There is something that happens when a group of people moves through a shared environment together with a specific quality of attention. The walk itself, the physical act of moving through the space, changes the nature of what is noticed. Things that are invisible from a meeting room, a planning document or a satellite map become suddenly visible. The particular texture of a place, its unexpected assets, its overlooked corners and its moments of spontaneous human life, can only be seen by people who are actually present in it.

The community walk, as a deliberate community-building practice, is built on this insight. It is not a tour. It is not an inspection. It is a disciplined act of collective attention, in which a group of citizens moves through their shared territory with a specific and intentional lens: the lens of abundance rather than scarcity.

The lens of abundance

The difference between a walk taken through the lens of scarcity and one taken through the lens of abundance is not a difference in the territory covered but in what the walker is looking for. The lens of scarcity seeks out what is broken, neglected, dangerous or missing. It confirms the deficit map. It produces a list of problems to be reported to the relevant authority. It is the lens that most formal inspections and community consultations are implicitly designed to use.

The lens of abundance looks for something different. It looks for what is already present and potentially generative: the cared-for front garden that signals a resident who takes pride in the shared environment, the informal seating area where people naturally gather in good weather, the underused community building whose car park could host a weekly market, the mural on a blank wall that speaks of local artistic energy waiting for a canvas and a commission. Each of these sightings is a potential building block for citizen-led initiative.

What to look for on the abundance walk

The abundance walk is structured around a set of specific questions that guide the collective attention of the walking group. Where are the spaces where people naturally sit and gather, without being invited or organised to do so? What physical assets, buildings, land, covered spaces or natural features are underutilised during significant parts of the day or week? Where is there visible evidence of care, whether in a maintained garden, a cleared public path or a decorated community notice board? Where do the community’s informal connectors tend to congregate, and what does the physical landscape of those spaces tell us?

Each of these questions directs the walker’s attention toward the positive potential of the environment rather than toward its deficiencies. The resulting inventory of sightings is not a wishlist. It is a realistic mapping of the assets that already exist and that could, with organisation and creativity, be put to work in service of the community’s own vision for its future.

Grounding vision in physical reality

One of the most important functions of the abundance walk is that it grounds the community’s emerging vision in the actual, physical reality of the place it inhabits. After a celebratory gathering and a Festival of Ideas, there is a risk that the community’s aspirations outpace its honest assessment of what is actually available to work with. The walk restores the balance, not by dampening ambition but by connecting it concretely to the specific spaces, assets and opportunities that the territory actually contains.

When a community can say not just “we want to create a space for intergenerational learning” but “we want to use the underutilised back room of the community centre on Tuesday afternoons, because we walked past it last week and it was empty,” the initiative becomes anchored in a specific, achievable reality. The vision is no longer abstract. It has an address.

Changing how the environment is seen

Beyond its practical function as an asset-mapping exercise, the abundance walk has a subtler and perhaps more important effect: it changes how the people who take it see the environment they have been walking through for years without really looking. A street that was previously experienced as unremarkable or even depressing is suddenly revealed to contain seven distinct potential assets that nobody had previously noticed, named or considered available for community use.

This shift in perception is itself a community-building act. Once people have walked their territory with the lens of abundance and experienced the transformation in what becomes visible, they tend to carry that lens into their daily lives. The environment stops being a backdrop and becomes a field of possibility.

Questions for reflection

If you were to walk through your office wing, campus or block looking exclusively for hidden, underutilised spaces and assets, what would you discover that you have not previously noticed?

How does physically touring your environment with a focus on hope, beauty and potential alter your assumptions about your group’s resourcefulness and capacity for self-directed action?

Think of a specific physical asset in your immediate environment that is regularly underutilised. What would it take to make it available for a citizen-led initiative?

What would change about how your team or community sees its shared environment if everyone walked it together once with the explicit question: what is already here that we could build from?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.