Sharing and taking up space in the world – how do we move past a scarcity mindset?

There are 8.3 billion people in the world, and several perspectives on whether this rock is big enough for all of us. If we zoom out, we may have to reckon with a correlation between population growth and the destruction of our home planet, though that might tell us at least as much about a capitalist approach to extracting, creating or sharing resources as it does about an inherent relationship between people and planet. Closer to home, we’re living through a turbulent political time where there is widespread encouragement to view the ways in which we share space and resources with fellow humans through a lens of scarcity and fear. Far-right narratives encourage fear and exclusion of those positioned as ‘other’, prompting many to shrink themselves for the benefit of a wealthy minority intent on claiming more space. I’m interested in exploring the ways that we share and take up our space in the world, and how we might begin to protect against a scarcity mindset in relation to this. Join me on a meander through considerations of sharing space and migration, gender roles, wealth and status, and how social change can begin with looking at things from different angles.

‘There’s not enough for everyone’ is a political choice, not a material reality

There are enough resources globally to meet everyone’s needs. The real issue is distribution - a fact that’s widely accepted but rarely sparks outrage or calls for change. In a predictable ‘tale as old as time’, attention has been diverted away from the few who have amassed enough wealth to eradicate global poverty, and pointed squarely at those who are already marginalised and navigating extreme danger in hopes of eventually reaching safety. The anger and fear being directed at asylum seekers and refugees may not be new, but the context in which it currently exists is. What’s new is the amount of money being thrown at anti-immigration campaigns from domestic and international sources, the technology available to support the rapid spread of disinformation, and the implosion of clearly defined political positioning (see for example, the Labour Party in the UK rushing to make policies that were further to the right on immigration than their Conservative predecessors). Counter-messaging may need to up its game in order to be heard above the well funded and emotive cacophony of hate.

At the risk of entering into a political diatribe about the policing of borders, I feel it’s probably worth addressing the question of how we know when a country is ‘full’, and what decisions are made on the basis of this. There tends to be a dearth of factual information about levels of migration into and out of a country, birth rates, ageing populations, and investment in infrastructure when arguments are being made for further restricting immigration. The intention is to engage people on an emotional level, and it works because of a sense of there not being enough to go around. That seems like an obvious assumption to make when people are choosing between heating and eating, struggling to find work and living in poor housing conditions. When people express fears of overcrowding, it’s almost always an expression of a sense of scarcity regarding public services, job and housing. There may be another conversation to be had about the uneven pressure on services and economies, with more urban areas often experiencing more poverty and issues with infrastructure, alongside a bid to protect what remains of a country’s green spaces from the impact of high human population. There are also inconsistencies around which communities and areas are invested in or neglected. But, ultimately, this issue boils down to economics and political decision making about what is invested in and what is cut.

The UK’s housing crisis persists, even as nearly a million homes in England stand empty or serve as second residences. A ‘lack of social housing stock’ is an expression of political will, not a material reality – social housing stock will exist if the government of the day invests in it. While there may be ‘no magic money tree’, there is an abundance of funding available for things that may be less popular with the voting public, yet more attractive to key political allies (the most obvious and controversial being contributions to wars and illegal occupations elsewhere in the world).

We’re served a sense of inevitability about this system, which likely makes us feel powerless. The people making political and economic choices are too powerful to be stopped – the mega-rich can get away with anything if they throw enough money at the problem. So, where does that leave us? Perhaps in search of someone else to take the fight to – someone we can win against. This is how despots have used scapegoating to redirect anger towards a vulnerable minority throughout history, and apparently, it still works.

If we feel confident that it’s possible to fairly distribute resources and access to public services (which are disproportionately staffed by ‘immigrants’) among all those who need them, we have no reason to fear losing what we have to anyone newly arrived. What reframing would it take to believe, and behave as if, there is actually enough space and resource for all of us? This is a conversation I’d like to hear in political spaces.

Taking up your space – how we embody or resist our assigned roles

I’ll be honest – this piece began in my head as a rant about ‘manspreaders’, and later morphed into something a little loftier about how humans negotiate sharing space in the world. London commutes in recent years have seen me choosing passive aggressive sighing over potential confrontation (or having to touch the offending manspreader). For the uninitiated, the term ‘manspreading’ refers to men taking up more than their allocated amount of space in public by sitting with legs spread wide in what seems reasonably interpreted as a show of casual dominance. It’s a minor issue on the face of it, but I’m interested in the ways in which we embody the roles we’ve been given in life via the accident of birth, and the interplay between how much space we feel entitled to take up and social hierarchy. This is not a new concept - feminist and anti-racist discourse has had much to offer about the idea of shrinking ourselves to avoid appearing threatening to those who hold a kind of social power that, on some level, they know is fragile. That fragility can be dangerous, and so those of us in female, Black, Brown, queer, trans, disabled and other marginalised bodies often learn – consciously or unconsciously – to make those bodies as small and convenient as possible when faced with potentially dangerous situations. And of course, there has been a tennis match of backlash in response to this – one notable example being the game of ‘patriarchy chicken’ that some women have documented as a way to test how often they would collide with men while walking in public if they didn’t give way to them (spoiler – the answer is ‘very often’).

I’m concerned and curious about the ways in which social divisions and a return to restrictive ideas about gender might calcify some of these embodied expressions of role and power, and the potential for violence as a response to non-conforming self-expression and claiming of space. This policing of norms, bodies and entitlement to space in the world comes straight from the fascist playbook. And while I don’t want to advocate for anyone to put themselves at risk of harm, I feel that we must continue to work on taking up our space in the world, letting others take theirs, expressing ourselves authentically, and pushing back on archaic roles and power dynamics.

Lawns, legroom and lobbies - social hierarchy in measurable terms

Literal space in the world, in the form of land, has been available to acquire through purchase or invasion throughout most of human history. This is a concept that might feel inevitable, in spite of its absurdity when we zoom out from it. We exchange our labour for currency, a human construct that (in contemporary times) fluctuates in value according to the whims and anxieties of professional gamblers. We hope that this exchange of labour and currency will allow us to say that a slice of the planet we live on belongs to us to do with as we please (local planning regulations permitting). The more value our labour is deemed to be worth by mysterious market forces and the social structures that influence them, the more space we are permitted to occupy. The value assigned to specific forms of labour doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to its social or environmental impact – what’s valued most is potential for further economic growth. So, taking up a lot of space in the world may be considered to be a reward for contributing to companies’ profits and the overall profits made on of a larger patch of land.

In contemporary society, buying a space to call home is increasingly inaccessible. For many of us, the aim is to take up the space that we need in order to live a comfortable and peaceful life. But the number of square feet we can call our ‘own’, and other forms of entitlement to space have also been status symbols throughout history. Take, for example, the humble suburban lawn. This patch of trimmed grass isn’t traditionally designed to support biodiversity, to grow food, or even necessarily to be occupied by its owners. It’s often an extension of the home that is maintained and observed, but doesn’t offer much functionality. Lawns originated as status symbols among the upper classes and, even today, modest lawns serve as displays of wealth—often in climates ill-suited for them. The point of this example is not to berate anyone who meticulously maintains a small patch of grass, but to step back from social norms and markers of status and look at them with curiosity. Disentangling ourselves from the idea of inevitability in the ways we organise our lives (both in private and in community) offers an opportunity to start imagining how things could be different, and what we might want that to look like.

Another example of this ‘space as status symbol’ phenomenon is the hotel or corporate office lobby. These are spaces whose practical function doesn’t necessarily tally with their square footage or their grandeur. They exist to let people know immediately that they are entering a prestigious, important and/or expensive space. The impact of this may be a sense of importance, power and belonging, or a feeling of exclusion (if not, in some cases, a more literal experience of exclusion). We can communicate a lot about who is or isn’t welcome in a space, and how we would like them to feel, through the ways in which we present and organise that space. This is not news to designers, architects, or city planners, but may be a consideration to bear in mind for those of us creating spaces that we wish to be welcoming and inclusive, often on a far more modest budget than a luxury hotel owner.

And now, to air travel… Each time I’ve flown over the last few years, I’ve found myself expressing the same frustration. I’m a pretty small person, but I’m convinced that the amount of space available to me on economy flights is reducing a little with every trip (no, it’s not me expanding). The shift of functional services and relative comfort from standard to premium is a common feature of life in the 2020s. This reminds me of ‘enshittification’ - a corporate tactic of initially offering quality before degrading it and raising prices, while pushing competitors out of the market. A version of this applies to leg room and seat space on flights. I remember complaining about having splashed out for ‘economy plus’ on a flight and apparently being put in a cramped economy seat. When the actual economy seats in the back half of the plane were pointed out, I was reluctantly glad not to be a six foot person who’d spent upwards of £1000 to be crammed into a child sized seat for eight hours. This was an airline I’d flown with a few years previously, and the difference was jarring. What’s interesting about this is the sense of scarcity and acceptance of declining standards around access to space and comfort. In a struggling economy, companies will take whatever action they deem necessary in order to stay afloat, including packing people into spaces like sardines. I’m curious to see how far we will go in accepting the widening division between those who can afford comfort, space and functional services (both commercial and public), and those who have their access to experiences cut off or limited by miserable conditions, long waits and increasing inconvenience. Since my expertise lies in the social, rather than the economic field, it’s difficult to imagine an effective solution for this. But I’m interested in what progressive and creative experts have to say on the matter, and I’m aiming to stay curious about what’s possible, rather than let my lack of knowledge lead me back to a sense of powerlessness and inevitability.

Abundance mindset – what looks different through this lens?

With all of these weighty social issues in mind, it might feel overwhelming to tackle questions of what’s possible as an alternative to a competitive, fear based approach to sharing the world with other humans. We’re not going to revolutionise embedded systems and perspectives easily, quickly or singlehandedly. But if we zoom all the way back in to our own thought processes (and how we communicate them to others), there is a starting point that could be both achievable and encouraging.

I’m using the concepts of ‘scarcity mindset’ and ‘abundance mindset’ here as a way to frame different ways of looking at the world. But I don’t use them uncritically – these are ideas that might lend themselves to over-simplification and stigmatising people for their experiences of structural inequality, so it’s important that they’re offered and considered with nuance and an acknowledgement of the two way relationship between how we think and the systems and cultures we are living in.

A scarcity mindset tells us that there is not enough to go around – this may be about physical space, housing, food, public services, jobs, money etc., but also may be applied to more relational concepts like power, love, being seen and heard, time and attention. If our baseline is a sense of scarcity, an obvious survival response may be to fiercely guard our resources, shut others out and compete for more. We might need to tell ourselves or be told various stories in order to position this as ‘fair’ and maintain our sense of ourselves as ‘good people’. Even though we’ve evolved to survive through cooperation, the amygdala-driven instinct to narrow our focus for our own survival can be powerful, hence populists successfully connecting with this response in disillusioned people, no matter how many times we say ‘never again’.

Conversely, an abundance mindset is similar to a growth mindset, in that it assumes that there is enough to go around and that we have the capacity to access the resources we need. It’s a focus on the possible, which tends to encourage us towards action because it positions us as powerful. It’s easy to see why economic crises, oppression and deteriorating living conditions make it harder to cultivate an abundance mindset – in these situations, evidence, experience and exhaustion tell us that we’re not powerful, and that resources are scarce and inaccessible. Spending the time and energy on reflecting and cultivating an abundance mindset might feel like a luxury when we’re in survival mode. But perhaps it’s a good, preventative practice to get into before we hit survival focused tunnel vision. Change starting with a belief in what’s possible is a cliché, but also an important aspect of human psychology. One of my favourite coaching questions is ‘what would you do if you did believe [insert relevant growth focused belief]?’ Imagining and outlining the steps towards a goal doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s a good starting point from which to look for ways around barriers, keep motivation alive and catalyse change. I’m not advocating for some bootstrap capitalist approach (no doubt, that’s obvious from the mini manifesto above) – it’s not about the power of the individual to improve things for themselves. It’s about taking the time, space and energy to reimagine what sharing the world with others could look like, even when time, space and energy feel scarce. And sharing ideas and imaginings with others may be another step towards changing things for the better – as interdependent creatures, we have so much capacity to make apparently impossible things happen when we tackle them together.