Can wasted resources be reused for social good post-COVID19?

As part of our keynote series Gee Sinha delivered a lecture exploring the ways we can reuse waste resources for social good to scale and mitigate risk in a post-pandemic world.

On 3 March Gee Sinha, Director of ReSpace Projects delivered The Bartlett Real Estate Institute’s first lecture for 2021 ‘Can wasted resources be reused for social good post-COVID19?’. The lecture was chaired by Dr. Jos Boys, MSc Learning Environments Lead.

Thank you to everyone who took part. If you were not able to attend, a recording of the event is available to watch.

Summary of the lecture

Respacing is a way to reuse empty buildings where everyone benefits by creating a space that uses wasted resources to help build a better city and a system that generates more resources. Empty spaces should be used for the benefits of local people and the only way to do this is to enable them to use it. By creating innovative showcase projects that can prove these benefits will provide evidence to create more flexible rules, regulations and legislation to give communities the same ability to use wasted resources that large companies and charities already have access to.

The lecture presented how we can help positively impact our social and physical environments by intelligently reusing large-scale waste resources to save time, money and energy. By using the wasted resources of our society to support change-makers and those who do social good, we can promote the reuse of wasted space to create a network of sustainable social projects that channel these resources for those who need it the most.

Gee Sinha commented:

“It was fantastic to recognise that there is a growing appetite amongst authorities and developers to pursue uses of empty space and definitely any use is better than none. What I hope I conveyed is the importance of a network of groups and projects. Partly because of the resource sharing but also to create a peer based system to ensure risks are mitigated and knowledge can be shared.”

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About the speaker

Gee is the founder and Director of ReSpace Projects, the Hive Dalston and Zero LDN - winners of the Sustainable Cities Award 2019 and mentioned in Sage Publishing's Strategy textbook as a standout example of social innovation. Having spent over ten years training in business, sales and marketing management for several blue chip companies, Gee then spent several years working at grassroots level with underprivileged and alternative communities.

 

ReSpace Projects is pioneering new models of social enterprise and has recently been included in the Mayor's Circular economy routemap as being a key collaborator in the London Plan. Gee's work in developing innovative systems that cross multiple social levels and are self-sustaining and self-replicating. He draws inspiration from new scientific research into business and social economies that throws a whole new light on the way things should be done. He believes that we see through the lenses of our conditioning and to have vision we must first clear those lenses.

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