A description of the work (Abstract): «Exploring a potential vision of the common good for London’s economic centres, this dissertation asks why and how economic democracy should be enacted at the scale of the high street. While COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities along many lines, evolving values around community, wellbeing and public space also pose an opportunity for re-imagining fairer economic trajectories through a focus on place. Often magnifying wider economic issues, the long-run decline of British high streets has been well documented. While commonly focusing on curation and design as a way to ‘activate’ these once public spaces, their complexity has given way to an equally diverse discourse lacking a consistent framework for guiding planning, interventions and policy. While current high street rhetoric offers a growing focus on social value and ‘community-led development’, economic power and equity implications are frequently overlooked. This thesis suggests, given the accessible and inclusive nature of high streets, the potential for situating a framework of economic development that considers a more radical restructuring of social and economic power. Placing the principles of economic democracy within an everyday site helps to foreground people and place. Through repurposing urban space for inclusive, collective and participatory workspaces, services or social centres, high streets can play a role in reformulating value concepts. Developing an analytical framework that considers rights, ownership and deliberation, through iterative empirical analysis, this thesis will address practices that could re-frame high streets to better serve their communities. SHORT: study asking why and how should a framework of economic democracy be used to re-shape london’s high streets, for the redistribution of economic power and the promotion of the common good.

Over the course of the last 30 years, changes in governance trends have led to a growing opportunity for citizen participation in decision-making at the level of local government. The 2011 Localism Act enshrined this in planning policy. However, the voluntary uptake of participatory planning mechanisms has been mixed at best. Areas with wealthier communities with more resources have been more likely to see these opportunities realised in a way they are not in areas with less affluent communities. UK planning policy does not specify the means by which local authorities should engage their communities but social infrastructure is implicated as a possible way to do this. This dissertation will therefore explore the potential contribution social infrastructure could make to empowering communities to play a more active role in the planning system. Community empowerment will be defined by using the concept of social capital and Sen’s capabilities approach. There has been considerable interest in libraries and participatory culture spaces since the start of the 21st century for their ability to generate social capital and broaden communities’ capabilities. This dissertation will look at two examples from East London. The first being Every One Every Day, the UK’s biggest participation scheme, in Barking & Dagenham and the second being the Idea Stores, a chain of modernised libraries, in Tower Hamlets. These examples will be used to make the case for a new type of social infrastructure that can empower communities and contribute to achieving participatory planning in line with the evolution of governance and recommendations in current planning policy. The findings from this study suggest that participatory culture spaces and libraries sit among wider networks of social infrastructure that, when combined, facilitate the social life and political power of communities across the UK to a greater or lesser degree.