Planning Pool

Creative Commons photo by Shawn McClung

What is it about current governance and decision-making systems that make them so resistant to change and act as barriers to implementing sustainability? A packed room of city counselors, sustainability consultants and public participation advocates explored this question with workshop leader Chris Lindberg at a Gaining Ground workshop on Wednesday.

Participants identified four reasons that our government and decision-making systems slow-down sustainability initiatives:

• Multi-jurisdictional systems reduce the capacity to act and dilute ownership of key issues
• Leaders are hesitant to share power and take risks
• The perfect can get in the way of the good
• Lack of imagination for alternatives to business-as-usual.

Planning Implementation Gap
Conference moderator Rob Abbott answered the question by pointing to communities’ habit of … Continue Reading

City in a Bubble by Flickr user polishq

Nicole Boyer facilitated a panel of speakers yesterday at Gaining Ground. Bill Rees, Vanessa Timmer, and Vincent Tan spoke about why we need to rethink cities and what cities of the future could look like.

To set up the context of why we need to rethink cities, Bill Rees showed how cities tax our ecosystems. Rees blamed Cartesian Dualism for creating the idea of “the environment,” something that is artificially separated from people and has infinite energy, resources, and capacity for waste. He also questioned the idea that economic growth is necessary, showing that growth is only a new phenomenon when considering the whole … Continue Reading

Nola-Kate Seymoar, social psychologist and President and CEO of Sustainable Cities, spoke today about the psychology of change. She began her talk by addressing three elements that contribute to human behavioral change: structure, process and attitude.

Creative Commons photo by ZebulaDesign

She argues that focusing on the structure part of this model (which includes factors such as built form, financial instruments, policies, and regulations) will yield the most ‘success’ in term of encouraging behavioral change. That said, process and attitude are critical in their own right as well as in terms of the role they play in informing the structural part of this equation.

Of particular interest to me was Nola-Kate’s discussion about the attitude dimension. She explains that humans are emotional creatures who respond … Continue Reading

Creative commons photo by Martin LeBar.

Bill Reed, Principle of the Integrative Design Collaborative, began his lecture by talking about the problematic structure of the English language and how this has influenced the way english-speaking cultures conceptualize nature and approach development. Specifically, the use of object verbs and subject verbs causes us to describe and ultimately understand elements of the world in isolation as opposed to in relation to other elements. While the topic of  language wasn’t the theme of this workshop, it set the stage for examining ‘Living System Design,’ which is an integrated design approach that philosophically and practically combines human development with natural ecosystems.

Framing his discussion about this integrative design approach, Reed spoke to the consequences of contemporary ideas … Continue Reading

Paul Hawken is a visionary environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author of well known books such as Blessed Unrest, and co-author of Natural Capitalism. (His opening remarks for the Gaining Ground Resilient Cities Conference were blogged on Planning Pool earlier today.) He is also a twin, as we learned during the session.

The author with Paul Hawken!

In a salon session with conference participants, Hawken mused on topics suggested by attendees. Here is a sampling of the wisdom and thoughts he shared:

Action

• As individuals, it’s okay to make make mistakes. Nature makes lots of small mistakes, but no big ones.
• Everyday I have the same problem you have, I ask myself: am I making a difference? I just need to have faith that if I continue to … Continue Reading
  

Who will be the most sustainable city in the world? Vancouver, British Columbia, unveiled its Greenest City Initiative today, which sets 10 ambitious targets for resource use reduction, to achieve by 2010. Portland, Oregon, is a close competitor for this “greenest” city title, having already won the number one spot in US city rankings by Sustain Lane and Popular Science.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams is urging Portlanders to not rest on their laurels. At the Gaining Ground Resilient City conference, Adams and his team outlined an innovative strategy to advance their city’s sustainability. The vanguard of this effort is a 25 year strategic planning effort that will push a triple bottom line for the city, to ensure “that Portland is a thriving and sustainable city and our people are prosperous, healthy and educated.”

Planning and … Continue Reading

The first morning of the Gaining Ground, Resilient Cities conference concluded with a presentation by Paul Hawken, renowned author of Natural Capitalism, the Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest. His remarks followed up on Mayor Gregor Robertson’s introduction of Vancouver’s Greenest City Initiative, so he opened by teasing Vancouver about our good-looking and charismatic mayor, whose work he takes seriously.

Creative Commons photo of Paul Hawken from 2007 by the Rainforest Action Network.

Hawken’s hopeful message is that resiliency is innate to cities, which are the most effective and natural epicenters of change. Humans’ most complex creations, cities are resilient for the same reason that ecosystems are resilient – with complexity comes efficiency. Culturally, … Continue Reading

During the coming week, Planning Pool will be liveblogging the Gaining Ground Summit from Vancouver, BC. This means you can expect a flurry of posts detailing many events headed by leading thinkers on urban resiliency. Click here for the event program — if there’s a specific event you want to hear about, let us know and we’ll see what we can do!