Flourish
A great book for professionals in the constructed environment. This book by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn is an inspiring call to action, written not by theoreticians, but by active participants in this field.
The book builds on recent thinking in the field, many of them reviewed on this site, and distils these diverse sources into 6 paradigm shifts which are necessary to get us out of our current destructive ruts.
The book maps out a new and necessary territory where design and creativity are vital tools to help shift us into successful, flourishing future.
The Totems idea as interpreted by the paradigms of this book, is: an action that changes the future; stewardship of living systems; long term perspective; Interbeing; and an agent of flow. Read the book to see what this means!
From the website:
Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
What will it take to restore balance to our world? How can we repair our devastated environments, and secure future generations’ survival? And what’s the key to unlock the mindset shift to enable truly regenerative transformation? Flourish reaches beyond ‘sustainability’ to explore ‘regenerative’ practice, what it really means, and how we can get there together. Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, Flourish draws inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives. Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles to transform how we design, make and manage our buildings, infrastructure and communities. Whether you’re a built environment professional or client, an activist or a policymaker, Flourish offers you an urgent invitation to inhabit a new array of possibilities. We can build a thriving future, together.
Covid-19 is a crucial point in the world’s fight against climate change. As societies chart their recovery from the pandemic, they have a critical decision to make: do they succumb to the worst of “business as usual” or can they mark out and follow a bright new path together? Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, argues that humanity’s best chance of a positive future lies not with looking beyond biology, as transhumanists advocate, or in retreating from civilization, as some deep ecologists propose. Rather, the answers are to be found in nature, where we will learn (or-re-learn) the perspectives and tools we need to support the flourishing of all life, for all time. By looking deeply into the web of life that created and supported us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, Ichioka and Pawlyn propose six paradigm shifts that would transform how we construct, design and manage the built environment, and our journey towards planetary health. These include:
moving beyond sustainable design towards regenerative design
‘re-patterning’ anthropocentric modes of thinking in architecture
envisioning cities as sites for interbeing and action, rather than consumption.
Notably, these ideas are based on transcending and including, rather than opposing and dismissing previous paradigms. Each key shift is accompanied by illustrative graphics and examples of how these essential shifts are more than possible, with existing or near-term methods and technologies. Flourish offers a fresh and compelling argument from two leading urbanists and architects, and a critical yet imaginative approach for how all of us - not just humans - can thrive in a time of intense urban growth. More than a manual on how to make the best out of our narrow window of opportunity, Flourish is an invitation to imagine a different array of possibilities and a call to action to move towards a truly regenerative and cooperative way of life.
Contents and outline chapter description:
Introduction:
"A growing number of people are deeply concerned about our planetary emergency and wondering how we can rise to this seemingly insurmountable challenge. We wrote this book because we believe that the necessary changes lie primarily in cultural, rather than technological, transformation, and that this must occur at the level of mindsets – the shared ideas that determine ... how society works. ...working in the built environment, this (broad) field is our main reference point when defining these shifts and how we might bring them about. We see these shifts as essential to the evolution from ‘sustainable’ to ‘regenerative’ design and development."
Chapter 1: Possibilism: evidence, uncertainty and agency
"If individuals minimizing their agency can have a contagious effect on others, then it is clear that the opposite can also be true. If we adopt a possibilist mindset that seeks out and assesses the totality of available evidence, that uses creativity to solve problems, that strives to always maximize our agency, that relentlessly challenges norms and myths, could this follow an exponential trend leading to a rapid tipping point?... We are thrilled by the possibility that it could. What we know for certain is that when we refuse to accept the status quo as inevitable and strive to bring about change, we can have a powerful effect in inspiring others to do the same."
Chapter 2: Co-evolution as nature: stewardship and living systems
"We believe that the way humans see our relationship with nature will be critical to our species’ future prospects, and that addressing the multiple environmental crises of the present moment will require us to completely rethink our position and role on Earth."
Chapter 3: A longer now: deep, cyclical time and holarchic progress
"It matters which buildings we celebrate. As philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote, 'Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are'. Whether the focal point of a town is a religious building, a shopping centre or a secular gathering space for public events says very different things about our culture and values. It is therefore worthwhile asking 'What should be the cathedrals of the future?' Could these be buildings that aspire to the deepest reciprocal values, rooted in a deep sense of time and place, sociologically, geographically and ecologically? Could these be projects that in some way enhance our sense of human potential and embody one-planet thriving in beautiful and poetic ways?"
Chapter 4: Symbiogenesis: mutualism, citizen-activism and public luxury
"A reappraisal of outdated metaphors about survival through competition, and of humans’ innate nature, has created an intellectual space for imagining a new way of living based on symbiogenesis. This conceives of design as a fundamentally inclusive, negotiated and co-creative process that can generate new structures and ways of living. To achieve this will require not just a change of perspective for design teams but also a rethinking of design training, styles of collaboration and forms of governance."
Chapter 5: Planetary health: qualitative development, living metrics and flows
"Keeping the goal of Planetary Health in mind should make it easier to decide when development is strictly necessary (for instance, to bring poorer parts of the world above the social foundation) and how to distinguish between different types of development. Qualitative, regenerative development that enhances planetary health is possible and we must learn to do better than just mitigating the negative impacts of growth. In a planetary emergency, there needs to be a strong bias towards avoiding unnecessary growth. This will require far more refurbishment of buildings and far less newbuild, designing out waste in all its forms, and pursuing durability and cyclicity in our material use."
Conclusion:
" We must mourn what has already been lost. And then we need to rise and regenerate. We need to join with clear eyed young activists and wise elders alike, to maximize our agency in a rolling wave across society. We need to act in a way that benefits those who will come after us. We need to challenge business-as-usual stories that hold us back. We need to collaborate like never before. This is what it means to live now. As designers, this is what it means to be truly creative, truly contemporary."
