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How We Live and How We Might Live with Ken Worpole

Thursday April 3rd
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm

How can we move from communities of interest to communities of care?

In his 1964 essay, "Urban Place and the Non-Place Public Realm",  American urban designer Melvin Webber coined a phrase which anticipated the changing nature of social life in the modern world: community without propinquity. This suggested that the communities of the future would be based more on shared interests and identities than physical proximity and face-to-face encounters. Webber predicted this long before the Internet made the creation of online 'communities’ – whose reach now extends across the globe - even more commanding.

Today social media generates millions of such self-described ‘communities’, none of whose members have ever met in person. In such conditions, social change becomes ever more difficult to achieve, for as John Stuart Mill argued in "Principles of Political Economy" (1848), society needs ‘experiments in living’ – new forms of working and living together - to guard against ‘the weight of Custom bearing down upon human capacity for improvement.’

In his recent books, New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society (2017), No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain (2021), and Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory (2025), Ken Worpole explores the post-war history of such experiments in living and working together, now commonly called elective or ‘intentional’ communities.

In this talk, Ken will highlight four remarkable case studies he knows well – one environmental, one pacifist, one religious in origin but open to all, and one a newly opened experiment in social care - and discusses what we might learn from them as we face the environmental and social upheavals of tomorrow.

Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian, and author of books on architecture, landscape and public policy. The New Statesman observed recently that: "Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition.’"

Ken's talk will be followed by supper and discussion.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Event starts at 7pm.

£8 Kairos Club Member, £15 Non-member, £10 Struggling financially, £20 Supporter. Food complimentary.

Before requesting a discounted ticket, please consider sincerely: Are you struggling to meet your basic needs? Would you have to make a genuine sacrifice to buy a full priced ticket? Do you have reduced earnings through a lifestyle choice or because you’re dedicating your time to unpaid work relating to the climate and nature crises?

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