An Economy of Place – Part 5

A tried and tested systemic procss with 3.8 billion years of practice

If you would like to start at the beginning of the series, An Economy of Place Part I starts here.

In part 4 of this series, we shed some light on how the way in which we think — our paradigm of thought — affects the way in which we design our world around us. In this part we explore a new narrative, a new design model on which we can base future design for the places of the world.

If we agree that the dominant economic logic of the 20th century has been as mechanistic machine, peppered with some more value-led models, and yet we recognise that these have had a overall deleterious effect on both the stability of our planetary ecosystem and the quality of human connection — what kind of new narrative or model could replace and transform it?

What could change the nature of constantly striving for every more efficiency and growth, organised through hierarchical management systems and measured by profits and GDP, the proliferation of extractive places? What could stop the onslaught of growth in megacities with their attendant air pollution, rabid unsustainable consumption patterns, and crowded conditions?

What would cities look like that are designed for all live to thrive not just produce, be efficient, and function well to serve the economy? What would tourism look like if it had development of human wisdom and connection at its heart instead of footfall and per capita spend? How would we build our homes if we thought first of what creates mental health and wellbeing rather than the functionality of flows and movement between rooms? What could make housing developments focus on quality of life and environment instead of investor profits, or shift the explosion of mega-farms chasing productivity with chemical interventions that have destroyed biodiversity and soils. What would be the role of our great estates if we stepped away from hierarchical community philanthropism to collective resilience?

It’s said that when the pupil is ready the teacher will appear. It’s also possibly true to say that when the time is right, an idea will take flight. There is an emerging story but it’s not a new one. It’s a story and process which has been tried and tested for 3.8 billion years. It is the way of nature. The way of living systems.

What are the main principles of living system design?

Many great minds have contributed to the understanding of how living systems or complex adaptive systems work including Russel Ackhoff, Peter Senge, Fritjof Capra, Carol Sanford, Daniel Christian Wahl, the legendary Donella Meadows among many others. I summarise only a small part of this great body of work here for the purposes of laying out the foundation on which we can build a new vision for places as living, thriving systems in which life flourishes. This work covers general systems theory, open systems, systems thinking, complexity science, quantum science and more.

The fundamental difference between mechanisms and living systems is the ongoing order or patterns which emerge from the interaction among the parts (sub-systems) within the system. It is also the fact that the behaviour of a complex adaptive system cannot be predicted or understood by observing and understanding the behaviour of the parts of the system. The complex and dynamic interaction produces its own unique behaviour that is adaptive to its circumstances. It is through the ‘self-organization of the components that life emerges and becomes self-replicating’.

We start from a premise of understanding what a healthy living system actually looks like, and how it works. Living systems derive their fundamental design principles from the way in which life on earth has operated and evolved for billions of years. They can be seen and experienced in nature, but also in the way in which we have designed constructs in the world around us. Cities are complex adaptive systems. Most national health systems are complex adaptive systems.

I will give some examples in nature, but our end goal is to understand these principles and how we can apply them to our place-sourced design which of course includes humans as part of the living system rather than separating us out through just observing what goes on in nature. Each point could be an essay in itself and we will explore each more during the series.

1) Creating the conditions conducive to life
The first and foremost principle is that life creates the conditions conducive to life — a phrase which I first heard from Janine Benyus at The Biomimicry Institute.That principle manifests in many different ways. Let’s take a fruit tree. A fruit tree produces an abundance of fruit that is available as food to a wide variety of species. It shares its abundance with anyone from bees who feed on the nectar of the flowers, to other insects who devour the over-ripe and rotting fruit, to birds and small mammals like squirrels, to humankind who make beverages and food from their fruit. 

A tree doesn’t keep growing upwards forever; it reaches an optimum height and then continues to share its bounty with its surrounding community until it wearies and slows its production as it ages. Fallen fruit or fallen trees may be seen by humans as waste but nature recycles it into nutrients for the soil in which new fruit trees grow which closes a loop on the cycle of life by fertilising the soil. The fruit tree also produces seeds so that new fruit trees may sprout and its existence as a species continues.

The golden rule to stay in the game of life is to ensure in your design

Just one idea within this concept should give us pause for thought. Nothing in nature continues to grow forever. Not even a coronavirus, even though it may feel like that at the moment. It grows to its optimum capacity and then, unless disturbed or disrupted by another force, it shifts into allowing other species to grow and thrive, until its time comes to pass into history. A tree grows to its maximum height and then fulfils a role of providing nourishment, nutrients and habitation for other life to thrive for the rest of its nature life, continuing even to renew the soil after it finally falls. As regenerative practitioners we are often like trees — planting other trees in whose shade we shall never sit.

What do cities and towns look like that deliberately do not continue to expand? What does tourism look like that doesn’t focus on growing footfall? What do housing developments look like that create thriving biodiversity beyond hedgehog corridors and a bit of pretty planting? How do you design a museum so that it creates more life instead of celebrating only past lives? How do we design for things to end, for death and closure rather than constant continuance?

Specific ways in which nature creates the conditions conducive to life can be seen in several existing human adaptations of nature’s intelligence:-

• Biomimicry: construction, product design, social innovation
• Waste management: the circular economy, closed loop recycling systems, cradle to cradle design
• Regenerative agriculture: soil revitalisation, re-forestation, agriforestry, permaculture

There are five key questions to ask ourselves here in any design or project or organisation we work on in our locality:-

• How can I ensure I create conditions conducive to thriving human life in my locality?
• How can I ensure I create conditions conducive to thriving ecological life in my locality?
• How can I ensure what I do in my locality contributes to thriving human life in a global context?
• How can I ensure what I do in my locality contributes only to thriving ecological life in a global context?
• Where I encounter challenges in transforming existing systems, what would nature do to continue life?

2) Living systems are inter-connected and inter-dependent across nested systems
The human body is a complex living system: we have multiple different systems that operate entirely independently with multiple different parts that form each of those whole systems .Our circulatory system includes plasma, blood corpuscles, veins, the heart. But that system is intimately interwoven with our respiratory system which provides oxygen to it and transports carbon dioxide away. If neither are working optimally, very quickly our muscular system will start to suffer from lack of oxygen to build muscle as lactic acid builds up, and if our muscular system doesn’t work well, we may not be able to exercise easily, will put on weight and our heart function will be impaired. The inter-connected, nested inter-dependence is a primary characteristic of all living systems.

We know from human interventions in bio-systems how easy it is to de-stabilise interdependent ecosystems. When the grey wolf was eradicated from Yellowstone National Park, the rapid increase in the elk population gradually destabilised the grasslands of the park through over grazing but also caused the elk population to face boom and bust periods of starvation — as larger herds were no longer able to weather the changes in droughts that were coming with increasing climate change. Within 20 years of re-introducing the apex predator — otherwise described as a keystone species — into the Park, elk herds are stabilising and the ecosystem is recovering.The wolf and elk are part of the Park ecosystem, and the park ecosystem is part of the wider system of rainfall that enables the bioregion to thrive.