This presentation addresses the following questions:

• What gives an urban space its character, personality, quality, identity, and its sense of coherence and order?
• What are the characteristics of a sustainable, adaptive, innovative, resilient, and regenerative city?
• What do living systems teach us about the attributes of a healthy and regenerative city and what are the implications for city planning and design?

Here is a high level overview of the 3 sections of my presentation:

Section 1 -  Paradigm Shift: Shifting our Mental Models

While the reductionist scientific method we inherited from Descartes and Newton has proven to be very effective for the development of technological innovations, this approach is very limited when dealing with the complex adaptive challenges faced by our cities today and even more so, by the cities of tomorrow: population density or lack of; social justice issues; poverty; economic issues; environmental problems such as pollution (water and air), watershed health, greenhouse gases emission, waste management; energy issues; food accessibility; and so on.

Systems thinking teaches us that complex systems have emergent properties that do not reside in any of their parts.  In order to understand the whole, we must embrace complexity and focus on the dynamic interactions between the parts (feedback loops).

Complex systems are dynamic and unpredictable; they cannot be controlled or managed.   Most often, addressing a problem in isolation may cause another problem over time.  Fortunately, the understanding of the systemic structures of our urban environments may allow us to find high leverage points where to intervene to positively influence the future of our cities.   The highest leverage points, however, are to be found in our worldviews and mental models.

Section 2 – The Living Systems Approach

This section considers the key attributes of living systems: openness; purpose; autopoiesis (self-creating); structure-determined behavior; diversity and differentiation; adaptation; self-organization; and emergence, and discusses these attributes within the context of a city.

A city that is ‘open’ facilitates the development of connections, interactions and relationships.  Efficient, interconnected physical infrastructures facilitate exchange of goods and mobility of people internally within the city and externally with its region and beyond.  The presence of open/public spaces as well as the elimination of any “walls,” physical or metaphorical, support interpersonal and intercultural interactions.  Communication network facilitates exchange of knowledge, talent, qualified labor and investments.

From an evolutionary perspective, a city that is ‘open’ continuously and dynamically changes and evolves over time.  It encourages community engagement, stewardship and leadership in envisioning the city’s future (a city developed by the people for the people).

An autopoietic city is a city that uses its network of communication to maintain life and its sense of identity, i.e. the culture of the place.  The physical, social, cultural, political, economic structures of a city reciprocally influence one another in a way that is mutually reinforcing.   A city has the power to choose to redesign its (infra)structures and institutions so that to generate new patterns of behavior, thereby enhancing the quality of life and of the surrounding natural system.

Diversity is necessary for creativity and survival.  A healthy city encourages diversity at all levels: culture and ethnicities; physical and knowledge assets; characters and styles; built and open spaces; public and private spaces; and so on.

A healthy city is one that has developed its adaptive capacity and resilience in order to flexibly learn, self-organize and adapt to contingencies.  The transformation of a city over time should increase its level of coherence and wholeness and strong sense of identity.  A healthy, regenerative city cannot be designed or built.  These qualities are emergent.

Section 3 – Implications for Urban Planning, Design and Community Involvement

From a living systems’ perspective, sustainability is a capacity, not merely a set of goals, metrics or criteria, nor a ‘thing’ that can be built.  A living systems approach to urban planning embraces complexity (as opposed to reducing it by focusing on individual parts independently) and focuses on building the adaptive (learning) capacity of the place: it is about sustaining life — an evolving process of continual renewal.  The understanding of the local context is primary to increase the resilience of a city.

One cannot acquire tacit knowledge of a place solely through analysis.  The emergent qualities of a place can only be understood by experiencing the place.  Consequently, city planning and design should support processes that increase participants’ learning and discovery and help people reconnect to the place where they live.

There are no easy and simple solutions to the design or sustainable and regenerative cities.  Urban planning is an adaptive, transformative process that requires us to challenge our beliefs, values and mental models.  The process must transfer ownership and leadership to the community and leverage the collective intelligence that resides locally so that creative solutions emerge out of the collaboration between stakeholders.

“Life accepts only partners, not bosses.  We cannot stand outside a system as an objective, distant director.  There is no objective ground to stand on anywhere in the entire universe.  Our disconnection — our alleged objectivity — is an illusion; and even if we fail to realize this, the system will notice it immediately…Systems do not accept direction, only provocation.”

~Margaret Wheatley, A Simpler Way

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While we always include a nature walk in our meeting agenda, it was the first time our walk was framed as a problem-solving exercise inspired by Biomimicry – a discipline created by Janine Benyus that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.  In sharp contrast with traditional, analytical and reductionist methods of investigating problems and their resolution, Biomimicry follows Life’s Principles and observes natural forms, processes, and ecosystems to inspire the design of more sustainable human technologies.  (Explore the concepts of Biomimicry further at the Biomimicry Institute and Biomimicry Guild websites.)

While companies as diverse as Nike, Boeing, Arup Engineers, Patagonia, Interface, and Seventh Generation, among many others, are most often applying Biomimicry to support the design of innovative sustainable industrial products and engineering solutions, our exercise was presented in such a way that it could generate insights for the resolution of non-technical problems as well.  It is from this non-technical perspective that I took the nature walk.

The exercise was framed as a way to force us to slow down and to carefully and intentionally observe nature as opposed to a casual walk where we might have just looked at nature without truly seeing it while our minds meandered.  I found the exercise both fun and insightful and am happy to share a few reflections about my nature observations.

Biomimicry Walk*

Step One:

Identify a particularly difficult problem/issue that you are currently dealing with.

Step Two:

Take a walk and identify and observe nature.  Select plants, animals, objects, situations, or nature’s dynamics (movement of tides, wind through the trees), etc., and observe them “precisely.”

Make a list of the items you observe.

Step Three:

When you return,

• Try to identify one or more principles from nature embodied in the thing you observed.  Look for ways to transfer nature’s principles embodied in the thing you observed to your subject.

And/or

• Make as many metaphors as you can between your list and your subject (problem).  Look for similarities and similar circumstances.

(Metaphor: The application of a word or phrase to an object or concept that it doesn’t literally denote.  Connections between two ideas/things through some similarity they share.)

• Ask yourself what new insights the principles from nature or metaphors provide as to how to solve the problem.

Step Four:

Share your problems and insights with other people and begin a group discussion/dialogue.

My Personal Observations/Insights:

I am currently in a personal and professional transition and, thus, the issue I identified for myself related to how to deal with deep transitions in general.  I decided to take the walk on the tideflats in front of Caswell’s residence.  The observations I made were metaphorical with some identification of principles from nature.

The first thing I noticed was oysters shell decomposing.  While static in appearance, the process of decomposition is a process of change and of transition between life and death.  This process is mostly invisible, yet it is very real.  Only the result of the process can be observed as small pieces of shell become detached from the main oyster shell.   Those small pieces will eventually become dust and be re-incorporated into the soil as nutrients.   I thought of a process of re-organization of atoms, where nothing is lost but what makes the identity of the shell at a given time evolves into something different, perhaps a new life, over the long term.

My second observation was of a spider at the center of her net.  It was quite windy that day, and the net was moving back and forth with strength. There was an interesting contrast between the movement of the net from the wind and the seemingly static position of the spider.  It felt to me like if the spider had to really hold on to her spot, as she seemed fragile under the influence of the elements.  She did not seem to be able to do anything else besides hold on.  Yet, as I looked more closely, she was, in fact, working on her thread as though nothing could disturb her process.

Finally, I walked further out on the tideflats, where the terrain started to become quite treacherous.  Under my feet, I felt the instability of the ground and the further I ventured, the clumsier I felt.   At the same time, my body reacted with increased alertness while I paid more and more attention to where I was laying my feet.  My body started to react and interact with the environment, my feet hesitating and testing out the ground in front of me before making the next step.  Now, I was truly paying attention as I could have twisted my foot or ended up in mud up to my ankles.  As my awareness increased, I became interconnected with the ground as it sent information to me about its condition, which influenced my decision on where to make the next step (a typical feedback loop).

Perhaps not new insights per se, my observations reminded me of the impermanence of everything.  One cannot always see (with the eyes or with the mind) the destination of our journey.  The process is what matters.  Strength can sometimes takes the appearance of fragility and does not need to be forceful – strength can be light and seemingly passive to the uneducated eyes.  While external conditions influence us, how we respond is up to us.  Information and feedback loops are critical to adaptation.  And when the body and the mind are connected, increased awareness arises.

*The Biomimicry Walk exercise was created by my friend and colleague Kyle Davy, Consultant, Berkeley, CA.  Kyle’s website: http://www.kylevdavy.com

Reynolds’s answers included: embrace restraints (what he meant by “restraints” is what I call “constraints” in my recent post); take a risk; question everything; and, it’s not about tools, it’s about ideas.  Duarte’s answers were: hierarchy; balance; contrast; clear space; and harmony.

To their input I would like to add a few insights of my own:

Collaboration – Like design, no business activities can be effective, productive, and creative in today’s complex world without collaboration between individuals from different disciplines and organizations.  But effective collaboration is an art – one that requires active listening, checking ego at the door, and willingness to stay in the process when things get tough.

Creative Abrasion – Conventional thinking is built on the idea that friction and conflicts are a nuisance.  I would instead argue that no productive collaboration effort takes place without some tension.  The term “creative abrasion” was coined by Jerry Hirshberg, founder and president for Nissan Design International (NDI), to describe the competition between different design ideas that provide the “creative energy” necessary to original thinking and the achievement of high quality design.  This process of simultaneous collaboration and competition means that “…as the creative fusion of ideas occurs by holding seemingly antithetical thoughts in the mind simultaneously, so creative collaboration between people can occur by an effort to retain conflicting cultural and disciplinary viewpoints in the mind without discarding or allowing either to dominate.”  The best innovative ideas emerge when the juxtaposition of divergent professional perspectives stimulates team creativity and helps transcend the obvious solutions.

Embracing complexity – The business tendency of rushing toward the resolution of a problem before the problem is fully understood is often creating more harm than good.  Designers know that the design process is inherently complex and that they must embrace that complexity before making decisions.  The design process provides a structure for problems investigation and inquiry.  It is an open-ended learning process that supports information and knowledge exchange in the goal of defining the problem while simultaneously testing out different ways for resolving it.  While designers, and architects in particular, have developed the specific skills required to embrace complexity, the process may overwhelm most individuals.  It is imperative for managers to facilitate the process of inquiry in their organizations and define a structure that allows knowledge sharing and creativity to take place while maintaining stability.

Prototyping – Designers develop prototypes (drawings and models) to explore different design alternatives, simulate reality, visualize constraints, facilitate trade-offs and manage expectations.  Models are objects that support experimentation, play and learning.  The most innovative companies today are developing a culture of prototyping to facilitate creativity and innovation.

Context – Architectural design occurs within a particular context, which informs it.  A clear understanding of the context provides a framework within which design ideas can be developed.  In our global economy, many businesses have lost touch with their immediate business context and locality.  Solutions developed for a Western world may be completely ineffective in the context of a developing country and vice versa.   Products and services must be re-evaluated and customized based on the context of their specific markets.

Hirshberg J. 1998, The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World.  HarperCollins Publishers, New York.