The Free People’s Village

by Sim Kern

A story that refuses to be either utopia or dystopia — a world that won on climate but not on justice, and a community trying to hold something real together anyway. Our richest conversation yet.

• We sat with the power of who tells a story — asking how the novel’s meaning would shift had it been told from Gestas’s point of view rather than Maddie’s, the white, cis narrator who came to the neighbourhood rather than from it.
• We explored grassroots involvement — what participation looks like, and the roles any one person can play.
• We worked the Futures Triangle: the Weight of the Past (the deep structures that produced the Village), the Push of the Present (what enabled it to form), and the Pull of the Future (the future the movement reached toward) — and traced how today’s structures still shape similar outcomes.

“The Village was there too, alongside every protest that had come before it… fruiting bodies that had launched spores that would radically alter the shape of things to come.”

— Sim Kern, The Free People’s Village

Read the full recap on LinkedIn.