Slightly obscured by the greening landscape surrounding it in the picture above is the Treforest Industrial Estate. You may be able to make out the outlines of the corrugated roofs of the factories which comprised the estate since its inception.

It’s an enormous space for manufacturing, warehouses, and in recent years (or maybe decades) learning – there’s a further education college campus located there – and recreation too, if you fancy going 10-pin bowling or watching a film. If you want to illustrate innovation at scale, across sectors, anchored in the heart of de-industrialised communities then it’s this. It’s a model which has been replicated and refined around Wales and the UK.

In fact the industrial estate is symbolic of interventionism, of scrambling policy in a post-industrial world and the support for new industry to replace employment and prosperity provided by the declining coal industry. It’s been around since the 1930s. And it’s the first steps, albeit on an absolutely massive scale in industrial estate terms, into the world of state-sponsored regeneration.

One of the many interesting aspects of the Treforest Industrial Estate is that this is, under the 1934 Special Areas Act, a realisation that the state can make an impact, by providing the space for industry to grow and breathe. For new economic avenues to be pursued through both tacit and much more interventionist support. The estate has a fascinating history intertwined with the tragedy of the Holocaust (Leon Gooberman has written about this eloquently in his book, From Depression to Devolution here; while this Aberystwyth University blog post also explores the estate’s emergence from the ashes of the Great Depression). Its post-war evolution sort of tracks the policy trends which have apexed Welsh industrial or regeneration policy over the decades… the build-it-big warehouses to accommodate foreign direct investment, the attempts to establish a healthy indigenous manufacturing sector, the concession to more limited ambitions about an industrial future: specialist sectoral clusters, office space to accommodate decentralised government departments and operations, a presence of vocational education institutions, the provision of retail, restaurants and recreation. There’s good detail on that policy story in this International Institute for Sustainable Development report here.

What’s this got to do with the Foundational Economy? Well not only has the FE always been a part of the Treforest Industrial Estate, it remains a part of it now: through things like the Coleg y Cymoedd campus, the refuse truck depot, the bowling alley and cinema that make up the elements of the different FE sectoral pillars.

What of innovation?

What does the Treforest Industrial Estate tell us about the coalfield’s innovation story? Well, geographically it’s about as far south as you can get in the Valleys before you reach Cardiff. While the enormous Nantgarw Colliery was at the periphery of where the estate’s boundaries begin, its proximity to Cardiff, to the M4, to the connections which have made the south east of Wales the nation’s wealthiest region, illustrate some truths about the nature of innovation (if what we mean by innovation is a place in which businesses can function, employ people, invest in goods and manufacturing) – in this part if the world at least. The further north, and away from Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, the Valleys finger, the further innovation becomes a challenge.

Where and how does and can the FE innovate and support innovation in innovation deserts? Namely: the communities of the coalfield which become more challenged the further away from the M4 you get.

The evidence for the innovation desertification is set out in the recently published NICE report. Clearly, policy interventions at all kinds of multi-levels of governance are not producing the intended outcomes. A Senedd report on City and Regional Growth Deals has criticised the projects for their lack of progress. Each of Wales’s four Growth Deals, according to the Senedd’s Economy, Trade and Rural Affairs Committee, face challenges in achieving their goals, while they have lagged on jobs creation targets.

As a proponent of the Foundational Economy as an engine for prosperity, and indeed, innovation, I think the gap can be filled by ideas in this space. This is especially true for communities in, for example, the coalfield of South Wales where the peculiarities of geography and topography have made post-Thatcherite economic reform so difficult. While the neoliberal project, through Thatcherism and post-2008 austerity, have stripped out services, the jobs, the provisions in life which establish good living for communities; supporting FE re-emergence can provide both a platform for individual flourishing and encouragement for local democratic institutions to behave as hubs and engines for a new kind of innovation.

There is good practice in, for example, Preston where the local authority has used community wealth building – a new approach to regeneration which shares characteristics with the FE – as a grounding for innovation. It uses the power of local government to strengthen and rebuild pillars of the everyday economy as embedded institutions ready to innovate and capitalise on the community as a place to empower and democratise economic functions. This is true innovation.

Reshaping an economy

There are global examples of the economy being reimagined and reshaped to support the flourishing of people rather than capital. The FE allows for the provision of services, the creation of jobs and well-being through that provision, and a sustained means of leveraging innovation rather than the potential transience of individualised entrepreneurialism. Innovation need not only apply as an entrepreneurial definition: democratic structures, trades unions, co-operatives, shared and locally-owned social businesses, can create an innovative environment as well.

Even in an idealised world where innovation and entrepreneurialism are synonimised, the need for strong foundational pillars to support that innovation is unquestionable. Without utlities, broadband, functioning transport systems, childcare, social care etc etc how can people begin to think about innovating?

Back to the industrial estate

How can we sync the FE into vast estates such as Treforest? The hollowing out of the public sector has been costly in social and economic terms. At times, the old industrial estates of the 20th century are being used for community and FE provision – eg through the location of FE campuses, office space for third sector organisations and regionalising public and civil services.

It’s clearly not enough. We are, perhaps, beyond the idealised version of innovator as an entrepreneur who began a business in their garage which is now a global brand. Instead, we need to reshape and rethink our attitudes about community and co-owned innovation. Democratised innovation which empowers communities and enhances people’s experiences of their localities. Descaling ownership from the top to a more egalitarian way of operating can be done. It has been through history via co-operative and friendly societies, for example. Community ownership of things like local renewable energy sources is an innovative solution to a crisis in the cost of provision of utilities. What is innovative about a water company (water, that basic stuff of life) being owned by a hedge fund? Or a bus company being answerable to shareholders rather than the people who use its services? Shouldn’t we reframe these elements of our economy as services for all, rather than systems to extract profit?

A foundational future may be one without large-scale industrial estates (though it certainly need not be). But it is one where the industrial estate is used to benefit people and economies in a much different way to our traditional and orthodox notions of these places and what they exist for.