This book is about the design of connections between places, communities, and nature. Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, I describe the practical ways in which living economies thrive in myriad local contexts. When connected together, I argue, these projects tell a new ‘leave things better’ story of value, and therefore of growth. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. 

The signals of transformation I write about are not concepts, and they are not the fruits of a vivid imagination. They are happening now. But in conversations about the book, I am often asked the same question: Are small local initiatives an adequate response to the global challenges we all face?

The sheer number and variety of initiatives now emerging is my first answer to that question. No single project is the magic acorn that will grow into a mighty new oak tree. But healthy forests are extremely diverse, and we’re seeing a healthy level of diversity in social innovation all over the world.

My second answer concerns scale. Many people – for example in government, or in large foundations – tell me that large-scale solutions are essential if we are to deal seriously with the large-scale challenges we face. But that’s not how healthy nature works, I answer. Every social and ecological context is unique, and the solutions we seek will be based on an infinity of local needs. There is no such thing as a correct approach for the whole planet.

My third answer concerns history. Big transformations in history have seldom been the result of a single cause or action; they were a consequence of multiple, interacting, processes and events that unfolded at different tempos. The German word eigenzeit – “proper time” – describes this phenomenon well: The timescales of change for a bacterium, a forest, or an economy, are very different – but they are all interconnected.

History also contains numerous examples of profound transformations that seemed impossible at the time – until they happened: the end of slavery in the United States; women gaining the right to vote England; or the end of apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela’s famous words on the subject – “it always seems impossible until it’s done” – have inspired millions of people – and rightly so.

The assumption that the future is all about cities is another ‘inevitability’ now being reversed.

Designers have taken the lead in rediscovering the qualities and value of rural life Design Harvests, for example, led by Professor Lou Lou Yongqi at Tongji University, leads the way internationally in the creation of of new links – both cultural and economic – between city and rural.

Designing for change, in this context, is less about single, problem-solving actions, and more about the continuous search for value in neglected contexts, and the creation of enabling conditions for system change.

The first and most important enabling condition is a capacity for ecological thinking – the ability to see the patterns of life as a connected whole. Experiencing the world as a web of connection – between humanity, place and nature – is deeply rooted in Chinese culture, but has been forgotten in most of the West.

These connections – or their absence – are best explored at the scale of the bioregions that surround our cities. A bioregional focus re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, food sheds, energy sheds, fiber sheds – not just downtown or in ‘the countryside’.

Thinking ecologically gives new meaning and purpose to the concept of growth. Rather than measure progress against such abstract measures as money, or GDP, growth in a bioregion means observable improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities. Value is created by the stewardship of living systems rather than the extraction of ‘natural resources’. The language used is one of system stewardship rather than ‘productivity’.

A second enabling condition for system change is a focus on the social. In the North, the sharing or Peer-to-Peer economy has been presented as a novelty in recent times – but throughout history, people have collaborated, and shared resources, to raise and educate their families, take care of the land, and support each other in times of difficulty; social systems based on kinship, and ways to share resources, have deep roots in China, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Although these practices have been neglected during the modern age, they have enormous potential today. We need to ask: who has answered a similar question in the past? How might we learn from what worked before?

A third enabling condition for system change design is a shift of focus in design from place making to place connecting. In place of an architecture concerned with discrete buildings, – or the design of stand-alone products – the new priority is relationships. As the biologist Andreas Weber points out, this is how nature works, too: The practice of ecology is the forging of relationships.

A fourth enabling condition for system change is that a new kind of infrastructure – social infrastructure – takes precedence over the concrete kind.

As we change the way we govern our communities and our ecosystems, a variety of different actors and stakeholders need to work together. The exploration of social and cultural assets, for example, can involve a range of skills and capabilities: the geographer’s knowledge of territory; the biologist’s expertise in habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources. This convergence of expertise requires institutional support.

The scale and complexity of learning we have to do now is demanding, but it is not not unprecedented. During the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, numerous regional institutions were invented to ease our transition. Many of these can be repurposed to do so again.

New sorts of enterprise are also needed: food co-ops, community kitchens, neighbourhood dining, edible gardens, and food distribution platforms. In these new kinds of enterprise, paying attention to the process by which groups work together is just as important as deciding what needs to be done, if not more so.

The social infrastructure we need is beginning to appear in the form of new social and business models: Sharing and Peer-to-Peer; Mobility as a Service; Civic Ecology; Food and Fibersheds; Transition Towns; Bioregions; Housing as a Service; The Care Economy. Platform Co-operatives, in particular, promise to be to effective ways to share the provision of services in which value is shared fairly among the people who make them valuable.

Technology has an important support role to play as the supporting infrastructure needed for these new social relationships to flourish. The re-emergence of gift exchange can be made possible by electronic networks. Mobile devices, and the internet of things, make it easier for local groups to share equipment and space, or manage trust in decentralised ways; technology can help us transition from an economy of transactions, to an economy of relationships. Technology can help reinvent cooperative practices in rural contexts: sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging, & swapping – in which money is but one means among many of holding or exchanging value.

A focus on the local and the social does not mean abandonment of collaboration at a national or international scale. We can use technology to link projects, initiatives, and individuals in a global ecosystem. Learning in a bioregion – and between them – can also be enhanced by the ways people in the software world find what they need on a day-to-day basis. They ask each other, in real time. The Tech For Good community, for example, keeps up to date on GitHub.

This book is not about pre-cooked solutions. It’s about building on what has already been done, in our various social and cultural histories, and on what’s being done, right now, in diverse contexts around the world. It’s about positive change that is top-down and bottom up; long-term and short-term. It challenges us all to search for connections that are working, and those that need to be made, or repaired. The health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, are one story – but it has many different versions.

The post How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Preface to the Chinese edition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In hundreds of cities around the world, mayors and citizen groups are planting trees – to provide shade, reduce ambient heat, improve air quality, assist with storm water runoff, and improve public amenity. Community groups, too, are starting forests on school campuses and brownfield sites; in the North of England, funding is available for the community care and management of local woods In New York ‘s Street Tree Census hundreds of volunteers explore their neighborhood, meet new people, and map trees using a fast-growing Open Tree Map. On a somewhat larger scale, China is committed to cover nearly a quarter of the country with forests by 2020.

But planting trees is just the start. A wide variety of activities and equipment – and a lot of knowledge-sharing – are involved in the management of tree populations. Trees have to be climbed, pruned, inspected, and surveyed. Seeds must be collected  from notable trees, and foliage sampled for research purposes. Specialist courses and industry guidance must be delivered for tree climbers and forest managers.

A love of trees and forests has fostered a growing variety range of spin-off activities. These range from: Forest Schools  and different approaches to edible forest gardens and edible forests Other activities include tree-climbing competitions and camping in trees You can even participate in Applied Splicing Workshops

In North Wales, DMM is a world leaders in the design of high-performance equipment for professional arborists – or ‘arbs’ (who describe their work as ‘veterinary care for trees’). And it’s not just about hardware. Because public money is often involved, safety regulations can means that every bit of kit needs its own certificate of conformance. Together with another local firm, Paper Trail, DMM has launched an Identity and Information Management platform, DMM iD, in which RFID technology is used to make carabina scannable and checkable anywhere in the world. It’s a far cry from a man, a rope, and an axe.

Photo by evcabartakova

The post Arborists Arising: From Tree Care to Tree Camping appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Q1 The consumerist model and our fossil resources have been stretched to their limits. What could be an alternative model of production?

Innovation can help us reign in the over-extraction of resources. This seafood tracing platform is being developed by @provenance

JT I’ve come to an inconvenient conclusion: production is not the purpose of life. I say inconvenient because many of us depend on industrial production, and its many support services, to earn the money we need to pay for daily life needs. But because the global economy has to grow just to survive, its hunger for energy and materials is insatiable. The growing complexity of it all is resource-hungry, too — think of all those interconnected global supply chains.

This conflict between a perpetual growth economy, and the biophysical limits of a living planet, is why the perpetual search for new forms of production – whether ‘clean’, ‘green’ or ‘circular’ – is not where our future lies.

Our future lies in a care-based economy that embodies a commitment to leave things better rather than extract value from the world as quickly as possible.

The good news is that a huge care economy already exists. So-called ‘non-market’ care work includes the essential activity people have always undertaken to raise and educate their families, take care of their land, and support each other in times of difficulty. Billions of people with low cash incomes meet daily life needs outside the money economy through traditional networks of reciprocity and gifts. They survive, and often prosper, within social systems based on kinship, sharing, and myriad ways to share resources.

In this parallel real world value arises from relationships., not from things. Value emerges when living entities – whether human beings, or living ecosystems – interact with each other in a healthy way.

Redirecting our attention from production, to care, is a matter of discovery, not invention. 

Millions of small-scale experiments, and new ways to meet daily life needs, are emerging throughout the world. The opportunity before us is to seek out these projects, and develop practical ways to help these new approaches thrive, and interconnect.

The physicist Ilya Prigogine put it beautifully. “When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system”.

So that’s our priority now: develop islands of coherence in our own situation – and connect with other islands when the need arises.

Q2 Design is proposing a new definition of ecology: civic ecology. Can you explain the concept?

The French company Natural Solutions develops apps like EcoBalade (above) that help citizens identify plants and other life-forms.

JT In the new economy that’s now emerging, care for life replaces our a preoccupation with money. Value is measured in terms of the health of living systems, and the land, air, and oceans that surround us.

Cities, in this context, are part of the natural world, not outside it. Civic ecology – also known as ecological urbanism – has emerged in response to this understanding of life as the ultimate value.

An ecological approach to the design of cities builds on some surprisingly good news. It turns out that there can be more biodiversity in cities than in cultivated rural areas that we think about as ‘nature’. 

Researchers who investigate disused industrial areas, rail yards, the edge of motorways, brownfield sites of all kinds, are finding all kinds of plants and beetles, insects, lichen, and other life, that they did not expect.

Civic ecology is technically challenging because so many variables are involved. Urban ecosystems are dynamic and interconnected, and interactions between human activity and living systems change over time. There is no one discipline of civic ecology; a variety of professions and discipline need to be involved: climatology, hydrology, geography, psychology, history, and art.

Stewarding the relationships between living organisms and their environment is not just a job for specialists. All citizens can be involved – and new tools are emerging to enable that. The French company Natural Solutions, for example, develops apps that guide citizens through their city and helps them identify the plants and other life-forms they encounter.

The English team at NatureBytes develops devices (above) – and teaches teaches digital skills – so that everyone, professional or amateur, can be an active conservationist.

Q3 What is empathy as a design tool?

JT Today’s challenges cannot successfully be addressed without the engagement of all the actors concerned. A variety of different stakeholders – formal and informal, big and small – need to to work together. The question – and it is also a design question – is how? Paying attention to the process by which groups work together is just as important as deciding what needs to be done, if not more so .

The Art of Invitation developed by Encounters Arts uses techniques from theatre, as well as the insights of psychology, to bring groups of people together who are diverse in age, experience and background.

Dealing with difference involves a lot of consensus building, active participation, and collective decision-making. All this takes time, and an approach to project work or local politics that involves endless meetings is neither attractive nor practicable for most people.

New ways of working together are needed that are shaped by the ways people live now – not the other way round. Participatory approaches are needed to convene diverse groups in ways that foster meaningful conversations among all the people who need to be involved.

An especially effective approach has been developed in England by Encounters Arts. Their Art of Invitation uses techniques from theatre, as well as the insights of psychology, to bring groups of people together who are diverse in age, experience and background.

The group’s facilitators – all artists – have developed groundbreaking approaches to inviting people to fashion a collective creative response to systemic challenges facing their communities.

Q4 
What is your definition of innovation in design?

JT Digital is a means. It is not not the destination. Data of all kinds have a role to play shaping how we interact with the world, but they are not the whole story.

At @IAAC in Barcelona, for example, their Smart Citizen platform enables citizens to monitor levels of air or noise pollution around their home or business. The system connects data, people and knowledge based on their location; the low power consumption of the device allows it to be placed on balconies and windowsills where power is provided by a solar panel or battery. Smart Citizen just one among a growing array of devices and platforms that can sense the world remotely – from the health of a tomato in Brazil, to bacteria in the stomach of a cow in Perthshire

This innovation is impressive – but a bigger question remains to be answered. How will this data contribute to the system transformation that we so urgently need?

The next step is to foster ecological literacy emotionally, and not just rationally. When we truly care about living systems, things will really begin to change.

Q5 What is your definition of innovation in design?

JT The word innovation has been devalued by a too-narrow focus on technology and data. Big Tech, and the investment community, interpret innovation to means the use of digital tools to financialise activities that used to be free: caring for our elders, growing food, learning, or playing.

A different approach assumes that the resources needed for food, clothing, or a roof over
our head, already exist . New types of local provisioning and self-governance systems are emerging all the time. Some of these resources are are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. Some are social practices learned by other societies and in other times.

Whatever their origin, an emerging care or social economy is being germinated in countless community initiatives, experimental projects, innovative organizations, and social movements. All these experiments can be enhanced by design.

Cooperation, and sharing resources, are a good example of a second kind of innovation in which the ways we cooperate, and the tools and platforms we use to do so, can be transformed by design.

The financial crisis of 2008, for example, triggered a plethora of experiments in alternative money and trading systems, and mutual credit schemes. Many of these experiments are place-based, and subject to local democratic control. An important new example is FairCoin – the world’s first democratically organised and eco-friendly crypto-currency. FairCoin is designed to be a digital currency for this new economic system.

end

My book How To Thrive In The Next Economy has been published in Italy by Postmedia: Progettare oggi il mondo di domani Ambiente, economia e sostenibilità

Photo by apple_pathways

The post When Value Arises From Relationships, Not From Things appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Two hundred people per second now climb onto a dockless bike somewhere in China; the blue dots (above) denote transactions in Shanghai.

Considering that dockless bike sharing platforms were only launched two years ago, in 2015, this growth rate is remarkable.

The biggest company, Mobike, already operates more than seven million bikes across over 160 cities globally – and a merger with its biggest rival, Ofo, is in the offing.

For its US launch Mobike (above) has teamed up with AT&T for its networks. Qualcomm will make the GPS-enabled smart tags attached to each bike. And iPhone maker Foxconn will manufacture the actual bikes.

Negative side effects have accompanied this explosive growth, of course; entrances to subway stations, for example, have been blocked by piles of carelessly dumped bikes (above) .

Beijing and  Shanghai have banned the addition of more bikes until their users learn, or are compelled, to use designated parking areas. Wayward user behaviour may well be just a blip; penalties (and inventives) cxan easily be added to dockless bike software.

When sharing platforms enable new relationships between people, goods, equipment, and spaces, the notion of mobility as a discrete economic sector no longer makes sense.

News that Ikea is buying Task Rabbit is further confirmation of this convergence

The bigger story now unfolding (above) seems to be one of system transformation – a peak-car tipping point – that’s been slowly ‘brewing’ for a very long time.

(I don’t believe the concept of  “Personal Era” is a timely one – but I’ll come to that in my next post).

For the physicist Ugo Bardi, the decline of a complex system can be faster than its growth – an insight he attributes to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who wrote:  “Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”.

This could surely be true for a global mobility ecosystem based the private car.

After 100 years of spectacular growth, the Mobility Industrial Complex now confronts three potholes in the road ahead that could each on its own,  prove fatal.

The first is energy. Americans now use as much energy on one month as their grandparents did in their entire lifetime – and that rate of increase is accelerating with the advent of  ‘cloud commuting’ and ‘smart mobility’.  The Stack now runs on about seventeen terrawatts a day.

(The chart above is from The Cloud Begins With Coal, by Mark P. Mills)

The second un-driver of mobility is cost. It now costs 91c to travel one kilometre to travel in your own car,  but less than half that (30c/km) if you share. In some Chinese cities, where dockless bike systems are marketed like an app, you can use one for free.

The third pothole awaiting modern mobility – and it’s a big one – is complexity.

There are more lines of code in a high-end Audi than in a Boeing dreamliner – a costly feature will feel more like a bug if the coming software apocalypse turns out to be real.

“Sustainable smart mobility”, in this context, is turning out to be different in degree, but not in kind, from traditional transport and infrastructure planning. It tweaks the means, but not the ends.

Because neither the ‘need’ for perpetually growing mobility is questioned – let alone its biophysical possibility – the road on the downside of Seneca’s Cliff will be a bumpy one if a new story

In part 2 (to follow:) Smart Mobility at the Service of Civic Ecology

ADDENDUM

This writer has learned the hard way that people read things when they are ready to read them – not when they are written. In the hope that the time is now right, the articles below may, now, be useful.

From Bike Chain to Blockchain: Three Questions About Cooperation Platforms and Mobility (2015)

Until now, transportation has been planned to ‘save’ time. In this age of energy transition, would a better criterion not be, how to save calories? Who should own mobility sharing platforms: private companies? cities? us? What kind of ecosystem is needed to support the sharing platforms we want? 


Cycle Commerce: the Red Blood Cells of a Smart City (2015)

India’s many millions of bicycle and rickshaw vendors embody the entrepreneurship, sustainable mobility, social innovation, and thriving local economies, that a sustainable city needs.As an ecosystem, they’re also part of the metabolism that makes a city smart. That said, cycle commerce is a challenge for a city’s managers. Many different actors are involved in bicycle commerce – often with differing or downright conflicting agendas. Managing this kind of urban constellation is hard.

Cloud Commuting (2014)
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem. Mobilotoop asks, ‘how will we move in the city of the future?’  – and does not worry too much about the design of vehicles. ‘Cloud commuting’, in this context, is about accessing the means to move when they are needed (such as the micro-van, above) rather than owning a large heavy artefact (such as a Tesla) that will sit unused for 95 percent of the time.

Caloryville: The Two-Wheeled City (2014)
Something big is afoot. E-bikes in China are outselling cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded planners who thought China was set to become the next automobile powerhouse.  In Europe, too, e-bike sales are escalating. Sales have been growing by 50% a year since 2008 with forecasts of at least three million sales in 2015.

Cycle commerce as an ecosystem (2013)

At a workshop in Delhi, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 professionals from diverse backgrounds: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?

Green Tourism: Why It Failed And How It Can Succeed (2013)

Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries – but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, just e50 would go to the cook and the mule driver who do the work. The mule, who works hardest, gets zilch. Can green travel be reformed?

From Autobahn to Bioregion (2012)
A few years ago, Audi’s in-house future watchers noticed an unsettling trend in visions for the future of cities : an increasing number of these visions did not contain cars. Urban future scenarios seemed to be converging around car-free solutions to problems posed by debilitating gridlock, lack of space, and air pollution.Wondering what this trend meant for a car company such as itself, the company launched its Urban Future Initiative to establish a dialogue.

The Gram Junkies (2011)

Gram junkies are those fanatical hikers and climbers who fret about every gram of weight that might be carried — in everything from titanium cook pans to toothbrush covers. Excess weight is not just an objective performance issue for these guys; they take it personally. In the matter of mobility and modern transportation, we all need to become gram junkies. We need to obsess not about speed, or about exotic power sources, but about the weight of every step taken, every vehicle used, every infrastructure investment contemplated. 
http://designobserver.com/feature/the-gram-junkies-in-transportation-design-the-key-issue-is-not-speed-but-weight/24178

Is an environmentally neutral car possible? (2010)

The future of the car has been electric for what? Five years now? Ten? The answer is 110 years, for it was back in 1899 that La Jamais Contente (The Never Satisfied) became the first vehicle to go over 100 km/h (62 mph) at Achères, near Paris.Since then, as we produced hundreds of millions non-electric cars — and despoiled the biosphere in the process — all manner of non-petrol cars, including electric ones, have come and gone.

A tale of two trains October (2010)

The fundamental problem with high-speed train systems is not that they burn too much of the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that – like the interstate highway systems that came before – they perpetuate patterns of land use, transport intensity, and the separation of functions in space and time, that render the whole way we live unsupportable.


From my car to scalar (2006)

To a car company, replacing the chrome wing mirror on an SUV with a carbon fibre one is a step towards sustainable transportation. To a radical ecologist, all motorised movement is unsustainable. So when is transportation sustainable, and when is it not?


Photo by fireflythegreat

The post Is Peak Car Headed for Seneca’s Cliff? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Back to the Present

Trumpeted as ‘the most significant innovation in beekeeping since 1852’, the Flow Hive  was pitched to a crowd-funding site in 2015 as the bee keeper’s dream product.

‘Turn the tap and watch as pure, fresh, clean honey flows right out of the hive and into your jar’ gushed the website; ‘No mess, no fuss, no expensive equipment – and all without disturbing the bees’.

Helped by glowing reviews in Forbes, Wired, and Fast Company, Flow Hive’s pitch on Indiegogo worked like a dream; having sought $70,000 to launch the product, more than $6 million had been committed on Indiegogo at the time of writing.

Too good to be true? Sadly, yes.

As news of Flow Hive spread, natural beekeepers described Flow Hive’s approach as ‘battery farming for bees’. The modular plastic comb at the heart of Flow Hive’s design might well be convenient for honey-loving humans, they charged – but what about the welfare of bees?

As Kirsten Bradley explained, the combs in Flow Hive are far more neat and orderly than the ones bees make on their own. Left to themselves, bees set their own cell size according to the season, and the colony’s particular needs at that moment.

A beehive, in other words, is not just a factory; it’s part of a super-organism within which the comb functions as a central organ. The hive is the bees’ home, and supports their chemically enabled communication system.

The replacement of an adaptive wax hive a rigid by man-made plastic one creates a functionally depleted and sometimes toxic environment. The imposition of standardised cells prevents the bees from breeding drones throughout the hive; this reduces genetic diversity among surrounding bee populations, and resilience is reduced.

Instead of thinking of the colony as a complex living system, the inventors of Flow Hive seem to have imagined insects as components of a production machine in which they are manipulated to suit the human desire for profit and efficiency.

Flow Hive is just one example, among myriad human inventions, of a design approach that impedes inter-connectedness between the elements, and the whole, in healthy living systems.

In a perpetual search for order and control, we privilege the abstract over the lived, and impose idealised solutions that are at odds with how healthy living systems actually behave.

We strive for perfect, static, utopian solutions that are different, in kind, from real-world ecologies that are dynamic and constantly changing.

This habit of mind is not limited to the engineering of hard systems. Some visions of nature itself have been utopian in this sense.

Until recently, conservation research tended to focus on the individual species as the unit of study – for example, by looking at the impact of habitat destruction on an individual’s situation. But there is now increasing recognition that species interactions may be much more important.

As the ecologist Jane Memmott has explained, all organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways – for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers. Each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions.

The extinction of one species can lead to a cascade of secondary extinctions in ecological networks in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

Since the 1980s, scientific discoveries have confirmed the proposition that no organism is truly autonomous.

In Gaia theory, systems thinking, and resilience science, researchers have shown that our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems. The dead, mechanical object that has shaped scientific thought for most of the modern age turns out to have been misguided.

From the study everything from sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, to trees, rivers and climate systems, a new story has emerged. All natural phenomena are not only connected; their very essence is to be in relationship with other things – including us.

On a molecular, atomic and viral level, humanity and ‘the environment’ literally merge with one another, forging biological alliances as a matter of course.

Although our culture does not equip us well to grasp these hidden connections, this knowledge is literally vital.

For thinkers such as Fritjof Capra, the greatest challenge of our time is to foster widespread awareness of the hidden connections among living – and nonliving – things.

In a powerful follow-up to Capra’s challenge, Stephan Harding, in his book Animate Earth, describes how the world works not only at the macro level – the atmosphere, oceans, or Earth’s crust – but also on a micro level. Plankton and bacteria contribute to the formation of clouds by acting as nuclei for water droplets; micorrhizal fungi team up with plants that grow in poor soils; chemical signals called pheromones allow ant colonies to behave like a super organism.

Co-evolution – the formation of biocultural partnerships – turns out to be how our fertile planet thrives, says Harding. Although we have have ruptured these relationships, it is not to late to build bridges so that Earth can become healthy and self-regulating once again.

These scientific findings resolve a question that has vexed philosophers more than any other: Where does the mind end, and the world begin?

Until recently, we tended to think of the nervous system as a glorified a set of message cables connecting the body to the brain – but from a scientific perspective, the boundary between mind and world turns out to be a porous one.

The human mind is hormonal, as well as neural. Our thoughts and experiences are not limited to brain activity in the skull, nor are they enclosed by the skin. Our metabolism, and nature’s, are inter-connected on a molecular, atomic and viral level.

Mental phenomena – our thoughts – emerge not merely from brain activity, but from what Teed Rockwell describes as “a single unified system embracing the nervous system, body, and environment”.

The importance of this new perspective is profound.

If our minds are shaped by our physical environments – and not just by synapses clicking away inside our box-like skulls – then the division between the thinking self, and the natural world – a division which underpins the whole of modern thought – begins to dissolve.

Having worked hard, throughout the modern era to lift ourselves ‘above’ nature, we are now being told by modern science that man and nature are one, after all.

New materialism

Ecological networks also involve things.

In today’s world we are taught to perceive the things around us as lifeless, brute, and inert. Nature, insofar as we think about it at all, is a nice place to go for a picnic. With this picture of the world in mind, we fill up our lives, lands and oceans with junk without a second thought.

But we used to think quite differently: The idea that things might be ‘vital’ was first expounded formally by Greek philosophers known as ‘hylozoists’ – ‘those who think that matter is alive’; they made no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter.

For Roman sages, likewise: In his epic work On The Nature of Things, the poet Lucretius argued that everything is connected, deep down, in a world of matter and energy.

Ancient Chinese philosophers also believed that the ultimate reality of the world is intrinsically dynamic; in the Tao, everything in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is embedded in the continuous flow and change.

In Buddhist texts, images of “stream” and “flow” appear repeatedly; they evoke a universe that’s in a state of impermanence, of ceaseless movement.

In seventeenth century Europe, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza conceived of existence as a continuum, an inseparable tangle of body, mind, ideas and matter. And just seventy years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was an advocate of not only being in the world but also belonging to it, having a relationship with it, interacting with it, perceiving it in all dimensions.

The belief that matter matters, so to speak, was obscured by the fire and smoke of the thermo-industrial economy. Fossil fuels powered economic growth so powerfully since the nineteenth century that we lost sight of the fact that this model might be of limited duration thanks to resource constraints.

Now, as those constraints make themselves felt, many of these ideas are resurfacing. For thinkers in the ‘new materialism’ movement, our relationship with the material world would be more respectful, and joyful, if only we realised that we are part of the world of things, not separate from it.

Timothy Morton, for example, is adamant that there is more to “things” than we know in the ‘vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge’ that constitites our world.

Another philosopher, Jane Bennett – responding, in her words, to a ‘call from our garbage – advocates a patient, sensory attentiveness to what she calls the ‘vibrancy’ of matter and the nonhuman forces that operate outside and inside the human body.

Our wasteful patterns of consumption would soon change, she reckons, if we saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt all this litter, rubbish, and trash as lively – not just inert stuff.

‘Sometimes those sticking their heads in the sand are looking for something deep’ quips yet another philosopher, Peter Gratton. When everything around is understood to be ‘vital’, he asks, what political and ethical consequences follow? Do bacteria count as life? Viruses? A robot? Is the eco-system itself a life?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, or even maybe, Gratton argues, then the assumption that we humans have a right to exploit the world to our own ends begins to break down.

How innovation happens

In this context change and innovation are no longer about finely crafted ‘visions’ and the promise of a better reality described in some grand design for some future place and time. Change is more likely to happen when people reconnect – with each other, and with the biosphere – in rich, real-world, contexts.

This proposal may well strike some readers as being naive, and unrealistic. But given what we now know about the ways complex systems — including belief systems — change, my confidence in the power of the Small to shape the Big remains undimmed.

We’ve learned from systems thinking that profound transformation can unfold quietly as a variety of changes, interventions, and often small disruptions accumulate across time. At a certain moment — which is impossible to predict — a tipping point, or phase shift, is reached and the system as a whole transforms.

It’s a lesson confirmed repeatedly by history: “All the great transformations have been unthinkable until they actually came to pass” writes the French philosopher Edgar Morin; “the fact that a belief system is deeply rooted does not mean it cannot change”.

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy describes the appearance of this new story as ‘The Great Turning’, a profound shift in our perception, a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate or apart from plants, animals, air, water, and the soils.

There is a spiritual dimension to this story – Macy is a Buddhist scholar – but her Great Turning is consistent with recent scientific discoveries, too – the idea, as articulated by Stephan Harding, that the world is “far more animate than we ever dared suppose”.

Explained in this way — by science, as much as by poetry, art, and philosophy — the Earth no longer appears to us as a repository of inert resources. On the contrary: the interdependence between healthy soils, living systems, and the ways we can help them regenerate, finally addresses the ‘why’ of economic activity that we’ve been lacking.

This new story does not negate the value of a proactive and systematic approach to design, but it does mean paying at least as much attention to the connections and interactions between elements of a system, as to discrete components.

As we saw with the Flow Hive, the danger in a product-only approach is that it imposes a too-rigid framework on a situation in which a community – like the bee colony as a super-organism – needs constantly to change if it is to remain healthy and resilient.

A growing worldwide movement is looking at the man-made world through a fresh lens. Sensible to the value of natural and social ecologies, they are searching for ways to preserve, steward and restore assets that already exist – so-called net present assets—rather than think first about extracting raw materials to make new components from scratch.

Designers and manufacturers have an important contribution to make in this movement. Designers can very usefully cast fresh and respectful eyes on a situation to reveal material and cultural qualities that might not be obvious to those who live in them.

This kind of regenerative design re-imagines the built world not as a landscape of frozen objects, but as a complex of interacting, co-dependent ecologies.

Photo by Miroslav Becvar

The post A beehive is not a factory: Rethinking the modular appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The way ahead will be based on a combination of knowledge obtained remotely, using modern tools and devices, and ways of knowing that are local, experienced directly, contextual, and embodied.

When we connect with living systems emotionally, and not just rationally, and focus on the informal, the local and the conversational – things will really begin to change.

The following text appears in the inaugural edition of Ding, a new magazine about the Internet and things, published by the Mozilla Foundation. Ding will be launched at MozFest in London on 27-29 October.

On a recent visit to @IAAC in Barcelona, I was charmed by their Smart Citizen platform that enables citizens to monitor levels of air or noise pollution around their home or business.

The system connects data, people and knowledge based on their location; the device’s low power consumption allows it to be placed on balconies and windowsills where power is provided by a solar panel or battery.

Smart Citizen is just one among a growing array of devices that can sense everything from the health of a tomato in Brazil, to bacteria in the stomach of a cow in Perthshire – remotely.

Low-cost sensing technologies allow citizens to assess the state of distant environments directly. We can also measure oil contamination in our local river with a smartphone. Thousands of people are monitoring the air they breathe using Air Quality Eggs.

This innovation is intriguing, but leaves a difficult question unanswered: Under what circumstances will possession of this data contribute to the system transformation that we so urgently need?

Info-Eco Scenarios

When we first posed that foundational question at our third Doors of Perception conference in 1995,  when our theme was “Info-Eco”, ecological monitoring and remote sensing were the most popular scenarios to be proposed.

Twenty two years later, the proliferation of tools and platforms is glorious – but our journey is only half complete. Remote sensing and monitoring have turned not, on their own, to be agents of system change.

Or not yet. Twenty two years is not that long when compared to the scale of transformation we are embarked on.

Over centuries, our cultures have been rendered cognitively blind by a metabolic rift between people and the earth. Paved surfaces, and pervasive media – developed over generations – now shield us from direct experience of the damage we’re inflicting on soils, oceans and forests.

This metabolic rift explains how we’re able put the health of ‘the economy’ above all other concerns. We invest immense effort and resources in a quest for speed, perfection and control but, because we inhabit an abstract, digitally diminished world, we’re blind to the true costs of our activities.

The energy we use  is literally invisible. The destructive impacts caused by resource extraction are usually felt by other people, somewhere else.

For the philosopher John Zerzan our planet-wide dissociative mental state began when we placed language, art, and number above other ways of knowing the world. Every representation, he argued, both simplifies, and distances, earthly reality. Our reliance on data underpins a concept of progress in which embdied, analogue local knowledge is downgraded and often disregarded.

Vital knowledge

We once knew better. For much of human history, the idea that the world around us is ‘vital’ was literally common knowledge. Greek philosophers known as ‘hylozoists’ made no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter. Roman sages thought likewise.

In his epic work On The Nature of Things, the poet Lucretius argued that everything is connected, deep down, in a world of matter and energy. Chinese philosophers, too, believed that the ultimate reality of the world is intrinsically connective; in the Tao, everything in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is embedded in the continuous flow and change.

Buddhist texts, too, evoke a universe that’s in a state of ceaseless movement and connection. And as recently as the seventeenth century, in Europe, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza conceived of existence as a continuum, an inseparable tangle of body, mind, ideas and matter.

The belief that matter matters, so to speak, was then obscured – for two intense centuries up until about now  – by two developments: the fire and smoke of the thermo-industrial economy, and, more recently,  by global communication networks.

Now, as this self-devouring system unravels, the healing idea that that we are part of a world of living things, not separate from it, is resurfacing.

This reconnection with suppressed knowledge is not superstitious. Developments in science are confirming confirm the understanding in wisdom traditions that no organism is truly autonomous.

In systems thinking and resilience science, and from the study of sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, bacteria in our gut, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, trees, rivers and climate systems, old and new narratives are converging: our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems.

These natural phenomena are not only connected; their very essence is to be in relationship with other things – including us. On a molecular, atomic and viral level, humanity and ‘the environment’ literally merge with one another, forging biological alliances as a matter of course.

The importance of this new perspective is profound. The division between the thinking self, and the natural world – a division which underpins the whole of modern thought – is beginning to dissolve. It follows that the great work of our time – and an answer to the value question that has so perplexed the Internet of Things –  is to re-connect us – viscerally, and emotionally – with the living systems we’ve lost touch with.

But how?

Going forward, our work needs to focus on three things.

First, we need to work with scientists to develop benchmarks against which to compare the data being collected. There’s plenty of knowledge to connect with.  An ecology metrics list on Github lists an astonishing three thousand terms – from molecular phylogenetics to microrefugia. And a European platform called Everyaware combines sensing technologies, networking applications and data-processing tools in one platform. The proposition is that connecting people with their environment creates “more effective and optimized relationships”.

A second success factor for reconnection  is a bioregional narrative. Connecting the dots, revealing system-level patterns, and searching for root causes, will be most meaningful, as well as just interesting, within a framework of bioregional stewardship. A bioregion re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the places where we live, and through our bodies  – not just through our ever-active minds.

A bioregional focus reminds us that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, and fibersheds– not just  in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’.Growth, in a bioregion, is redefined in a healthier way, too –  as improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities. And because value is created by stewardship, not extraction, a bioregion  frames the next economy, not the dying one we have now.

Third: in our ongoing search for new and better ways of knowing – and being – we have huge amounts to learn from non-literate and indigenous cultures whose experience of the world is more direct than our own.

The deep knowledge of tribal communities about medicinal herbs and plants needs to be respected equally with data we collect using IoT devices. Photo: VGKK, BR Hills, courtesy of Quicksand

The way ahead will be based on a combination of knowledge obtained remotely, using modern tools and devioces, and ways of knowing that are local, experienced directly, contextual, and embodied.

When we connect with living systems emotionally, and not just rationally, and focus on the informal, the local and the conversational – things will really begin to change.

Photo by KyllerCG

The post From Gut to Gaia: The Internet of Things and Earth Repair appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve been re-reading “the internet and everyone” by john chris jones.

I’ve been astonished once again by the sensibility of an artist-writer-designer whose philosophy – indeed his whole life – first inspired me when I was a young magazine editor more than 30 years ago.

Like another muse of mine, Ivan Illich, John Chris Jones was decades ahead of his time. The time is ripe now for a wider readership.

He wrote about cities without traffic signals in the 1950s – sixty years before today’s avant garde urban design experiments.

In the 1960s, Jones was an advocate of what today is called ‘design thinking’; (then, it was called design methods).

He advocated user-centered design well before the term was widely used. He began by designing aeroplanes – but soon felt compelled to make industrial products more human. This quest fuelled his search for design processes that would shape, rather than serve, industrial systems.

As a kind of industrial gamekeeper turned poacher, Jones went on to warn about the potential dangers of the digital revolution unleashed by Claude Shannon.

Computers were so damned good at the manipulation of symbols, he cautioned, that there would be immense pressure on scientists to reduce all human knowledge and experience to abstract form.

Technology-driven innovation, Jones foresaw, would under-value the knowledge and experience that human beings have by virtue of having bodies, interacting with the physical world, and being trained into a culture.

Jones coined the word “softecnica” to describe ‘a coming of live objects, a new presence in world. He was among the first to anticipate that software, and so-called intelligent objects, were not just neutral tools. They would need to adapt continuously to fit new ways of living.

In time Jones turned away from the search for systematic design methods. He realized that academic attempts to systematize design led, in practice, to the separation of reason from intuition and failed to embody experience in the design process.

After watching the rapid wing movements of a flying duck, Jones compared ‘the beautiful, unconscious and ever-changing complexity of natural control systems with the stiffness and self-conscious centrality of all forms of government, management or social control’.

Jones called for the re-introduction of personal judgement, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility into the design process. He came to believe in ‘reversing the reversal’ – by which he means the Renaissance ‘and its antecedents in ancient Greece and at the end of Stone Age thinking when masculine gods and values displaced feminine ones, and notions of dominance replaced those of receptiveness’.

“the internet and everyone” is the opposite of a how-to textbook. But at one point, in a passage on contextual design, Jones lightly introduces a manifesto that calls on designers:

‘To begin with what can be imagined
To use both intuition and reason
To work it out in context
To model the contextual effects of what is imagined
To change the process to suit what is happening
To refuse what diminishes
To seek inspiration in what is
To choose what depends on everyone’

A character in the book (who I *think* is Jones) attributes this sensibility to being brought up in an old culture – in Wales – where ”the renaissance never happened” and “pre-Cartesian thinking is in the language”…

john chris jones’ real enthusiasm, throughout the years, has been for a kind of social designing that did not even have a name when he started writing and teaching about the subject.

He decided that he would not try and change the system from within. So, thirty six years ago, Jones resigned from institutional life – from having a job, material security, and a neat job label – for the life and economy of an independent writer, researcher and artist.

Since then Jones has written “design plays” and other fictions, many of which are included in “the internet and everyone”.

‘I’ve been drawn to study ancient myths and traditional theatres for decades’ he writes; ‘unless we can rid modern culture of its realisms there is no getting out of the grim realities of commercial engineering and the way of life built on it’

With its multiple voices and formats, this is not a book that I would presume to ‘review’ in a linear way. The best I can do is tell you how much I have been inspired by its 560 pages- and urge you to explore the book for yourselves.

Jones writes: “there are two kinds of purposes. The purpose of having a result, something that exists after the process is stopped, and does not exist until it has stopped,…and there is the purpose of carrying on, of keeping the process going, just as one may breathe so as to continue breathing. The purpose is to carry on”.

Long may John Chris Jones carry on. His public writing site is here

Photo by MIKI Yoshihito. (#mikiyoshihito)

The post The Internet and Everyone: Celebrating John Chris Jones at 90 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1. Why we need a new story

We are cognitively impaired by a metabolic rift between our culture and the earth. Paved surfaces, and pervasive media, shield us from direct experience of the damage our actions inflict on soils, oceans, air, and forests. A unique epoch of energy and resource abundance added zest to a story of growth, and progress and development, that put the interests of ‘the economy’ above all other concerns

The comforting narrative of perpetual growth has now hit biophysical and financial constraints – and we all feel it. Only 15% of the global population feel that the system is working and ecoanxiety—the feeling of impending environmental doom—afflicts populations on a global scale.

This is why post-truth’ politics should be described as pre-truth politics. In this time between stories, populists have picked up on our justified anxiety – but divert our attention from the root but invisible causes of our predicament. It’s easier to blame a Muslim, than entropy.

But a new picture is now emerging in myriad projects around the world. Their core value is stewardship, not extraction. Growth, in this story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient.  Care for place – not money, and not GDP – is the ultimate measure of value.

In Ojai, California
In California, Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff are engaging with a water crisis that will not have a single solution. They use Transition Design (above) to coordinate multiple interventions over short and long horizons of time. by different actors and stakeholders: new technologies, institutional and legislative reforms, new financial mechanisms, platforms for long-term environmental stewardship.

These seedlings are inspiring to behold – but something more is needed to effect the system change we yearn for: a shared purpose, that diverse groups people can relate to, and support, whatever their other differences.

2   Bioregion: a story that reconnects

A strong candidate for that connective idea is the bioregion. A bioregion re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, fibersheds, and food systems – not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’.

In the Altiplano of Spain (above) John Liu  is leading the first in a series called Ecological Restoration Camp to restore a severely damaged ecosystem in a damaged dry landscape. A diverse community of researchers, landscape designers, farmers, gardeners, engineers and other professionals are restoring the landscape in ways that regain environmental, social and economic value.


Bioregions are not just geographical places; they also embody the inter-connection of our minds, and and nature’s, at a molecular, atomic and hormonal level. A bioregion repairs the unity of mind and world, that has been fractured by modernity.

A bioregion, in this sense, is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’, in Robert Thayer’s words, that is definable by natural rather than political or economic boundaries. Its geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological qualities – its metabolism – can be the basis for meaning and identity because they are unique.

Growth, in a bioregion, is redefined as improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities. And because its core value is stewardship, not extraction, a bioregion frames the next economy, not the dying one we have now.

3. Scope of a bioregion

A bioregion is shaped by characteristics of the natural environment rather than by man-made divisions: Its geology; topography; climate; soils; hydrology and watersheds; agriculture; biodiversity, flora and fauna, vegetation.

Ecological systems are unique to each place, and the same goes for the social assets of a bioregion – individuals, groups, networks, and cultures.

A  bioregion is not a generic template. It meaning deepens during the discovery and mapping of its social and cultural assets.  Bioregional knowledge is socially created,  local,  experienced directly,  and embodied.
The embodied nature of land-based knowledge has shaped recent trends in agricultural knowledge and information systems (AKIS) and agricultural innovation system (AIS).

LUMA-Arles is a new contemporary art center and campus founded by Maja Hoffman in the Camargue region in southern France. In Atelier-Luma (above) designers and researchers, curated by Jan Boelen, working with local stakeholders, are exploring new opportunities for Arles and its bioregion. Projects range from the development of algae-based polymers to the use of biodiversity telematics in citizen science and ecological restoration.

With a focus on systems change towards sustainability,  agricultural ‘extension’ gives priority to participatory discovery, and experiential learning. Social network analysis is also being used to identify key players who can act as critical injection points in the system.

A lot of information about a bioregion’s social, cultural and ecological assets can be discovered  in overlooked archives and databases. This information is often dry, de-contextualised lists; wonders can appear when artists or actors are allowed access to these resources.

4. Cities, too

Cities are part of the bioregional story, too. They do not exist separately from the land they are built on, and the resources that feed them.

A growing number of blogs and platforms encourage a city’s citizens, and its managers, to re-connect in practical ways with the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water and energy systems on which all life, including ours, depends.

Seen in the context of its bioregion, a city is about more than architecture and hard (or electronically networked) infrastructure. In cities, it turns out, a wide variety of emergent ecosystems are developing before our eyes.

Some of these can be tiny. Biotopes – the smallest unit to be studied in a landscape, including urban ones – include hedges, roadside verges, drainage ditches, small brooks, bogs, marl pits, natural ponds, thickets, prehistoric barrows and other small uncultivated areas.

A new priority in the urban landscape itself is to connect these patches together. Green-blue corridors can transform a mosaic of discrete parts into a place-wide ecology. Attention is also turning to metabolic cycles and the ‘capillarity’ of the metropolis wherein rivers and biocorridors are given pride of place.

In New York, researchers are mapping its microbiomes.

Inspired by the power of the small to enrich the big, 45,000 vacant lots in Allegheny County, Pittsburgh, are being brought back to life, one by one. In that same don’t-knock-patches spirit, @ioby enlivens neighbourhoods block by block.

One likes to think that these and other cities have been stirred into action by by Wendell Berry: “The cities have forgot the earth and will rot at heart till they remember it again”

5  Food

The bioregional approach enriches economic relocalisation efforts that measure where resources come from; identify ‘leakages’ in the local economy; and explore how these leaks could be plugged by locally available resources.

One such ‘leak’ is food.  Up to 25 percent of the ecological impact of a rich city can be attributed to its food systems. Similar constraints apply to flows of textiles and clothing.

The relocalisation of regional food and fibre systems entails transition from a linear to an holistic, social and ecological approach to agriculture.

A farmer, in this story, is far more than a producer of agricultural commodities for the city.  She is also the steward of an agro-ecological system in which water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity, are a interdependent.

With ‘social farming‘ and ‘care farming’  the direct participation of citizens in farm-based activities needs also to be enabled by service platforms.

Ecological agriculture begins with an analysis of the carrying capacity of the land, and then growing crops, and rearing animals, in ways that regenerate the soils and biodiversity. In the transition to High Nature Value Farming, each location has to be understood and designed as an ecosystem within a bioregional web of natural systems.

This approach is more knowledge-intensive than the industrial model it’s replacing – and the scale and complexity of biodiversity data can be formidable.  An ecology metrics list on Github lists more than three thousand terms – from molecular phylogenetics to microrefugia, from myrmecology to ecophisiology.

A collaborative approach, and multiple skills in new combinations, are needed to cope with that complexity.  Open information information channels for the sharing of resources are a challenging design priority.

At a bioregional scale, ecological agriculture also includes the development of new forms of land tenure, new distribution models, processing facilities, financing, and training.

In England, the Ecological Land Co-operative  is creating smallholding clusters. The ELC buys agricultural land and seeks planning permission for new residential smallholdings as well as providing shared infrastructure. These ‘starter farms’ (above) are then leased to smallholders – at well below market rates – on a long and secure leasehold.

5   Time

All this takes time.

Industrial or ‘production’ approaches to the land treat agriculture as an engineering challenge. But nature is calibrated to a multitude of different time scales – in cycles that are shaped by the unique qualities of infintely diverse locations.

The tempo of bioregional work needs to be guided by eigenzeiten – the embedded times specific to an organism or system.

6.   Technology

Ecological restoration in a bioregion, and ecological agriculture, are of course supported, to a degree, by technology.

The Climate Tech Wiki, for example, lists hundreds of mitigation and adaptation technologies – from advanced paper recycling, to urban forestry.

Stewarding a bioregion involves measuring the carrying capacity of the land and watersheds; putting systems in place to monitor progress; and feeding back results.  Diverse arrays of networked microprocessors are being developed to this end.

In the Camargue bioregion of France Olivier Rovellotti , a biodiversity telematics designer, develops platforms such as Ecobalade (above) that equip citizens with the means to understand and monitor biodiversity assets on the spot and in real-time.

Under the umbrella of ‘precision agriculture‘,  developers hope that sensor applications might be also useful for farmers; applications range from thermal imagery and current soil moisture content, to soil surface porosity and water absorption capacity.

Some optimists also believe that regenerative agriculture and-robotics can benefit each other.

At @IAAC in Barcelona, their Smart Citizen platform (see photo above) enables citizens to monitor levels of air or noise pollution around their home or business. The system connects data, people and knowledge based on their location; the device’s low power consumption allows it to be placed on balconies and windowsills where power is provided by a solar panel or battery.

We can also measure oil contamination in our local river with a smartphone. Thousands of people are monitoring the air they breathe using Air Quality Eggs.

Monitoring – with or without tech – is most meaningful when it enables practical steps to be taken in ecological restoration at a bioregional scale. In Bangalore, the revival of  Jakkur lake began with a mapping platform developed by Aajwanti (an ex- Quicksand intern) working with @ZenRainman.

7.  Skills

Developing the agenda for a bioregion involves a wide range of skills and capabilities: The geographer’s knowledge of mapping; the conservation biologist’s expertise in biodiversity and habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources; the service designer’s capacity to create platforms that enables regional actors to share and collaborate; the artist’s capacity to represent real-world phenomena in ways that change our perceptions.

How will these skills be learned, or accessed?

If the health of people, and the places where we live, are connected, what kinds of business can help them thrive together? With its own unique assets, North West Wales has the potential to lead the world as a living laboratory for innovation where adventure sport, tourism, and wellness meet. To realise this potential, and turn ideas into new livelihoods and enterprise, the region’s assets need to be combined and connected in new ways. Pontio Innovation is leading on this work.

Universities across the north-western United States have developed a Curriculum for the Bioregion that transforms the ways in which tomorrow’s professionals will approach place-based development.

The curriculum, which is taught across the Puget Sound and Cascadia bioregions, covers  such topics as Ecosystem Health; Water and Watersheds; Sense of Place; Biodiversity; Food Systems and Agriculture; Ethics and Values; Cultures and Religions; Cycles and Systems; Civic Engagement.

A impressive archive of completed projects is evidence that these are not just academic activities.

Multidisciplinary teams have evaluated water quality data as indicators of the health of an ecosystem; mapped stream channels in a local watershed; learned about the geology, hydrology, soils, and slope stability of a local town; analysed the environmental costs of metal mining; studied how indigenous peoples used to inhabit their region – and discussed how best to integrate this legacy into today’s new models of development.

At the University of Idaho, a Masters in Bioregional Planning and Community Design draws on the expertise  of ten departments; there’s the option of a joint degree from the College of Law. The Priest River Bioregional Atlas, created by the university, is one of the more compete documents of its kind out there.

in Europe, an online course on Land Stewardship:was produced by the LandLife EU programme. During the course, students presented case studies of land stewardship; designed a stewardship agreement; analysed collaboration methods and communication experiences; and explored funding opportunities for land stewardship.

A Soil Academy is being developed by a group called Common Soil. A Common Soil Campus is proposed as a learning centre for regenerative agriculture, land restoration, regional food systems, and land stewardship; the idea is equip the next generations of farmers and citizens the skills to become stewards of living soil.

If ecological restoration is indeed the “great work” of our time’ – then we need training centres in every bioregion. For this writer, the Nordic system of Folk High Schools has tremendous potential.

8.  Mapping

Maps –  in whatever medium they are made, or experienced – need to represent the ways a bioregion’s  social and ecological systems interact with each other.

 In the past, nature conservation was preooccupied by  the impact of habitat destruction on individual species. Today, there is increasing recognition that species interactions may be even more important.

As Jane Memmott explains, all organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways – for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers – with the result that each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions (see below).

In a bioregion, trophic interactions among humans and bacteria are a single story

Mapping exercises can reveal gaps. When researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre studied a wetland management network crossing all 26 municipalities of the city, it was found (see below) to be fragmented not just ecologically, but administratively, too.

9.  Local Knowledge

Role models and case studies are always important. ‘Mapping’ therefore includes multiple ways to collect and tell stories from other places – and other times – in ways that are easy to find, and share.

In this ongoing search for new and better ways of knowing – and being – we have huge amounts to learn from non-literate and indigenous cultures whose experience of the world is more direct than our own.

10.  Art

Bringing a bioregion to life means connecting with living systems emotionally, and not just rationally.
This is where art comes in.

Art can make us curious about “what we’re inside of”  (Nora Bateson) and tweak our interest in “the pattern which connects” (Gregory Bateson).

Art can allow us to understand complex interdependences, and enhance our capacity to understand processes and system conditions.

The ancient metaphorical power inherent in path walking, and path making, frame a project in Scotland called Cateran’s Common Wealth. Clare Cooper curates arts and cultural activities that connect together cultural, social and ecological assets of ‘Big Tree Countrry’;. Deirdre Nelson for example (above) makes handheld stories that weave words and wool, that value knitting and narration as ways of living.

Art can provoke encounter, engagement and conversation.

Art can trigger attentiveness to living systems, and foster a sense of obligation towards future generations.

Art can make us aware of the power of small actions to transform the bigger picture.

A growing biocultural education movement links nature and culture as a way of promoting learning about and respect for both, as well as the intimate linkages between them.

11. Making 



Makerspaces are not the factories of the future, but they can nonetheless be part of a bioregion’s infrastructure as a hub for community-based production that supports a sustainable local economy and create a local market for local products

Many human and technical resources – skills, workshops, machines – are scattered around – but not known about. MakeWorks, in Scotland, are changing that. They describe themselves (see below) as ‘factory finders’.

Farm Hack, in the United States are a community for open source farm innovation. Members of the network share tips on adapting machinery via hackathons and open-hacking camps.

A purely transactional maker economy, based only on selling things, is unlikely to be sustainable in the longer term. If it’s just about the thing, someone will soon find a way to source a similar thing, but cheaper.  The French cooperative L’Atelier Paysan therefore trains farmers to design their own machines and buildings adapted to the unique needs of each small farm ecology.

12. Governance

Social practices, more than technical platforms on their own, are the cornerstone of bioregional governance. Paying attention to the process by which groups work together is just as important as deciding what needs to be done — perhaps more.

It’s not enough to simply to proclaim the moral superiority of sharing, for example, and expect everyone to fall in line. Tough questions must be confronted, and not brushed under the carpet. Among these: How to define, map and name the resources to be shared; determining who is entitled to what; designing rules and sanctions; designing how to make the rules.

Dealing with difference involves a lot of consensus building, collective participation, and transparent decision making. New ways of ‘doing’ politics are needed that are shaped by the ways people live now – not the other way round.

A wide variety of collaborative services, policies and infrastructures is emerging in support of food co-ops, collective kitchens and dining rooms, community gardens, cooperative distribution platforms, seed banks, hothouses, nurseries, and other enhancements of community food systems.

Nurturing these kinds of social practice is a ‘soft’ activity – but no less demanding for that. It involves politics, governance, communications, training, empowerment – and, in particular, the ability to help people with different agendas, from different backgrounds. work together.

Thus stated, it lies well outside the comfort zone of most design professionals. But it’s not a matter or either social or technical innovation – we need both.

Besides, examples of such new approaches already exist in other domains. The free software movement, for example, has evolved a flexible and effective culture of cooperation.

In France, Colbris et l’Université du Nous have launched a Governance MOOC in partnership with 
360Learning

13. Policy

Bioregionalism is appearing with growing frequency in public discourse in European policy and among professional networks (if not always under the same name).

A tolerance for acronyms and buzzwords is demanded of the bioregional explorer, but with a bit of digging she too will discover such gems as: IALE (European Association for Landscape Ecology); the “Cork 2 Declaration” (on diversification in rural development); RISE (a European plan for more biodiversity friendly agriculture and food systems); ICLEI  (Local Governments for Sustainability); SURFNATURE (a regional development funding for biodiversity); EFRD (a big regionb al development fund);  NATURA 2000 (a big programme about biodiversity in cities); GI (all things Green Infrastructure); URBAN-RURAL LINKAGES  (to do with rural cohesion); LAND-LIFE (land stewardship principles and tools);  BiodivERsA ERA-NET (research on biodiversity and ecosystem services);  
EKLIPSE  (upport mechanism for biodiversity); IPBES  (“Science and Policy for People and Nature” ); GIAHS (Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems)’ ARC2020 (Seeding the Future of Rural Areas); or PEGASUS (“unlocking public ecosystem goods and servces from land management”).

There are surely many more – and do tell me if I have missed any – but you get the picture.

In any case, the plethora of blogs and platforms has emerged in recent times includes:Smart Garden Cities
The Nature of Cities Urban Ecology Lab Cornell Civic Ecology Lab Biourbanism Biophilic Cities  Cities Biodiversity Center and Biohabitats .  La Ciudad Verde seems to be the biggest with 93,000 Twitter followers.

13   BackToTheLand2.0



Reconnecting with our bioregion is not about leaving home to live in a yurt. For most of us, it it means re-connecting with the land and biodiversity  in the places where we live now – but in new ways.  These can involve social farming, place-based development, and learning journeys.

In a series of xskool workshops called #BackToTheLand2.0 we brought local actors together to ask: What are the key social-ecological systems in this place? What are the opportunities for  this city-region? How night one design in them?

We discovered that a rich diversity of city-rural connections is emerging. These include: Maker networks; grain and fiber ecosystems; outdoor and land-based learning; adventure tourism, sport science, mixed-reality gaming; ecological restoration; civic ecology; farmer-city connections; learning journeys: and the reinhabitation of abandoned  of rural communities.

We learned that myriad new ways for urban people to re-connect with the land are emerging: Ways that are part-time, but long-term; ways that involve an exchange of value, not just paying money; ways to share knowledge, land, and equipment in new ways; ways based on historical links between town and country – but reinvented in an age of networks and social innovation.

Designers and artists, we saw, can contribute to bioregional development in various ways. Maps of the bioregion’s ecological and social assets are needed: its geology and topography; its soils and watersheds; its agriculture and biodiversity. The collaborative monitoring of living systems needs to be designed – together with feedback channels. New service platforms are needed to help people to share resources of all kinds – from land, to time.  Novel forms of governance must also be designed to enable collaboration among diverse groups of people.

Another large topic, simply stated: What would a bioregion look like, and feel like, to its citizens, and visitors?

None of these actions means designers acting alone; their role is as much connective, as creative. But in creating objects of shared value – such as an atlas, a plan, or a meeting – the design process can be a powerful way to foster collaboration among geographers, ecologists, economists, planners, social historians, writers, artists and other citizens.

One way to begin the journey could be a Doors of Perception Xskool.  The outcomes of an xskool, typically, include a shared perception of new opportunities; new connections between motivated and effective people; and the determination to make something happen.

Thank you to these great friends who have been partners in many of the experiences that have informed this text: @helloQS  @andygoodman @SchumacherCol @regenesisgrp @bossestwit ‏ @abadiracademy  @relationaldes@CasaNetural  @StirToAction 
@Choraconnection ‏ 
@CateransCommon
@CACollegeofArts  
@ALBA_Lebanon
@zenrainman
@CMUdesign 
@zenrainman
 @iaac @stefi_idlab
 @GaiaEducation 
@mbauwens 
@davidbollier
 @alastairmci

The post Back To The Land 2.0
 – A Design Agenda For Bioregions appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The publisher describes it as a “community of essays”. In my words it’s half encyclopedia, half commonplace book, half a secular bible, half survival guide, half … yes, that’s a lot of halves, but I hope you get the picture. I have never encountered a book that is so hard to characacterise yet so hard, despite its weight, to put down.

The editors of Lean Logic, who have completed the project following Fleming’s untimely death, say it’s about “cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty”. Well, yes. But today I have also read entries on nanotechnlogy, carnival, casuistry, multiculturalism, and the ‘new domestication’ – and I still have more than 1,000 entries to read. Waiting for me ahead are entries on road pricing, the vernacular, trust, resilience, the marshes of Iraq.

Lean Logic does not sugar-coat the challenges we face: an economy that destroys the very foundations upon which it depends; climate weirdness; ecological systems under stress; shocks to community and culture. Neither does the book suggest that there are easy solutions to these dilemmas. As Fleming has said, “large scale problems do not require large-scale solutions – they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.

This is not a book to read from start to finish – although entry Number 1, on Abstraction, is engaging enough.

Fleming defines abstraction as “Displacement of the particular – people, places, purpose – by general principle”. Within a few lines Fleming introduces someone I never heard of, Alexander Herzen [1812-1870], as one of the first writers to “make the case for local detail, for pragmatic decision-making, for near-at-hand, for ‘presence’. Fleming goes on to quote such other “scourges of abstraction” as Oliver Goldsmith, Montaigne, Joseph Conrad, and Matthew Arnold. And that’s all on page one.

Among the incredibly useful passages I’ve already discovered are: a long text about ‘resilience’ and its multiple meanings; a clear account of Energy Decent Action Plans; an explanation of Harmonic Order; a comparative guide to barter through the ages; and a section on Lean Health.

Fleming was a co-founder of the UK Green Party, chair of the Soil Association, and active from its early days in the Transition Towns movement. He was one of the first people in the world to understand the implications for industrial civilzation of peak oil, and a good deal of the book is about energy in its many meanings. Fleming was the inventor – and advocate for more than a decade – of Tradeable Energy Quotas or TEQs. This energy rationing scheme is designed to share out fairly a nation’s shrinking – as it must and will – energy/carbon budget, while allowing maximum freedom of choice over energy use.

But Lean Logic is neither a policy manifesto nor a dry technical guide. It’s an incredibly nourishing cultural and scientific treasure trove. Its pages span ethics, science, culture, art, and history. The book’s greatest strength, for this mesmerized reader, is the lightness with which it draws on knowledge from earlier periods of history, and from other cultures.

The post Book of the Day: Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It appeared first on P2P Foundation.

These lessons are exemplified by The Nubian Vault Association (AVN). With a mission is to serve the one hundred million people living in the Sahel region of West Africa who are either homeless, or live precariously in short-life structures, AVN has spent 16-years, on the ground, developing a multi-dimensional approach that works.

“No wood, no iron – we build with the earth”


One hundred million people are living precariously in the Sahel region of West Africa. Deserts are spreading, the bush timber they once used to build homes is no longer available; as a result they are forced to use imported wood and corrugated iron to build houses.

These modern materials have poor insulation properties, are unhealthy and uncomfortable to live with, and cost cash to purchase that many poor families simply don’t have.

The traditional development model is either to give people money or, in social impact design projects, to treat the situation as a production challenge.

The Nubian Vault Association has evolved a quite different approach: the long-term, muti-dimensional cultivation of living local economies based on three kinds of value: a roof, a skill, and a market.

The roof in question is inspired by a building type, the nubian vault, invented by  Egyptians 3,500 years ago. Adapted for today’s conditions, these vaulted earth roofs are built with locally-made adobe bricks whose raw materials are free and locally available.

Because nubian vault structures contain no wood, or iron, they are affordable, ecological, and – with their excellent thermal properties – comfortable.

They are also durable: AVN houses built more than fifteen years ago are still in daily use and can be expected to last 50 years or more. This compares with an average life expectancy of 7 – 10 years for a house with a corrugated iron roof and thin concrete block walls.

Skills are created as the cohort of masons trained by AVN grows. Since 2000, more than 440 masons have been trained, and a growing cohort of apprentices is following in their steps by learning and working on new sites. This transmission of know-how between master and apprentice is at the core of AVN’s approach.

AVN has evolved a nuanced approach to the creation of self-sustaining local markets They begin with a demonstration project – for a small mosque, perhaps – and then recruit a dynamic and confident individual to be their ‘ambassador’.  He or she looks for new customers among up within a 100km radius of the demonstration project. New customers, as they are found, are connected with a mason.

Unlike many architecture-for-good efforts, AVN does not build homes for local people, and has not donated lent them money to do so. On the contrary: new clients usually participate in the construction of their own house and pay the masons directly. AVN’s core objective is to create autonomous local markets that do not depend on external inputs of cash.

AVN supports this process with advice on the recruitment of local apprentices, and helps with the logistics and planning of the first construction sites in new markets.

Its local teams also organise two to three day congresses at the start and end of each construction season to which all NV masons are invited. They swap experiences and tips, make contacts, and network. AVN also provides training workshops on  skills needed to run a small business and become a successful entrepreneur.

Right now, a large proportion of new customers are found by the builders themselves.“It’s like priming a pump”, explains AVN co-founder Thomas Granier; “our work expands on the famous saying: we teach a man to fish; we teach him how to mend the nets; we teach him how to sell the fish”.

In the language of impact and outputs, AVN’s record is impressive: Masons trained through AVN’s Program have built more than 2,000 homes and other structures for their clients. More than 800 villages contain at least one nubian vault, and AVN  offices have been opened  in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali and Senegal.

Looking ahead, progress, for Granier and his team progress,  is not like ramping up production in a factory. Although the number of new buildings completed has been growing at an impressive 25% a year – that rate would mean the completion of just 200,000 buildings by 2040. Probably ten times that number are needed.

A growth rate of 35% would multiply that number by six – to 1,200,000 buildings – which gets a lot closer to the scale of the need. But how?

Thre are no easy precedents to learn from. As Tom de Blasis points out in an interesting new book called Leap Dialogues, only a handful of programmes have been succssful at the million-plus scale: vacinnations for measles and rubella; anti-malarial bed nets; mobile phones; and micro-finance. None of these is comparable to building houses.

AVN therefore needs to develop an operation that works at a system scale. It needs to figure out what factors determine the readiness of an area to become self-sufficient – its ‘market-readiness’?  And to achieve that, it must decide what kind of platform it must become if it is to enable the exponential growth of its approach.

Funding is important, of course. It can take AVN staff several months to research and write a grant application. They must wait more months for a decision to be made. And once they have the go-ahead, it takes more time to ramp up activities.

This heavy back-office work diverts energy from
 AVN’s most important work: curating the exchange of value among multiple actors in diverse and changing contexts.

In sixteen years so far, AVN has fostered working relationships between actors in different domains. local, regional and national public authorities; international donors; civil society actors such as NGOs; and so on. The diversity of agendas and cutures invoved in one programme is mind-boggling.

During this process, system conditions on the ground have continued to change; AVN must adapt continuously in an environment shaped by changing demographics, migration, armed conflict, and climate change.

In traditional development projects, with their clearly defined vendors and suppliers, a legacy support infrastructure exists: laws, business models, financial management systems.

AVN, in the absence of a legacy support system, proceeds on the basis of sensitively  cultivated trust.

A new kind of business model is needed to support this kind of complex long-term system-shaping work.

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