The Locals' Cambridge 2040 (in reference to the government's proposal of the same name) is a local project to encourage residents' say in the wider Cambridge area's future development.
As residents all our lives, we have grown up around our area's continual and exponential development. However, as we have grown older, the lack of benefit these developments provide to common locals has become clear; there is not a single benefit among a sea of increased noise, more pressured services, removal of the environment we chose to live here for, pricing us out - despite all the new houses, countryside loss - forever. These are things no local asks for.
With the government's Cambridge 2040 proposal it became clear that it was planned to entirely swamp several villages within the span of the next 20 years, thus increasing development to a rate somehow previously unheard of. Such a rate would be impossible, as locals correctly highlighted, demonstrating clearly that we ought to be heard more, rather than shut out further, as the state of things is currently. Clearly, "other stakeholders" (East West Rail, 2023), whether these murky figures be developers, large landholders, or hypothetical future residents*, are considered too willingly over local people. In comparison, they lack the local knowledge to highlight what can & should actually be done, or are - in the former cases - just tied to increasing their short-term bottom line.
Therefore, we decided that something had to be done to increase locals' say, rather than attempt to have locals say more in the hopes that "this time, things will be different", as it is becomig clear they won't. To put the previous statement in mathematical terms:
"loudness of discontent" x 0 ≈ 0
We plan to achieve our goal via several means:
Initially and, we suspect, primarily, we will do this through providing a platform for any & all local views on current and future infrastructure proposals, alongside views and opinions on what future directions and aims development should take & required legislation for said direction. This will be performed via in-person discussions, blogs by residents, and a system of proposing & showing support to local ideas. We hope that this will mean all local views and beliefs are clear before any project is dreamt up, removing the opportunity for bureaucrats and developers to decide what we reportedly believe for us, forcing greater transparency over decision-making.
We plan to use this site as a means to provide easier, more centralised access to information on current & proposed development, as well as working to more quickly raise awareness of proposals, before they are too concrete to be meaningfully debated. Once locals are aware, we will also use this site to allow for easier cross-campaign communication and coordination, increasing their efficacy and so making them harder to ignore. We hope that this will force greater communication & transparency. Our reasoning being that if information is more readily available, then people will organise into campaigns earlier and in greater numbers due to greater awareness. This will amplify and advance voice on its own, but will also allow for earlier voicing of concerns and greater realisation of issues through more people being able to analyse the information for them. The better connected and collaborating causes would have a clearer voice and so be harder to avoid than the individual campaigns attempting many bilateral collaborations. This could therefore also, hopefully, set a precedent of that voice having to be listened to.
And, finaly, we will campaign directly for honest representation of residents & their views in the running of projects and decision-making procedure. This means campaigning against current structures which allow for little say for locals in projects just next door, or even against developments on their own properties.
As an organisation we are intended only to campaign for locals to have a greater say in their regions developmental future. However, in cases where the vast majority of the region & the team hold certain views, we reserve the right to use this site to put forward that position. We will not ever prioritise one locally-held position over another but will provide any data necessary for context for the support for an opinion and also its foundations, if applicable.
*Who if I, on a personal note, may add, are perfectly entitled to be considered. However, at no point should their potential/provided wish for American-style suburbs trump locals, already here and having chosen their living environment for the village qualities which would be destroyed.
Those future, hypothetical people would already be living in an urban environment, and so it would result in significantly less overall change for all if they were in higher-rise (but still high quality) buildings, which would not encroach on countryside. As a matter of fact, the smaller distances to countryside, paired with the fact that building footprint would be not extremely different between a townhouse or higher building when built well (i.e., not solely for profit), might actually be better for future residents, as they can more easily, quickly & greenly reach the true countryside. In addition to all of this, there would be less pollution in going to the actual countryside, as the current walkable/cyclable city limits would be preserved, removing the average person's future need to drive to city limits to escape to nature.
And, if you think there isn't already precedent, this exact fallacy has already been seen with East West Rail, where Cambridge residents already living near rail tracks were counted equally to residents with no railways currently nearby for noise pollution factors; urban people would have experienced little change (if any due to speed restrictons & slowing) & already live in a city where there is lots of noise, whereas rural people would see a completely different living environment. See an upcoming blog on NIMBYism in the UK vs the USA and how the two have become misconstrued for more on this.