I went to a brilliant event last night at Arup in London. After a talk from Michael Pawlyn for the launch of the third edition of his book Biomimicry in Architecture, he joined a panel (Charlie Warwick, Jo da Silva, Andy Chalmers & Tom Lloyd) to discuss how to push beyond a ‘sustainable’ building industry to aim for real regenerative practices.
A couple of things that occurred to me during the discussion, some of which came up in audience questions too. And I wrote some of the below over on LinkedIn, but wanted to expand a bit more here.
Firstly, there is always acknowledgement of the social dimension in regenerative conversations in this space; but it is never seemingly the first thing addressed. Perhaps it is easier to discuss the trade-offs of the economic and environmental regeneration, especially when we get to the pioneering use (and reuse) of materials.
I guess if you are concentrating a lot on how to take the carbon cost out of the building process, then a lot of your time is spent thinking about ‘yes, but how can we do this more effectively given this budget and those constraints…’
It takes me back in a way to the challenge we designed for the back of the Regenerative Design Field Kit: how do you design ‘The healthiest environment, with the greatest economy, for all in society‘? I have been thinking about this a lot, and for me, to be properly regenerative you have to improve the social, the economic and the environmental together.
But what happens if you truly centre the people who will be affected before, during and after construction, making efforts socially regenerative from the off, and THEN bring that material and economic expertise to bear?
One of Tom Lloyd‘s examples of how the design process (through globalisation) now meant that it’s harder to create a truly regenerative design. For instance, if you needed to do some aluminium casting, the project manager would be able to get that for the best price from anywhere in the world.
But what if, instead, you started from the position of ‘well, what do people make around here?’.And what would the broader social impacts be if we sourced from the immediate surroundings, and invested in what we produce today, and researched how that might be transformed for tomorrow. The building, in a way, then becomes the opportunity for social regeneration, not just the object that needs to someone manage it once designed.
Tom also made the very valid point that for too long the design industry has concentrated on the user-centred, making for the individual. The key point here for me though is that society is not (and has never been) comprised as a stack of individuals, like some many identical bricks in a wall. If we consider concentrating people as being a problem, we are still separating them from nature, rather than being a part of it.
Secondly, there were many mentions of Donella Meadows, systems and levers.
It occurs that deploying such metaphors in an engineering-heavy industry, which will tend naturally to the mechanistic, are perhaps an issue. I usually default to the key lesson from Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By – the more we use metaphors around a certain thing, the more we are likely to behave as if it is that thing.
If you tell a room of engineers that they have to think in systems, and look for levers to pull at certain leverage points, they are going to imagine everything can be processed and systems so that pulling that one level will ‘work every time’
I think it’s better to lean into Meadows invitation to ‘dance with systems’, perhaps?
Have copied it across the below from here – you should go and read the whole thing.:
The Dance
Donella Meadows
1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.
People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.
I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world.
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Thanks to host extraordinaire Lauren Davies for the invitation too, looking forward to the next events in the series.
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