2.2 Community spaces

Sometimes it isn’t possible to practise leadership at work, but it is possible within communities. Black people encounter particularly high expectations from their communities to give back (Jackson, 2022), meaning that boundaries between work and community spaces can blur.

There’s more than one way of thinking about what a community space is and how it is produced. Space exists before human intervention – a natural landscape would be here without our presence – but human beings reshape space in important ways through their creative, social and economic actions. So, it’s helpful to think of community spaces as being produced in three ways: conceived, experienced, and lived (Harvey, 2019a; Lefebvre, 1991). Each of these provides a different register – a different pitch – for leadership practice, for considering the ways in which your leadership can shape your local spaces, and the ways in which you are shaped by your local spaces. The challenge is to think of space as continually being (re)produced through human practice, rather than seeing a space as unmovable and static.