Making It Happen
Practical Steps to a Sustainable Lifestyle
One of the great things we’ve learned in delivering our trainings and workshops is that when given the opportunity, people are brilliant, playful, creative, collaborative, passionate and powerful. They can solve virtually any problem, design processes, create structures, and make, break or bend rules.
One of the not so great things we’ve learned is that many of the best ideas people have for creating new ways to live can not currently be implemented because of regulatory roadblocks. From zoning to building codes to financing and insurance models, obsolete rules and old paradigms impede the creation of new and vital communities and lifestyles.
That’s why we created the 2010 Turnaround Challenge. By January 1, 2010, we propose to put the necessary support mechanisms, tools and processes in place in Santa Fe to enable existing neighborhoods to begin to transform themselves into empowering, resilient and sustainable mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods with facilities for lifelong learning and plenty of open space.
We see this effort on the magnitude of the Apollo Project. But instead of putting a person on the moon, we intend to move beyond the disconnected, overly consumptive lifestyles. By bringing our hearts and minds together, finding mutually beneficial ways to get our needs met while taking care of the planet, we can have a life of abundance and deep values. We believe wise neighborhood redevelopment will reap an amazing quality of life for every resident and turn the tide on our overly consumptive lives.
To enable this transformation of our neighborhoods, we need supportive tools and processes to get the job done. While they are all completely interconnected, we’ve broken these down into specific areas to work on:
Logistics
Process
Joy of the Journey
Logistics: the nitty gritty of redesign
Logistics deal with the structural support mechanisms that foster socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable communities. .
These are a few of the areas we’ve identified that will require enabling tools.
Land use, zoning, and codes – Mixed-use, pedestrian friendly neighborhoods that create a safer, alive street life by putting work, shopping, learning, and play all within walking and bicycling distance need enabling ordinances. Current zoning and parking regulations support car dependant sprawl. Alternative support mechanisms need to be created.
Building codes need to be updated to support the current American lifestyle as well. Only 24% of American households are the traditional “Mom, Dad, Buddy and Sis” – two adults and two children under 18, under one roof. Singles, couples, roommates, single parents and “solo seniors” are demanding creative solutions to achieve a new kind of “neighborhood as extended family” that meets their diverse needs.
A 1926 plan for a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood
Financing, insurance and tax strategies – The large scale renovation of our suburban lifestyle requires mixed-use financial instruments that are as convenient to acquire as current Fannie Mae-backed mortgages (Fannie Mae is strictly prevented from commercial lending). We need lending and insurance models that support commercial / residential mixed use, and collective / community ownership.
Supportive tax strategies can promote the development of sustainable neighborhoods through shifting taxes away from what we do want, like income and investment, to things we on’t want, like sprawl, pollution and resource depletion. Jurisdictions typically lose money on traditional suburban / sprawl-based development models because the costs of extending infrastructure and services exceed the impact fees and taxes collected. By “in filling” areas where infrastructure and services already exist, those costs are avoided while the “in filled” tax base expands dramatically.
Ownership, structure and amenities – Shared ownership and profit sharing of newly created commercial space can reward neighbors for their redesign efforts once we create new models of ownership. Imagine that a profitable mixed use neighborhood is created, but instead of being owned by outside developers and institutions, it’s owned by the neighborhood. So not only do neighbors get a more affordable and more connected lifestyle, when they shop locally, they also put money in their own pockets.
By creating new legal mechanism and agreements to support the success of models like this, a large proportion of residential units can remain permanently affordable, and the community can profit share off of the resale of open market units.
Neighborhoods can also own and share infrastructure and amenities that enhance affordability and lessen environmental impacts. Features such as laundries, guest rooms, meeting rooms, workshops and studios can be jointly owned, shared and rented out. This assures neighbors access to features they need on an occasional basis without having to pay the full cost of developing them, and provides an income stream to amortize the initial investment.
Cotati, CA co-housing with seven neighborhood-owned commercial spaces below. There are 30 residential units in the complex.
Appropriate technologies for water, energy, waste and communications – Sustainable neighborhoods can implement “best practices” in a number of key areas. Even here in the arid southwest, for example, it’s possible to create local communities that capture and recycle all their water, thus supporting a larger population on fewer resources. These neighborhoods can also generate all their own energy through wind, solar and biomass, and own their local communications networks that they then lease to content and service providers such as cable and phone companies.
Building these networks (and developing the legal structures and agreements to govern them) will create jobs and community income, significantly reduce neighborhoods’ eco footprints and make all these critical resource streams much less susceptible to disruption.
Local food, habitat and open space – Sustainable neighborhoods can provide a sense of connection with neighbors and the planet. Through careful design, we can produce a significant portion off our food, provide open space for recreation and enjoyment, and preserve or restore habitat for local species. Greenhouses, rooftop gardens, “edible” or “continuous production” landscaping and rotational planting of some open spaces can provide fresh, healthy food and livelihood for food producers. Habitat restoration, biodynamic farming and a far shorter distance from field to the table sequesters carbon dioxide and lessens our consumption of fossil fuels.
An 'alley garden' in Albuquerque, producing fall basil. Photo courtesy of the Alley Garden Project.
Process: the ways we work together
To create the positive future we envision will ask each of us to learn new ways of living working together in harmony based on mutual respect and appreciation.
Our modern world has moved far away from the traditional models of community that we humans ‘grew up’ in. Those were tribal, based on kin and clan relationships. According to the traditional knowledge that has been passed down, decisions were made through a ‘council’ model. In that process, all contributions were welcome and valued, and decisions were made after careful consideration of everyone’s interests.
Obviously, we are no longer bound by kin and clan, but we believe that traditional models – adjusted for modern realities – provide a great starting point. Instead of tribal identity, we have what we call ‘clusters of affinity’, in which citizens are connected through shared interests, common visions and personal relationship.
A design group facilitated by 2010 in Albuquerque.
Open Space
We believe that everyone has a stake in creating a positive future; that everyone has an important contribution to make; and that the collective intelligence of the group holds greater wisdom than any individual possibly can. To tap that wisdom, we use a process derived from the Open Space model introduced by Harrison Owen.
The fundamental principles of Open Space, as described by Owen, are:
Whoever comes are the right people.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
When it's over, it's over.
The guidelines we overlay on that are:
Be good to each other
Embrace uncertainty, tension and paradox (because that’s where the learning is)
Share (space, ideas, facilitation)
Eat cookies!
While we facilitate the process, the passion and purpose of the participants generate the outcomes. And even though we never know exactly what those outcomes will be, we’re confident that certain things will happen:
All the issues that are most important to the participants will be raised.
The issues raised will be addressed by those most qualified and capable of getting something done on each of them.
New alliances and relationships will emerge that support further development of the process / endeavor.
All of the ideas, questions and plans that emerge will be recorded as a basis for action.
The results of the work will indicate what the next steps should be.
The beginnings of a 'sustainability scorecard' developed by a team in group exercise during a 2010 workshop.
Open Source
Open Source is the term that traditionally has referred to software that is both co-developed by a variety of writers and available free to users. We use the term in a broader sense to denote that the “content” – the ideas, directions and solutions that emerge from our workshops and design charettes – resides in the public domain and may be adopted and adapted by anyone who chooses to do so. We believe this is vital for a number of reasons:
Sharing the content means others will expand on it and improve it. This is a way to tap the brilliance of an even larger group and make the content even stronger and more meaningful.
Individuals or teams can move on, for whatever reason, without depriving the larger community of vital knowledge.
New members of the community can come up to speed much faster when the content is openly available.
Content and process can spread far beyond communities actually involved in our process and allow others to initiate their own processes.
What if you could redeign your neighborhood?
Other key concepts we are committed to include:
Distributed Leadership, which means that there are no bosses or hierarchy in our work. Leadership emerges as needed from the group. When a given task is completed, the leadership, and any structures that evolved specifically to accomplish that task, dissolve back into the group. This is a basic concept from Complexity Science, which informs a lot of our work. It is similar to concepts in Buddhism and other practices that see life as a continuum of arising, presence and dissolution to create space for the new.
Self-Organization, which means systems organize themselves through simple relationships among the members who make them up, and through continuously evolving with and adapting to changing conditions in their environment. Self-organization occurs around identity, such as with our ‘clusters of affinity’. It’s also central to Open Space and relies on ‘Collective Intelligence’ or ‘Co-Intelligence’.
Net-Centrism, (from ‘network-centric’) which is about collaborating in a continuously-evolving community of relationship, technologies, information and services. All of these are interconnected by communications networks, formal and informal, to share information around which the members organize and act.
Non-Violent Communication, which is a model of communication intended to strengthen our ability to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves. Based on the work of Marshall Rosenberg, NVC guides us to reframe how we express ourselves and hear others by empathically listening to what others are observing, feeling, needing and requesting, and honestly expressing what we are observing, feeling, needing and requesting ourselves.
Ubuntu, which is a Southern African term sometimes translated as, ‘I am because we are.’ Desmond Tutu explained it as, ‘A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.’ This means we cannot create new ways of living by fighting against or excluding others (such as developers, bureaucrats or financiers) but must find ways to include and benefit everyone, for ‘they’ are ‘we’, too.
Joy of the Journey
‘Goekler’s Law’ – If it’s not fun, it’s not sustainable.
Creating new ways to live is big work, and it will last a lifetime. Excitement, joy, play and energy keep us engaged and focused, and we see this effort as working for a positive future, rather than against a dysfunctional present. Inherent in that process is a perspective of joy and abundance, rather than fear and scarcity.
For that reason, poetry is as important as policy, potlucks are as essential as technology, and sometimes we just need to take a break and play music, get goofy with the kids and eat cookies.
We also want to make sure that those positive aspects are envisioned and called forth in the designs that come forward from this process. Harmony, connection and delight are the ‘glue’ that binds us together in community.
