3ºC Birmingham

A collaborative research project with CIVIC SQUARE to understand the climate realities of UK cities in a +3ºC world. The publication illustrates the scale of future climate breakdown risks, as well as strategies for the radical redesign and retrofit of our neighbourhoods. This is part of a series of publications from CIVIC SQUARE to inform their ongoing work in Ladywood, Birmingham.

3º Neighbourhoods is a research collaboration between Dark Matter Labs’ Neighbourhood Futures team and CIVIC SQUARE that asks a deceptively urgent question: what does a +3ºC future actually mean for the places where people live?

The work seeks to understand the current risks UK urban neighbourhoods face over this century due to climate and ecological breakdown under a high emissions scenario — not as an endorsement of that future, but as an attempt to understand it and chart a path towards a more just, regenerative alternative. Focusing on Birmingham, the UK city with the greatest number of neighbourhoods identified as priority areas for climate adaptation, the research maps overlapping risks including overheating, flooding, drought, food insecurity, and rising cost of living, and shows how these impacts fall hardest on those already facing the greatest inequality.

Alongside confronting the consequences of a warmer planet, the work proposes six reimaginings at the neighbourhood scale: regenerative resources, renewable energy systems, retrofit and densification, re-coding comfort, rewilding the city, and re-infrastructuring; each of these offering a direction for shifting how we build, organise, and own our neighbourhoods. Together, these frame a civic-led transition rooted in community agency, democratic governance, and a fundamental rethinking of what resilience looks like from the street up.

As of 2026, we are beginning work on a new edition of 3ºC Neighbourhoods, geared at orienting the existing research toward neighbourhood-scale future-readiness measures.