How do we design regenerative cities ?
This month’s Connectle Conversation on Regenerative Business focused on cities. How do we design cities to be regenerative? What does regenerative mean in the context of an existing city or even a development within the confines of a city? Luckily I was joined by one of the world’s most ground-breaking economists in Kate Raworth, designer of the Doughnut and author of Doughnut Economics and someone at the sharp end of delivering urban development — Natascha McIntyre Hall of Portsmouth City Council, to explore the question.
The Rapid Takeaways
- Change is accelerated when people see other people’s experiments working; we need better funding for regenerative pioneers and those regenerative pioneers need to become better at storytelling and finding places to tell their stories. Action drives change as much as conversation and theory.
2. Cities need to consider redesign in four contexts:-
- creating thrivability for people locally
- creating thrivability for natural systems locally
- not externalising impact on thrivability for people elsewhere
- not externalising impact on nature elsewhere
3. Pioneer species leaders need to
- bring emotion, aspiration and vision into the narrative
- be able to work on twin tracks of determindly pushing forward a transformative agenda whilst being able to speak the language of business-as-usual to avoid risk-averse decision making
- be able to make the case for what works on Earth and in the context of living systems rather than the ‘business case’
4. We need to recapture the importance of two other forms of provisioning that we have ignored: the household and the neighbourhood or community. We have to bring strategy back to place.
Here are some of the questions we explored and insights gleaned in more detail. A quick video highlight first!
Firstly, if you have never heard of the Doughnut before (hard to believe, but possible….), the goal of the design is to help cities, organisations, places, communities re-edsign their economies so that we leave no one falling short without the essentials of life and that we achieve that whilst staying within the confines of the planetary ecological boundaries or carrying capacity. The essentials of life are crowd-sourced from the UN Sustainable Development Goals, already agreed by all the governments in the world, and the outer ecological boundaries are from the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries.
Kate combined both into one handy design which is a brilliantly flexible tool being used by major global cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen in Europe, and organisations like my own Really Regenerative to host conversations with village and town communities about their future — and many people in between those two extremes using their own creativity to leverage the design.
What does a regenerative economy look like in the context of a city?
Let’s start with Kate’s definition of what a regenerative economy (and therefore city) should look like and the design principles on which the Doughnut draws.
“We start with the reality of earth’s (ecological) systems (how they work), and we design cities to work with the cycles of the living world. That means we’re not drawing on nature’s sources beyond which she can regenerate them, we are not creating waste beyond which she can reassimilate them. Waste from one process becomes food for another. They should be modular by design and that design needs to be open source. How do you do that in a city? That’s part infrastructure — the actual physical layout of a place — but it’s also partly the deeper economic design of institutions and the incentives and organisational shapes that are given space to become part of the 21st century ecosystem of interaction.”
Kate uses inquiry and questions to great effect in her work. For Kate the complexities of re-designing urban environments bring togehter both the local and global impact but also a sense of uniqueness of place which I have also seen reflected in the work of Regenesis International on place-sourced potential.
“We can ask in Tipner West or Cairo or Berlin — what is nature’s genius here? How does nature sequester carbon here? How is housing supporting biodiversity, is water cooling the air, what would it mean if our place tried to mimic the way in which the nature around it works? How do we ensure that the clothes we’re wearing and the food we’re eating in the city isn’t doing ‘harm’ somewhere else? What are their wage and working conditions? Maybe they are just outside the reach of the city, but they may be on the other side of the world. How do we ensure the global procurement supply chains for cities respect the human and ecological conditions that the produce they suck into their city are respecting people’s human rights and the ecological boundaries of the planet?”
In Portsmouth, Natascha and her team are focusing in on the areas in which they can make the most difference — not unlike Jaime Learner in Curitiba but on a different scale. “Although as a city we have many different developments on the go at any one time, we are focusing on newer, larger developments, in particular Tipner West which is not only a gateway site for the city itself but it can also act as a catalyst for change in how development is done. Smaller developments that may not have the capacity to push a regenerative perspective, but we can do it on a larger project.”
Tipner West is a proposed development of the main entry road to the island city of Portmsouth, where Natascha’s team’s ambitions include a kerb-less and car-less society that deals with isolation and loneliness, one which has renwable energy powered heating, lighting and transport, one that is modular by design and able to be redesigned and readapted over decades, one which incorporates biophilic design, one where the precious waterfront land is not allocated to those who can pay the most, but shared equally across community housing and executive properties, and one which creates a working community focused on marine employment as a specialism. And that’s just a few of the ambitions!
In a highly developed landscape like much of Europe which has seen human habitation for thousands of years, it’s sometimes a challenge to understand how nature would have worked in ‘this place’ but a bit of archeological, geological exploration often reveals hidden insights. When I was first in touch with Tipner West, I was also studying with Regenesis on methodologies to reveal the systemic potential of place. Part of my research into Portsmouth revealed a long history of out-ward looking culture; the home of the navy, the starting off point for colonial expansion but little inward looking focus on the quality of life and nature at home. I suspect developments like Tipner will go some way to redressing the balance of outward looking and inward looking culture in Portsmouth, as well as inner and outer health.
What are the core issues cities are having to get to grips with?
Within the context of local government, Natascha highlighted a number of major challenges of developing more regenerative approaches to development as being
- land assembly, where land ownership is fragmented, difficult to access or purchase and cannot simply be solved by compulsory purchase orders — a tool which is a very blunt and convoluted instrument
- funding innovative approaches, especially at a time when councils have experienced years of successive budget cuts, now compounded by the experience of covid19 which could create an increase in risk averse decision making
- managing the perception of risk in ‘current commercial realities’ of the development sector which include the short-term demand for returns, and the above years of spending restraint
- adapting historic urban infrastructure, done at a time when assumptions were that no-one had mobility issues, and there was little understanding of the emotional and wellbeing impact of urban design
- the impact of political short-termism and lack of willingness to make good collective decisions irrespectie of party affiliations which is driven by the combative environment of electioneering
“How do we justify spending the money on something that may look at times unnecessary and frivolous? How do we manage the risk that councils and investors may feel about something pioneering?” Natascha McIntyre Hall
Cities are also having to respond to the threat of climate change, even where a country’s climate legislation is weak or too far off into the future, as is the case in the UK. Yet city mayors all over the world are showing that as relatively autonomous units, cities can take pioneering leaps forwards outside of the national agenda.
But are our current commercial realities a ‘construct’ that we can change?
We all talk a great deal about finding ways forward within our ‘current commercial realities’. That generally translates to: investment always wants a return. No matter the crisis, no matter the circumstances, no matter the fact that the world teeters on the brink of systemic collapse — ‘money wants its return’, as Kate says. But what if we considered that ‘reality’ as a construct? Something we designed, and therefore we can re-design?
Alongside other more visionary economists such as Mariana Mazzucato, Kate is a strong advocate of changing the way in which economists have traditionally measured value — through GDP.
“Making the business case for this work takes you down a rabbit hole and we shouldn’t go there. Instead of having to ‘make the business case’ we should be making the case of what makes sense on earth. And then after that ask ourselves, what kind of finance system supports that. I think we’ll see a lot more public finace, long term finance. We are going to have to step away from the idea that you put some money into a project and get a 3% return forever. Nothing in nature works that way. ”
There are other values on the horizon other than GDP and other ways of determining value of action. At Tipner West, Natascha hopes to be able to measure the increase in human wellness and mental health that comes from living in a place where there is a mixed, connected, supportive, equalised community that is engaged with protecting and preserving the nature that surrounds it.
“We are going to have to step away from the idea that you put some money into a project and get a 3% return forever. Nothing in nature works that way.” Kate Raworth.
They are also taking up Kate’s challenge of designing buildings that clearly state the provenance of every component that has gone into the design for the building — not unlike Patagonia’s pioneering Footprint Chronicles. A different industry, same principle.
How can the Doughnut help to change how we view those ‘realities’?
The design of the Doughnut makes it possible for us to challenge the ‘reality’ of our current economic and financial designs . I might argue that the first step in creating change is understanding your current misunderstandings or illusion about what’s possible — but Kate goes one step further and believes that it is the example of actions taken that help people to change.
It’s difficult to imagine what we haven’t seen happen before. Mostly when we are talking about strategy and design, we are looking into the past for a guide or pillars against which to design ‘new’ thinking. We consider how others have achieved something, we’re looking for something to model by so that we can say to funders and investors — look, this worked here. So Kate believes its vitally important to get out there and experiment, and ‘do’ projects at all levels. That those people who have in their DNA to be pioneering species, get out and pioneer.
One of Kate’s first pioneer cities is Amsterdam. During the covid19 crisis in April, the city of Amsterdam published their City Doughnut Portrait. Building on the goals they had set themselves — a city free of fossil fuel vehicles by 2030, a city that’s 100% circular by 2050 — the city adopted the Doughnut as the unifying framework that gave shape and narrative to those goals which they could then back up with legislation where necessary.
More recently Copenhagen announced it would shape its future strategy based on the Doughnut.
This coming September sees the launch of DEAL Doughnut Economics Action Lab, a pioneering project in collaboration with Janine Benyus of The Biomimicry Institute that brings the Doughnut together with Life’s Principles. DEAL will focus on five different communities: global cities, governments, education, national-level businesses, and communities. The project will see the release of tools to support the use of the Doughnut across four key design principles:
- a place should be home to thriving people
- a place should be home to thriving nature
- a place should recognise and contribute to the wellbeing of all people on the planet
- a place should recognise and contribute to the ecological integity of the planet
“So what you have is a local aspiration to be thriving people in a thriving place, set in the context of global thrivability in terms of people and ecology too. Its local and global, social and ecological.”
What impact will covid19 have on the potential for regenerative cities to emerge?
Whilst the obvious answer to this question is the pressure on budgets following the pandemic, I love Kate’s perspective on the positive opportunities for refocusing on two aspects of economics that we have largely ignored: the household and the community.
“What covid19 has done is make it absolutely obvious that there are two other forms of provisioning for our wellbeing that you cannot ignore. The first is the household. Self provisioning. People in lockdown who haven’t been stressed by financial constraints have discovered cook and gardening in a beautiful way. It has also convesely raised stress in the household through domestic violence increases. The second is the community. I live on a street that never used to connect, just cars going up and down. Now we have a WhatsApp group; we’re connecting. We talk about difficult issues like who, in the student accomodation next to an old people’s home, can have a party and when and how long. We come back to sorting our stuff in the actual neighbourhood between us (rather than relying on state, lawyers, legislation).”
A case for ‘feelingful skin’: how city leaders manage the bridge between ‘current realities’ and the future we want.
As Natascha pointed out, one of the things that constrains pioneer species, is the support and funding that is available for them. Which brings us back to the business-as-usual economic and investment model being at the heart of change. If there are no willing investors with patient capital that buy into the nature of experimentation, many active changemakers end up beg, borrow and stealing (not literally) influence, supports and funds and innovate on a shoe string.
Whilst we have organisations like Innovate UK in the UK to help facilitate scalable innovation, we have many accelerators allegedly designed to facilitate innovative startups, the reality is that most of the ideas that get funding are those that say they can deliver short term, exponential returns. We haven’t yet created a middle kingdom of experimental social, place-sourced funding. Social enterprise and social capital has tried to do it. But how many social enterprises can you name that have achieved large scale systemic impact?
In the meantime pioneer leaders need to be able to navigate the complexity of working in the world that is, whilst bringing into birth the future we want. This takes persistence, determination, a high degree of articulate storytelling, being able to build strong collaborations across multiple stakeholders and partnerships, engaging the community in radical thinking and visioning, and managing the resistance that arises to the new and different.
“We need to remember to bring emotion into the discussion. We don’t need to have thick skin, we need to have feelingful skin” says Natascha McIntyre Hall. Most urban designs were produced in Europe at a time when we didn’t consider that people might not be fully mobile, that the emotional quality of our lives and therefore human potential could be vastly affected by the environment in which people live. “Whilst we are trying to ensure we provide a biodiversity net gain, we’re also thinking about the way people use the community they live in. We’re removing the largest, fastest moving, polluting element — cars — and focusing on creating a much less hostile environment when people step out of their doors. That means good qualty public spaces that understand and respect the emotional complexities of humans and the needs of nature.”
You can watch the full conversation here .
There are a series of interviews I have done over 18 months on different aspects of regenerative design and culture, all of which are viewable on the Connectle Regenerative community platform.
If you are interested in piloting a Doughnut District project in your village or town, do get in touch via Really Regenerative Doughnut Districts projects. We will be back running them from mid Summer now that we have worked out the social-distancing criteria for larger group interactions!
Huge thanks to Kate Raworth and Natascha McIntyre Hall for joining me at such a busy time in their mutual calendars!
