Salutogenic Cities & Bioregional Regeneration (Part II of II)
For part Part I of II click here
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Salutogenic Cities are regenerative by design!
Town planning pioneer, Sir Patrick Geddes, stressed in Cities in Evolution (1915) that effective urban planning must be based on a detailed survey of, and integration with, the surrounding region.
As a biologist, Geddes is also credited as a founding contributor to the fields of sociology and town planning. His work in the Old Town of Edinburgh was an early example of slum redevelopment through the active participation of residents which led to the creation of the world’s first student union housing.
The Edinburgh Summer School — today ‘The Edinburgh Festival’ — started by Geddes was an interdisciplinary exchange of some of the leading thinkers at the time and served as an opportunity for public education. The ‘Outlook Tower’ at Ramsey Gardens established by Geddes invited the visitor to contextualise their city within Scotland, the United Kingdom, Europe and the World, with each floor focusing on one of the these inter-connected scales.
Almost 100 years later, Herbert Girardet wrote in a World Future Council report on Regenerative Cities: “Planners seeking to design resilient urban systems should start by studying the ecology of natural systems. On a predominantly urban planet, cities will need to adopt circular metabolic systems to assure their own long-term viability as well as that of the rural environments on which they depend.”
Girardet suggests: “Policy makers, the commercial sector and the general public need to jointly develop a much clearer understanding of how cities can develop a restorative relationship to the natural environment on which they ultimately depend” (Girardet, 2010). The graphic on the left shows how the transition to regenerative cities with a drastically reduced ecological footprint will required a redesign of the material and energy flows that cities depend upon primarily at the scale of their region.
In Creating Regenerative Cities — a book based on Girardet’s work with the World Future Council — he describes the evolution of cities from ‘agropolis’ to today’s ‘petropolis’.
To create ‘ecopolis’ as cities that are restorative and regenerative by design, we need to learn from the cascading and circular flows of energy and matter within ecosystems. Applying these patterns to how we organise cities can help us reduce their ecological footprint. The aim is to optimise the urban metabolism by designing for circular resource and energy flows and reliance on renewable energy and resources (Girardet, 2015).
Girardet’s book is a great place to start exploring how cities can become Salutogenic processes that support the health of their inhabitants and of people in their bioregion while actively restoring healthy ecosystems functions and regenerating planetary health. We would however do well to also go back to Geddes’ original work and pay attention to the crucial role that civic participation, public education and individual and collective capacity building will play in this transformation.
The work of Marilyn Hamilton and her ‘The Integral City’ trilogy (2008, 2017, 2018) offers important insights and processes for how we might go about facilitating such profound change towards Salutogenic cities.
Watersheds are a useful starting point for exploring bioregional boundaries and situating cities within the context of their bioregion. Clearly some watersheds of the world’s major rivers are so large that the appropriate scale for bioregional context for cities within them might require defining sub-regions within one large watershed.
“Re-inhabitation”: Return to bioregional futures
Sir Patrick Geddes (1915) suggested that cities should be planned within the biological, ecological, geological, hydrological, climatological, and socio-cultural context of their region. The great American urbanist Lewis Mumford (1961) was very much influenced by Geddes and in turn inspired the work of the landscape architect Ian L. McHarg, who’s book ‘Design with Nature’ (1969) and TV show ‘The House We Live In’ on CBS contributed significantly to the first rise of environmental and ecological awareness in the 1970s. His ‘over-lay mapping’ approach followed Geddes’ suggestion and eventually evolved into the Geographic Information System (GIS) software that is now used by planners everywhere — sadly not with a focus on regional regeneration.
A large part of our species history is based on bioregional patterns of inhabiting the Earth in close reciprocity with the opportunities and challenges of particular ecosystems. Whether during the many millennia of our Nomadic existence or among the early settled cultures, our patterns of living where closely matched to the uniqueness of the places and regions we inhabited.
Bioregional patterns of organisations are not something new. We are invited to combine the wisdom of indigenous cultures with the best of modern (appropriate) technology to rematch our human presence into the bio-physical realities of regions within the limits of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al, 2009).
It is at the local and bioregional scales that we can transform the impact of the world’s cities. With more than half of humanity living in urban areas the creation of bioregionally regenerative cities will be a critical contribution to the redesign of the human impact on Earth from being exploitative and degenerative to being regenerative and healing!
“Those who envision a possible future planet on which we continue […], and where we live by the green and the sun, have no choice but to bring whatever science, imagination, strength, and political finesse they have to the support of the inhabitory people — natives and peasants of the world. In making common cause with them, we become ‘reinhabitory’.”
— Gary Snyder, 1976
The process of healing our relationship with each other, with the Earth and the wider community of life is a process of “re-inhabitation.” The poet Gary Snyder saw this rematching of human affairs to the uniqueness of each place and its story as the central aim of bioregional regeneration. Snyder worked closely with the early bioregionalists Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann of the Planet Drum Foundation.
The Planet Drum Foundation (1973) described a bioregion as “a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole “life-place” with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured”.
There is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for Salutogenic Cities within regenerative bioregional economies. If we aim to implement this vision we have to do so in deep connection to a place and its people. Regenerative practice aims to identify the unique essence of people and place and enable their contribution to improved health. To find this essence we need to pay attention to the ‘story of place’ (Regenesis Group) and work from the potential of people and place rather than fall into the habits of ‘problem solving’ in a piece meal fashion.
Regeneration starts with personal development, including individual and collective capacity building. This, in turn, creates a culturally creative field effect that reorientates our ‘doing’ and ‘being’ toward the process of ‘unveiling’ or ‘manifesting’ latent potential sourced out of the bio-cultural uniqueness of each place.
I believe, working with cities to transform them into Salutogenic processes and weaving the complex cross-sector, multi-stakeholder collaborations that are necessary for bioregional regeneration requires us to work patiently over the long term.
Initially we need to pay less attention to the physical design decisions or infrastructural changes that are clearly required and focus instead on patiently nurturing the emergence of regenerative cultural expressions — isolated at first and then woven into an infectious story.
Working with people, inviting them into dialogue, education and capacity building, awareness raising, creating public spaces where people can explore the questions they hold about their children’s future and the future of their place, listening deeply to their stories and how the place speaks through them, paying close attention to what wants to emerge are all foundations of such culturally creative work.
How can we enable a culturally creative process of engagement — between people and with this place — in ways that manifest the potential of this city-region to become Salutogenic by enhancing the capacity of everyone to find and express their unique essence and contribute to systemic health and regeneration?
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, john fullerton and Stuart Cowan at 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 successfully by the Commonland Foundation and Ecosystems Restoration Camps a popping up around the world thanks to the inspiration of John Dennis 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
