The Orgacity of Hope

One of the questions I encounter most frequently is how the vision for a sustainable society we are developing in the market town of Stroud might be applied to the cities where most of the world's population now live. This is a troublesome question for me, because I have never enjoyed the city, with its concrete and anonymity, but from an ecological perspective no question is more important.

Part of the answer is that the transition to a sustainable future will mean different patterns of habitation. The growth of cities mirrors the process of industrialisation and, in particular, the exploitation of fossil fuels on which they depend. There are no two ways about it: cities are grossly unsustainable. Herbert Girardet, who first discussed this issue in the Schumacher Briefing Creating Sustainable Cities, presents some disturbing statistics, including that 'Cities, on 3-4% of the world’s land surface use 80% of its resources'.

Herbie has gone beyond alarming statistics to exciting plans, which he calls 'regenerative cities'. So far the signs of hope have come from urban food growing in cities such as Havana and Portland, but the regenerative city is a whole shift in urban planning and a holistic solution to the unsustainability of the urban environment.

These cities of future - the orgacities of my outrageous title - will, of course, provide for their own energy needs from renewable sources, but in addition they will develop a 'circular metabolism', in contrast to the petropolis which sucks in resources and spits back wastes. They will be diverse rather than monocultural; rather than contributing to CO2 emissions they will be responsible for carbon sequestration; they will be embedded in farmland and provide their own food.

The report is a visionary document, but also contains numerous examples of the best that is already being done in urban planning. The example of Seville, a pioneer in solar generation, and Freiburg, Germany, whose Solarsiedlung development produces more energy than it requires, offer models for the future. However, changing our expectations and, perhaps most importantly, our sense of identity, is at least as important as these technological and design changes.

In the age of the iPad it is difficult to convince the laptop-bound of the simple beauty of the natural world, which they are most likely to encounter through Google Earth. Downsizing and de-energising our cities will offer one priceless gift: the stars. Ecological economist Richard Norgaard recently posted about 'economism and the night sky': he argues that, while technology and urbanism have provided much, what we have lost - and may regain - has deeper value.
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Habitat and yoghurt culture

In the ethereal realms of academic discussion the buzzphrase of the moment is ‘ecological modernisation’. This phrase relates to the idea that, now that we have won the argument that the ecological crisis is real, there is a struggle going on about how to respond to it. This struggle boils down to a choice between business-as-usual with a few green tweaks, or a wholesale reorganization of society and economy. The question being asked is whether it is possible to have a sustainable world without fundamental social and economic change.

In the field of habitat the ecological modernizers would like to expropriate and commodify the learning that has been developed in low-impact communities, wipe it clean of its radical overtones, and make it profitable business. They are seeking to divorce the technological wisdom from the social wisdom that gave it birth. They are ignoring the lessons of holism that are the most important lessons of the sustainable vision. Knowledge based on practical experience cannot be reduced to information to be written into technical manuals.

Much of the knowledge about how sustainable communities might look has been garnered within the Ecovillages network, co-ordinated by Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn Foundation. He recently published a book sharing some of this experience. The communities he studied are found in rich and poor societies and offer an experience of creative living. He likes to think of them as ‘yoghurt culture . . . small, dense and rich concentrations of activity whose aim is to transform the nature of that which surrounds them’.

Most of the ecovillages are success stories, but many ‘collapse’ because of the difficulty of building new relationships and social structures. It is vital that we do not see these shorter-lived projects as ‘failures’. The learning and positive experiences generated by experimental living are not lost when the people move on and the structures decay. Learning to live experimentally requires learning to accept that the natural life-span of some of these ventures may be short.

Is it possible to build sustainable communities without asking questions about ownership, equality and hierarchy? In my view, not only can we not ‘solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’; we also cannot save the planet without asking questions about who owns it. The message of ecovillages the world over is that these issues are intrinsically linked to the building, physically and metaphorically, of a sustainable future. Tweet