Regenerative City Circles
I play with bowls at writing retreats: cereal bowls, mixing bowls and whatever I can lay my hands on. It started over ten years ago when I had a compulsion to organize my thoughts in a non-linear way and draw instead of write. (At an earlier retreat, I measured and recorded time spent writing in fifteen-minute increments. When I struggled with writing, I pulled an oracle card as a writing prompt, asking myself: what am I missing? The answer: retreat. I learned that non-writing time is writing time.) The bowls helped me draw circles. Here’s where the circles took me.
It starts with a Venn diagram
At planning school in the early 1990s, I took an elective course about sustainable development. One of the core readings was the UN’s Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, published in 1987. The visual legacy of that report, embedded in my brain and being, is a Venn diagram. At that writing retreat over ten years ago, I captured the Venn diagram with its three overlapping circles—environment, economy, and social—and sustainable development at the center.
Beth Sanders: Our Common Future‘s three pillars of sustainable development (the Brundtland Commission’s report).
In 1987 and for years to come, this was a big idea: that all three of these pillars—environment, economy and social—have a significant role in the health of our communities, cities and planet, and are interconnected.
And then my hands started to think differently, on my behalf. What would happen if the three circles were concentric, nested within each other?
Then concentric circles
With bowls and pens, I started to draw, imagining that the work we do to start, create and recreate human settlement is always in relationship with the physical world. Human settlement is only sustainable if what we make is in relationship with the physical world.
Beth Sanders: a city habitat dynamic as concentric circles (2011)
Access to potable water, materials to make shelter, and places to grow food are the initial elements. Any action—our work—that erodes our access to these basic needs means our settlement becomes untenable, either immediately or further out in time. In larger cities, this relationship between our work and our physical, ecological world may feel abstract, but it is a truth that is unavoidable. Not wanting to accept this does not make it go away.
Here’s the progression behind the scenes. First, for each of us, our work is an exchange with others: our economic life nested within our physical world.
Beth Sanders: our work, our economic life, is always in relationship with our ecological habitat (2011)
With the bowls out again, I started to imagine what our social habitat entails, nested between our economic life and our physical habitat. I immediately realized that the quality of our social habitat, how well we communicate with others, impacts our work, our economic life, and our physical, ecological world. Our social habitat is always in play, in relationship with our experience of self, others and our world.
Beth Sanders: the city habitat dynamic (2011)
Our city nest occupies three essential habitats:
Our economic life—and new work—is the force that regenerates our cities. At the heart of this dynamic that creates and recreates cities is our work and our exchanges of work with each other.
Our physical habitat holds it all. The largest nest is the physical habitat in which we live, the habitat we receive when we arrive in the world and the habitat we make and remake with our work.
Our social habitat is our contract. It is the space where we resist or encourage connections between our work and our physical habitat. The quality of our social habitat always affects our economic life and physical habitat and our ability to create the conditions in which we will thrive.
NOTE: More about this city-making dynamic can be found in Chapter 2 of Nest City.
An energetic shift
As my fingers and hands made all the squiggles in the drawings along the edges of the circles, I started to explore how cities connect to each other, how the ideas (the work, our economic life) in one city stretch and spread to the next. And how villages and towns and cities and bigger cities connect to each other. Small places are connected to bigger places, and bigger places are connected to smaller places.
Beth Sanders: the city habitat dynamic at scale (2012)
Beth Sanders: the city habitat dynamic at scale (2012)
Wherever my fingers took me, it was clear that at any scale, everything is connected. Decades ago, the Venn diagram fostered clarity in me to see the vital roles of economic, environmental and social realities of human habitats. This understanding of overlapping (at times) but largely separate imperatives became insufficient. My energetic understanding of human habitats shifted to understand our economic, environment and social habitats as connected and in relationship with each other entirely, and always.
“At any scale, everything is connected.”
The Venn diagram image reinforces the idea of trade-offs; each element has an existence on its own, separate from the others. As concentric circles, the relationship is always present. There is no competition, only complementarity. The isolation embedded in the Venn version longer felt sensible or responsible.
I played with all the different possible combinations of circles at that writing retreat. I put our social habitat in the center, or our physical habitat in the center. As I explored, I realized that it doesn’t matter which is at the center; what matters is a drawing that has all three habitats always in contact with each other, interrelated.
The Nest City city habitats. Illustration: Amanda Schutz
Vital feedback loops
Our social habitat is the space in which we facilitate, resist or halt feedback. It’s like a tap, or conduit, that we open or close, or somewhere in between. When open to feedback, we acknowledge what is working well and what needs improvement in our world. We make space to meet our own needs as well as those of others. We adjust our work to make improvements.
Just to make things difficult, we don’t all have the same idea of what constitutes improvement, of how to meet as many diverse needs as possible, but it is in our social habitat that we talk—or don’t talk—about what we need. When we do, and we sort it out, we begin to work, paid or unpaid, differently. And to make things extra difficult, each time we make improvements, we create the conditions for new challenges to emerge, and we step back into the work of improvement. All along, we dance in and around our city nests, at every scale, making different economic exchanges, adjusting our social habitats and also changing our physical habitat. The currency we need to navigate our city habitats well is information.
What we measure matters + Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth describes another set of concentric circles in her book, Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, that serve as a vital feedback loop for our cities. Think of the Doughnut itself as the sweet spot we should aim for, where the conditions for humans to thrive are present. If we extend beyond the outer boundary, we overshoot past our ecological ceiling and risk harm to our planet and ourselves. If we allow shortfalls in the necessities for human life (physical and social resources, as well as equity and human rights), we erode our social foundation. The Doughnut is the sweet spot, the safe and just space for humanity.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: the doughnut of social and planetary boundaries. https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
Raworth’s work exemplifies three city making principles I describe in Nest City:
New work regenerates our cities. Raworth is thinking in a new way and asks us to think differently. She identifies how to make a new kind of economy that is regenerative and distributive. She asks us to do things differently—in our behaviour, our analysis, and what we measure. The capacity she is building in herself and others to let go of flawed economic models and create new ones that create the conditions for people to thrive—is helping cities regenerate themselves. She invites us to think, make and do differently.
Have a sense of direction. Raworth proposes a new sense of direction, to put “GDP growth aside and start fresh with a fundamental question: what enables human beings to thrive? A world in which every person can lead their life with dignity, opportunity and community—and we can all do so within the means of our life-giving planet. In other words, we need to get into the Doughnut.”
Feedback allows us to know if we are moving in the direction we choose. For Raworth, the Doughnut is a compass that points to a future that “provides for every person’s needs while safeguarding the living world on which we all depend.” A compass doesn’t set the direction, but it does tell us the direction in which we are moving. The Doughnut Economic model is about those measurements, the feedback loops that tell us when we are beyond our planetary limits and eroding our social foundation.
Learn the foundations of Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth and I are co-faculty in Ubiquity University’s about-to-begin Master of Regenerative Action program. Her inaugural course, Foundations of Doughnut Economics, is starting on Wednesday, June 9, 2021. (Four Wednesdays from 10 am to noon Pacific.)
Doughnut Economics is a vital feedback loop for the well-being of our cities, and I highly recommend you grab some people you work with and enroll in this course. There is a 100% discount on the course fee if needed.
Here’s what you need to know:
When: Wednesdays, June 9 to 30, 2021, 10 am to noon Pacific
To register: Foundations of Doughnut Economics
Fee: $60 USD to audit the course
Discount code: enter CORDON50 for a 50% scholarship or CORDON100 for a 100% scholarship
Our regenerative future
Our future depends on the quality of our feedback loops. Doughnut Economics is an emerging way of thinking, making and doing—differently—that leads our cities, and ourselves, into a regenerative future. And, of course, the quality of our social habitat will shape how well we incorporate and integrate what we learn from the feedback we receive—and how wise we’ll act with and from that feedback.
Reflection
What new ways of thinking, making and doing have your interest right now?
What is the direction the work you are passionate about seems to be taking you? (Not a specific destination, but a sense of direction…)
How do you know if you are moving in a direction that is revitalizing to you?