WeCanMake is a community land trust and neighbourhood test-space in Bristol, imagining and making new ways to create homes that build social infrastructure and community wealth.
The initiative emerged as a people-led response to the housing crisis. As a community land trust, WeCanMake creates affordable homes using micro-sites in big back gardens and in between buildings.
“Our neighbourhood test-space shows that through creative community-driven innovation, it is possible to seed change within the current system.”
Nothing WeCanMake has done has required new policy or regulation. Within existing frameworks, they have created a new supply of land, established new routes through the planning system and developed ways to diversify and localise the production of new homes, placing them where people want and need them most.
WeCanMake shows how communities and neighbourhoods can open up different routes to scale and impact: where aggregate numbers are realised through multiple, distributed and diverse communities using a common set of tools and methods to deliver development on their own terms.
