Ethical Reading - The UK's first ethical city
Reading Roofscape by Chris Wood.
Searching online for “ethical cities” you might only come across two. There is Prato, city of 195,000 in Tuscany, Italy, describing itself as an ethical city working to address local problems of poverty, homelessness and reliance on care.
The other is Ethical Reading, an English town located 40 miles west of London, with a population of 173,000. Launched in January 2018 as a not-for-profit social enterprise, Ethical Reading’s mission is to “embed ethics into the way we do business and help make Reading a great place to live and work.”
Ethical Reading was set up by three local business leaders - Gurprit Singh, Gill Ringland and Jim Bignal. The team has grown over time with Directorship in 2024 shared by Gurprit, Graham Roberts (previously worked in the telecom sector) and Brad Hooker, emeritus professor specializing in moral philosophy from the University of Reading. The entire Ethical Reading team is made up of volunteers.
Visiting Ethical Reading in 2018
Since I was planning to visit the UK, I reached out and arranged to meet with Gurprit, Gill and Jim on 8th May 2018. We met at the Great Expectations Hotel and we were joined by Professor Emma Borg from the Philosophy Department at the University of Reading.
I had read an article (coincidently published in January 2018) about how Totnes was one of the most ethical towns in the UK, and quite frankly I was anticipating that Reading, as an ethical city, would be very similar - vegan friendly cafes, zero waste shops, a Transition Town with a local currency, and many more progressive initiatives.
However, Reading is very different. It is an important commercial centre located in the Thames Valley. Hosting the headquarters of a number of major information technology companies, the area is known as the UK’s Silicon Valley. Indeed, Gurprit worked as a software engineer for over 30 years.
This explains why Ethical Reading focuses on promoting an ethical culture in local organizations and on supporting sustainable business practices.
If we consider that the majority of people in the town are employed in the technology sector, are highly educated and entrepreneurial, then the challenge for the Ethical Reading team is how best to present ethics in a manner that would resonate with them. This requires framing the focus on values in terms of business ethics, workplace well-being and ethics in education. It is about working within existing systems and modus operandi rather than calling for transformative change to address social ills.
The town is not without its problems and according to the local council in 2017 it was the third most unequal location in the terms of wealth, containing some of the most deprived neighborhoods in the whole of the Thames Valley.
There may be very little that an entity like Ethical Reading can do about these broader social issues, other than perhaps raising awareness about ethical issues in the wider community. Another bigger and more ambitious goal is to “spark an ethical cities movement.” This was to be our main topic of conversation during my visit.
How to Spark an Ethical Cities Movement?
From March 2015 to March 2018, I worked at RMIT University in Melbourne, which hosted the UN Global Compact Cities Programme from 2007 to 2021. This was a network of around 120 cities that signed up to the ten “ethical” principles of the Global Compact on human rights, labour rights, sustainability and anti-corruption. As of April 2024, there remains fifty-four signatory cities, even though there is no Cities Programme to support their activities.
In the period I spent in Melbourne, we implemented a number of activities to promote the ethical city. This included the 16 February 2016 Urban Thinkers Campus organized at RMIT on “Ethical Cities: Locking in Livability” which brought together 266 participants from 138 organizations.
This was part of the preparations for the UN Habitat III Conference held in Quito on 17-20 October 2016 and where we launched a massive open online course on “Ethical Cities: Shaping the Future of Your City” hosted by Futurelearn. Clearly there were a lot of synergies between the Cities Programme and the work of the Ethical Reading team.
In our discussions it was evident that Gurprit, Gill and Jim would like to see the emergence of an Ethical Cities movement. This would be some form of “Collaborative Partnership” where each city commits to the following: (1) promote ethical values; (2) undertake actions to foster positive change by working with organizations and individuals to create ethical workplace environments; (3) walk the ethical talk (practice rather than preach); and (4) agree to share learnings across the movement.
It would not be necessary for the local government to take the lead (but they should certainly be supportive) and each city would find the model that best fits their circumstances.
Progress since 2018
A lot has happened since 2018 and Ethical Reading has certainly progressed significantly. In the interim, I co-authored a book on Ethical Cities with John Fien and Ralph Horne in December 2020. We invited Brad Hooker to join a panel discussion for the book launch in March 2021 where he provided an update on Ethical Reading (see video).
More recently, Gurprit kindly delivered a lecture on 6 June 2023 to my course on “Ethical and Regenerative Cities” at Osaka University. My students were fascinated to learn about his experience in setting up Ethical Reading and the kinds of challenges they encountered to date.
While an Ethical Cities Movement is yet to emerge, there has been an upsurge in interest (especially from academics) in the notion of the Ethical City.
Back in 2019, one of the first books published on the topic came from Jeffrey Chan on “Urban Ethics in the Anthropocene.” In 2021, Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser published their edited volume on “Urban Ethics: Conflicts over the Good and Proper Life in Cities.” Most recently, there is the book on “The Ethics of Cities” by Timothy Beatley, published in April 2024.
Is this indicative of growing momentum underpinning a new Ethical Cities Movement?