Future Observatory and Dark Matter Labs identified six critical domains of enquiry; six themes for structuring how we systemically reimagine the UK in order to address this moment in history.
As part of stage one of the UK 2040 project, Future Observatory hosted six thematic roundtables in late 2024 and 2025 – exploring the interconnected domains of Home, Things, Land, Work, Civics & Flow. These themes and topics of discussion are briefly summarised below, as well as participants.
Land: Ecosystems, Land-use, Resilience
How do we foster and scale new low-carbon, low-energy regional food production at scale?
Rebuilding both food security and nutritional value in the face of climate risk and cost inflation. This will require reimagining farming and land use in ways that address biodiversity loss and promote bio-regional health.
What’s Changing?
Topsoil destruction
Unpredictable growing seasons
Energy and Carbon intensive
Greater focus on regenerative agriculture, permaculture and small scale farming practices offers glimpses of wider transition in the agricultural sector. Combining this with new technologies focused on traceability and waste reduction, new multi-functional business and investment models – we have the potential to shift both how people relate to the full lifecycle of their food, as well as unlocking the systemic potential for preventative health and the avoidance of societal harm.
Innovation Areas:
Regenerative networks
Carbon registries
Things: Materials, Supply, Waste
How can we drastically alter our material economy to become more bio-based, regenerative and closed-loop?
What’s changing?
Circularity is changing
Securitisation of resources
Shrinking carbon budgets
An interrogation into the true carbon and biodiversity costs of both raw materials and common industrial processes. How do we reimagine both the material metabolism of the objects that we use everyday, as well as shift mainstream culture and aspiration beyond consumerism and material validation?
Innovation areas:
• Bio-regional currencies
• Public material registries
Home: Typologies, Ownership, Neighbourhoods
How might we reimagine the typologies and use patterns of residential buildings and neighbourhoods and the need to adapt them? How will this interact with new governance and funding models centred around alternative forms of ownership, construction, retrofitting and energy transition?
What’s changing?
• Carbon cost and durability
• Rising Insurance costs of land
• Demographic shifts and retrofit
A renewed focus on climate adaptation, retrofitting, and bio-based construction methods offer signs of promise in how we might reconfigure and update the built fabric of our neighbourhoods. Adapting change of use, planning policies, funding and ownership structures will be critical levers in achieving meaningful innovation in the cultural and physical ideals of home.
Innovation areas:
• Self-ownership
• Bio-based supply chains
Work: Care, Labour, AI
The coming decade will see a huge surge in the need for social and elderly care falling on a social care sector in crisis. Adjacent to this is a rise of automation and AI, which will likely create a more fundamental shift in the human contribution to labour and our need for purpose and fulfilment?
What’s changing?
• An aging UK
• Higher demand for care staff
• AI and climate risk
New models of care delivery, such as community-based and person-centred approaches, can improve care outcomes and satisfaction. Exploring alternative care models, like shared living arrangements and enhanced home care services, might alleviate some pressures on traditional care settings.
Innovation areas:
• Community land and care
• Digital citizenship
Flow: Mobility, Infrastructure, Energy
The CCC placed the UK’s existing transport and infrastructure as one of the highest risk sectors. How do we build resilience against the impacts overheating and flooding may have on not only our transit infrastructure, but critical infrastructures of the future; energy production, heat networks, and data centres?
What’s changing?
• Rising urban temperature
• Car use is (still) rising
• Rising inequality
From ‘active streets’ to integrated multi-model transit networks how do we address the task of adapting and reinventing our neighbourhood and urban infrastructures to become both more resilient in the face of the unequal impacts of climate risk, and more supporting of civic life and biodiversity?
Innovation areas:
• Nature-as-infrastructure
• Streets adaptation and LTNs
Civics: Trust, Politics, Participation
Rising anxiety, distrust, and disenfranchisement have become hallmarks of how we interact with both the current political system and networked technologies. How can our political systems and social infrastructures foster hope in a new age of multi-polar geopolitics, climate anxiety and synthetic intelligence?
What’s changing?
• Divergent politics
• Normalisation of conflict
• Rising youth despondency
From mass participatory policy processes, civic assembly experiments, and emerging examples of negotiated sovereignty of nature across the world – how can we reimagine the space for consensus building, negotiation and governance be reimagined?
Innovation areas:
• Rights of nature
• Participatory processes
Acknowledgements
Things attendees:
Daniel Charny, Laura Lebeau, Summer Islam, Joe Iles, Mark Miodownik
Home attendees:
Sara Edmonds, David Madden, Yolande Barnes, Matt Jones
Land attendees:
Gregory Brown, Tim Waterman, Rosanna Vitiello, Rachel Fisher, Megan Blake
Work attendees:
Rui Costa, Rachel Coldicutt, Clementine Collett, Danny Dorling
Civics attendees:
Emily Morrison, Torange Khonsari, Immy Kaur, Geoff Mulgan
Flow attendees:
Owen Garling, Victoria Lee, Maddie Kessler, Juliet Mian
Project Team:
Justin McGuirk, Indy Johar, Liz Thornhill , Jack Minchella, Ross Crawford
Advisory Board:
Geoff Mulgan, Kate Josephs, Keri Facer, Indy Johar, Cassie Robinson, Christopher Smith
