The Right to Community Infrastructure

Across the UK, localities are experiencing a rapid decline in social and community infrastructure (e.g. community centres, maker-spaces), with government cuts to local authority budgets resulting in a fire-sale of such assets. This deterioration contributes to health inequalities, social isolation, community resilience, diminishes residents’ sense of participation and self-esteem about the place they live, and compounds regional inequalities. What’s missing is an objective, testable measure for accessing such infrastructure. We propose a new measure for conceiving access to social and community infrastructure, termed “the right to community infrastructure”, focused in one locality, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.