Regenerative Development & Design

Forward by David Orr
1. rethinking relationship between economic growth and progress
2. design to regenerate the fabric of life
3. design as act of integration, not specialization
  1. creating wholeness
4. designers as
  1. facilitators in public conversations
  2. architects of greater possibilities
5. design with fragility of civilization in mind
Changing Our Minds
1. challenges not in problems themselves, but in the complexity of the world
2. need to creatively navigate multiple overlapping systems
  1. social
  2. ecological
  3. political
3. Regenerative Development
  1. about enhancing the ability of living beings to co-evolve, so that our planet continues to express its potential for diversity, complexity, and creativity.
  2. core issue is cultural and psychological
    1. secondarily technological
  3. problems are symptoms of fractured relationship between humans and nature
  4. requires transformation of human role
  5. shift directly connected to
    1. will
    2. agency
  6. meta-discipline integrating
    1. living systems thinking
      1. Charles Krone
    2. Permaculture
    3. developmental change processes
4. We are all designers
  1. 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 Future of Sustainability
1. A growing need for integration
  1. must see the relationships among varied strategies and how to fit them together.
2. What is sustainability, really?
  1. Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development,
    1. John Tillman Lyle
  2. Two models of nature
    1. ideas of Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and Renee Descartes.
      1. nature is finite, linear, and subject to the same laws as mechanical systems.
      2. Humans stand apart from and hold stewardship over nature for the purpose of maintaining and growing human welfare.
    2. drawn from the insights of ecology.
      1. nature works as a dynamic organic web, within which interdependent entities organize and maintain themselves, exchange information and energy, and evolve in harmony with their local environments.
      2. biocentric
      3. Humans are simply one species among many, equal rather than superior.
  3. The changing meaning of sustainability
    1. 3 overlapping phases in its evolution
      1. equilibrium
      2. viewed as a steady state
      3. Design strategies for achieving sustainable equilibrium began by focusing on efficiency and the minimization of the negative impacts of resource and energy use.
      4. Living systems simply don’t exist in steady states. They survive by changing and adapting, seeking dynamic equilibrium within their evolving environments.
      5. require disruption to remain healthy
      6. resilience
      7. seeks to maintain the health and productivity of systems in the face of unpredictable changes arising in the environment.
      8. change is nonlinear, that it emerges from complex relationships among multiple actors.
      9. based not on achieving a steady state but rather on being able to regroup and move forward when equilibrium has been disrupted.
      10. metaphor of a world spinning out of control and can result in a complex game of avoidance and rapid recovery.
      11. politics and economics are defensive.
      12. bunker mentality
      13. integrity of larger systems gets sacrificed to immediate local needs.
      14. co-evolution
      15. humans contribute to the abundance of life.
      16. role of humans has recently begun to move from the margins of the sustainability conversation to its center.
      17. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources.
      18. Kat Anderson
      19. Raymond Cole
      20. move from designing things to designing “the ‘capability’ of the constructed world (and of human activities) to support the positive co-evolution of human and natural systems.”
3. Regenerative development
  1. “co-evolutionary partner with nature,”
    1. pursuing sustainability within the conceptual framework of living, evolving systems.
  2. regenerative development as defining the desired outcome and regenerative design as the means of achieving it.
  3. 3 key ideas
    1. Regeneration as Enabler of Evolution
      1. regeneration is one of four different natures of work (Charles Krone)
      2. operate
      3. increase the efficiency of energy and material use, remove variances such as toxicity, and achieve higher standards through capable and disciplined practice.
      4. maintain
      5. concerned with sustaining the desired effect and effectiveness of operations in the face of perturbations and environmental uncertainty.
      6. improve
      7. increasing the value-adding capacity of human and natural systems.
      8. regenerate
      9. addresses the unrealized potential inherent in the relationship between a given system and the larger systems within which it is nested.
      10. enables living systems to evolve by expressing their latent potential in the form of new value in the world.
      11. four levels of work are interdependent and necessary to one another.
      12. the highest or regenerative level of work guides the other levels, enabling the system as a whole to evolve in harmony with its environment.
  4. working in place
    1. if we wish to engage in co-evolutionary partnerships with nature, we have to do so place by place,
    2. works on growing the capacity of the natural, cultural, and economic systems in a place.
    3. it is only in relationship to place that humans experience a sense of intimacy with and responsibility for the living world.
  5. notable scholars
    1. David Suzuki
    2. Daniel Wildcat
    3. Wendell Berry
    4. David Orr
  6. developmental processes
    1. grows new capability and capacity in the people that it affects.
    2. including human development in every aspect of a project.
    3. project teams seek to develop their capability to think and act more systemically as they engage in the work of producing designs.
    4. vision and planning were emergent, growing out of an understanding of place that came from ongoing community dialogue.
4. Becoming a regenerative practitioner
  1. 3 agents that influence ability to bring about change
    1. product
      1. continues to act on the world into which it has been created.
    2. process
      1. shapes the consciousness, capabilities, and aspirations embedded into the product.
    3. designer
      1. unique capabilities and outlook impress themselves on everything she does.
  2. Three Lines of Work framework
    1. engages in all three lines of work and seeks to understand, develop, and integrate them, making them more conscious and bringing them into alignment.
    2. as much about developing capability and potential in oneself and one’s teams as it is about developing them in projects and communities.
Part I: Creating Regenerative Projects
1. do not think about what they are designing as an end product. They think about it as the beginning of a process.
2. regenerate not only the ecological health of the area but also the local culture and economy.
3. Grounded in place
  1. Playa Viva
4. Continuing to evolve
  1. allowed itself the time to adapt and expand gradually. It has become a leader in the community, with an increasingly beneficial effect on the surrounding ecosystem and its inhabitants.
1:1 - Evolution
1. Evolution vs entropy
  1. not an accurate description of the ways that living systems actually work.
  2. premise one
    1. every living system has inherent within it the possibility to move to new levels of order, differentiation, and organization.
  3. Shaped by the Industrial Era’s interpretation of evolution and natural selection as the struggle over scarce resources,
    1. worked to make sure we came out on top in any competition with other species.
    2. evolution as a kind of existential game in which the only rule is to stay in it.
  4. principle one
    1. design for evolution
2. Reconceiving evolution
  1. cooperation (deriving from the mutuality of interest among organisms and ecosystems) rather than competition as evolution’s primary driver.
  2. cooperation is the hallmark of a species’ evolutionary trajectory.
  3. No species is in charge— the system’s leadership is distributed among all species,
  4. the organisms that succeed in evolution are the ones that become important to the complex, multileveled larger systems they depend upon.
  5. “the story not merely of evolution, but of co-evolution.
  6. organisms that are seemingly at odds can “help” each other— not because they are altruistic, but because they play supportive roles within the ecosystem on which they mutually depend.
  7. every organism on Earth is a participant in evolution.
  8. Human Ecosystems
    1. Natural systems are inherently complex, yet too often our engineering practices try to simplify them— dumbing them down,
    2. we manifest the same complexity that we see in nature within our social behaviors and organizations.
    3. the tendency toward differentiation, cooperation, altruism, and holism offer the same evolutionary advantages in human systems that they do in natural ones.
  9. Staying in the Game
    1. four fundamentals of living systems
      1. The Only Constant Is Change
      2. Designing for evolution requires us to treat change as a source of creativity.
      3. harness the energies of change, as a surfer rides a wave, in order to outmaneuver the forces of entropy.
      4. In times of crisis (rapid and disruptive change) evolution accelerates.
      5. must help build the capability to use change positively into the systems in which they are working.
      6. Diversity Is About Exchanging Value
      7. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos,
      8. Mitchell Waldrop
      9. A forest doesn’t become healthy because it contains a long list of plant and animal species; it becomes healthy when those species actively nourish and shelter one another in an unbroken web of beneficial relationships.
      10. A diversity of elements, such as organisms in an ecosystem or buildings on a site, adds nothing if there is no beneficial exchange of resources, energy, or material among them.
      11. “The evolutionary process is an awesome improvisational dance that weaves individual, communal, ecosystemic and planetary interests into a harmonious whole.”
      12. Elisabet Sahtouris
      13. Value Enhances Viability
      14. Exchanges become important to evolution when they create value.
      15. Value arises when an object or service is delivered to a recipient.
      16. increases when, as a result, that recipient is enabled to contribute to the viability of a larger system in a continually evolving world.
      17. As living entities evolve, they upgrade the value delivered by what they produce.
      18. virtuous cycle
      19. the tree strengthens its community, which in turn enables the tree to grow stronger and further strengthen the community.
      20. Adding Value Is a Nested Phenomenon
      21. Each living system contributes to the value-adding processes of the larger system within which it is nested, and that system in turn contributes to an even larger system.
      22. Too often, people design systems with inadequate understanding of how their effects, positive and negative, will move outward into larger and larger systems (or inward into smaller and smaller systems).
3. Regenerative goals
  1. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
    1. Stewart Brand
    2. buildings evolve organically when their occupants refine and reshape them in response to their immediate needs
  2. design for evolution, entails working with a complex, layered, and dynamic set of relationships.
  3. a regenerative project seeks to build the evolutionary capability of the systems into which it is designed— for example, organizations, communities, and watersheds.
  4. regenerative projects seek to transform human communities into living systems enablers.
4. Evolution and design
  1. shift from working on things and structures in isolation from their context to the design of living systems with built-in evolutionary capacity.
  2. invite a far higher level of unpredictability into their work
  3. By abandoning the illusion of control, designers enter a deeper practice, fostering the inherent creativity of the systems in which they are working.
  4. wealth should be measured in the ability to evolve and adapt.
    1. C.S. Holling
  5. regenerative approach shifts the focus of sustainable design from slowing down entropy to building the capability of living communities to evolve toward greater value.
5. Architecture for change
  1. Teddy Cruz
  2. housing density needs to be understood not in terms of number of units but “in relationship to the larger infrastructure of the city, which includes transportation, ecological networks, the politics and economics of land use, and particular cultural idiosyncrasies of place.”
  3. “the best ideas for the shape of cities in the future will not come from any place of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can inspire us to rethink urban growth today.”
  4. need to redefine density, not as a series of objects thrown on the territory but as a series of exchanges.
  5. four key ideas
    1. Focus less on physical buildings and more on inhabitants’ social flows and exchanges.
    2. Draw on the inherent design intelligence of the community and leave open the potential for that intelligence to source future evolution.
    3. Stimulate collaborations that can engender new political processes and economic frameworks.
    4. Design to grow value-generating capacity, “shifting neighborhoods from systems for consumption to producers of cultural and economic wealth.”
6. The Battleboro Co-op
  1. The real product of design is the work that these structures enable.
  2. regenerative projects become instruments of co-evolution in the places where they operate.
  3. building a resilient business network, aligned around a shared regenerative vision of place.
  4. sharing information, facilities, and investments in new infrastructure.
7. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. can’t design or predict specific outcomes of evolution, but we can create evolution-friendly conditions that influence the trajectory and speed of change.
  2. Designing for evolution doesn’t mean designing evolution.
  3. Maintain the potential for evolution.
  4. identify barriers to evolution.
    1. homeowners’ association rules, zoning restrictions, or building codes
    2. Architectural programming,
  5. focus more on life-enhancing social flows and transformative exchanges than on physical structures.
  6. designed buildings that were easy to modify and expand,
  7. Align with the wisdom of nature.
    1. Nature is a master developer.
  8. Living systems structure themselves in response to their environments.
  9. we can pattern design solutions on the cumulative intelligence embedded in local cultures.
  10. Define projects by their roles.
    1. locate it within a systemic context.
  11. Grow value-generating capacity.
  12. the processes those systems use to generate value need to be the central concern:
  13. integrated socioeconomic programs to address economic, cultural, and educational needs.
1:2 Understanding Place
1. The commodification of place
  1. increasingly homogenized world
  2. “Every place is like no place in particular”
    1. James Kunstler
  3. The special places on Earth, the ones that draw us to visit and write about them, have learned to sustain their integrity as living systems.
  4. Premise Two
    1. Co-evolution among humans and natural systems can only be undertaken in specific places, using approaches that are precisely fitted to them.
  5. The proliferation of places, each different from any other, represents a key strategy for the planet as a living system, a diversified portfolio of investments.
2. An approach to place
  1. What makes each place unique? What gives it vitality? Viability? What is the source of its potential and, therefore, of its capacity to evolve?
  2. tailor sustainable design strategies and processes that are harmonious with the character of a specific place.
  3. returns place to its core position in human life, making it a touchstone of shared meaning and caring that can enable people to make common cause with one another and with nature.
3. Transformational leverage
  1. Place is more than material reality; for many people it is also the holder of deep emotional attachment.
  2. It is the “right scale of whole” for people to work on,
    1. represents a powerful strategic leverage point for transforming the ways we live on Earth.
  3. Principle Two
    1. Partner with place
  4. Place serves as the laboratory and learning environment for developing community intelligence about how to live in harmony with natural systems.
  5. conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used.
  6. implies affection for the place and respect for it,
  7. “A sense of place offers a unifying story that weaves together our relationship with nature, art, and community and inspires us to re-imagine, not only how we live and lead but the nature of the universe itself.”
    1. Michael Jones
  8. it is only in relationship to place that humans experience a sense of intimacy and responsibility with regard to the world. From this they make meaningful identities and roles for themselves.
    1. Ivan Illich
    2. John Cameron
    3. René Dubos
    4. Peter Berg
  9. From this they make meaningful identities and roles for themselves.
4. Becoming partners
  1. The first fundamental step to designing projects that can partner with place is to understand that place is alive.
  2. Partnership is relational rather than transactional.
  3. we’ve spent too much time separating people and the land and precious little time being in dialogue about what defines a healthy relationship between the two.
    1. Peter Forbes
5. Renewing the source
  1. Springs Preserve in Las Vegas,
  2. planning process whose focus was community development rather than site development.
6. Place as living system
  1. places are dynamic and understanding them presents special challenges.
  2. Learning to recognize and read key patterns
  3. Patterns of Nestedness
    1. All of these levels of systems are whole and distinct from one another, and at the same time, they are dynamically interdependent and inseparable.
    2. Living systems are open; they interact and co-evolve (or co-devolve) with their environments.
    3. mutuality of interest among their different levels, based on the energies they exchange.
    4. organisms are at once complete, independent, and autonomous, they are also interdependent with other life forms.
    5. “Systemic health is a scale-linking, emergent property of healthy interactions and relationships within complex dynamic systems.
      1. Daniel Wahl
    6. places can be understood in terms of patterns of nestedness.
    7. it is the systems within which it is nested that it will regenerate. How one defines these systems depends on what it is working on.
    8. Each school will play a different role, based on its integration within a unique set of nested systems.
  4. Patterns of Interaction
    1. Living systems are sustained by a host of interactions among diverse forces.
    2. patterns of interactions can be traced backward and forward.
    3. Virtually everything on Earth can be understood as the trace or a residue of some pattern of interaction.
  5. Essence Patterns
    1. the true nature or distinctive character that makes something what it is; the permanent versus the accidental element of being.
    2. “the quality without a name . . . [the] central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building or a wilderness.”
      1. Christopher Alexander
    3. have to understand the essence of a place and create a building that resonates with that.”
    4. “spirit of place . . . the living ecological relationship between a particular location and the persons who have derived from it and added to it the various aspects of their humanness.”
      1. René Dubos
    5. Spirit has to do with essence, soul, defining attributes, life-giving principles, underlying animating structure. What gives a place its core and center of gravity? That which, if altered or taken away, would change the place fundamentally into something else. That which permeates and infuses place. What embodies place spirit? Represents or holds its essence? What stands for the physicality, materiality of place but its people and activity?
    6. Place and Placelessness,
      1. Edward Relph,
    7. core patterns that organize the dynamics of a given place. These core patterns are the source of its recognizable character and nature— its essence.
    8. How does this place organize and renew itself? What does it consistently pursue? What value does it generate as a result?
7. Creating an icon
  1. Central Park in McAllen, Texas,
  2. Discovering Essence
    1. interviewed city officials, naturalists, environmental scientists and scholars, archeologists, anthropologists and cultural historians, respected elders, cultural and social activists, thought leaders, project stakeholders, and many others, all of whom had a stake in “dreaming forward” the city and region as a whole.
    2. This integrative quality, which ignores the arbitrary divisions of state and national boundaries, is core to the character of this place.
      1. “Spirit of Non-apartness.”
    3. team named these patterns
      1. Dynamic flowing
      2. how the Rioplex renews itself.
      3. difficult to tell where the international border lies because the location of the river changes frequently.
      4. Seasonal migrations of animals, birds, and fish cross and re-cross the landscape in pulses that mimic the water surging through this fluid terrain.
      5. natural pulses are mirrored in the human history of the region.
      6. back-and-forth flow of different human populations has influenced and even redefined McAllen’s social, political, and economic landscapes.
      7. Immigrants and invasions
      8. interweaving is reflected in a city where hard divides and divisiveness are antithetical to the way of life.
      9. Stabilizing nets
      10. enable communities to thrive in this place of dynamic flows and floods.
      11. the land itself is organized in a web-like pattern of hummocks, shoals, and braiding channels,
      12. act as a brake on the erosive force of floodwater.
      13. have formed stabilizing social networks to allow their cultures and livelihoods to thrive rather than be swept away in periods of war, human migration, and isolation.
      14. Living mosaic
      15. integrates diversity and creates wealth within what could otherwise be a chaotic environment.
      16. juxtaposition and blending of these variegated elements are the source of the variety and vibrancy of exchanges that enrich the community.
  3. A Healing Role
    1. presented patterns to community members
      1. responded with stories describing patterns
    2. from stories, planning team extracted set of guiding concepts
      1. Welcome all ages, incomes, cultures, and languages.
      2. Build adaptable, well-defined spaces for a variety of uses and users.
      3. Make transitions between spaces gradual; avoid abrupt edges.
      4. Foster entrepreneurial and cultural talent.
      5. Reflect living water, farming heritage, ecology, and diverse cultures of the region.
      6. Educate and inspire; make the community’s underlying values explicit.
      7. Integrate the global and local, the unique and the branded.
    3. needed to shed light on the underlying patterns of place and be an embodiment of the democratic exchanges that made it work.
8. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. Discovering the key patterns that can facilitate understanding a place as a living whole requires synthesizing diverse kinds of information.
    1. “How big is here?”
      1. looks at place through the lens of nested systems.
      2. Every project is nested within its place (its proximate whole), which is nested within a greater whole
      3. project,
      4. could be as limited as a single building or piece of infrastructure or as large as a regional planning effort.
      5. proximate whole.
      6. a living system that is coherent and bounded by natural features of the landscape and/ or cultural agreement.
      7. neighborhood in which a building is sited
      8. watershed within which a township is located.
      9. greater whole,
      10. If the project is a building, and a neighborhood is the proximate whole, then the district or city is the greater whole.
      11. “every boundary is a useful bit of fiction.”
      12. Buckminster Fuller
    2. "How does here work?"
      1. scan disciplines and sources of information in order to bring them together in a way that generates meaning.
      2. pattern literacy.
      3. looking at political or economic boundaries rarely reveals how a living system actually works. Looking at place from a pattern perspective yields a very different picture.
      4. Patterns of Geophysical Organizing
      5. Looking at how the physical landscape is structured often provides clues about the dynamic operations that are at work in a place.
      6. Patterns of Biological Organizing
      7. Interactions among climate, soils, and hydrology shape local biological communities.
      8. Patterns of Human Organizing
      9. Place-sourced human culture arises in response to geophysical and biological organization.
      10. At the same time, humans also contribute to making places what they are.
    3. “What kind of here is this?”
      1. ability of design practitioners to discern the essences of places by observing and engaging with the people who live in them.
      2. How Do Local People Describe Place?
      3. naturally think of place in terms of nestedness
      4. layered approach is commonly used to contextualize all kinds of relationships.
      5. How Do Local People Express Place?
      6. notice how people celebrate it.
      7. fairs or parades or community days.
      8. way people spruce up their streets,
      9. indicators of what people take pride in and how they express it.
      10. see through what is presented externally to the message behind it.
      11. local recipes.
      12. Local literature and art
      13. What Do Local People Love about Their Place?
      14. the heart of the matter, which is why they live there in the first place.
      15. not only reveals its essence; it regenerates their sense of connection to it.
1:3 Discovering Collective Vocation
1. Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.
  1. Aristotle
2. When a community awakens to its uniqueness, it taps into a potency that comes from operating authentically, from the core of who it is.
  1. can be drained away by conventional planning efforts,
  2. destroy wholeness by breaking problems into their component parts in order to solve them.
  3. fail to pay sufficient attention to the living systems in which the parts are embedded.
3. The point is not to sustain buildings; the point is to make beneficial contributions to the future of life on Earth.
4. Sustainability is a byproduct
  1. byproduct of growing the value that living systems create.
  2. becomes possible when a person, forest, or river is in a reciprocally developmental relationship with the proximate whole it inhabits.
  3. This relationship is described as “adding value.”
  4. in order to be regenerative, one must develop the ability to take direction from a higher-level system.
  5. Premise Three
    1. The sustainability of a living system is tied directly to its beneficial integration into a larger system.
5. The idea of vocation
  1. taking direction does not mean taking orders or following instructions.
  2. it is a pulling or a calling forth, in other words, a vocation.
    1. the trail to which a person is especially drawn because she knows that it is hers to blaze.
  3. vocation is a source of meaning.
  4. not only individuals, but also their communities and places.
  5. Smaller systems gain meaning from the beneficial contributions that larger systems call forth from them.
  6. collective vocation provides a context within which people are able to discover their individual vocations.
  7. a regenerative project can help a community coalesce around its shared purpose, inspiring will and action, and illuminating a path to sustainability suited to the unique character of a place.
  8. Like an individual’s vocation, a vocation of place can be seen as an expression of essence in the form of new life that will allow both the place and its world to evolve.
  9. Principle Three
    1. Call forth a collective vocation
6. Curitiba
  1. It starts from knowing and loving your village— interpreting its collective dream.”
    1. Jaime Lerner
  2. Out of this daily interweaving of large-scale planning and engagement with the needs and hopes of the people, a vision emerged of a city whose vocation was to function as a school of ecological urbanism.
  3. team began to develop a set of guidelines for their engagement with the community, which would shape the myriad creative solutions
  4. core concept of “linear city with structural arteries,”
  5. Leveraging Will
    1. “Man is not merely an observer of nature. He is a part of nature. All environmental actions must take him into account.”
    2. “The zeal for ecological legacy is not just the concern of public powers. On the contrary, it is a whole community’s task.”
    3. “equation of co-responsibility.”
    4. Every major initiative undertaken by the city engaged key stakeholders (both public and private) in dialogues to find co-responsible solutions.
    5. showed respect for the self-organizing capacity of favela residents.
7. Sourcing direction
  1. Every design project, and in fact every complex activity, is guided by a set of values or principles (often unconscious) that keep it headed in its intended direction.
    1. infinite diversity
      1. the direction that guides nature’s design processes.
    2. manageable uniformity
      1. has guided the design of human communities.
    3. Maximum yield,
    4. optimal yield,
      1. a more holistic source of direction that emphasizes the biodiversity required to sustain the health of every level of ecosystem, from small niches to large ocean regions.
      2. decisions are based on emerging information about the interplay of social and ecological systems.
    5. Manageable uniformity and maximum yield arise from mechanistic thinking.
      1. lead to actions that conflict with the working of complex ecological and social systems.
    6. infinite diversity and optimal yield take into account the ways that species and ecosystems are embedded within and interdependent upon each other and how this shapes the dynamics of evolution.
      1. require accountability for the consequences of actions across systems and through time.
      2. enable projects to produce wealth— defined as the conditions for well-being— for the integrated whole of the systems within which they work.
8. Vocation of place
  1. provides direction for everyone in the community, including the project team, and therefore it is the basis for enduring, co-creative partnerships.
  2. enables the integration of two processes that are essential to all regenerative projects:
    1. organizing
      1. bringing activities and materials together in ways that are effective and efficient.
      2. enables a project to stay on track, meet benchmarks, and use time and resources well
      3. provides it with a polestar that helps make choices practical, consistent, coherent, and in harmony with the systems that the project is serving.
      4. keeps the project connected to the living, dynamic processes that it is trying to produce in its place.
    2. ordering
      1. vocation must be a source for ordering, moving work up to higher levels.
      2. A regenerative project aims to elicit new expressions of essence.
      3. works to realize its place’s potential, it also grows the value-generating capability of those who carry it out.
  3. helps people sustain a connection to the deeper meaning and significance of their work.
  4. evokes new spirit and inspires people to be the best they can be as they work.
  5. invites higher levels of consciousness and creativity, and offers opportunities for personal transformation.
9. Nested Vocations
  1. With a compelling, collective vocation, a community becomes capable of inspiring its members to take on collaborative and integrative efforts.
  2. development of nested vocations, where individual vocations become aligned with larger, shared vocations.
  3. As nested vocations become increasingly conscious and aligned, they reconcile the apparent conflict between thinking globally and working locally.
  4. Communities begin to realize new potential through the roles they play within larger, bioregional systems.
10. Giving voice to vocation
  1. The first challenge to tapping the power of vocation is eliciting or uncovering it.
  2. few communities are aware enough of their vocation to speak about it.
  3. La Palmilla
    1. El Jobo
    2. wanted to catalyze an agroforestry economy as the basis for a sustainable watershed culture.
    3. would require creating livelihoods that local people could take pride in.
    4. region’s capacity for evolution would be increased by integrating its economy across multiple industries— for example, ecotourism, agriculture, research, and education
    5. concept was to showcase local culture and products in a way that enabled local people to see the true value in what they had—
      1. strategy very similar to the one pursued by Italy’s slow food movement.
    6. People and Place, Woven Together
      1. Palmilla’s vocation was reweaving people with place.
11. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. Discovering Vocation
    1. iterative process that requires both reflective dialogue and research.
    2. Because every place is unique, there is no one right way to discover vocation.
    3. See a trajectory.
      1. imagining a place within a stream of time.
      2. What value is this place continually working to create for its region— and for its watershed, nation, and the world?
      3. What would a higher expression of that value look like?
      4. What changes would need to occur to make it possible to pursue this higher expression?
    4. Draw on legacies.
      1. cultural, spiritual, and philosophical foundations of a place can become sources of new spirit.
      2. Is there a legacy that may have faded but still has resonance for people?
      3. If it was reawakened, what would it inspire?
      4. What does this tell us about what this place has to offer?
      5. What does that contribute to a larger system?
    5. Identify iconic events and people.
      1. What stories do people tell that exemplify the place when it is most truly being itself and therefore most able to make a unique contribution?
    6. Take inspiration from the future.
      1. How will this place serve the lives of future generations?
      2. What about this place’s unique character will enable it to serve future generations?
      3. What contribution must the community make to enable their children and grandchildren to thrive here?
  2. Employing Vocation as a Source of Direction
    1. Once a candidate vocation has emerged, testing and upgrading it provide opportunities to deepen people’s understanding and connection.
    2. Criteria:
      1. It is grounded in a deep, pattern-based understanding of the local web of life.
      2. It depicts the place’s potential within its region and beyond in a way that local people experience as authentic, meaningful, and significant.
      3. It is integrative and holistic in ways that bridge cultures, classes, and generations.
      4. It can be translated into personal aims and principles that people find relevant in their own lives and work.
      5. It is capable of serving as the regenerative source of direction for a project, reminding everyone on the team of their larger purpose.
1:4 The Guilded Age
1. Coevolving mutualism
  1. influence on place continues to unfold long after a project is “completed.”
  2. must call into existence a system of mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships.
  3. Premise Four
    1. projects should be vehicles for catalyzing the cooperative enterprises required to enable evolution.
  4. a progressive and mutually beneficial harmonization of human and natural systems.
  5. process that cannot be predicted but can be continually planned and managed toward.
  6. Principle Four
    1. Actualize stakeholder systems toward co-evolving mutualism.
  7. term coined by Stuart Kauffman
    1. “Species live in the niches afforded by other species.”
  8. requires seeing people and nature as “co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture.”
  9. pattern themselves after healthy ecosystems.
    1. self-creating, self-managing, and self-regenerating through reciprocal relationships among their parts and with their larger environment.
  10. humans can translate ecosystem understanding into concrete, place-specific strategies for cooperation.
  11. stakeholder systems need to grow their intelligence about place.
2. Cape Flats nature
  1. what needed to be sustained through time was the process they were introducing, not a structure
  2. away from the centralized, top-down pattern of traditional conservation efforts and toward a living network of community-level cooperative systems
  3. A History of Fragmentation and Separation
  4. Mainstreaming Biodiversity
    1. community needs could be addressed through conservation.
    2. shifted the focus of conservation from protection to creating “a constituency for conservation among citizens who understand themselves to be living as part of natural systems.”
  5. based on partnering and capability development.
  6. learning forums were key to sustaining it as a living, evolving process.
    1. set up to enable champions from different sites to share experiences and learn together.
  7. provided extensive developmental support to local conservation managers.
    1. set a pattern of mentorship that continued into the city departments that subsequently hired them.
  8. the work of the project out there in the world was nurtured through the work we did internally. We transformed our external reality through our internal practice.”
  9. shifted to creating institutional collaborations that would ensure that its approach would deepen, spread, and continue to evolve.
  10. possible to include people as part of “living landscapes.”
  11. sustained by active stakeholders and ongoing capability development.
3. Guilds
  1. stakeholder systems are organized as guilds,
  2. a web of exchanges among a diverse range of entities, which together create the whole that sustains them.
  3. complex reciprocity, in which exchanges are often indirect and equivalent value is hard to measure.
  4. not a wheel with a central hub through which all exchanges pass. Instead, it is a multidirectional network.
  5. a web of exchanges among a diverse range of entities, which together create the world that sustains them.
  6. applies to human systems as well.
    1. businesses, individuals, or organizations
      1. foster reciprocal benefits among its members, supporting their capacity to invest in and be valued by the system.
  7. grows consciousness about mutuality of interest, which stimulates creativity with regard to realizing it.
  8. each species earns its welcome by contributing to the conditions that favor other members and the ongoing health and evolution of the whole.
  9. in human systems a guild prospers to the degree that each stakeholder is aware of and invested in the continued well-being and resilience of all other stakeholders.
    1. each member sees itself as an investor in the whole.
  10. form around organizing cores
    1. oak tree
    2. In human systems, guilds form around overarching purposes that benefit the broader health and viability of the community, place, or field of endeavor that guild members depend upon.
    3. vocation of place provides a larger purpose around which a guild of stakeholder investors can form.
4. Guilds and regeneration
  1. Guilds extend the reach of a project.
    1. able to leverage resources and influence without added expenditures.
  2. catalyzing a stakeholder system should never be undertaken as a public relations exercise.
    1. strongly conditioned to view their relationships with communities through a transactional lens.
  3. A project is regenerative when it works as a node in a network, rather than as a partner to a transaction.
5. From transactional to relational
  1. Stakeholders are usually defined as those who have some influence over a project and will be affected, positively or negatively, by its outcomes.
  2. development projects usually address stakeholder concerns in one-time events, often as part of negotiations for development rights.
  3. In regenerative development, stakeholder engagement is relational.
    1. those who have a stake in what could be— the greater potential
    2. seen as co-creators and co-investors, working together to move a project, community, and place up to a higher order of expression.
    3. seeks to bring them together as a guild, with a shared purpose that connects them to one another and their place.
  4. Genuine wealth is grown from the simultaneous development of multiple forms of capital, which work together as a dynamic system.
6. Stakeholders as investor partners
  1. Stakeholders provide the creativity and participation required to sustain regeneration. A project alone cannot generate a systemic change.
  2. Mariposa
    1. formed partnerships with nearby colleges and universities to create a campus for field learning.
  3. Regenerative development reveals potential investors who would ordinarily go unrecognized.
7. Wealth redefined
  1. grows new resources and new conditions for well-being— new wealth.
  2. concentrates on investment rather than conservation
  3. seeks to create instruments for growing the “commonwealth” of a place.
  4. grown from the simultaneous development of multiple forms of capital, which work together as a dynamic system
    1. social capital
      1. the capacities to foster cooperation, trust, and mutual benefit among people and groups whose interdependent efforts are needed to achieve common goas
    2. natural capital
      1. web of living systems that generate, provide sustenance for, and enable the evolution of life
    3. produced capital
      1. assets such as buildings, tools, and infrastructure, that enable the flow of goods or services
    4. human capital
      1. health and capacity of individuals, which can be grown through education, training, development, and experience
    5. financial capital
      1. money invested to provide goods and services or to produce other forms of capital return.
  5. genuine wealth depends upon the balanced development of all five forms of capital.
  6. makes it easier for communities to become conscious of the systemic effects of decisions and actions.
  7. enables them to design for solution multipliers, leveraged actions or interventions that grow multiple forms of capital simultaneously.
8. Creating a guild at El Jobo
  1. began by creating a movie in his mind of the ecological agro-forestry industry as if it already existed.
  2. Next, he described the different classes of stakeholder he thought this guild would need to include:
    1. local campesino groups,
    2. regional food processors and distributors,
    3. local tourism businesses,
    4. regional research institutions working on agricultural innovation,
    5. agencies charged with managing the ecological preserve surrounding the river.
  3. then named specific people within each of the stakeholder classes who he believed could contribute to growing the appropriate industry infrastructure.
  4. used the list of five capitals to identify what they had to invest and what they would be looking for in return.
  5. then tested his thinking by making a quick sketch of the probable, mutually beneficial relationships that could be established among these stakeholders.
  6. Just as with a guild in nature, the returns were not always direct; instead they grew out of the development of a system involving the investment and reinvestment of all five capitals.
9. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. Attracting a guild of stakeholder investors
  2. Anchor thinking to the future.
    1. What particular future is it intended to create for its place?
    2. Envision this future in concrete images,
    3. serves as the initial parameter for identifying potential guild members.
  3. Start general, then go to specifics.
    1. use the five forms of capital to map out the kinds of stakeholder that will be necessary contributors.
    2. then identify specific individuals and groups that could take them on and would probably want to be involved, given what they are working on.
  4. Map relationships.
    1. mutually beneficial relationships that could be established among these stakeholders..
    2. identify what capitals each will be able to invest and what they would be looking for in return.
  5. Catalyze the guild.
    1. should grow the resources, energy, and creativity available to its members and the project.
    2. Look for a strategic opportunity that would catalyze a group of key stakeholders and potential champions,
      1. providing them with the experience of working together co-creatively.
Part II: Creating Regenerative Processes
1. Design thinking has helped reorient the process from products to users.
  1. next step is to redefine the concept of user to include the networked complexity of a living world.
2. Designing the design process is critically important
3. Design is not about artifacts anymore but about a process . . . (it) is not a noun but a verb. The myth of the lonely genius is an old model.
4. Metro Vancouver
  1. “We’re not doing sewage treatment, we’re sourcing freshwater!”
  2. image as an anchor, the team was able to articulate a common purpose.
  3. explored the ecological and social dynamics that made the site unique and created shared principles that were later embedded in the design.
  4. nine evocative “themes” that inspired the design team to develop nine entirely new approaches
    1. ant colony
    2. urban garden
  5. design process helped them see the plant as a node, an active and dynamic member of the community with an important role to play.
  6. developed the image of an attractor point, a place where people would come together to learn, interact, and build community.
  7. project’s vision was supported by sophisticated metrics that demonstrated its ability to deliver both quantitative and qualitative value.
  8. organizing the planning process around a series of workshops, as well as a carefully constructed work plan, the team was able to leverage its efforts.
  9. public engagement as an opportunity to grow collective intelligence about the potential that this project could realize.
    1. Community members were disarmed by this transparency,
  10. engaged in an unfolding process that included the public in a series of open meetings.
  11. designing the design process is as important a responsibility as designing the project itself.
2:5 Start From Potential
1. Starting well
  1. Design is often defined as creative problem solving.
    1. most sustainability work continues to respond to problems.
    2. dictates a future based on past and present problems rather than entire ranges of possibility.
  2. the first phase of a design project is discovery.
    1. rarely examine the source of the initial idea,
    2. the real beginning of a project is in the nature of thinking— the DNA— that gave birth to the initial idea.
    3. is it defined by existence or potential?
  3. about growing the capability of living beings— humans, communities, ecosystems— to co-evolve toward ever higher orders of diversity, complexity, creativity, and life.
  4. regeneration is the process by which potential gets moved into existence.
    1. provides a completely different context for how we address those problems.
2. Beyond problem solving
  1. problem-solving orientation causes us to look backward while the world evolves forward.
  2. Focusing on a problem is inherently reductionist. It brings a single broken fragment to the foreground and fails to account for the context or system within which the problem is a symptom.
3. Creating a mecca of sustainability
  1. Portland
4. Thinking big enough for evolution
  1. Potential is the “latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and lead to future success or usefulness; having or showing the capacity to become or develop into something in the future.”
  2. Designing for regeneration always starts from potential— specifically, the potential for future evolution.
  3. a way of conceptualizing the gap between what something is and what it could be, if it fully realized its purpose.
  4. Premise Five
    1. Potential comes from evolving the value-generating capacity of a system to make unique contributions to the evolution of larger systems.
  5. also includes the processes by which it is used, maintained, improved, and celebrated over the years.
  6. By starting from potential, we focus our attention on what we value and seek ways to evolve systems to new orders of value generation.
  7. Principle Five
    1. Work from potential, not problems.
5. Rain savers
  1. shifting their orientation from stormwater problem to stormwater potential.
  2. swales, trees
6. Potential is inherent
  1. One way to characterize living systems is that each is distinctive, with an essence that is the source of its uniqueness.
    1. Regenerative potential arises from this distinctive core character.
  2. discover inherent potential by recognizing the essence of an entity and then seeing how that essence can be uniquely value-adding within its context
7. Distinguishing essence from talent
  1. Talent is what an individual or entity is good at, but uniqueness determines what that talent is directed toward.
  2. each of us is at peril of being pigeonholed, coming to lean so heavily on our strengths that we never develop the whole of ourselves in order to live out our essence and potential.
    1. same dynamics can be seen with regard to place.
  3. community must discover the unique contribution called from it by the world if it is to endure the rigors of development without losing its soul.
  4. Qualitative differences— when they are discovered and sensitively developed— offer nearly unlimited opportunities for communities to prosper.
8. Hubbel trading post
  1. educational center, the farm demonstrated sustainable, culturally appropriate methods to local farmers.
  2. designed to support generational exchanges, as older farmers passed on their wisdom and skills to younger people.
9. Potential and systems
  1. The potential of a place arises from what makes it unique, but it manifests only when this uniqueness contributes new value to its region or some other larger system.
  2. The potential of a project manifests when it helps its place step up to this new value-adding role.
10. The nestedness of potential
  1. important to think in terms of at least three levels of system:
    1. the potential of a project
    2. the potential of place
    3. the contribution to the larger whole
11. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. Stay Oriented to Potential
    1. can require overcoming deeply engrained habits of thinking and practice,
      1. build agreement from the outset that this is a shared intention.
    2. Remember what’s essential.
      1. Rather than becoming distracted by “presenting symptoms,” always come back to essence.
    3. Remember the context.
      1. opens up a range of creative opportunities and resources for a project.
    4. Value the restraints.
      1. Reframing problems as restraints allows them to become sources of creative energy.
      2. design challenge is to discover the value a restraint is bringing to the mix.
      3. shifting to a larger context than the one within which the problem appears to be a problem.
    5. Map the emerging pattern of relationships.
      1. potential is a systemic phenomenon, emerging out of new relationships among different levels of system.
      2. Moving too quickly to targets can fragment the mind’s ability to hold onto those systemic relationships.
      3. Regenerative development articulates the pattern of relationships that will replace the existing pattern when potential is realized.
      4. can be mapped in order to clarify the specific shifts in capacity, capability, performance that will need to be developed in and among the relevant systems.
      5. helps a team maintain its orientation to potential, even as it works into successively finer levels of detail.
  2. Find the Right Level of Potential
    1. Work on individual elements aims too low, but too ambitious a scale of change effort can cause a project to collapse before it starts.
    2. nested wholes framework to graph alternative sets of systemic relationships
    3. assess different levels of potential in order to find the “stretch” that is inspiring but not overwhelming.
  3. Harness the Energy of Potential
    1. spirit and energy need to be harnessed if they are to sustain motivation through time.
    2. the moment of seeing potential is a particularly important hinge point in a project.
2:6 Value-Adding Roles
1. When people connect with the potential of place, they become aware of previously unimagined possibilities.
  1. Their will is awakened and they feel a powerful urge to do something with what they’ve seen.
2. often the way we organize action by setting goals is degenerative.
3. Functional goals
  1. what could go wrong? A lot, as it turns out, if your goals define project success in purely functional terms.
  2. SMART goals
    1. Edwin Locke
    2. can be useful for organizing tasks, where the effect one is trying to produce is the direct outcome of an activity.
    3. In a regenerative process, on the other hand, the value of a project is related to how it contributes to a larger system’s evolution.
    4. the relationship between any given activity and an overall improvement in systemic capacity can be indirect.
  3. A project can meet or exceed every sustainable performance benchmark without contributing to the viability and vitality of surrounding communities.
  4. regenerative goals organize work around the evolution of a system, providing the context within which functional goals make sense.
4. Regenerative goals
  1. open-ended and alive.
  2. don’t just get checked off the list when a project is completed.
  3. An entity’s function has to do with what it does. Its role, on the other hand, is what it needs to be in order to bring more life into a system.
  4. It is possible to think concretely about a role only when it is understood within a system, a set of interconnected elements working together toward a purpose.
  5. Premise Six
    1. The continuing health of living systems depends on each member living out its distinctive role.
5. Value-adding roles
  1. projects can also be thought about in terms of their roles within systems.
  2. Regenerative goals orient a design process toward the capabilities and qualities required by a project’s envisioned value-adding role.
  3. Value-adding is a concept originally developed by Charles Krone as a way to understand businesses as open systems.
  4. As living systems, places pursue the development of their own contributions to a constantly changing world.
    1. Projects seek to play roles within the unfolding lives of places,
    2. The quality of a project’s role is directly related to the level of systemic potential it can see and therefore pursue.
  5. starting with the predesign phase, regenerative practitioners seek to discover and illuminate the value-adding roles of all the nested systems that will be engaged in the project,
    1. team
    2. stakeholders
    3. community
    4. place
    5. larger wholes served by the place
  6. Principle Six
    1. Find your distinctive, value-adding role.
  7. All of a sudden, a team or community group’s tasks become charged with meaning because their relevance and importance is apparent.
    1. will can be sustained to ensure that a project lives up to its potential.
  8. Roles in Natural Systems
    1. Yellowstone
      1. wolves, elk and beavers
  9. Regenerative Concepts
    1. A regenerative role may be expressed as a concept.
      1. an idea that conveys the energy and potential of the role that a project intends to play.
    2. shifts the orientation from things to processes, and addresses dynamics, systemic relationships, and purposes.
    3. brings something to life for us by indicating what it generates rather than what it is made of and looks like.
    4. evokes an image of what is manifesting in a particular setting.
    5. provides a kind of shorthand that enables a team to maintain systems consciousness across disciplines and throughout time.
6. End-state thinking
  1. projects the mind to some future evolution of the system that the project is working toward.
  2. image of what something could be and the ends that it could be pursuing as a result.
  3. When collaboratively developed, it becomes a pattern generator for everyone involved
  4. become able to set their own courses, while staying in alignment with the overall goals of the larger system.
7. Middle Kyle Canyon, Nevada
  1. In order to play a role that is value-adding, a project needs to be conceptualized in terms of the desired state it is trying to produce within its nested systems.
  2. Using a comprehensive narrative of place to create context, Regenesis helped the design team see through this long list and associated guidelines to the real role of the project.
  3. articulate a project concept that could guide its design.
  4. primary value-adding role was to help visitors from the nearby urban areas make an appropriate transition to the area’s natural environment
    1. Rather than think of Middle Kyle Canyon as a hub, the team conceptualized it as a gateway
  5. shift its attention from expensive “hard” features— such as buildings, parking lots, and permanent displays— to the “soft” dimensions of the user experience.
    1. led to an explosion of ideas, all deriving from the image of gateway.
  6. Regenerative Goals
    1. flow from the value-adding role it is called to play and the system of reciprocal roles it calls into being.
    2. setting goals that would advance only what was critical to enable the project to play its role.
    3. gateway for partnering
      1. public with the land,
      2. forest service with the tribe,
      3. communities with their government land stewards.
    4. gateway for regenerating heaven,
    5. stakeholders must be included in goal setting.
      1. project doesn’t have to spend a lot of time and resources convincing people of its value.
      2. The value, which they have helped to envision, is self-evident from the earliest stages.
8. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. Design teams are skilled at thinking imagistically, conceptually, and in terms of multiple interacting relationships among elements.
  2. extend this practice into conceptualizing living, dynamic processes within open webs of relationship in order to express potential.
    1. requires subjective engagement in questions of meaning and purpose.
  3. requires subjective engagement in questions of meaning and purpose.
  4. requires adaptability,
    1. goals of a project and the means for achieving them will emerge and evolve from an ongoing discovery process.
  5. Develop the capacity for imaging.
    1. ability to place ourselves mentally within someone or something else, to experience what is different from us, as it lives and works, in concrete images.
  6. Engage “being thinking” as the context for “function thinking.”
    1. Function thinking uses the senses to gather data for analysis, breaking things into their separate parts in order to know them.
    2. produces knowledge, but it cannot produce understanding.
    3. Being thinking produces understanding, which requires empathy, the ability to stand in the shoes of another person or entity.
    4. Once understanding is gained, function thinking allows one to lay out a course of action for the expression of potential.
  7. See everything in motion.
    1. Regeneration is an instrument of evolution.
    2. looks to where a place has been historically in order to better understand the trajectory
    3. opens the way to discern the trajectory it could be on and the contribution a project could make to that evolution.
  8. Don’t work on the project from the level of the project.
    1. First, work to understand the living place in which a project is nested.
    2. define the project’s contribution in terms of the distinctive value-adding role that it could play.
    3. goals can then define what the project needs to deliver and how it needs to operate.
  9. Set goals that address both existence and potential.
    1. Differentiate between goals that belong to different levels and the different natures of thinking that they require.
    2. short-term, functional goals always support the goals of long-term systems evolution.
2:7 Transformational Leverage
1. law of unintended consequences,
  1. our actions always have effects that we didn’t anticipate or intend.
2. How do we increase human impacts in ways that are consciously beneficial?
3. The Replicability Fallacy
  1. How can we leverage the impact of sustainability efforts
    1. has followed the pattern laid down by industrialism— find good solutions and scale them up through replication.
  2. when projects are replicated outside of the contexts in which they arise, they tend to be resource intensive in their creation and resource consumptive in their operation.
  3. fail to reflect the cultural, economic, and ecological systems of place
  4. fail to tap the creative potential of local people to design, build, and manage them
4. Leveraging beneficial impacts
  1. efficacy of regenerative work comes from making small but powerful interventions whose beneficial influence ripples across systems and up and down scales.
  2. Premise Seven
    1. Small conscious and conscientious interventions in the right place can create beneficial, system-wide effects.
  3. like acupuncture
  4. begins with understanding not only that everything is connected to everything, but how.
    1. apprehending the patterns by which things are connected in reciprocal, value-adding relationships,
    2. using this insight to become more strategic in how we design for and measure impact
5. Living networks
  1. “unifying set of patterns of organization that goes through all life, at all levels and in all its manifestations.”
    1. Fritjof Capra
  2. metabolic patterns.
    1. organize the flows and exchanges of energy, material, and information that enable life.
  3. The significance of pattern, whether in a landscape, organization, or body, is that it can provide designers with a framework for understanding what is sourcing life in a particular place.
6. Flows and nodes
  1. how the built environment can “engage in . . . resource flows such that when resources are returned [to the system from which they were drawn], they support the maintenance of ecosystem functions to enable them to provide necessary services.”
  2. nodes are the points in a network where flows of energy, material, and information intersect, the locations where exchanges are carried out and transformations occur.
    1. ex. farmers markets
  3. For designers, nodes create opportunities to work across media, flows, and systems and to manage the interfaces between systems. This is where leveraged interventions become possible.
  4. Looking at the dynamics between flows and nodes reveals a systems at work
  5. Principle Seven
    1. Leverage systemic regeneration by making nodal interventions
7. Recognizing nodes
  1. shifting from seeing a landscape (whether natural or social) as a collection of objects to an interrelated set of dynamic processes.
  2. edges are nodes
    1. between two systems
      1. geological
      2. hydrological
      3. ecological
      4. cultural
  3. keyline
    1. change in steepness
  4. Living Organisms are Nodes
    1. language bias depicting organisms as things, not processes
    2. nexus of of the multiple flows that continuously move through it
    3. every living organism is a node in some larger system
8. Transforming Baltimore Harbor
  1. floating wetlands
  2. nodes in the system
9. Nodal interventions
  1. The work that takes place at a node, the exchanges that it supports, can either generate or deplete the life-giving capacity of a landscape or neighborhood.
  2. often the best place to intervene in order to create systemic change
  3. relatively small, inexpensive change revitalized social, economic, and cultural interactions.
10. Leveraging grassroots movements
  1. more and more focused on design interventions that are spontaneous, democratic, creative, and grassroots.
11. Systemic leverage
  1. shift from seeing nodes as things to seeing them as knots in a flow
    1. systems of energy exchange and transformation
  2. Designers who understand the patterns of dynamic interplay among nodes and flows are able to transform smaller systems in ways that benefit much larger ones.
  3. shift from seeing discrete things to seeing an energy system is challenging in an object-oriented culture.
    1. crucial if we are to develop the pattern understanding of how energy flows shape places.
    2. basis for developing mental maps of the points in a system where even a single building can become the opportunity for significant leverage.
12. Sequencing change
  1. Designers must learn to imagine a sequence of transformations rather than a sequence of activities.
  2. Once a node has been discovered, there is an opportunity to develop a strategy, an action that will launch this sequence of transformation.
13. Rio Sabinal
  1. restoration was based on both community identity and culture, and the potential for new livelihoods for many of the city’s impoverished citizens.
14. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. An effective nodal intervention restores connections that have been broken or creates new ones in order to move a system to its next level of health.
  2. connections facilitate existing flows of energy and resources, making them available for new purposes.
  3. map the nodes
    1. look first at what flows through, that is, at how the neighborhood is itself a node in a larger system.
    2. then focus down to a finer scale to understand what occurs within the neighborhood, identifying where linkages can be restored or created to lift it to a higher expression of its potential.
      1. reveal the nodes where a strategic intervention can be made.
    3. nature of the node and the kind of intervention that it calls for then determines the characteristics that will need to be built into her project.
  4. Identify the right node for the intervention you want to make.
    1. accurately assess the true relationship between a project and its larger environment and then tune his project’s concept and strategies accordingly.
  5. Choose the appropriate relationship with a node.
    1. a high volume of flow is not always beneficial or benign.
    2. One important nodal effect is modulating a flow, slowing and distributing it or concentrating and intensifying it.
      1. creates opportunities for value-adding exchange.
2:8 Developmental Work
1. Avoidance breeds reactivity
  1. NIMBY
    1. not in my backyard
  2. activists often pushed into a posture of reactivity
    1. reacting to intrusion
  3. conventional design processes are carefully managed to minimize any chance for proactive community involvement.
  4. issues tend to get resolved through negotiation and compromise rather than creative collaboration.
2. A classic lose-lose
  1. gray area between what the current zoning allowed— or almost allowed— and what the community preferred became a breeding ground for intense frustration and debate.
3. Proactive versus co-creative
  1. When developers do attempt to engage communities proactively, they usually end up with a tangle of opinions and issues that stifle their ability to be creative themselves.
    1. group visioning and brainstorming
    2. incoherent collections of contradictory viewpoints are rarely useful.
  2. problem is that stakeholders are not invited into an authentic co-creative process.
    1. requires a structured process that is oriented in a common direction.
    2. become co-responsible for the project’s success.
4. Developmental processes
  1. enables communities to evolve beyond current conditions by growing capabilities that they don’t already possess.
  2. builds the capability of the systems it affects
    1. communities
    2. organizations
    3. watersheds
  3. serve as catalysts for continuing co-evolution.
    1. completion of a regenerative project is actually a beginning, not an end.
  4. foundation for growing the necessary understanding, skills, and capabilities is laid in the design process
  5. A developmental design process works directly on growing meaning and will.
    1. starts with building strong relationships among stakeholders around a shared identity and future
  6. helping stakeholders envision the roles they are called to play in order to bring this future into being.
  7. supports the relationships, new capabilities, and self-accountability that these roles will require.
  8. work of a designer is to create a process that invites everyone into this co-learning culture.
  9. stakeholders are invited into a field of commitment and caring where they can step forward as co-designers and ongoing stewards.
  10. improving their ability to do their work is an explicit project goal.
  11. Principle Eight
    1. Design the design process to be developmental.
5. Albuquerque's International District
  1. walked the area with community members and held in-depth conversations with residents, natural scientists, urban planners, and local historians.
  2. Community members were invited into a conscious articulation of the stake they held in their place and awakened to a sense of purpose that felt worthy to them.
  3. convene local gatherings to share findings and explore ways to light a few sparks in order to energize the whole system.
    1. street festival
  4. “story curation” program,
    1. collected the cultural history of the district in the form of residents’ stories for the purpose of countering the negative associations of the “war zone.”
  5. "story plaza garden"
6. Upgrading the predesign process
  1. predesign is usually dedicated to due diligence, it would be better used to build stakeholder alignment.
  2. Shared purpose, articulated before any design work begins, creates a field of energy that is entirely different from the public brawls that many development projects encounter.
  3. Predesign can be used to establish several important patterns that will influence or carry through all subsequent phases of the project.
  4. discover the potential and identify the vocation of a place
  5. becomes possible to identify and recruit the members of the guild, which will further the larger systemic changes that are desired.
7. Las Salinas, Vina del Mar, Chile
  1. move from a transactional relationship with the community to one of reciprocity.
  2. next steps in the process have been to work with the activist groups to envision the future they want
  3. created a graph that showed the starting position of each of the stakeholder groups and where they had progressed, ranging from neutral to strongly supportive.
8. Limitations of conventional approaches
  1. protectiveness gets interpreted as secretiveness and ill intent,
    1. excessive dependence on specialist expertise to justify a project’s existence.
  2. A project begins only when a community has engaged in dialogue about its own potential.
    1. From this dialogue, a field of caring can be generated,
  3. Premise Eight
    1. A project can only create systemic benefit within a field of caring, co-creativity, and co-responsibility.
9. Guidelines for applying the principle
  1. Start with a collective process to discover potential.
  2. Create an “equation of co-responsibility.”
  3. Approach design as a reciprocal developmental process.
    1. It is the spirit of a place that we seek to regenerate.
    2. Vision and planning grow out of the understanding that comes from ongoing community dialogue.
  4. Make the core values of the project explicit and shared, and use them as a source of creativity.
    1. conflicts that arise around projects come from locking down on elements that are “non-negotiable.”
    2. return to the core values that are the source of inspiration and partnership
    3. use them as the basis for reconciliation.
  5. Employ new measures of success.
    1. redefine what’s at stake from protecting what is to pursuing what could be.
    2. primary indicator might be how well a community is able to balance the development of all five forms of capital.
  6. Identify or invent the portfolio of design tools and technologies that are appropriate to the unique character of a place.
    1. co-invent an approach that is native to the soil of a place.
    2. privilege not knowing over knowing.
  7. Monocultures of thought and technology are just as brittle in the face of environmental disturbance as monocultures of corn in a farm field.
  8. it is only from places that variety crops up, because it is in places that people weave the present into their particular thread of history.”
    1. Wolfgang Sachs
Part III: Becoming a Regenerative Change Agent
1. To be agents of transformation, designers must transform themselves.
2. redesign their own thinking and ways of being.
  1. requires inner work
3. develops the ability to work creatively with ambiguity and uncertainty, which enables her to welcome the complexity of natural systems and the diversity of perspective that characterizes living communities.
4. The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution.
5. In order to evolve systems we need to develop the people within those systems.
6. need to increase the ability of the systems that we create to deal with complexity.
  1. develop our capacity to embrace more complexity so that we can operate these complex systems effectively.
7. The strategies didn’t come from me or from the group I was working with. They came from the profound need and possibility of the place.
8. setting our egos aside and listening deeply to what wanted to come into the world.
9. requires total commitment to personal development.
3:9 Systems Actualizing
1. can never settle into the comfort of having “the answers.” The state of “not knowing” that is necessary for true innovation requires steadiness of being and clarity of purpose.
  1. must break old habits of thought.
2. Inner work
  1. we cannot make the outer transformations we envision for the world without making inner transformations in how we think and who we are able to be.
  2. focus of this inner work is to evolve ourselves.
  3. often overlooked, discounted, or pursued for personal enrichment rather than as part of professional practice. It is rarely integrated into the workplace.
3. Self and systems actualizing
  1. self-actualization is a critical aspect of inner work.
    1. it is not— and cannot be— the goal.
    2. emphasis on self alone can isolate us from the larger living systems we are part of and the value-adding role we have to play within them.
  2. must incorporate an additional layer, the psychology of what might be called systems actualization.
  3. Every “self” is nested within a system and is dependent upon developing some level of reciprocal nurturance with that system.
  4. Premise Nine
    1. The actualization of a self requires the simultaneous development of the systems of which it is a part.
  5. The actualization of a self requires the simultaneous development of the systems of which it is a part.
  6. development unveils the inherent potential in a system and moves it toward actualization in an ongoing, evolutionary way
  7. the self we need to actualize is a systems-actualizing self.
  8. Principle Nine
    1. Become a systems actualizer
4. Becoming a systems actualizer
  1. does not replace self-actualizing; it extends it.
  2. Just as we cannot think about self-actualizing outside of the context of systems, working on systems actualization requires that we become self-actualizing individuals.
  3. requires capabilities beyond those traditionally taught in educational institutions or professional development programs.
    1. will to cross the boundaries that prevent innovation,
    2. dexterity of thinking needed to integrate increasingly complex systems within our purview,
    3. ability to manage our state as we work.
5. Developmental aims
  1. Setting developmental aims is one way to grow these meta-capabilities.
  2. An aim helps us to hold an internal pattern through time so that we are able to maintain an appropriate state of being and quality of thinking, regardless of changing circumstances.
    1. aim defines what we are seeking to become in order to accomplish our goals.
  3. who we are able to be in a given situation has an important influence on what we can create and, therefore, it helps determine what is possible.
  4. stabilize our state of being so that we are less likely to become a victim of circumstance and more likely to hit the targets that we are shooting for.
  5. ability to self-manage— to avoid collapsing into counterproductive states of being and habits of thinking— is a necessary prerequisite to becoming a systems actualizer.
  6. Aim One: Awaken Caring
    1. “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
      1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    2. human will, when connected to an important purpose, is an inexhaustible source of energy and creativity.
    3. Fields of Caring
      1. fueled by seeing new potential and feeling called to bring it into being, to care enough to make it real.
      2. Because potential has no inherent limit, the changes that result from realizing one level will always reveal further levels that are yet to be realized.
      3. requires the inner capacity to see through existing circumstances to the potential reality that lies behind them.
      4. requires the faith that this deeper reality, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, is what longs to become manifest.
      5. takes humility and ruthless honesty to engage in the deep listening that will reveal what is true about a place, rather than be seduced by fantasies of what it could be.
    4. Energy Fields
      1. shape our experience and set limits to what it is possible to pursue.
      2. If we are unconscious of their effects, energy fields manage us
      3. By learning to consciously observe and reshape fields, we become able to take charge of our individual and collective destinies.
      4. One could say that regeneration begins when a field of vitalizing energy is intentionally introduced as the context for an activity.
  7. Aim Two: Honor Complexity
    1. atomizing bias makes Western cultures poorly equipped to comprehend living systems.
    2. Living systems tend to become increasingly complex through time. When humans simplify nature . . . we betray not only reality but our own creative possibilities.
    3. Culturally Determined Seeing
      1. shifting between foreground and background as needed.
      2. ability is limited by cultural patterns
      3. Geography of Thought
      4. Richard Nisbett
    4. Pattern Literacy
      1. “When it comes to the environment, Americans are almost completely change blind.”
      2. important to be able to see where change is coming from, and to understand what is sourcing it.
      3. The cognitive capability of “reading for change”
      4. What is unseen is more powerful than what we see. Understanding requires seeing beneath the surface.
      5. Perceiving the deeper meanings behind all of the things we see in the physical world is the essence of tracking.
      6. seeing not just the elements of the world, but the patterns of life.
      7. Tracking patterns is always a matter of tracing trajectories— where things have come from (their source) and where they are headed (their goal).
  8. Aim Three: Be a Work in Progress
    1. thought creates the world and then covers its tracks, allowing us to remain unconscious of our participation in shaping reality.
      1. David Bohm
6. An invitation
  1. role of human being on earth needs to shift
    1. from despoilers to coevolvers
    2. catalytic role
      1. sparking process of transformation
  2. must relearn how to think like natural systems then act accordingly
  3. become humble listeners and cocreators
  4. fierce advocates for unexpressed potential
  5. requires us to manage ourslelves
  6. learn to take sustanence from the process of change
    1. may take generations to realize
  7. must bring our whole selves to the task
Epilogue
1. Blessed Unrest
  1. Paul Hawken
  2. At the heart of regen work is the belief that we must work from place
    1. know your place and know who you are
    2. power to create a new world comes from putting these two together
2. A New Role for Design
  1. away from centered on solving problems
  2. design as "the social construction of meaning"
    1. Victor Margolin
  3. making sense of things
    1. Ezio Manzini
  4. an evolution in norms
    1. Erich Janstch
  5. conversational drift
    1. co-design as social conversation
    2. developing distributed intelligence out of a deepening understanding of place
    3. discourse creates a field
      1. within which guilds and nodal interventions can emerge
      2. leveraging influence of designers
  6. 3 design agents that can be employed in evolving a new culture
    1. design products
      1. which continue to shape their environments
    2. design processes
      1. which evolve the thinking and values of direct participants while generating larger fields of influence
    3. designers
      1. who develop the inner capabilities required for emergent and co-creative processes
      2. evolve beyond problem solvers
      3. become resources for reconnecting places and people to their inherent potential
      4. facilitate learning and develop the capacity of local citizen designers
      5. collaborating the creation of shared images and stories
      6. skilled agents of systems transformation