A cultural disconnection between the man-made world and the biosphere lies behind the grave challenges we face today. We either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as resources whose only purpose is to feed the economy. This ‘metabolic rift’ – between the living world, and the economic one – leaves us starved of meaning and purpose. We have to heal this damaging gap.
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?
《新经济的召唤：设计明日世界》【英】约翰·萨克拉 著 马谨 马越 译 尺寸：140mm×210mm 页数：288页 装帧：精装 定价：68.00元 书号：ISBN 978-7-5608-8188-1 出版日期：2018年11月 Pages: 1 2
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.