Dr. Imandeep “Immy” Kaur isn’t interested in simply imagining new systems—she co-builds and demonstrates them. From the ground up. With a wide ecosystem of partners, neighbours and communities, not for them. As a Co-Founder of CIVIC SQUARE, Immy, the team and the ecosystem around them, has spent a decade transforming civic infrastructure from abstract ideals into trying to bring them into lived reality. With a vision of co-building neighbourhoods that thrive through regenerative, participatory, and democratic frameworks.
CIVIC SQUARE is more than a project. It’s a movement. A public square, neighbourhood lab, and creative platform designed to reimagine how we invest in our homes, streets and neighbourhoods, and how we heal the fractures caused by broken investment models and extraction. Under collective leadership, CIVIC SQUARE is focusing on being a blueprint and rehearsal for what neighbourhood civic infrastructure can be rooted in land, spatial, climate, social and economic justice, centred on collaboration, and built by everyone. Their work has always been both visionary and practical. As Impact Hub Birmingham, which was open between 2015 to 2019 an ecosystem of Birmingham artists, writers, speakers (and many other practitioners) were on a mission to help build a fairer, more equal, and just city. In 2018, Impact Hub Birmingham was named a NESTA New Radical, a testament to its innovative approach and far reaching impact.
Immy’s reach extends well beyond any single project. For her contributions to Birmingham and beyond, Immy has been recognised with numerous accolades including an Honorary Doctorate from Aston University’s School of Life & Health Sciences in 2019, and a prestigious Ashoka Fellowship in 2020. And yet, it’s not awards or titles that drive her. It’s the deeper understanding she has cultivated through years of organising at many scales, of the way economic injustice is entwined with the very land beneath our feet and how we need to make what we are building fit for purpose for the futures we face. How true progress is now only about how we heal our human and planetary health, demands rethinking everything from investment models to social infrastructure, with neighbourhoods and the communities that live in them at the forefront of that transition.
Immy’s journey has always been one of emergence and discovery. Of learning from others and building alongside them. Of inviting people to envision new futures where agency and creativity belong to everyone. Her work isn’t just about regeneration—it’s about radical reimagination. And it’s far from over.
