Introduction

The Productive Margins research programme was formed in the belief that the people and communities excluded from participating in the regulatory regimes that impact upon their daily lives have the expertise and experiential knowledge to be politically productive. The Productive Margins’ mission statement is that these regimes can be redesigned and harnessed for engagement, ensuring that communities at the margins are engaged in regulatory processes and practices. The challenge is therefore to experiment with new systems of engagement that enable creativity and increase agency. One of the selected themes that the research programme set out to explore was spaces of dissent. This chapter focuses on the work co-produced with Coexist, one of the programme's community partners, in response to this theme.

Coexist is a social enterprise set up to create a space where different communities and individuals can grow, share, collaborate and learn what it is to live in coexistence with each other. In 2008, Coexist acquired the lease of Hamilton House in central Bristol, creating a place where the cross-pollination of progressive ideas could emerge by offering low-cost rent to artists, well-being practitioners and social enterprises. Coexist combines elements of radical practice with a distinct mindfulness approach as a means of enabling new forms of social relations within the space. The more dynamic aspects of the organisation's practice are offset by the need to pay rent and fulfil its legal obligations. Therefore, Coexist performs the role of regulator, responsible for the safety of the users of the building and ensuring that the project is economically sustainable.

In the period covered by the research, Coexist discovered problems reconciling its core purpose and values – being open to all and providing space for the community – with the challenge of managing the unequal power relations that make this vision potentially unachievable. It found that its commitment to ‘solution-focused’ forms of engagement between its various groups meant that it was unable to adequately deal with dissent and conflict. There is a risk within projects with egalitarian ambitions that – in the desire to create a space for ‘everybody’ and ‘celebrate difference’ – projects neglect to address latent power relations that perpetuate exclusion and privilege.