Dr Iona Hine interviews Professor Flora Samuel, Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. The conversation explores the concept of urban rooms, spaces where communities converge to discuss city futures, and the potential role of faith groups in these discussions. They discuss theoretical and practical challenges of considering representation, noting the 1% of a populace that typically participates in planning consultations is far from diverse.

Dr Hine also invites Professor Samuel to reflect on four possible ways faith communities can engage in sustainable urban futures, referring to a recent article by Prof Christopher Baker and Dr Chris Ives.

This episode is part of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme's UK Interfaith Futures series.

00:00 Introduction to the Interfaith Futures Series

00:38 Meet Professor Flora Samuel

01:37 The Concept of Urban Rooms

02:19 Faith Groups and Community Building

04:23 Challenges in Representation and Engagement

07:32 Faith and Urban Sustainability

10:01 Reflecting on Faith's Role in Urban Spaces

12:21 Concluding Thoughts

Resources mentioned

• The Cambridge Room, an urban room for Cambridge: www.cambridgeroom.org
• Quality of Life Foundation: www.qolf.org
• Ives & Baker, Engaging faith for a sustainable urban future, in Global Sustainability 7. doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.32

Hello, I'm Dr Iona Hine, Programme Manager for the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, a research and engagement centre based in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. This conversation is part of our Interfaith Futures series, probing intersections of research, policy and practice. With me is Professor Flora Samuel, Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.

Her current work explores the ingredients of inclusive community consultation in different settings, rural and urban. In Cambridge, Flora is in the process of setting up a new urban room, a space where the community, universities, local authority, industry and practice can come together to debate Cambridge's future.

She is also a member of the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum.

Flora, tell us about urban rooms and why religion is on the table as part of the participation conversation.

Thank you. Well, urban rooms are, as you said, a space for different communities to come together to talk about the future of their city, and there is an urban room network of existing urban rooms across the country, where this is happening, and we hope to set one up for Cambridge. I set one up with the colleagues at Sheffield, which is still going 10 years later.

Obviously when you're, creating a space for discussion and interaction, you're trying to bring in together community groups from all sorts of spheres. And typically I would say in the world of architecture and planning, faith groups tend to be rather left behind, I think, in those discussions.

Yet faith groups are some of the sort of most important bits of social glue that we actually have. And I think we saw that when the Grenfell tragedy happened, where faith groups leapt into the void that the local authority couldn't actually deliver in the face of this immediate tragic circumstances.

I'm really interested in how faith groups contribute to the making of community. I'm really interested in how we can pull ideas and networks, how we can work together to expand the discussion on the future of our cities and our places, working with faith groups. And I'm really interested in the culture of care that runs through faith groups. One that we hope to extend into a space like the Cambridge Room, which is— it's not just about planning and planning consultation and finding out people's opinions, but also we found in practice these places become somewhere to alleviate loneliness and to have conversations about all sorts of dimensions of life.

So for me, and this is my entirely my own personal opinion, an urban room is a place which says we need to be hopeful. If we work together, we can make change. And this is difficult, of course, in the face of such profound change and in Cambridge, in the context of a huge growth agenda, which is threatening to silence the voices of communities.

So faith groups have an enormous role to play in that. But one of the things I'm interested in terms of working with faith groups in a context of a space like an urban room, is how we create a balanced dialogue, actually, and how we tackle these issues in a balanced and inclusive way. And this is something that's not really been explored very much.

Right. So balance, there's the other word "representation", which is already, well, it's always really difficult. I am involved with what's currently known as the Faith & Belief Policy Collective, which has come together and through some combinations of invitation and happenstance and where there was necessarily a really kind of important conversation to have about what representation looks like, what, who do you need to have at the table, and that representation is always going to fall short in some kind of ways because we're complex beings, we individually carry many different aspects of our identity and there are limits to how far you can go.

But that makes me curious: when you talk about faith groups, what do you have in mind and how does, how do you kind of, um, anticipate bringing faith identities together alongside of other kinds of identity that might be jostling for space?

Well, these are really good questions. And again, ones that are really, really unexplored in the context of the planet of planning and, and indeed planning engagement.

Engagement and planning is very under explored area. So, yeah, this is a really good question. And actually, what is representation? And what is a representative group of the community? And how do we make sure we are working with that representative group? Even getting the basic demographic data is hard, I have to say. And what happens when there are intersections of issues as well?

At the moment, we're simply trying to work to make sure that we engage with and get data and information and stories from a group that is representative of the community itself. Now, this in itself is a big, if we can manage that, and we've managed that in experimental urban rooms in various parts of the UK, then that's a start. Because typically only about one percent of the population gets involved in a planning consultation, and of that one percent, they are, tend to be very much of a very uniform demography.

In the first instance, it's just trying to get a sort of a simple democratic, demographic group that look rather like the one that we have in the area. And then beyond that, you start thinking about techniques, about amplifying certain voices that are difficult to access, or to you know, where does AI come into it? Where does other kinds of data come into it? How can we actually try and make something representative? And indeed, is it completely impossible? Actually, should we instead be doing a citizens assembly?

And there's a lot of experimentation happening in Cambridge around citizens assembly with kids and young people at the moment. So is that a better way of doing it?

I don't have any straightforward answers to this because it's such a nascent area. But yeah, watch this space.

I think when we're thinking about futures, it is so important to be involving young people and children and not feeling like we can as stewards of the today, how we help them bring forth a tomorrow that has the kind of potential of hope that you have mentioned, and that potential for change.

If I can bring in an obvious kind of topical concern: One can't really think about the future of the city of Cambridge, one can't think about urban futures in general at the moment without also thinking about the challenges of climate change and what we might need in terms of sustainability. So I want to introduce a bit of research that comes from Chris Baker who is William Temple Professor of Religion and Public Life at Goldsmiths, University of London.

And he just recently published a paper together with Chris Ives, a climate scientist, where they were trying to think together about opportunities for faith to engage with urban sustainability and urban futures. In the article, they came up with sort of four domains where faith is obviously engaged in the urban and there could be something meaningful happen.

And I'm curious to know if any of those resonate with you. So they talk about the physical and that can mean something as basic as places of worship are obviously part of the urban landscape. But also, a butcher shop may, if that's a halal butchers shop, that's also part of how faith is shaping and involved with the landscape.

Then they talk about practices. And you also have mentioned care as being something that's a practice often associated with religious groups. They referenced hospitality. You can also say stewardship. So there's that kind of aspect potentially for engagement.

They also talk about this trickier thing called the prophetic imagination, and I won't do justice to quite what they say about it, but I would term it as being that power of religion to speak critically, to speak truth to power to raise issues of social justice that maybe don't come out as easily from other corners of public conversation.

The fourth item that they raise is policy and they raise that specifically and I think this echo something you mentioned earlier, in a different context, because you mentioned it in relation to Grenfell, but that capacity for the faith communities to show up and do something really important in a moment of crisis, and how at its best that can open new possibilities for collaboration between the public sector and faith communities.

So they're talking about it in the context of COVID and how maybe local government is more able to imagine working with faith groups and less prone to getting into hierarchies and things as a result of that. So yeah, there's a really long sort of introduction to the question, but the question is, do any of those particularly make sense within your work in terms of how you're thinking of engaging faith groups or indeed just more generally?

No, absolutely. I think they're really excellent and useful sort of categorizations. Physical space is an obvious one and public space of faith organizations incredibly important. It's an interesting question.

It makes me think of discussions around play because you mean that you think of play, people think of playgrounds and then you think of faith and you think of churches or mosques or temples or whatever.

But actually, I'm interested in places of spirituality that aren't actually necessarily associated with particular physical spaces. And it's something we're trying to collect through some of our work.

We work sometimes with the Quality of Life Foundation's criteria on it's the framework for measuring quality of life. And one of the criteria is wonder, which is a sense of— what is it called? Eudaimonic well being— a sense of feeling, a sense of happiness, which comes from feeling there is something beyond your own personal self. So it is about physical spaces, but I think also, what are these other less obvious spaces in there?

And then practices, absolutely. Care, hospitality, stewardship. They are fundamental to what we would hope to see in any of our consultation spaces. I love the idea of the prophetic imagination. It makes me think of Justin Welby's book, Reimagining Britain, I think, which is a great book, actually an interesting book.

I think it is the power of coming as an archbishop of Canterbury. It enables him to look at the world in a different light. And I think that was really important. And he aligns his work with social value, which is a particular area that I'm super interested in.

So I do think we've got to be nudged into thinking differently. How could things be otherwise? It doesn't have to be like this.

And then the whole thing about policy and crisis, definitely. The faith groups step up, step in. They're an incredible part of the social infrastructure and the spiritual infrastructure of our lives. And they do have an intensely important role to play where other systems don't work, and in times of great tragedy and loss and joy as well.

So I think those are excellent categories and I think I shall have to go and have a think about them. But for me, they all have a place in an urban room.

Wonderful. I think that's been a really stimulating conversation. And the phrase that jumped out for me was “thinking otherwise”, the capacity of faiths to enter into a conversation about thinking otherwise in all kinds of different domains. So maybe that's the one that I will carry away from this conversation to keep thinking about.

But I hope that those who listen in on this will take something away to stimulate and keep pondering on because that's surely the aim of catching up in this particular way.

So thank you very much, Flora.

Can I just add one thing?

Certainly.

The whole point of public engagement and participation is to hear the voices of those whose voices are drowned out and don't get to be heard. And if that wasn't a faith issue, I don't know what is.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.