local Prosperity Plans'. These are single, long-term, integrated strategic plans that deliver economic, social and environmental prosperity.

In addition, we connect plans across places through ‘Innovation Corridors’, knitting them together through shared aims, institutions and initiatives, supporting places to benefit from economies of scope and scale. One example is One Creative North – an RSA-initiated partnership to super-charge the creative industries across the North of England.

Education and skills

Our 250-year-old education system is creaking in the face of challenges it was never designed to address. Its approach to learning is not fit for the 21st century, leaving many millions of young people and adults excluded.

We have developed a new system of learning pathways covering children in their early years to entrepreneurs of all ages, offering new practical, experiential and creative approaches to learning. These approaches are designed to nurture 21st century skills, re-engaging those furthest from learning on a lifelong basis and, crucially, ensuring that learning is tailored to the places in which they live so individuals do not need to move in order to thrive.

Playful Green Planet seeks to transform how children foster a connection to their community and surroundings through outdoor creative play. It transforms unused green spaces into ecologically thriving outdoor playrooms and classrooms that grow children’s capabilities for climate action and social engagement.

RSA Spark is an intervention targeted at social entrepreneurs of any age, whether in education or otherwise. Developed in partnership with the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme, participants grow transferable life skills through practical, team-based experiential learning, responding to real-world missions set by businesses, public institutions and civil society.

For post-16 learners who have not thrived in traditional settings, our Regions of Learning intervention tackles the related challenges of economic inactivity, unemployment and skills shortages for employers. We work with local authorities and regions to accredit hidden capabilities and develop new skills tailored to the needs of local labour markets.

Social connection and cohesion

The evidence suggests who you know is just as important as what you know. For many places, too little social capital – the fabric of our relationships, trust, and community bonds – is now acknowledged as a hindrance to the life chances and wellbeing of residents.

Connected Places is a practical approach to rebuilding social connections. We start by mapping an area’s social capital in unrivalled detail. Then, alongside local leaders and residents, we design projects to fill gaps and build new connections between people, repairing frayed social fabric and growing life chances.

These interventions have grown out of the RSA’s work over recent years, such as the UK Urban Futures Commission, our Creative Corridors initiative, and Cities of Learning. They are not intended to provide solutions to every local problem; rather, they are innovative, evidence-led, targeted approaches to address specific challenges.

The RSA is uniquely positioned as a partner for places on these interventions; indeed, place-based activities span the entirety of our 270-year history. This includes 18th Century efforts to reverse the effects of deforestation that resulted in the planting of more than 60 million trees, the purchase and preservation of the entire village of West Wycombe in the 1920s, and the City Growth and Inclusive Growth Commissions of the 2010s.

This history was made possible by features of the RSA that remain today. Our 31,000-strong Fellowship, distributed across the globe, means there are always members of our community on the ground or an expert opinion to draw upon. Further, as an organisation that has only ever existed to advance the public good, we are a trusted and neutral partner for public, private and civil society organisations.

The modern RSA marries these timeless qualities with cutting-edge practices, well-suited to helping places address their challenges. Our ‘nested systems’ philosophy reflects, and helps think through, the multifaceted, and sometimes competing, priorities of residents, local leaders, and national policymakers alike. Recognising that adopting a nested systems approach is hard, we have a multidisciplinary team of researchers, designers and delivery specialists, as well as deep subject-matter experts, who work with places to bring them to life.

Our aim is for places to be at the forefront of developing approaches to solve pressing local challenges, resulting in people who live, work and study there leading the fullest life possible. However, for the RSA, a prerequisite to success is a multitude of partnerships across the UK and beyond, in order that places can experiment with innovative practices and learn from each other’s successes and setbacks.

Whether you are a resident, local leader or national policymaker, if you are interested in partnering with the RSA as part of Prosperous Places, please contact partnerships@rsa.org.uk to discuss how we can work together.