What is Civic Biodesign?
Civic Biodesign is an approach to facilitate and translate the future while making sense of the current liminal space we find ourselves in. It is a whole systems approach. It assumes that things are wildly more complex than perceived. It is multidimensional. It is scale-linking. It is a set of cognitive tools to help everyone from the individual to the collective create conditions for wellness, healing, and growth. It shows deference to salutogenic (health emergence) vs pathogenic (disease emergence) discussions. It recognizes humans as nature, not separated. It holds space for discussion of better language and for debates about the Anthropocene. It deconstructs and dismantles power systems based on false narratives. It lives in a dialogical space between ideologies.
Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges require a different form of leadership. Leadership that uses frameworks and pathways to navigate the complex realities of the situations. The legacy systems are all failing. Civic Biodesigners are like the middleware between the legacy and the emergent. They are backward compatible yet flexible enough to understand and translate what is to come.
We are all living at the beginning of the Great Transformation. This process needs individuals who can boldly and humbly dive into the foray with an eye on collective wellness and facilitate key parts of this shift. We call these people Civic Biodesigners.
These people already exist. In fact, you might be one. Maybe you are a landscape architect who infuses health and equity genius into community discussions about a public plaza. Maybe you are a school teacher who helps students have an ecological view of power systems. Maybe you are a local food producer who is dismantling bureaucratic power preventing farmers from having pathways to land and markets. Maybe you run a hyper-local Facebook group that makes sure every person in your neighborhood is fed. Maybe you are a citizen volunteering their time on a city committee for housing and you facilitate discussions to understand how segregation shaped the current policies.
