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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The evolution of sustainability, with a practical framework for integration Regenerative Development and Design takes sustainability to the next level, and provides a framework for incorporating regenerative design principles into your current process. The Regenesis Group is a coalition of experienced design, land-use, planning, business, and development professionals who represent the forefront of the movement; in this book, they explain what regenerative development is, how and why it works, and how you can incorporate the fundamental principles into your practice. A clear, focused framework shows you how to merge regenerative concepts with your existing work, backed by numerous examples that guide practical application while illustrating regenerative design and development in action. As the most comprehensive and systemic approach to regenerative development, this book is a must-have resource for architects, planners, and designers seeking the next step in sustainability. Regenerative design and development positions humans as co-creative and mutually-evolving participants in an ecosystem--not just a built environment. This book describes how to bring that focus to your design from the earliest stages. * Understand the fundamentals of regenerative design and development * Learn how regenerative development contributes to sustainability * Integrate regenerative development concepts into practice * Examine sample designs that embody the regenerative concept To create a design with true sustainability, considerations must extend far beyond siting, materials, and efficiency. Designers must look at the place, it's inhabitants, and the purpose--the whole living ecosystem--and proceed with their work from that more humbling perspective. The finished product should itself be an ecosystem and sustainable economy, which is the root of the regenerative development approach. Sustainability has evolved, and the designer's responsibility has increased in kind. Regenerative Development and Design provides an authoritative resource for those ready to take the next step forward.
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REGENERATIVE DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN
A FRAMEWORK FOR EVOLVING SUSTAINABILITY
PAMELA MANGBEN HAGGARDREGENESIS
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: (bottom) © Flickr/Nicholas A. Tonelli, Susquehanna River; (top, left to right) © Michael Sotnikov, Cheonggyecheong Festival; Courtesy of Playa Viva © David Leventhal; Teachers © Regenesis Group; © Sasaki Associates, Las Salinas Master Plan
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
9781118972861 (pbk); 978-1-118-97291-5 (ebk);
978-1-118-97292-2 (ebk); 978-1-119-14969-9 (ebk)
CONTENTS
Foreword
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Changing Our Minds
Regenerative Development
We Are All Designers
An Invitation
Endnote
The Future of Sustainability
A Growing Need for Integration
What Is Sustainability—Really?
Regenerative Development
Becoming a Regenerative Practitioner
Endnotes
Part One: Creating Regenerative Projects
Grounded in Place
Continuing to Evolve
Endnotes
Chapter 1: Evolution
Evolution Versus Entropy
Reconceiving Evolution
Regenerative Goals
Evolution and Design
Architecture for Change
The Brattleboro Co-op
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Chapter 2: Understanding Place
The Commodification of Place
An Approach to Place
Transformational Leverage
Becoming Partners
Renewing the Source
Place as Living System
Creating an Icon
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Chapter 3: Discovering Collective Vocation
Sustainability Is a Byproduct
The Idea of Vocation
Curitiba
Sourcing Direction
Vocation of Place
Nested Vocations
Giving Voice to Vocation
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Chapter 4: The Guilded Age
Co-Evolving Mutualism
Cape Flats Nature
Guilds
Guilds and Regeneration
From Transactional to Relational
Stakeholders as Investor Partners
Wealth Redefined
Creating a Guild at El Jobo
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Part Two: Creating Regenerative Processes
Endnotes
Chapter 5: Start from Potential
Starting Well
Beyond Problem Solving
Creating a Mecca of Sustainability
Thinking Big Enough for Evolution
Rain Savers
Potential Is Inherent
Distinguishing Essence from Talent
Hubbell Trading Post
Potential and Systems
The Nestedness of Potential
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Chapter 6: Value-Adding Roles
Functional Goals
Regenerative Goals
Value-Adding Roles
End-State Thinking
Middle Kyle Canyon, Nevada
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Chapter 7: Transformational Leverage
The Replicability Fallacy
Leveraging Beneficial Impacts
Living Networks
Flows and Nodes
Recognizing Nodes
Transforming Baltimore Harbor
Nodal Interventions
Leveraging Grassroots Movements
Systemic Leverage
Sequencing Change
Rio Sabinal
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Chapter 8: Developmental Work
Avoidance Breeds Reactivity
A Classic Lose-Lose
Proactive Versus Co-Creative
Developmental Processes
Albuquerque’s International District
Upgrading the Predesign Process
Las Salinas, Viña del Mar, Chile
Limitations of Conventional Approaches
Guidelines for Applying the Principle
Endnotes
Part Three: Becoming a Regenerative Change Agent
Endnote
Chapter 9: Systems Actualizing
Inner Work
Self and Systems Actualizing
Becoming a Systems Actualizer
Developmental Aims
An Invitation
Endnotes
Epilogue
Blessed Unrest
A New Role for Design
Endnotes
Further Reading
Index
EULA
List of Illustrations
Changing Our Minds
Figure A.1 Our destiny? It is in our hands.
The Future of Sustainability
Figure B.1 A growing cornucopia of green design choices makes it ever more challenging for designers to sort what we
should
do from what we
can
do.
Figure B.2 Levels of work. Every living system engages in work that is essential to its continuing capacity for evolution.
Operating
and
maintaining
are focused on current existence; they increase performance and efficiency.
Improving
and
regenerating
introduce potential life and creativity, advancing the whole.
Figure B.3 Regenerative practitioners engage simultaneously in three lines of work.
Part One
Figure C.1 Private casita at Playa Viva Resort near Juluchuca, Guerrero, Mexico.
Figure C.2 Ecosystems and trails at Playa Viva.
Figure C.3 Local biodynamic growers treating manure to make organic soil amendments.
Figure C.4 A vibrant local marketplace in Juluchuca.
Figure C.5 Newly hatched sea turtles find their way into the surf, with a little help from employees at the local turtle sanctuary.
Figure C.6 A member of the salt harvesters cooperative at Juluchuca. Visitors to Playa Viva who enjoy the local salt purchase it to take home with them, and this has helped launch an export business.
Figure C.7 A peaceful evening, poolside at Playa Viva.
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 The highly engineered drainage system of the Los Angeles River exemplifies the almost total degradation of a natural riparian system.
Figure 1.2 In comparison, the drainage system of a healthy river watershed nurtures abundant and ever-evolving species in a web of complex relationships.
Figure 1.3 The exchange of pollen and nectar is a mutualism that has driven the evolution of bees and flowers.
Figure 1.4 In healthy natural systems, a single element such as a tree adds value to the larger systems within which it is nested.
Figure 1.5 Along with teaching people to fish, is it possible to teach them to regenerate the health of the fisheries on which they depend.
Figure 1.6 Teddy Cruz’s renderings for Living Rooms at the Border show the project’s emphasis on flexibility for the small, high-density site.
Figure 1.7 The Brattleboro Food Co-op started in 1975 as a small buying club located near the center of downtown Brattleboro.
Figure 1.8 The co-op’s new building, completed in 2012, is still located near the center of downtown, where it serves as an important anchor business. Its multipurpose design supports and helps to continuously renew the 6,000-member co-op’s commitment to community building and a vital local food system.
Figure 1.9 Welcome to the Brattleboro Food Co-op.
Figure 1.10 A primary purpose or role of the Brattleboro Food Co-op is to support the region’s farm economy and make local foods available to members.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Tract housing exemplifies the replacement of distinctive cultural features with imported styles and generic materials.
Figure 2.2 Historic housing in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, expresses the cultural legacy and vibrant daily life of the neighborhood.
Figure 2.3 An architectural rendering showing the layout of botanical and conservation gardens at Springs Preserve in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Figure 2.4 The Desert Living Center and Sustainability Gallery at Springs Preserve.
Figure 2.5 Botanical gardens at the Springs Preserve featuring local native plants.
Figure 2.6 An aerial view of Springs Preserve in the construction phase, showing its location within the city in relation to the downtown strip.
Figure 2.7 Living systems are made of smaller systems nested within larger systems. Within a human body, a muscle cell is nested within a heart, which is nested within a circulatory system. (The body, in turn, is nested within a family, a larger community, and an ecosystem.)
Figure 2.8 The location of McAllen, Texas, on the Rio Grande estuary at the Gulf of Mexico.
Figure 2.9 The organizing idea for Central Park was to bring people from all walks of life into contact with water and each other.
Figure 2.10 Water became a central element of the proposed plan.
Figure 2.11 Every project is nested within its place (its proximate whole), which is nested within a greater whole.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Aerial view of Curitiba, Brazil.
Figure 3.2 Lands around Curitiba’s rivers and riparian systems were purchased by the city and developed into linear parks, running parallel along densely populated urban transportation corridors.
Figure 3.3 Curitiba Botanical Garden is also located in a densely populated area within the city.
Figure 3.4 La Palmilla, an area of the Rio Bobos watershed of Veracruz, Mexico.
Figure 3.5 Recently discovered ruins in La Palmilla, partially excavated and developed for tourism.
Figure 3.6 The El Jobo project master plan, developed in the conceptual phase.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 A restored stretch of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, the largest metropolitan area in New Mexico.
Figure 4.2 When wildlife corridors are restored, wild animals can show up unexpectedly in urban neighborhoods. This requires some adjustment but also reconnects residents with nature.
Figure 4.3 View of Cape Town, South Africa, from Table Mountain.
Figure 4.4 A guild is a web of exchanges among a diverse range of entities, which together create the world that sustains them.
Figure 4.5 A natural guild in a southwestern U.S. desert ecosystem, whose key element is a species of juniper tree.
Figure 4.6 Genuine wealth is grown from the simultaneous development of multiple forms of capital, which work together as a dynamic system.
Figure 4.7 The
campesinos
who would be members of the El Jobo project’s stakeholder guild would benefit from agricultural training provided by the university. In turn they would provide a benefit to distributors in the form of higher-value farm products.
Part Two
Figure D.1 Location in British Columbia of Metro Vancouver’s Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Figure D.2 One designer joked that the Lion’s Gate water treatment plant should be a place where couples would come to get married. “Why not?” responded others, and the team made it a design standard.
Figure D.3 Metro Vancouver’s public engagement process for the Lions Gate project built overwhelming public support, resulting in a decision to embrace transparent public involvement in all future projects.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Downtown Portland, Oregon. In the 1960s adjacent residential neighborhoods were torn up to make room for highways and high rises.
Figure 5.2A A street in the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, before swales were dug and food-bearing trees were planted.
Figure 5.2B The same street in 2006—a representative image of transformation throughout the neighborhood.
Figure 5.3 In the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood, a newly constructed water-harvesting
chicane
(basin) along a bicycle boulevard is filled with rainwater after a summer storm.
Figure 5.4 A mobile hammermill grinds neighborhood-grown-and-harvested mesquite pods into edible flour.
Figure 5.5 Everyone is invited to participate in the neighborhood prickly pear harvest!
Figure 5.6 The original stone building at the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site now houses the traditional jewelry room and grocery, a curator’s office, wareroom, and storage room. A two-story stone barn is visible behind the main building.
Figure 5.7 Stone hogans are traditional Navajo dwellings, often homes for extended families. This modified version (windows added) was originally used as a guest house.
Figure 5.8 Outbuildings and fenced pasture at Hubbell Trading Post.
Figure 5.9 Churro sheep are a foundation of the traditional Navajo herding life, essential sources of food, clothing, and furnishings.
Figure 5.10 Nested wholes of Hubbell National Historic Site.
Figure 5.11 Salmon fed the valley, even as the valley enabled them to thrive.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 When wolves like these were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park, degraded natural systems rebounded and became vibrant again.
Figure 6.2 Gateway to the Spring Mountains. Forest Service Visitor Center, Middle Kyle Canyon.
Figure 6.3 The project mandate is to promote more public use while protecting the integrity of the many fragile ecosystems and sacred sites that make the Spring Mountains special.
Figure 6.4 A primary value-adding role is to help visitors from the nearby urban areas make an appropriate transition to the area’s natural environment.
Figure 6.5 A site plan for the Spring Mountains Visitor Gateway illustrates the project’s change in concept from “administrative hub” to “gateway,” fostering gradual attunement to the area’s ecological and spiritual values.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Replication made sense in a mechanical age, but it fails to reflect the cultural, economic, and ecological systems of place.
Figure 7.2 In a gallery forest, as in all natural systems, a set of unifying patterns organize the continuing flow and transformative exchanges of energy, material, and information that enable life to be self-generating.
Figure 7.3 A through D Some “edges” that as nodes include the permeable surfaces of human bodies, market places, geological keylines, and beaver dams.
Figure 7.4 Students planting wetlands seedlings in floating platforms constructed in part from plastic bottles retrieved from Baltimore’s storm drains.
Figure 7.5 Students prepare to float platforms, Earth Day 2012.
Figure 7.6 Platforms soon become nodes in a thriving wetlands system.
Figure 7.7 Crabs, mussels, eels, and other aquatic life colonize the floating wetlands’ root systems; waterfowl take advantage of the reappearance of food and shelter.
Figure 7.8 Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the Rio Sabinal watershed of Mexico.
Figure 7.9 A stretch of the Rio Sabinal showing bank erosion and stabilization.
Figure 7.10
Collar de flores
, a concept for the Rio Sabinal restoration project: Parks are strung along the river like a “necklace of flowers,” each a node in the larger riverine system, and each featuring a different sacred flower.
Figure 7.11 Rendering of a walkway in a
collar de flores
park. Each park is also a node within a neighborhood system, a center to promote education and active community engagement with smaller river tributaries.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 A local crowd gathers at the ID LIVE! festival.
Figure 8.2 Residents converse at the ID LIVE! festival.
Figure 8.3 Street performance at the ID LIVE! festival.
Figure 8.4 A view of the horizon in Viña del Mar, Chile.
Figure 8.5 Street art in Viña del Mar, Chile.
Part Three
Figure E.1 Beatrice Benne is a Bay Area–based community developer with a regenerative practice.
Figure E.2 A coastal view in Brittany, France.
Figure E.3 Participants at the workshop facilitated by Beatrice Benne.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Self-observing and self-remembering requires differentiating the self into three levels.
Guide
Cover
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Foreword
Predictions of the future can be hazardous or downright foolish. But the failure of foresight—the inability to read the hand-writing on the wall—is even more so. Designers of all kinds work in the conflicted space between these two poles. Their goal is to improve small parts of a rapidly changing world with the tools of form, scale, materials, energy, water, color, landscape, and the creativity that is found most often at the grassroots level. But what needs to be improved?
The short answer is “a great deal,” including an energy system that is rapidly destabilizing the climate, an economy driving tens of thousands of species to extinction, a political system that sanctions gross inequality, an uncivil society, the growing autism toward the natural world, and a global system mired in conflict. These are related problems, parts of a larger civilizational crisis with roots traceable to the seventeenth century authors of the mechanical world view. But there are deeper pathologies with footprints back to our ancient schizophrenia toward the natural world that had to be tamed a bit before it could be appreciated.
Designers, however, typically do not work at the macro scale of civilization for good reasons. Whether as architecture, engineering, materials, or landscapes, design is bounded by the minute particulars of projects in their specific social, cultural, and historical context. As a result designers work from the bottom up on projects at the building, neighborhood, and city scales. But the big problems mentioned above are in large part the sum total of bad design (including that of public policies) at lower levels. There are many reasons for bad design, not the least of which is a professional focus on form-making, often oblivious to other consequences.
Beginning in the 1970s a few renegade architects like Sim Van der Ryn in California became concerned about the collateral environmental impacts of the design professions. Van der Ryn envisioned ecological design as the calibration of buildings with their places, which required further integral understanding of landscapes, energy flows, waste cycling, materials, sunlight, water, and ecological processes. Ecological design, in other words, aims to calibrate human actions with the way natural systems work as particular places, larger landscapes, and whole ecologies. It aims to work with, not against, the flows of energy and natural cycling of materials. The goal, in short, was to reduce environmental impacts of the “built environment” in a civilization that prized economic expansion above all else with hardly a thought for the morrow.
What began so modestly in the 1970s has rapidly grown into a global movement to harmonize buildings, neighborhoods, and cities with the surrounding nature. After the publication of the Brundtland Commission report in 1987, the goals of ecological designers expanded to embrace the wider (but vague) mission of sustainability. But we know now that that word signifies more than was once assumed. Sustainability is the sum total of other qualities. As Chattanooga City Councilman, David Crockett puts it: “make it clean, green, safe, and fair and it will be sustainable.” The left side of that equation, however, requires the elimination of the growing inequality that is a precursor to violence and ruined lives. It further requires rethinking our core assumptions about the relation between economic growth and real progress. Ecological design, in other words, must be large enough in foresight, scope, and heart to include the social and economic environment in which it is embedded. In that way ecological design is a radical endeavor in the true sense of the word, it gets to the root of what ails us.
The work described in this book takes design to yet another level that aims to regenerate the fabric of life and repair the wounds and tears inflicted by the carelessness of the fossil-fuel-powered growth economy. Regenerative design strives to create the conditions of health which ecologist Aldo Leopold once defined as “the capacity of the land for self-renewal.” It aims, in other words, for wholeness, a word linked etymologically with healing, health, and Holy. Designers in this sense are midwives to the birth of a larger, deeper, and more resilient kind of order capable of regenerating the conditions of life and health. It is predicated on the co-evolution of human and natural systems, each supporting the other. In Robert Grudin’s words, design, “unlike any other concept . . . calls for us to create a unity of part with whole, a concord of form and function, a finished product that is harmonious with society and with nature.”1
In this history the trend is for design questions to go to deeper levels and design projects to become catalysts for still further changes. In architect Stuart Walker’s words design must, “transcend utility and conventional function-led, and especially technology-led approaches.”2 Designers, in his view, must rise above “the calculated creation of dissatisfaction” and “think more comprehensively about the products we already produce and their implications.”3 Design, in other words, must be an act of integration, not just specialization, with the goal of creating a wholeness that includes spiritual well-being. And it should start with those who serve as designers.4
Regenerative design has many effects. For one, it changes the relationship of people to their places. It can restore the reservoir of practical ecological competence at the local level allowing us to do more for ourselves and for each other—the things that we once did naturally as capable people, good neighbors, and active citizens. It helps ground us by better informing us of where we are and the ecology and energy flows by which we are sustained in a particular place. In a world where any one place has come to look much like any other, we have lost sight of the fine print of our lives and how we are provisioned with food, energy, materials, and spiritual sustenance.
We are mostly ignorant of the costs and consequences of the systems that provide for us so seamlessly and oblivious to their inherent fragility. Regenerative design helps us know where we are and how to be competent, respectful, and generous there. Our places should be ecologically designed landscapes whose multiple functions retain water for drought periods, manage floods, grow food and fiber, sustain wildlife, and absorb carbon. They should be working systems that blend agro-forestry, mixed-use permacultures, intensive agricultural and gardening zones, viticulture, aquaculture, water purification, restoration, and recreation. And they should be loved and managed by local citizens who use them to train young people in the essentials of managed integrated ecologies.5
Further, regenerative design should enhance the opportunities for caring, conviviality, celebration, and face-to-face democracy.6 Communities with front porches, public squares, community gardens and solar systems, neighborhood stores, corner pubs, and open places of worship are more likely to thrive in the years ahead. This is because they create the conditions favorable to neighborliness, community cohesion, and buffering from hardships. Good design should engage people in the making of their homes, neighborhoods, towns, and regions. It should increase civic intelligence, sense of potential, and joy in life. In this way, designers are facilitators in a larger public conversation, architects of better possibilities, not just makers of buildings and things.
A rapidly warming climate will add to the design challenges ahead. Designers must reckon with a world of higher temperatures, stronger winds, more frequent and larger storms, rising ocean levels, longer droughts, much larger rainfall events, and new diseases.7 These will likely cause interruptions in supplies of food, energy, and water and could trigger social disruptions. We must design with the awareness of the fragility of our civilization, as Jared Diamond and others warn. We must build in the ability to maintain hope and function as a society in emergency (and possibly breakdown) and lay the basis for recovery.8
The Great Work of our generation is to create a post-fossil-fuel and post-consumer economy that is regenerative, fair, durable, resilient, convivial, and democratic. It must be powered by renewable energy. It must be a circular economy that recycles, reuses, or transforms its wastes. Of necessity it will be much more focused on essentials of food, energy, shelter, clean water, education, the arts, and rootedness in place and bioregion. It will be built by local people who cherish and understand their places and the place of nature in a sustainable economy. But it must also be a political economy, a product of revitalized grassroots capability and vision. If it is to flourish, it must regenerate possibilities and capacities that grow from foresight married to practical ecological competence.
David W. Orr
Endnotes
1
. Robert Grudin,
Design and Truth
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) p. 131.
2
. Stuart Walker,
Designing Sustainability
(London: Routledge, 2014) p. 35; also Victor Papenek,
Design for the Real World
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984/1992) p. 252.
3
.
Ibid
., pp. 47, 45.
4
. Papenek,
op. cit.
, pp. 293–299.
5
. Modeled on John and Nancy Todd’s work in ecological design, the Intervale project in Burlington, Vermont is a prime example.
6
. Randolph T. Hester,
Design for Ecological Democracy
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), is a thorough guide to “ecological democracy” and the use of design to rebuild the sinews of a coherent, participatory, and therefore resilient society.
7
. Sue Roaf et.al.,
Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change
, 2nd edition (London: Elsevier, 2009); Alisdair McGregor et.al.,
Two Degrees: The Built Environment and Our Changing Climate
(London: Routledge, 2013).
8
. For example, Lewis Dartnell,
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm
(New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
Acknowledgments
We’d like to give thanks to our colleagues at Regenesis who “authored” the work introduced here through their work over the past 20 years—Joel Glanzberg, Bob Mang, Nicholas Mang, Tim Murphy, Bill Reed, and our newest member Ray Lucchesi.
We’d also like to acknowledge our writing team, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day: Shannon Murphy, our multitalented business manager whose editing sharpened our writing and whose project management kept the whole show on the road; Kit Brewer, copyeditor supreme, who made our sentences elegant and brought order and harmony to the text; and Adriane Zacmanidis, who brought her expressive gifts to the task of developing, selecting, and assembling the images and illustrations for the book.
We have the utmost gratitude for our respective spouses, Bob Mang and Joe Miron, whose remarkable patience and ongoing support kept us going.
And, finally, we thank the many people whose work has inspired us to dig deeper and go further over the years, and on whose shoulders we stand. Our work has been particularly sourced by the thinking of Charlie Krone. In some ways he triggered this journey with his statement 30 years ago that regeneration must be the work of the twenty-first century.
Other thinkers who have influenced us include Gregory Bateson, John Bennett, Wendell Berry, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Ervin Laszlo, John Tillman Lyle, Bill Mollison, David Orr, Robert Rodale, Elisabet Sahtouris, Carol Sanford, and E.O. Wilson. In addition, we have been nourished and inspired by the spirit of exploration and committed engagement that we find in friends and colleagues such as Bob Berkebile, John Boecker, Chrisna DuPlessis, Dominique Hes, Jason McLennan, Sym Van der Ryn, Judy Wick, and our students and clients around the planet who are striving to bring a more regenerative world into being.
The work of these visionaries continues to inspire and support us as we move on to the next horizon in our own learning and growth.
Changing Our Minds
Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come not from dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds—sometimes by only a little bit. . . . By deliberately changing the internal images of reality, people can change the world.1
Willis Harmon
In the twenty-first century, human beings face global and seemingly intractable problems. However, close examination reveals that the challenges lie not in the problems themselves, but in the inherent complexity of the world within which they exist.
Most of the technologies needed to address these problems have been developed and are well understood, and yet they persist because their causes are systemic and can’t be solved at a purely technical level. They require a different kind of mind, one that can creatively navigate multiple overlapping systems—economic, social, ecological, and political.
One could argue, for example, that the solution to the problem of deforestation is simple: “Plant trees.” As a technology, tree planting generates beneficial results with regard to everything from climate change to degraded ecosystems to people’s quality of life. Yet it has proven very difficult to summon the political will and financial resources necessary to make a commitment to reversing environmental decline through broad-scale tree planting. The technology might be simple, but managing the complex interactions among political, economic, and ecological dynamics in order to put the technology to use? That’s another matter.
The important global challenges of our time will be solved through widespread adoption of design practices that are capable of assessing and responding to the world’s living complexity.
The challenges of our time will be solved through widespread adoption of design practices that are capable of assessing and responding to the world’s living complexity. Regenerative development provides a framework for growing this capability.
Regenerative Development
The Regenesis Group first proposed the term regenerative development in 1995. It describes an approach that is about enhancing the ability of living beings to co-evolve, so that our planet continues to express its potential for diversity, complexity, and creativity.
The core issue, Regenesis proposed, was cultural and psychological, and only secondarily technological.
The founders of Regenesis began with a fundamental belief that environmental problems were symptoms of a fractured relationship between people and nature. The core issue, they proposed, was cultural and psychological, rather than technological. Addressing it would require a transformation in how humans played their role as members of an ecologically connected planet. We would need to shift from seeing ourselves as separate from nature to seeing ourselves as part of a co-evolutionary whole, in symbiotic relationship with the living places we inhabit.
They further proposed that this shift is directly connected to will and agency. Managing the level of complexity that we are faced with requires consistent effort. For this reason, questions of individual and political will lie at the heart of many of the challenges we face as a species. If we don’t address intangibles like motivation and will, the tangible solutions that seem so obvious will continue to elude us.
The theoretical and technological foundations for a regenerative development methodology emerged as Regenesis engaged its clients and colleagues in the practical challenges of land and community development. The goal was a meta-discipline for integrating a broad range of ecological and social dynamics.
This work drew from the backgrounds of Regenesis’ members, which included architecture, business, landscape ecology, geohydrology, landscape design, regenerative agriculture, real estate development, urban planning, general systems theory, living systems theory, and developmental psychology. It integrated three distinct but complementary approaches to change:
Living Systems Thinking: a framework-based approach, developed by Charles Krone, that consciously improves people’s capacity to illuminate the inherent potential that a living system is attempting to manifest
Permaculture: an ecological design system, originated by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s, that discerns patterns in natural and human systems in order to weave them together as dynamic wholes
Developmental Change Processes: an approach to community engagement that encourages stakeholders to work together to evolve the potential of place, rather than struggling over the limits presented by existing conditions
We Are All Designers
Those who are drawn to the practice of regenerative development tend to share certain characteristics. They feel a deep connection to natural systems. They recognize that a sustainable future requires transforming not just physical infrastructure but social structures as well. They believe that how decisions are made is fundamental to creating real change, and they seek to work developmentally and co-creatively with those they serve. They make thoughtful choices about which actions are likely to be the most systemically beneficial. Put another way, they are designers.
Although this book is addressed primarily to designers working on human habitation, the principles articulated here are applicable to the design of almost anything—from industrial products to forest management plans, educational curricula to transportation infrastructures, community economies to businesses. In other words, because design is a nearly universal human activity, this book is not just for architects, planners, engineers, or community organizers. Its principles can be applied by all those who wish to better the health and well-being of their communities. Educators and businesspeople, investors and community leaders, farmers and foresters, architects and engineers—all have necessary contributions to make to a regenerative way of living.
. . . because design is a nearly universal human activity . . . its principles can be applied by all those who wish to better the health and well-being of their communities.
The purpose of this book is to provide a user-friendly introduction to the nature of thinking that is fundamental to regenerative development. Through real-world examples and general principles, it provides a framework for rethinking what design and development have the potential to accomplish. From a regenerative perspective, any project, no matter how modest, can generate beneficial impacts that ripple out and contribute to making a healthier world.
Because this practice was first evolved in arenas of land use and community development, the vast majority of the examples offered in the following chapters are drawn from these fields. However, regenerative development is organized around a set of design principles that are broadly applicable. Design, after all, is the application of forethought to something we wish to achieve. Teachers design curricula, activists design community engagements, and doctors design medical protocols in much the same ways that planners design town centers.
Regenerative development lies outside of the mechanistic habits of thought that are cultivated and sustained by most educational, social, and economic institutions. This means that regenerative development can feel elusive and challenging at first. Its language can seem opaque, its meanings slippery and hard to grasp, because words are being used in unfamiliar ways, marked by the continuous flow and change that is characteristic of living, evolving systems. But even so, regenerative development can be understood by anyone with the will to engage with it. Our human minds, with their elegance and power, are the products of the same evolutionary flow and change as every other living system. Nature, one might say, is our nature.
An Invitation
The thinking behind regenerative development continues to evolve through project work and in dialogue with diverse sustainability practitioners. A core aim of this book is to extend an invitation to join in that exploration. Regenerative development is itself a co-evolutionary process that will continue to deepen and ramify as new practitioners, disciplines, and cultures bring their perspectives to defining a new, participatory role for human beings on a rapidly changing planet. We at Regenesis see ourselves as part of a tradition that started before us and will continue long after us. The journey is only beginning.
The present moment offers the potential, born of crisis, to transform the way humans inhabit Earth.
The present moment offers the potential, born of crisis, to transform the way humans inhabit Earth. To do so, we must learn to respond creatively to an increasingly unpredictable world. We must enable the places where we live and work to thrive, not just sustain a precarious balance. We must embrace the inherently beautiful complexity of life as a source of innovation and evolution. We must discover new ways to participate in a dynamic universe.
An old Sufi story beautifully captures our historic moment: There once was a man who was renowned in his village and the surrounding region for his wisdom. Two young jackanapes decided to test him. “Let’s catch a small bird,” said one to the other. “We’ll ask him if it’s alive or dead. If he says it’s alive, I’ll crush it in my hands. If he says it’s dead, I’ll let it fly away and prove him wrong.” When they approached the sage, the youth called out, “Old man, hidden in my hands is a bird. You have great wisdom. Can you tell me if it is dead or alive?” The wise man looked him in the eyes, and with a gentle smile replied, “It is in your hands.”
Our destiny? It is in our hands.
Figure A.1 Our destiny? It is in our hands.
Copyright © Nathan Siemers/flickr.com Creative Commons
Endnote
1
. Willis Harmon,
Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century
(New York: Warner Books, 1990), pp. 155, 157.
The Future of Sustainability
We have an incredible opportunity to improve life on this planet for all living beings.1
Daniel Wildcat
Over the last decade and a half, the global sustainability movement has grown more rapidly every year. Aided by blockbuster films, startup industries, and widening impacts of climate change, the practice of sustainability has shifted from twentieth-century geeky backwater to twenty-first-century international dialogue. Cities around the world are in a race to show who can be greenest quickest. Businesses tout their sustainable practices as a marketing advantage. Green products compete for shelf space in retail markets with a war of adjectives—natural, holistic, organic, sustainably harvested, fair trade. Today the debate is shifting from whether we should work on sustainability to how we’re going to get it done.
This focused attention has led to an explosion of creative activity and new methodologies: cradle-to-cradle, natural step, permaculture, biophilia, living buildings, eco-districts, resilience planning, transition cities, and integrative and biomimetic design. But a superabundance of options for what we can do has also made figuring out what we should do more challenging (Figure B.1).
Figure B.1 A growing cornucopia of green design choices makes it ever more challenging for designers to sort what we should do from what we can do.
Copyright © Regenesis Group Inc. Illustration by Kronosphere Design
Professionals and citizen activists alike find themselves challenged: “How do all these approaches fit together?” “How do they connect with my work?” “How should I choose among them?” “How can I know that they are leading to a more sustainable world?”
To successfully access and employ the power of this rapidly changing field, we must see the relationships among these varied strategies and how they fit together. This becomes possible through an integrative framework called regenerative development.
To successfully access and employ the power of this rapidly changing field, we must see the relationships among varied strategies and how to fit them together.
Regenerative development provides a context and guide for understanding the multiplicity of sustainability approaches as a coherent phenomenon that is genuinely capable of matching the complexity of today’s global issues.
A Growing Need for Integration
Analysts typically trace such rapid growth in a modern industry to the rise of global communications or the economic incentives of new markets. But in this case there is a deeper explanation. The primary driving force behind the growth of sustainability has come from Earth itself. Whatever one believes about the causes, it is evident that every one of our critical planetary support systems—oceans, forests, soils, atmosphere, biodiversity—is in decline. It is even more evident that all of our best efforts have failed to halt the degenerative spirals that are sapping the health of these systems and, in the process, threatening the viability of human communities.
Since the turn of the century, cascades of scientific studies have been painting an increasingly grim picture of the state of the planet. Loss of biological diversity has reduced the ability of ecosystems to sustain human societies.2 Sixty percent of ecosystem services such as water supplies, fish stocks, fertile soils, and storm protection are already in decline.3 Between 1970 and 2010 vertebrate populations around the world (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish) dropped by more than half in fewer than two human generations.4
In Latin America the decline is even more drastic—83 percent. Fifty countries are experiencing “moderate to severe water stress on a year-round basis.” Twenty-seven countries—including the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and the Netherlands—are importing more than half the water they consume in order to produce goods from wheat to cotton. Fourteen of the top 20 U.S. cities (40 percent of the world’s population, nearly 1.2 billion people) are located in coastal zones where a changing climate exposes them to the risk of storm surges and sea level rises.5
Sustainability is no longer an issue of altruism or responsibility; it has become one of survival. “Nature,” notes pioneer ecologist Lawrence Slobodkin, “doesn’t die. But the planet may no longer be a welcome place for human habitation.”6
What Is Sustainability—Really?
The sustainability movement continues to be handicapped, decades after its emergence, by a lingering lack of clarity about what sustainability actually means. When pressed, most people agree that sustainable human endeavors are those that can be maintained over a long period of time without causing problems for future generations. They also generally agree that sustainability is going to require fundamental changes in the ways humans live. But then the conversation goes straight to strategizing. What’s usually missing is an adequate understanding of what sustainability is actually supposed to achieve.
The Urban Learning Group has observed that, “When tools and strategies are the initial focus of efforts to seed fundamental change, people tend to end up in the same place as they started, with little or no fundamental change.”7 In our action-oriented modern culture, we jump to devise a solution as soon as we see a problem. We try to discover the way to sustainability through a process of elimination—pick a strategy, pursue it until its usefulness has been exhausted, then switch to another. Or worse, we stand around and argue about which strategy to choose in the first place. Because we don’t know where we’re going, any path will do.
We can continue like this, but the risk of arriving too late increases every day.
