Salutogenic Cities & Bioregional Regeneration (Part I of II)
One aspect of taking a dynamic and evolutionary approach to cities in their regional and planetary context is to go beyond asking ‘what would a healthy city look like?’ or ‘how can we create sustainable cities?’ If we understand cities primarily as a process and the physical infrastructure of cities as temporary manifestations or footprints of that underlying process, we can begin to explore the potential of cities to contribute to the health of individuals, communities, ecosystems and the biosphere?
Can we re-conceive cities as catalysts for whole systems health? In doing so we would make urban development a healing profession. This offers an invitation for urban design professionals to take a form of Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm! I personally believe we do urgently need such an oath for urban development and all forms of design.
The notion of Salutogenesis — improving dynamic health — as distinct from a pathogenic approach to health that starts with symptoms or ‘problems’ was pioneered by the Israeli health scientist Aaron Antonovsky (1979). My 2006 doctoral thesis on ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic / Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’ applied the Salutogenic approach to health to the field of design.
Inspired by the work of Janis Birkeland (2002), as well as, Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan (1996), I used the notion of ‘scales of design’ and ‘scale-linking design’ to explore design with a big ‘D’ (see graphic). Salutogenic Design aims to regenerate health, vitality, transformative resilience and adaptability at personal and collective levels. It takes a glocal (global and local) approach that pays attention to facilitating health across scales. Place is always a fractal with local, regional and global significance in affecting systemic health.
The measure of good design is whether it improves systemic health reflected in the health of individuals, communities, ecosystems and the biosphere. The Salutogenic Design practitioner has to develop the skill of considering all design decisions as affecting and being affected by interconnected scales of green chemistry, product design, architecture, community design, industrial ecology, urban planning, bioregional planning, and national and international collaboration.
If we want to redesign the human presence and impact on Earth from being degenerative and exploitative to being regenerative and healing we have to re-match human activities to the golden rule of biomimicry: “Life creates conditions conducive to life” (Janine Benyus, 1996).
Regenerative practice and Salutogenic Design ask us to pay attention to the material manifestations of design at all these scales while actively transforming the underlying processes, worldviews, value systems and narratives that give rise to these manifestations in ways that add health and value to the nested wholeness in which we participate.
At the bioregional scale we can reintegrate urban development into the bio-physical processes that maintain ecosystems health and stabilise climate patterns. We can do so in place-sourced ways that pay attention to manifesting the potential inherent in the bio-cultural uniqueness of people and place.
Bioregionally integrated cities will makes essential contribution to systemic health. A Salutogenic City serves its inhabitants by improving their health and as a process of bioregional regeneration contributes to planetary health.
The bioregional scale is the scale at which we can increase the resilience of communities, cities and their region in the face of the catastrophic climate change we are already committed to. Past emissions will cause continued warming for the coming decades at best. We need to act decisively now to avoid irreversible climate cataclysm and a worsening of the extinction crises driven by cascading ecosystems collapse.
Creating Salutogenic cities that catalyse the improvement of ecosystems and planetary health is grounded in place and participation and focusses on the local and regional scale. Yet, it also needs to be enabled through collaboration, solidarity and open knowledge exchange at the national and international scales, in order to be inclusive and reduce inequality.
Part II of II:
For the full paper see (page 36 to 45):
More on Bioregional Cities and Bioregional Regeneration:
Have a look at the good work of John Thackera, the Planetarty Health Alliance, the Regenerative Communities Network, Joe Brewer in Colombia, Pooran Desai, Sue Riddlestone, Bioregional and One Planet Living, Isabel Carlisle set up the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, there is a new initiative in Sussex started by Jenny Anderson and friends, landscape scale regeneration is being implemented successfuly by the Commonland Foundation and Ecosystems Restoration Camps a poping up around the world thanks to the inspiration of John Liu and the team at the ERC Foundation …
More on Salutogenic Design:
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
