Charles Leadbeater’s new book, We Think, which will shortly be featured as Book of the Week, promises to be an extraordinary interesting book, full of concrete real-life examples of mass creativity at work.

Chapter 11 for example, features the experience in a city in Brazil, which I recommend reading in full.

Here’s the crux of the story it tells, in terms of peer governance, and how it can be applied to the real material world of housing and urban planning:

“Self-organisation without leadership all too easily leads to a dead end: the shanty. Top down leadership that stifles self-organisation fails to mobilise a wide range of people and resources. The trick is to provide leadership for a process through which people, together, find structured collaborative solutions. Cities like Curitiba are among the best examples we have of innovation as a mass, self-organising collaborative activity. That is why cities have been such vital sources of innovation in all fields – government, art, science, business. The lessons of cities like Curitiba should be applied to innovation in other walks of life.”