Yessenia Funes:

Welcome. If you didn't already know, this podcast is all about architecture and climate change. The stakes are pretty damn high if climate change continues to run unchecked. Our society needs to figure out how to cut greenhouse gas emissions while also taking care of the most vulnerable—tribal communities in Pakistan, families in Puerto Rico, and the activists on the front lines. A big part of how we do that is through the design and architecture itself. That's where regenerative design comes in, which today's guests are all about. Get ready to meet Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn, authors of Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, a book that proposes a bold set of principles to address our dual environmental and social crises. Sarah is based in Singapore. Michael is based in the UK.

This episode is all about some of these principles in the book by Michael and Sarah. When scientists rang the alarm in 2018 that we had 10 years to cut emissions, Sarah and Michael went to work. How could their world of architecture transform to help make that happen? What new words and phrases could help their peers understand their field—and the world—differently? I used to always say “time is money,” but after this interview, I've been trying to unlearn that mentality. Let's find out why.

This is the Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.

On today's episode, I am joined by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn. Sarah Ichioka is an urbanist, strategist, curator, and writer based in Singapore exploring the intersections of cities, society, and ecology within international institutions of culture, policy and research. She leads Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social impact initiatives and organizations. Michael Pawlyn is an architect noted for his work in the field of biomimetic architecture and innovation, as well as jointly initiating the Architects Declare movement in the UK. He is also the co-initiator of the global movement Architects Declare Climate and Biodiversity Emergency, and founder of Exploration Architecture, established in 2007. Together, they are authors of Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, that proposes a bold set of regenerative design principles for addressing compound environmental and social crises.

Welcome, Sarah and Michael.

Michael Pawlyn:

Thanks very much for involving us.

Sarah Ichioka:

Thanks, Yessenia. It's great to be here.

YF:

Thank you. Your bios are quite a mouthful. Y'all have accomplished a whole lot. I'm really excited to dig into some of that with you today.

MP:

Thank you.

SI:

I'm excited to learn about your work, too, if we get a chance.

YF:

I was hoping to kick things off by maybe starting from the beginning and hearing a little bit about the origins of the work that you two do. Where did y'all grow up? How did that affect who you are, your experiences, and your practice? Perhaps we can start with Sarah.

SI:

Sure. I am a child of the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Oakland and raised between Oakland and Berkeley, California. And I'm sure that that shaped me in many ways. The public school system in that part of the world, in particular at the Berkeley Public School system, has been ahead of the curve in terms of including diverse voices in its curriculum and diverse perspectives for many, many years. I mean, my high school was the first public high school in the United States to have an African American Studies department back in 1969, and I think that… It's by no means a multicultural paradise, but I think that growing up in that context has definitely shaped the way that I'm always trying to think what voices might be missing from a conversation, and what role I can play to bring diverse voices together in conversation. And also, really quickly—grew up in a family of readers. We didn't have a television. I think that's really biased me towards books and writing, and maybe given the optimism to dive in and co-author this book with Michael. And, also grew up with a lot of time out in the open air. And I think that so much of what we want to talk about today is about how we can all reintegrate with the rest of the natural world, and I'm sure that some of my seminal childhood experiences would've shaped that.

YF:

Wow, growing up without a TV is something. My weekends were spent in front of the TV for hours. So that sounds quite lovely. Michael, really excited to hear about your upbringing, especially as someone who is not from the US, as Sarah and I are, and in that experience and how that has shaped you as well.

MP:

Well, thanks. And interestingly, I grew up largely without television as well, because my parents moved around quite a lot. And a really formative experience for me was around age 11, when my parents moved to Qatar and I went snorkeling in coral reefs for the first time, and I was just captivated by the sort of otherworldly beauty of marine life. And that definitely made a profound impression on me, and I think it was part of what made me love biology as a subject. And then another important influence was that I had quite a kind of radical uncle, actually. He was a real polymath and he gave me a book called Blueprint for Survival when I was about age 13. And I think that politicized me about political issues at quite an early age. So there were these three strands. There was the environmental politics, there was the love of nature, and then I was also really into making things.

I thought about studying biology at university, but I couldn't see the creative side of it, so I went off to study architecture. And it was really some years later, when I was age 30, when I joined Grimshaw to work on the early stages of the Eden Project, that I realized that there was a way to bring those three strands of biology, design, and the environment together. And then a further, really significant step was going on a short intensive course at a place called Schumacher College, which is a center for ecological studies in the UK. And that course was led by Janine Benyus and Amory Lovins. And that was when I realized that biomimicry was such a rich subject, really.

SI:

Is it alright if I just hop in? Because Michael and I have known each other for years, but I actually didn't know he had a radical uncle. And I wanted to reciprocate the story of your radical uncle with my radical uncle and aunt because I think, again, when I think back to Yessenia's question—when I probe that, definitely, the fact that my parents and their siblings, at least on my dad's side of the family, were quite active politically, and my uncle and aunt were co-founders of the nascent Asian American Rights Movement, which was inspired in solidarity with the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans. And I think that what I gained from that is this understanding—they were both also scholars—but the relationship that could coexist between scholarship and research and that kind of investment in culture, and also political activity and action, as those not being conflicting, but being totally complementary spheres of activity.

YF:

So you two have known each other for years. I mean, how long have you two been friends?

SI:

A long time now, right, Michael? Since...

MP:

Since about 2007, I think.

SI:

Yes. Yeah. So that's a long time, when we were both working in London.

YF:

And when did Flourish come about? How did this book manifest itself? How did you both know that you wanted to collaborate in this capacity to create a book together? And let me just say, as a writer, I think that one of the most significant things you can do is publish a book. I always think it's just such an incredible, impressive thing when someone does this, especially with another person, because that collaboration can be tricky. So curious to hear about how this book came together and how that decision came about.

SI:

Michael, do you want to dive in?

MP:

Yeah, sure. So we'd known each other for quite a while and we were in a habit of meeting up fairly frequently for ideas-sharing sessions. And when we met in late 2018—I think it was probably around October, November—and it was very shortly after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had issued the October 2018 report, which was really alarming. And Sarah and I discovered that we were in a very similar headspace, feeling very concerned and also feeling a degree of frustration that the debates within the built environment seemed to have narrowed and hadn't really acknowledged that 30 years of sustainable design, using conventional sustainability, hadn't got us anywhere near to where we needed to be.

We were talking very much about one of our common heroes, Donella Meadows, and particularly her essay “Leverage Points,” which I think provides some really important clues for how to think about bringing about change. And I remember the first time I read it, it really brought it home to me how often, when we're trying to bring about change, we intervene in the less influential places. And right at the top of her list is trying to intervene at the level of the mindset or paradigm that really drives how a whole system behaves.

SI:

I think that frames it pretty well. And you're absolutely right, that collaboration can be really challenging. And I think we've both been involved in other projects where we find collaboration a bit harder. But for some wonderful reason, this was really… I mean, it was such a great experience. It's one of the best collaborative experiences I've ever had. I think it really helps that we have very... Our worldviews are fairly aligned. We're coming from different backgrounds, but as Michael said, we had this kind of common accelerant of our concern and the direction which we wanted to travel in terms of trying to reframe solutions to our planetary emergency—or planetary emergencies—in a way that might prompt people towards systems change. But also the fact that we bring slightly different disciplinary backgrounds, different perspectives in terms of our lived experience, the geographies we've worked in, et cetera. So I feel like almost every chapter and paragraph—you can remember which bits we might've written—but it was such an ongoing conversation that it feels like, truly, truly co-created.

MP:

Yeah. And from my perspective, it was an immeasurably better book than it would've been if I had done it as a solo project. I'm absolutely certain of that.

YF:

It resonates with me that the 2018 IPCC report sort of catapulted the conversations that led to this book. And for listeners who aren't familiar, this was the IPCC report that said, "We have 10 years left to address, or rather to reduce, our greenhouse gas emissions enough so that we can actually stay to 1.5 degrees." And I think that that was a big moment for the climate movement and the world at large. I mean, that sort of fueled the Youth Climate Movement that we see now. These climate strikes and these protests that have been record-breaking have happened in the wake of that IPCC report. And since then, the findings from the IPCC have continued to be quite urgent and, to be frank, quite frightening.

I think that coming at that with this book that frames this from this architectural perspective, from this design perspective, and through a solutions perspective feels quite fitting, and feels like the way that more and more folks within the climate movement should be responding to these terrifying findings. And I know that a big focus of the book is regenerative design. Would love for you all to firstly define regenerative design. My understanding is that it's sort of inspired by regenerative agriculture that looks at ways of farming that enriches the soil versus strips the soil of its nutrients. Would love to just hear you all define for the listeners what regenerative design is, what some examples of this is, and why it's so important in responding to the climate crisis.

MP:

Sure. Sarah, did you want to start on this one?

SI:

Sure, I'll go for it. Thanks, Michael. So, absolutely right that the term “regenerative” has its roots and historical usage as a term to describe kind of permacultural, agricultural practices. But it's really important to acknowledge that those are actually rooted in traditional and Indigenous practices of stewarding ecosystems that are millennia old. But in terms of the term, that's absolutely right. It arose around agriculture. And one of the other spurs for us to come together to write this book was that we had noticed within the built environment industries broadly—and I guess you could even say design more broadly; we also could see it in places like fashion—this term was cropping up more and more, but without necessarily any clear definition on it. So we thought, okay, right, the terminology is shifting from “sustainable” towards “regenerative,” but let's take this window of opportunity to try to draw on some great thinkers who really inspire us and also practitioners who really inspire us, who we feel are showing examples of what this looks like in practice, as well as articulating it in theory, to try to establish some key principles of regenerative design. And we can get into what those five principles that we've articulated are. But mostly, I think I would define regenerative design as approaches that seek to restore what may have been lost in an industrialized society that try to mimic restorative aspects that we can find in nature and that deliver net benefits to our overall environment. And, in doing so, means moving beyond just trying to limit our negative impacts to having a net positive impact. And we also have a very concise but ambitious definition which—Michael, would you like to share that?

MP:

Sure. So we set out a whole new role for professionals in the built environment, encouraging us to see ourselves as co-enablers of the flourishing of all life for all time.

YF:

“The flourishing of all life for all time.” So this is a really long-term perspective. It's sort of like the seven-generations-ahead perspective, and how design functions in our society.

MP:

Yeah, that's a lovely reference. And as Sarah alluded to there as well, in the writing of Flourish, we were working very much as kind of integrators. So we were trying to build on a lot of the work done by others, pioneers like Bill Reed and Pamela Mang and Daniel Wahl and Carol Sanford and so on, as well as acknowledging the amazing thinking that we've inherited from Indigenous peoples, and tried to integrate that into an overall vision and really tried to clearly differentiate “sustainable” and “regenerative.” One of the distinctions there, as Sarah mentioned, is the idea of moving from mitigating negatives to striving for net positives. Another is, I think, shifting from a very anthropocentric or human-focused perspective to a broader planetary perspective. And then the third would be shifting from a rather mechanistic perspective, which has dominated a lot of the design tools and rating systems that have been used in the built environment, to a much more systemic perspective that looks at whole-system health.

YF:

And Sarah mentioned that there were principles, five principles. What are those principles of regenerative design?

MP:

Well, we've tried to contribute to the debate by making the case for a number of profound shifts. And the first one is the idea of possibilism. And that forms the first chapter. And the idea there is that it's not enough to just be optimistic or pessimistic. We need to be much more deliberate about how we shape the future and see the future as something that can be influenced. So in that chapter, we really focus on the characteristics of a possibilists’ mindset, which is… We think it's largely about being evidence-based in your thinking, seeing the future as something that can be shaped, and getting better at dealing with uncertainty. Sarah, do you want to come in now and pick up on chapter two and the other shifts?

SI:

Yes. So yeah, moving on from optimism and pessimism to possibilism and expanded agency. In our second chapter, we really take on the degenerative mindset of dualism—this idea that humans are separate with nature. And Yessenia, I was really enjoying reading your publication's recent interview with Vandana Shiva, where she talks so, in her powerful and elegant way, about how this has gotten us into so much trouble; I think she calls it eco apartheid—the idea that humans are somehow separate and unique and above all of the rest of the web of life. And then maybe I'll talk about three and then Michael, you can pick up on four, unless, Yessenia, did you want to share any thoughts on—

YF:

No, I mean, I really appreciate the sort of debunking of dualism as a principle. Because at Atmos, the binary sort of viewing of the world is something that we, too, make a really explicit effort to break down—this sort of human versus nature, the gender binary, right versus wrong, black versus white. There's just so much binaries in our society that really prevents us from, I think, capturing that gray space, that nuance, and making space for what I think what you all describe as this possibilism, if we're just thinking of the world as optimism or pessimism. So I really appreciate that notion of “the duality isn't working,” and how can we move past that. So I'm just really excited to hear about the next three principles.

SI:

Thank you. Definitely. Sorry, but actually… I want to let Michael talk about principle three, but right before that—just also to say that I really appreciate how your work is also seeking to convey Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous expertise, and also bring home the point that a lot of these practices and worldviews are not extinct. They're very much still living and being practiced and there for those of us who are from a more industrialized background to learn from. I think it's also important to emphasize—just in the framing of these concepts—that we're not trying to present them as wholly novel. As Michael said, we're “assemblers” and trying to weave in a lot of strands that have inspired us into these principles. But we try to make an effort throughout the book to credit the many different individuals and cultures in which we can see evidence of this thinking. Michael, do you want to talk about paradigm three?

MP:

Sure, yeah. So in the third chapter, we take on the whole subject of time. And in most of the chapters we're actually identifying maladaptive frames or metaphors or stories, and then proposing or articulating new, regenerative mindsets. So, for instance, in the chapter on time, we talk about how the idea that “time is money” has been repeated so often that it's hard to track down who even first said it. And when something's repeated as often as that, it tends to develop a sort of air of undeniable truth about it. Often, it takes someone with a bolder story to replace the dominant one. And the one that we focused on quite a bit comes from Karma Tshiteem, who headed up the Gross National Happiness Project in Bhutan. And he said, "No, time is life."

And I think it's really interesting if you ponder on the kind of behavior that would emerge from say, a political or a business leader that subscribe to one or other of those views—if you take the view that time is money, then it would probably seem quite normal to treat people as a kind of commodity to be exploited. If, on the other hand, you take the view that time is life, I think you're much more likely to respect people and also to think deeply about how you want to spend your own precious time on Earth. So I'll-

YF:

I’ll definitely admit that I'm one of those people who sometimes uses that as motivation: time is money, I can't waste my time.

SI:

You live in New York, after all.

YF:

Hearing you reframe that as “time is life,” I feel like it actually captures some of the sentiment, at least that I experience, when I'm just like, "Oh, man, I got to be productive,” or, “I have to make sure I'm not wasting my time." But “time is life” has an appropriate and emotional… And, as you're communicating here, a relationship focus to it that… Of course, “time is money” is very capitalistic and rooted in everything that is destroying the planet. So maybe I might have to start saying that now, instead.

MP:

Okay. And there's a strand of biology that runs through the whole book. So in the chapter about time, we look at the difference between time scales that nature works in compared to conventional human time scales. And I recently heard a wonderful talk by a curator called Cecilia Pardo. She curated the exhibition at the British Museum about Peru, and she showed this kind of spiral image that represented the way the Nazca people saw time, and they saw it in terms of parallel time. And this spiral image showed past, present, and future kind of unfolding together. And the more I thought about that, the more it seems to make sense to me, because the way that we got used to linear, very sort of quantified time, that tends to encourage the view that the past is over and the future is something that will happen to us.

Whereas with parallel time, there's a view that, actually, history is very much an open-book subject and we can and should look at past injustices and, where possible, rectify those and also see which characters have been overlooked in history. And then also looking forward—we quote from Brian Eno, who talked about the way that the future comes into being is partly through the ideas that we choose to hold and articulate. And once you articulate a dream, people start comparing reality with that dream and it kind of becomes an invisible force drawing the future into being. That perspective on time, I think, also picks up on the ideas of agency maximization that we mentioned in chapter one. And the way you view time can clearly have an influence on how effective you are as someone that wants to bring about change. Sarah, do you want to pick up on chapter four?

SI:

And I guess just to sit with that perspective you shared as well, Michael—I think in a way it resonates really nicely with the icebreaker question that we started off with, too, just thinking it might seem at first light, like, "Oh, how does where I went to high school shape the perspectives of Flourish?" But I think that actually taking that longer-term perspective on influences and how influences can manifest in unexpected ways further down the timeline—I'm sure this conversation we're having today will, in some way, touch all of our practices in the future, even in ways that might not register for us.

So I think that continuity and this idea of kind of choleric progress is really important to that concept, too. But moving on to chapter four, paradigm four of the five that we articulate in Flourish: As Michael mentioned, there's a thread that runs throughout of, what lessons can we learn from the rest of the web of life that sustains us, as well as other disciplines that study that web. And, taking a historic perspective, we look at the degenerative paradigm of competition. So often, our thinking has been shaped by earlier understandings of how evolution happened and how that was co-opted through social Darwinism to create—just like the “time is money” mentality—got to be elbows out,” “someone else is going to eat your lunch if you don't.”

YF:

Survival of the fittest.

SI:

Survival of the fittest. Again, I'm thinking of Manhattan for some reason.

YF:

It's a really great metaphor for all of what you're describing here. That’s why I live in Queens.

SI:

Exactly. So I want to hear from you how Queens, or other places, can offer examples of what we are offering as the regenerative mindset to move towards. So moving away from the idea of competition, survival of the fittest, and instead moving towards the evolutionary metaphor of symbiogenesis—or really, in shorthand, you could call that mutualism. But symbiogenesis is our tip of the hat to the amazing biologist and science communicator, Lynn Margulis, who's also one of the co-initiators of the Gaia Theory. But she had a major breakthrough in terms of theorizing that evolution—in addition to the mutation and competition form that it does take—also has a strong strand of symbiogenesis, which is, in short, just when two simpler organisms coexist reciprocally for a long enough time that they eventually merged to become a new life form together.

So we thought that that was a really beautiful new metaphor to shape regenerative practice, whether that means moving from thinking of ourselves as individuals to thinking about how we look at or intervene with others, moving from a concept of everything being zero-sum through to thinking about how we can act in solidarity. And I think that's really applicable in a professional context. We write a lot about how, in our field, broadly, the built environment, so much of this competitive metaphor is made quite literal in terms of how firms or individuals are made to compete for work, often with pretty detrimental effects. And we try to posit this idea of moving from the model of the designer as a consumer-stroke-critic to the designer as a citizen activist. And finally, in terms of thinking what that might look like in how it manifests in our cities, our buildings— moving from the idea of private luxury and public austerity to a new model of private sufficiency, but public luxury... which, I know there are some great examples of public luxury in New York, if we're going to loop back to where you are.

YF:

Yeah, and this notion of becoming one, but as a collective, I think is really powerful, especially with the climate movement. I mean, an individual can only have so much impact. And there has been a lot of criticism over the years about this notion of our “individual actions to combat climate change”: recycle, turn off your lights, ditch the car. There's been all these individualistic focuses on the climate and environmental movement over the years. And I did some Googling on this before we spoke, and my understanding is that this is what scientists believe have helped contribute to the formation of some of our cells. Is that right? This might have been what helped life on Earth exist.

SI:

Yes. That's right. So that was Margulis's first paper, was talking about this and early cell complexity. But now, if you look all throughout the life sciences, there are so many amazing examples of how actually we are all collectives, even those of us… We think of ourselves as individuals, but actually cells of human DNA are outnumbered by other cells in any given person's body—let alone thinking about broader communities, multispecies communities.

MP:

And I think some people might wonder why we'd want to use a term like “symbiogenesis,” which might sound a bit jargon-like. And there are quite a few progressive urban planners that talk about some ideas similar to this, like the importance of providing good social infrastructure and shared facilities and so on. And I think the really key point is that Lynn Margulis showed that organisms that live in symbiotic relationships, over time, new structures or adaptations come into being, which further enhance that. So what Sarah and I did is, we explored what that might mean for cities. And I think this idea that it can become self-reinforcing is one of the strong points, and that's why I think “symbiogenesis” works so well as a term.

YF:

And I really want to hear about specific examples of all this, but I think it would be great to just get that final principle out so we could… I’m itching to hear about the examples of what this actually looks like in cities and communities.

MP:

Sure. Okay. Well, I'll deal with the fifth one fairly quickly. In the final chapter, we take on the whole vexed subject of growth and we conclude that neither growth nor de-growth by themselves are good purposes to drive an economy, and a much better one would be the idea of maximizing planetary health. And the point with planetary health is that our well-being as humans is inseparable from the state of health of the broader life systems on which we depend. It is a significant move on from global health, which was really just about humans. And I think common with a lot of the things we're talking about—this shift into the realm of regenerative design—a lot of this is about expanding perspectives. And if you take a long view of the evolution of human thought and consciousness—originally there was an individual consciousness that gradually turned into a tribal consciousness, and then a national and then an international consciousness. And now I think it's becoming increasingly clear that we need to adopt a planetary consciousness that sees everything as connected and, ultimately, we've got to integrate everything we do into the web of life.

SI:

So it's really nicely aligned, I think, with what I understand this podcast's focus on… architectures of planetary health. We're very, very, very interested in that perspective that you're taking for your own work.

YF:

I'm so fascinated by all this, and I don't know how much you all are aware, but architecture is a field that I'm very new to. The sort of possibilities that exist within architecture, within design, are just really exciting to me, especially as someone who lives in a city, in a city like New York. I think people consider New York to be pretty impressive, with our park systems and our transit. But I'm someone who… I have one hell of an imagination, and so I just start thinking about all that we can still do in cities like New York, all that can still exist. We still need more bike lanes. Imagine buildings that… I think of Singapore, where you're based, Sarah, and these gorgeous, tree-like buildings that y'all have. And I'm just like, "Why don't we have that here?" I'm just really excited to hear about whether these are examples that already exist or examples that sort of encapsulate what could exist that help us imagine, radically, what this world can look like. What are some examples that capture these five principles, or maybe even one of the principles, that can help bring us closer to this world that we urgently need if we're going to step up to the plate to address climate change?

SI:

Really happy to do that. Just before we dive into specific examples, I think it's important to frame the stakes of intervention for built environment practice, and then the scale of impact that we have the potential to make and why Michael and I chose to focus on this realm—in addition to it obviously being our core area of practice ourselves. But buildings—if you take into account materials, construction, and operations—create nearly 40% of our global greenhouse gas emissions. And if you add transport on top of that, it's another 25% from transport.

So that's already huge. If we're talking about the responsibility for and the power to take action in response to the planetary emergent day thing, it’s really important to establish that. And then also, if you think about our future cities and trends of urbanization along current trajectories, urbanization trends mean that it's likely that the total area of our planet that's devoted to buildings is anticipated to double by 2060. So again, if you put those figures together, the importance of…I really want to dive into examples, for sure, but also just thinking about the scale of what there is— both, it's quite daunting but also incredibly exciting to think about the scale that if we could transform this sector, the potential for positive impact would be—

YF:

I mean, this sort of brings me back to that possibilism mindset, really. Yes, it's daunting. Yes, it's exciting. But it's also… it is possible. There are actually things that can happen here, realistically—evidence-based actions that we can take to transform our cities and just elevate them and make them not only cleaner for the environment, but I'm also thinking of all those things you mentioned around transport and construction materials. Those things also affect our health. There's a lot of pollution. Not only air, but waterways. Yeah, I don't know, I just...

SI:

It's all interrelated. Michael, do you have a favorite example you want to share?

MP:

Well, sure, I've got a few that I can bring up. And what we really tried to do in the book was to set out the kind of philosophical end goals that we need to aspire to, as well as try to show how we get there. Because I think a lot of regenerative design thinking now has the status of principles that are broadly accepted. The debate, really, now is how we achieve those. So what I'm referring to there is ideas such as, it's not enough to just be less bad, we need to be net positive. We need economics within planetary limits. We need to integrate everything we do into the web of life. I think most people now would agree with that. The hesitation would be, "Okay, well, fine in principle; how do you actually do that practically?" So we did try to do that throughout the book. And in the possibilism chapter, an example that we used when we are discussing how to design for uncertainty is Janette Sadik-Khan, who… I believe her job title was Head of Transportation for Manhattan Authority. Is that right, Yessenia? Maybe you can...

YF:

You're putting too much trust in me.

SI:

Under Michael Bloomberg, she headed up transport. Yeah.

MP:

Okay. And she—

YF:

That was before my time, Michael.

MP:

—Okay, no worries. She was a real pioneer of tactical urbanism. And the reason that's a really significant approach is because what had all too often happened is that attempts to improve the urban realm had got bogged down in very long consultation periods, and endless cycles of visualizations, and so on. Sometimes that could take five years or more and end up not producing anything. And with tactical urbanism, the idea is that you use very simple measures to show what… To actually implement a version of what it is you want. So you can transform an area of road into something that can be used by people just using simple measures like pop plants and chairs and tins of paint. And, very often, that gets people over the kind of skepticism threshold. And once they can see the possibility, then that's an excellent way of building support. And during her tenure, I think she transformed something like 30 public spaces, really reestablishing a much better balance between cars and people—because after all, cities are for people, not just forms of transportation.

SI:

And what I like about that example Michael just shared is a point that we try to make throughout in the book, that actually all of the solutions that we would need to make the transformation—so, regenerative practices in the built environment—already exist. It's just a matter of actually identifying, prioritizing, and… I hate the word “scale,” but finding ways to implement them locally. So for example, Sadik-Khan was definitely, as Michael said, was a real… One of the first to bring tactical urbanism to the heart of the wealthy world. But she is clearly inspired by examples from places like Curitiba in Brazil, and Bogotá and Medellín in Colombia, where these practices had been tested and trialed and proven.

But maybe to offer another example… So as Michael said, there's this thread of biology or, what can we learn from the rest of the living world that runs throughout Flourish? A lot of the key examples that we draw on out of building scale or a material scale are really cases that are deeply inspired by or co-creative with the rest of the web of life. So a really easy example of that is things like innovations in bamboo structures. So we give the example of the Arc building at the Green School in Bali in Indonesia, which was designed by the design firm IBUKU in collaboration with Atelier One and Jörg Stamm. And here, it's kind of contemporary design and engineering innovations on this deep tradition of bamboo construction in Bali to create these amazing, inspiring new structures that are literally very light on the land, but also are from this kind of flourishing, regenerative material, as well as investing in local economies and local, cultural skillsets. We also talk about a number of different materials, rather than buildings, per se. And we give the example of the company Biome, who is a company based in London who have developed technology to grow insulation products that are pretty high-performing using underutilized biological fibers and mycelium. And they're often sourced really locally to the site where a project is located.

We have some other great examples of the company Biomason, which is launched by the architect Ginger Krieg Dosier, which produces bricks that are grown using a calcifying bacterium that binds grains of sand together in a mold. So it doesn't require any of the additional heat, like firing bricks... Michael, we did a manuscript check. I couldn't believe that at the time the amount—

MP:

The incredibly high temperature.

SI:

—that’s required. I said, "It can't possibly be that hot." And you're like, "Yep, it really is."

MP:

Yes.

SI:

But Biomason's procdure doesn't use it and doesn't require any additional heat and has zero carbon emissions. So, if you just think about scaling up those materials across a range of buildings, just for starters, the potential is really exciting.

MP:

Picking up on the bamboo example there, we use that to help clarify what is sometimes a concern or a conundrum, which is this idea of localizing resource use. Is that going to lead to a sort of parochial view? And actually not at all, because if you just distinguish between physical resources and intellectual resources, then what we believe we should be aiming for is the localization of physical resources and the globalization of intellectual resources. So with bamboo, there are loads of different species of bamboo in just about every tropical and semi-tropical part of the world. There are species of bamboo that you could use so they're local to the place. And then you could actually share the knowledge of how to use those globally in the most effective way.

SI:

Could we just stay on bamboo for just a second? Because I think the other important thing there, if we’re using bamboo, is to point out that we are not… Even though Michael and I feel that there's so much... We all need to adopt an attitude of humility and an attitude of learning in terms of traditional knowledge but also, we are not in any way trying to evoke some sense of nostalgia or just necessarily going backwards in time or saying that there's not room for technology or innovation. And what I love about the Green School example that I gave is that Atelier Ten, the engineers, are working with cutting-edge digital visualizations, looking at the strength of individual pieces of bamboo and then understanding where exactly they can be cut and what kind of joints can be created to maximize its positive characteristics and try to minimize some of the risks that come with this material, like shearing, for example. If you're not careful of how you attach it, it can break. So I think it's a really beautiful example of how you're building on this deep tradition of bamboo construction in this area. But also there is huge room for innovation with the built environment practitioners, who are also coming in collaboratively.

YF:

I’m thinking about the next generation of architects, designers, planners, policy makers, and how they're able to plug into these ideas and plug into the innovation and research that's happening. How can we make these ideas that you all have shared, and these examples—how can we make them more accessible to this next generation of designers and architects?

MP:

Well, I think the first thing is to contribute to a lively debate about what regenerative design means. I think we're still at an early stage and I would welcome a really rich debate with a diversity of perspectives and so on. And then I think, as I'd said earlier, I think a lot of it is about getting better at sharing ideas for how to practically implement some of these big-picture ideas. Because I do sense that we're coming to a kind of tipping point and we've broadly accepted the principles of regenerative design—at least that's the sense I get when I speak to rooms full of people. And so really, it's about getting better at implementing the ideas that exist. And a lot of these ideas have been around for a long time.

SI:

Thanks, Michael. I mean, bringing us back to the idea of transfer to the younger generation… I mean, in some ways I feel like I would almost flip that. I find, increasingly, when I have the privilege of speaking to groups of younger architects or students or younger staff members at larger firms—in terms of motivation, they're really there. And I feel like there's very little... Things have moved so quickly. I mean, Michael's referred to a tipping point, but things have moved so quickly in the two-plus, three-ish years since we started co-writing the book together. And it's just coming on its one-year birthday of being out in the world. I feel like in that time, things have moved so much in terms of the conversations that people are willing to have and the resources... Sorry, let me say that again.

Things have moved on so much in terms of the conversations people are ready to have, and when it comes to younger practitioners. And I also feel like they have pretty good access—great research skills and access—to case study examples, and are really hungry for more. I see a critical gap now in terms of some establishment practices not really wanting to get out of the way. And I also feel that there's a huge need for new, inspired clients who are willing to commit their money and their projects and their risk management considerations to building regenerative culture by creating the real opportunities—not just little pavilions here and there, not just exhibitions—but actually committing to building- or city-scale projects that can move us forward quickly. Because I think that young designers and built environment practitioners are hungry and ready to move in this new direction, and now is the time for those visionary clients to make that possible for them to do.

YF:

Beautifully said, Sarah. That feels like a really great place to wrap up. I wanted to ask if you two might have a quote that you can share with us today that helps you envision the world you want to see, the world you're hoping to create. I'm not sure if there's one quote from both of you, or if you each have a quote that resonates with you. Whatever you prefer.

MP:

Sure. So we start the book with a good one from Arundhati Roy, who said, "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

SI:

And my quote builds perfectly on that, although we did not have time to coordinate our remarks because it's been a very busy start of the week. So the quote that I wanted to share is not from Flourish, but I think it resonates with what Michael was just putting forward. And it's from another daughter of Berkeley, California, the amazing writer Ursula K. Le Guin. And this is from a mid-eighties, 1986, essay that she wrote that has… I've recently noticed a lot more people are circulating again and it makes me so happy. And the essay was called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” And so if you substitute in this quote the way Le Guin talks about science fiction for just thinking about how we generally craft our shared cultural narratives, I think it resonates a lot with what we've been talking about together in the last hour or so.

So Le Guin writes, "If one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily a cultural carrier bag, rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one." And I think it just underpins, again, the idea that the change that we're looking for is a cultural change, it's a mindset change, and that those mindsets that constitute for a generative worldview are actually already there and readily available for us if we choose to engage with them and incorporate them into how we conduct our lives. And that, actually, this future that we've been talking about could be a very realistic one for us to achieve if we reorientate our behavior in that direction.

YF:

Wow, those were really beautiful and lovely, lovely quotes. Michael, actually, the Arundhati Roy quote is one of my all-time favorites. So really, really glad that—

MP:

Oh, great.

YF:

—you shared it with us today. And Sarah, science fiction, all the queens of science fiction, are reserved a spot on my reading list, so I appreciate you sharing Ursula's quote with us today. Well, with that, Michael, Sarah, thank you all so very much for being with us and for sharing your philosophies and your necessary and critical work. It's really been a pleasure to learn from you this hour.

MP:

Likewise, and really a great pleasure to be involved in what you're doing.

SI:

Thank you, Yessenia, and I'm so excited to see what comes next for you as well.

YF:

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Well, with that, y'all, I'm sure we'll be in touch more soon.

Audio:

Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast of revisions, a media initiative supported by re:arc institute, a philanthropic organization committed to supporting architectures of planetary well-being. For more information on re:arc, please visit www.rearc.institute. This season is hosted by Yessenia Funes. For more information on her work, you can follow her online at @yessfun, Y-E-S-S-F-U-N, and in her work, The Frontline at Atmos magazine. This podcast is produced by Minah Kwon and Andi Kristins. Music by In Atlas.