Dark Matter Labs

We are growing a clean energy neighbourhood in Newham. The Repowered Community is Repowering London’s clean energy neighbourhood model. It strengthens communities by delivering clean energy hand in hand with long-term local services and benefits. We are now over one year into our flagship programme! In our latest blog we share what we've been up to 🔗 https://buff.ly/W0fZwiD Thank you to The National Lottery Community Fund, and our partners Dark Matter Labs, Glasgow Community Energy, London South Bank University, London Borough of Newham and Community Energy Newham

"What are the conditions that make democracy possible? This is the question that animates the work of Györgyi Gálik, the Hungarian co-founder of Governing Together at Dark Matter Labs, a non-profit research and design lab that builds alternative models for future economies." The latest in Lorelei Kelly's series on Global Women Peacebuilders. https://lnkd.in/g75Rg3Ac

🔥 🔥 🔥 Otra ola de calor. Cada vez es más evidente que el calor extremo está pasando de ser una molestia estacional a un riesgo sistémico que atraviesa la ciudad y pone en peligro su vitalidad y prosperidad, su valor mismo. En una ciudad como Madrid, blindar el valor en riesgo frente a las temperaturas futuras requiere una transformación que ningún actor puede acometer de manera aislada, pues excede las competencias, los saberes y los presupuestos sectoriales. Hacen falta acciones sinérgicas que atraviesan la edificación, el espacio público, la energía, la infraestructura verde y azul, la movilidad, la regulación y el planeamiento, junto con nuevas herramientas, procesos y protocolos y una inversión del orden de decenas de miles de millones de euros. La pregunta no es si podemos permitírnoslo, sino hasta cuándo podemos permitirnos no hacerlo. Cada año que pasa, sufrimos los impactos de un clima cambiante, gastamos dinero, consumimos materiales y agua y generamos emisiones en respuestas parciales e insuficientes. Pagamos el coste de la inacción y asumimos las pérdidas de la acción descoordinada. Y a la vez, en un contexto de volatilidad creciente, cada año nos acerca más a un momento en el que no podremos permitirnos el lujo de pensar en el futuro, porque estaremos atrapados respondiendo a las urgencias del presente. En Dark Matter Labs, vemos esta necesidad imperiosa también como una oportunidad para pensar con ambición y optimismo pragmático y construir colectivamente un futuro más justo, próspero y resiliente. Con el respaldo de financiación filántrópica de largo plazo, estamos trabajando para comprender, diseñar y facilitar el desarrollo de nuevas capacidades —ecológicas, tecnológicas, financieras, institucionales y cívicas— que aumenten la capacidad de respuesta de ciudades, comunidades e individuos en un futuro cada vez más incierto.  Puedes leer más sobre ello aquí: https://lnkd.in/eeH6QFRz Si eres un ayuntamiento, una institución pública, un inversor o una organización interesada en explorar cómo movilizar capital, coordinación y gobernanza a la escala necesaria, nos encantaría hablar contigo.  No hay tiempo que perder. Malik Lakoubay Sofia Valentini Oliver Burgess Gurden Batra Joost Beunderman Indy Johar Robyn Bennett

Extreme heat in cities like Madrid, where Dark Matter Labs has worked for over five years and built a growing team, is turning from a seasonal nuisance into a systemic risk, threatening the city's long-term 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 and 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺. Protecting that value against future temperatures, in a context of rising volatility, requires connected interventions across buildings, energy, public space, and infrastructure, at an investment scale in the tens of billions. The question isn't whether we can afford it; it's how long we can afford not to. This work sits within our Expanding Civilizational Optionality (xCO) programme, which builds the capital, capability, tooling, and coordination infrastructure to identify cascading systemic risks and construct investable portfolios of response before those risks become irreversible breakdowns. It draws directly on the frameworks and methodologies being developed through Dm's Risk Intelligence Lab, which builds our wider ecosystem's capacity to sense, calculate, and map systemic risk. We're publishing this piece in Spanish, part of an ongoing conversation with multiple local actors and Dm's shift toward more rooted, collaborative, place-based work. Rather than a finished proposal, it is an open invitation meant to spark questions, critique, and collaboration. Find it here: https://lnkd.in/dCkvRwJQ You can find more on xCO here: https://lnkd.in/dUYrH4eV Malik Lakoubay Alicia Carvajal Rowan Sofia Valentini

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗶𝗹 𝗕𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 by Lorelei Kelly I am so happy to be named and included in The Conversationalist’s 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗪𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 series by Lorelei Kelly. The Conversationalist was founded in 2018 by journalists warning that authoritarian movements were gaining ground worldwide with little pushback from traditional news outlets or political institutions. The series profiles women around the world whose work expands how we understand peacebuilding: not simply as something that happens after conflict, but as the everyday work of sustaining democracy and creating the conditions in which violence becomes less likely. Peacebuilding is not a specialist practice reserved for societies experiencing or emerging from conflict. It is part of the everyday work of democracy building itself. The first profile introduced Diana Dajer, whose experience of Colombia’s armed conflict led her to understand democratic exclusion as a driver of violence, and participation as the real name of peace in Colombia. Her work has since focused on embedding deliberative democracy and meaningful citizen participation within Bogotá’s institutions. The second featured Nerima Wako Ojiwa, founder of Siasa Place in Kenya, whose youth-led, digital-first organising demonstrates another face of peacebuilding: fast, adaptive and deeply networked collective action capable of responding when institutions fail. Our interview, ‘𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗶𝗹 𝗕𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆’, focuses on the relational and institutional conditions that make democracy possible. It draws on the work we have been developing through Governing Together with our small team, Ryan Bellinson and Anahat Kaur, our entire 'Village', Governance Futures Network, and the wider team at Dark Matter Labs. In the piece, Lorelei and I talk about trust, kindness, integrity, and relational capacity as critical infrastructure that we need to deliberately design for and invest in; collective agency, dignity, and the invisible relational labour that holds institutions together; and why peacebuilding and democratic renewal are not separate projects. We invest in building roads, pipes, and technology, but not in how we relate to one another. Peacebuilding is less about the absence of violence and more about the presence of agency. Peace does not begin only when violence ends. It begins much earlier, in the everyday conditions that help people feel seen, valued, connected and capable of shaping the world around them. These conditions are too often absent from how we design and evaluate our institutions, yet they may be exactly what democracies are most urgently missing amid growing social fragmentation and declining public trust. Read ‘The Soil Beneath Democracy’ in The Conversationalist: https://lnkd.in/dFaszets #GlobalWomenPeacebuilders #peacebuilding #democracy #GoverningTogether #trustbuilding #relationalcapacity #collectiveagency

Europe’s event economy is a vast temporary city: for a few days at a time, it concentrates millions of people, billions of euros, specialist knowledge and extensive infrastructure - then dismantles itself and moves on. Trade fairs alone attracted around 102 million visitors and generated an estimated €45 billion in direct spending across Europe in 2024. That is only one segment of the wider event economy, but it gives a sense of the resources and attention at stake. The question is what remains once the lights, stages and temporary structures disappear. Public Vitality Camp is our attempt to redirect more of those resources into what happens before, during and after a gathering: identifying real tensions, bringing the right people into relation, supporting the difficult work of collaboration and creating conditions for something to continue. The first Camp will take place at Teufelsberg Berlin , 17–19 September 2026. We are currently shaping the programme with partners, communities and institutions working on resilience-related questions in Berlin and beyond. https://lnkd.in/dkTyJ-GB Bring a case or host a session and test with us what an event can make possible when it is treated as part of a longer civic process. Read more and contribute to the making of the Camp. https://lnkd.in/dvEmsUgy

𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗮𝗶 𝗖𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗰 On 28 March 2026, we ran the first Mumbai Citizen Risk Clinic, a 2.5-hour participatory workshop built on the premise that citizens already function as a distributed risk sensing infrastructure for their city, continuously detecting weak signals and adapting under stress. We wanted to see if that knowledge could be surfaced, organised, and made legible enough to act on. We built the pilot clinic around Mumbai's extraordinary 2025-26 climate year, a heatwave and flood cycle that pushed the city's systems to breaking point. This was on the basis that these are the conditions under which the city's systemic failures become most legible to its local residents across class, caste, gender, infrastructure, and labour. We were joined by over a dozen organisations working directly with Mumbai's residents, gig workers, and community groups, using tools from across our RiskSense portfolio to trace how people actually navigate systemic risk in their day to day lives. This is a small pilot, one clinic, one city, and we're not claiming it's representative of anything beyond the people in that room. But what came out of it was still enough to upend our own premise. We discovered that risk in Mumbai is first experienced as interrupted access to water, food, rest, and dignity, shaped as much by loan structures, rental enforcement, and the language of governance as by any single weather event. And what determines whether someone can absorb the next bad week is their ability to rest, to recover from the last one – something hard to find in a city that never sleeps. The clinic format itself is open for anyone to use. Every instrument, the clinic structure, the mapping tools, the templates, is free to download from the site, and can be viewed alongside the full synthesis. Get the tools and read the synthesis here: https://lnkd.in/dYtBghPd Siddhi Ashar, Yamini Srivastava, Prateek S., Dr. Abhishek Fullton, Anish Verghese, Dishant Parmar, Dulari Parmar, Harshvardhan Sharma, Hiranya Ganatra, Janhavi Mane, Dr. Lakshmi Lingam, Myron Mendes, Paridhi Mundra, Parveen Sheikh, Rohit Lahoti, Sandhya Naidu Janardhan, Shreya Agarwal, Anahat Kaur, Gurden Batra, Sofia Valentini, Eunsoo Lee, People's Courage India, UNICEF, EK KUTUMB SOLUTIONS, YUVA, Planet Pact, Transitions Research, WRI India, DY Patil University NAVI, MUMBAI, INECC, Nazaria Arts Collective, Community Design Agency, Govandi Arts Foundation, Pratham Education Foundation