IT’S TIME TO REDRAW THE WORLD (WHO DO WE WANT TO BE?)

Jennifer Cutbill // Vancouver

Connection, commitment, and capacity for radical change

Lately, I can’t help but hear a few lines on repeat. From Regenesis Group, that “we have the opportunity, born of crisis, to transform how we inhabit the earth.” And from Rebecca Solnit, that there are really only two questions for activists: “What change do you want to see?” and “Who do you want to be?” While the latter is essentially a rhetorical version of Ghandi’s “be the change…” the framing seems germane in the face of our current crises.

While there are a lot of finer grain sentiments and actions deserving commemoration, at coarse grain I think there are four key, higher order take-aways for designer-activists. First: we’re reminded that we have an intrinsic capacity for caring. While there have also been fear-fueled reactions from apathy to hoarding, harassment and harsh inequalities, the exponential global rise in compassion—from random acts of kindness to state-negotiated truces—reminds us that we are social creatures with compassion at our core(tex).  

Second: we are fundamentally, and inextricably interconnected. Not just by digital platforms and global supply chains, but as innate participants in the web of living systems across nested scales, in all their messy non-linear complexity. Our health is perhaps one of the most powerful and poetic metaphors for understanding this interconnectedness, as our health depends not just on our own actions, but on our collective efforts and on the planetary health of the living systems that support and sustain us. While a groundswell of people are underscoring the parallel efforts needed to address the conjoined public health and climate crises, even more powerful is the understanding that these are not separate issues. Rather, they are part of an interconnected, nested, systemic health crisis. The first stage of crisis response focused on mitigating an acute shock; the latter stage focused on longer range stressors to intergenerational health equity. Through this lens, it becomes clear that competing to be merely less bad—to cut fewer holes in our life raft—is cognitive dissonance. Rather, it seems obvious we must collaboratively regenerate our communities and our planet, as this is the only way we will heal ourselves. Independence is a colonial construct after all, a fact that I am regularly reminded of by an Indigenous mentor.

Third: we have incredible capacity for radical, paradigm-shifting transformation. And the “we” here is not just us as members of societies, but also the unique agency we have as designers. Regenerative economist Kate Raworth describes the pencil as “the most powerful tool, because with it, we can redraw the world.” We can help make visible the invisible by revealing essential patterns of place (through participatory and developmental practices that honour and integrate Indigenous wisdom and place-based knowledge), and by envisioning new potential futures—ones designed to function in regenerative harmony with these essential place-based patterns. This revealing work will enable project investments to serve as catalysts for creating cascading co-benefits that improve the “vitality, viability, and evolutionary capability” of their local citizens, communities, economies, and ecologies, now and through time. This is radical shift in how we practice—but, it is possible. It is being made right now by practitioners around the world. For example, we can look to the international portfolio of Regenesis Group and the growing regenerative lab network of Common Earth (in partnership with the Commonwealth). And locally (here in the lower mainland of British Columbia), we can look to projects like the Iona Wastewater Treatment Plant (by Metro Vancouver with Local Practice, Miller+Hull, Seven Group, Regenesis, Space2 Place, AECOM, KWL, Jacobs, and many others) which is being approached as a catalyst for regenerating the health of the Salish Sea (instead of its original mandate to essentially hide a secondary treatment plant in a park). 

And lastly: changing patterns require conscious commitment if they are to endure. This is especially front of mind as we shift from onset stage triage to long-range strategic planning. In the past few weeks our global society has made changes that were previously thought to be unaffordable or outright impossible. As anyone who has changed patterns of behaviour knows (be it learning a language, losing weight, or quitting smoking), permanent repatterning takes practice, and practice requires commitment. We have seen our societies support each other in short-term commitments to physical distancing; now we must find ways to collaboratively support each other in long-term changes. The Architects Declare movement includes over 4,100 architectural organizations and firms across twenty countries who have signed on to publicly commit to the urgent and sustained action required. 

Like health, we understand changing paradigms as an interdependent effort. While it will demand new technical and functional capacities—like performance-based modelling (carbon, energy, water, materials), post occupancy evaluations, and integration of new minimum distance and psychometric thresholds—it will also necessitate deeper shifts in our cultural narratives. Such shifts might include acknowledging the illusion of total control and embracing dynamic uncertainty as a generative restraint. Or they might include rapid shifts to a culture of open source collaboration—like we saw with the London Energy Transition Initiative’s Climate Emergency Design Guide and like we are seeing with the international Carbon Leadership Forum. (We (members of the Architects Declare movement) are working to build capacity for these rapid shifts in our efforts to expand innovation infrastructure.) And lastly, such shifts may include accepting the fallacies of what Raworth refers to as the “neoliberal script,” and  transcending colonial patriarchies (“old power”) to embrace epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies (in that order) that nurture and empower regenerative post-colonial futures. 

For most (if not all) of us, fully delivering on these paradigm shifts is beyond the limits of our current capability. However, those of us who have signed on to the Declare movement have committed to making these difficult changes, and to becoming who we need to be, collectively, in order to realize them. We declare that with the power to redraw the world comes the responsibility to use that power, and that the only thing left that is certain is that we have no more time to waste.

Author Bio:

Jennifer Cutbill is the Founding Director of Lateral Agency and Vancouver Design Week. She is the Regional Director of the RAIC, adjunct faculty at The University of British Columbia, and licensed Architect under the AIBC.