Kris – John Thackara

Two Time Ecologies: Designing for Production and Designing for Care

Kris — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:37:24 +0000

How, as a designer, might you care for the land?

If you’re me, you write blog posts telling people it’s a good thing to do. If you’re the design researcher Gizem Oktay, you get practically involved in the aftermath of two massive earthquakes in Turkey that claimed 58,000 lives.  Arriving on site, Oktay witnessed debris and wreckage containing medical and toxic waste being dumped into agricultural fields, wetlands, freshwater sources. The pressure on emergency responses to the earthquake was for quick results. There was no time to consider the impact on microorganisms.of dumping waste on soils and wetlands. But the consequences down the line, for human and more-than-human life would be profound.  Rather than criticise from the sidelines, Oktay decided to explore whether practical alternatives, and especially bioremediation, could be a better approach than dumping to deal with waste and toxic contamination.

Bioremediation is a family of approaches that involve plants (phytoremediation); fungi (imycoremediation) and microorganisms such as bacteria (probiotic landscapes). Placing mycelium spawn (the living network of fungi) in a designated place, for example, can remediate contaminants by reading enzymes that break down complex molecules into simpler compounds that the soil can metabolise.

In an early experiment, Oktay writes: “Watching fungi grow on contaminated soil felt as what was once on the brink of death via destruction came to life with the aid of fungi”

At this point I half-expected a miracle to be described. Superhero fungi would eat up all those nasty toxins and replace them with teeming healthy soil.

Not so easy – and not so fast.

Oktay discovers that mycoremediation techniques developed in laboratories do not transfer easily to the ‘feral’ or living world. There, remediation depends on the times other beings need to operate in their own time, and on at their own pace and scale.

Mycelium, for example, does not grow to order. It grows according to conditions that are unique to each context: temperature, moisture, earthworms, termites, other insects, microorganisms, precipitation levels, and myriad other factors. Caring for the land involves attuning to these multiple rythms of a landscape.

These messy and complex contextual factors are carefully excluded from the sterile laboratory settings of industrial bioremediation research. Such labs aspire to achieve efficiency, precise outcomes – and above all, scale.   This approach follows an industrial production logic. It must meet the needs of global markets and perpetual economic growth.It therefore assumes, for any promising organism or process, that its metabolic functions needs to be be accelerated. Think: genetic modified crops with higher yields; fish that grow faster and fatter; yeast that accelerate fermentation. Forcing biomaterials into productivist timelines also results in energy-intensive, highly processed materials.

Caring for soils, and indeed all living systems, means aligning with naturally occurring temporal patterns. It means developing patience for natural processes to unfold in their own times. It entails more complex ecological relationships than the timescales of industrial production.

Gizam Oktay, and this book’s other authors, aim to rediscover temporality and contextuality as positive qualities that industrial systems treat as inefficiencies.

This switch of focus from productivity to care is not – to put it mildly – a small change for design.

And not a fast one: social change on this scale takes time.

Think back to Copernicus. When he proved that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa, it took a further 100 years of denial and resistance before the news really sunk in.

The same lesson on timescales goes for the crisis-ridden industrial economy we have today. The root cause of these polycrises. for John Michel Greer, is temporal-geological. We’ve burned our way through fossil fuels -that were formed by sunlight over millions of years – in a couple of hundred years. Greer describes the inevitable reckoning, that we are now in, as ’catabolic collapse’ .  wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Catabolic_Collapse

The good news, here, is that we are not starting from scratch. A Copernican-style revolution in values – from productivism, to care – has been brewing for decades.

“We need to think about time as interdependent, co-created, and multiple” concludes the book’s editor, Larissa Pschetz. And not just think. Designing within temporal ecologies, at least in this book, is no longer just a wish. It’s beginning to happen all around us.

Designing Temporal Ecologies: A New Framework for More-than-Human Worlds,
edited by Larissa Pschetz
bloomsbury.com/uk/designing-temporal-ecologies-9781350522305/

Introduction (and postscript) to ‘Care, Value, Place’ in Mumbai

Kris — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 17:15:27 +0000

The following is the text of my (12 minute) introductory talk in Mumbai, in September, at the Care, Value Place event hosted by the new design school BITSdesign together with RMIT. I was the co-curator. Here is a summary of the programme, . Videos of most of the talks are on the BITS Design School Mumbai YouTube channel. Scroll down here, too, for a Postscript in the form of an interview I did with a national newspaper journalist.

[The text below is reconstituted from my notes, it is not a literal transcription.
I will align the two versions when the recording is found]

I am billed on your programme today as as an expert in design for sustainability.  But I have a confession to make – which some of you may find shocking. I don’t care about climate change. And I don’t care about sustainability.

The reason I don’t care is that I can’t care. For me, care is something you do. It is not how you feel. It is not a pleasing state of mind.

I’m haunted by the words of John Berger when he wrote:

“The words ‘climate’ and “sustainability” are universal, placeless, and abstract.
They bathe us in feelings of sadness. But our places and communities don’t need feelings. They need practical acts of care”

As an antidote to the decades of high-level but abstract talk about sustainability, I’ve spent forty years seeking out people whose actions, in meeting daily life needs, bring the s-word to life: restoring the land, sharing water, making homes, growing food, designing clothes, journeying, and caring for each other.

People like that are the focus of this event, and the reason we chose Care as one of our three, interconnected, themes.

Care, when it’s practiced, replaces passive anxiety with meaningful activity.

Care work has been at the center of society for uncountable generations. And as Naomi Klein reminds us, it was only when economics (and economists) came along that the work of carers – mainly women – disappeared from the story.

It’s also thanks to economists that we have a system today which “the more one’s work immediately helps or benefits other human beings, or nature, the less you are likely to be paid for it”. That was the late, great, David Graeber.

The German theologian Ina Praetorius, in her book The Care-Centered Economy, reinforces this key point https://www.boell.de/en/2015/04/07/care-centered-economy

”Unpaid and underpaid care-work – embedded in nurturing nature, history and society is by far the biggest economic sector”,

she writes, before lamenting that “economic thinking is resolutely oblivious to this fact. The idea of “care” can be used to revitalise the very word economy”.

Our second theme in this meeting is Value.

Value is important because it’s part of a larger transformation that’s also now happening – a shift in understanding of what matters. In healthcare, in biomedicine, in food and agriculture, a remarkable new consensus is emerging. Health and well-being are properties of the social and ecological contexts in which people live. Health is not a product or services that you ‘deliver’ to people for a price.

That’s why I call the world’s small farmers, parents, and cooks – who give us good food, and care for our soils and rivers – “health professionals”. And we’ll be hearing from some of them over the coming two days.

Place

Our third theme – and of course all three are connected – is Place .

The power of connection between people and place is a key ingredient in systems change. That’s because restoring our own health, and caring for place, is a single story.

For the architect Pamela Mang, “place is a doorway into caring. Place can unite people across diverse ideological spectra and makes a shift to true sustainability possible”.

A corollary of Caring for one’s place is paying better attention to the local.  ‘Local’ is great for sustainability for two reasons.

First, because local uses time, space and energy in radically less wasteful ways than global does.

And secondly, ‘local’ is already mainstream. The vast majority of economic activity to meet daily needs is already local. Changing the word faster, to closer is not as hard as it sounds.

Desired outcomes

So those are our three theme for the next two days. But what about our desired outcomes?

Well our first and most important desired outcome was to get you together in one room.

Our second aim is to hear first-hand, from you, about place-based partnerships for social change.  What are you trying to achieve? What works? What comes next?

Our third aim starts with that last question – “what comes next?” – and asks a follow-up: “are there ways that design can help?”

We are all here because a new design school – BITSdesign – is just starting out. Its leadership and faculty are adamant that learning from and with communities will be central to this new education.

But what should next-generation community projects look like? Who else should be involved, if not just designers? And, are Rules of Engagement needed to ensure that communities get a fair deal when they host design researchers?

An agenda with five threads

We’ve asked each invited project leader to make a 15-20 minute introduction. We’ve organised these into five threads.

The first thread is about regenerative water systems. What happens when tradition, and historical water practices, meets technical innovation.? How does one involve communities in projects that integrate technology, social innovation and local government?

Our second thread is about the social life of mobility, and alternative, less energy intensive ways to inhabit and move around the city: energy-light cargo-bikes, bike sharing, walking, We will hear how roads, parking, and gas stations can be repurposed enhance the social and ecological vitality of urban spaces.

Thread three is about community-based recycling systems linked to local crafts and material processes. What is the potential of technology and new business models to scale grassroots recycling initiatives, based on circular economy principles?

Our fourth strand is about success factors in social design and, in particular, how BITSdesign can best nurture socially-conscious designers

Our fifth strand is about Community Managed Natural Farming. It’s been described as the most important stories in the world, so how can we establish learning relationships with the movement? What are the best ways to codesign, with the farmers, improved ways to share knowledge and develop new skills?

Cross-cutting questions

In discussions with project leaders before today’s event, we’ve heard about several cross-cutting questions that are especially important to them – and that they thought design might be able to help them with:
– How to tell the story of a place in ways that will connect with city people?
– Funders keep demanding metrics of progress – but how do you measure social or ecological impact?
– Are there better ways to host and organise meetings, and other ways of being together?

Those five strands – not to mention those cross-cutting questions – are a lot . And we only have two days together.

So let me end this introduction on what I hope is a reassuring note. There’s no way we can ‘solve’ all these issues in a couple of days. But that’s not why we’re here.

Yes, we hope to learn from each other what works – but this event is not a problem-solving hackathon. It’s about making new connections, and starting new conversations.

As I said just now, the variety and quality of people in this room answers the first of those two ambitions.

As for the conversation part – well, it’s it’ time for me to shut up and leave you to get on with it.

Q1.
What was your experience at the CVP conference like?

JT I have not encountered such fresh thinking for a very long time. The launch of a new design school turned out to be a good moment to move beyond business-as-usual responses to climate change, and biodiversity loss. But I had the strong sense, too, that obstacles to positive change are being pushed aside after decades of inertia.

The emergence in India of the natural farmimg movement, from its roots in Andra Pradesh, is a perfect example. Agriculture reformers and farmer movements around the world been advocating for agroecology for years, but have felt ignored. Now, nearly a million mainly women small scale farmers are making it happen for real. It’s one of the most signifcant stories in the world – but far too few people know about it.
The other project leaders we met at CVP were also real-world pioneers in urban ecological restoration, river and watershed recovery, two-wheeled commerce, 15-minute cities, ‘the last mile’ in waste ecosystems, and more. They’re doing brilliant work, but they need our respect and far more support.

Q2
You emphasized care for life over care for GDP.
Can you elaborate?

JT Well, GDP extracts value from the planet, caring for life adds to its vitality by restoring living ecosystems.

The health sector is a good example. The design of products, places and services for health care has become a huge economic sector in India, and around the world. But modern health systems are becoming unaffordable even for rich countries – and unavailable to the majority world. And besides, modern health treats the effects – but not causes – of ill health.

The concept of OneHealth transforms this picture. When you realise that caring for nature, and caring for people, are the same story, one’s priorities change, profoundly. The notion of “One Health” shifts attention upstream to the causes of health – or ill-health, and redirects of priorities to soil restoration and care, river and watershed recovery, the foods we eat, the air we all breathe, and so on.

Q3
What were your biggest takeaways from the conference?

JT Another world is not just possible, it’s already happening . Practicable, workable solutions are being implemented, right now, by grassroots communities across the world. But you have to seek them out – and universities and design schools have been too inward-looking to notice in recent times. We have a lot of catching up to do! We need to understand the development and growth, so far, of Community Managed Natural Farming, establish learning relationships with the movement, identify ways that design can serve it, and how.

Q4
How can Mumbai and India incorporate the concept of care into design ?

JT India is a global centre of care right now. Today. Hundreds of millions of your citizens care for each other, and their places, in myriad creative ways. Design can learn from this social rainforest of diversity .

But the great challenges we face won’t be solved by design in its own. It was striking just how many disciplines were involved in the projects at CVP: the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources; the service designer’s capacity to create platforms that enables regional actors to share and collaborate; the artist’s capacity to represent real-world phenomena in ways that change our perceptions.

Q5
In what ways is this relevant to industry?

JT Care Value Place brings much needed new social energy to industry. Corporate Social Responsibility, and ESG investing, are a box-ticking duty for many firms – but what I call Business-to-Place, or B2P, replaces dutiful reporting with meaning, and purpose. When companies are involved in place-based partnerships for social change , the result is sustanability you can touch, and feel. Staff don’t just feel better about their work, they also acquire green skills that are so badly needed as we develop and support a sustainable and resource-efficient society.

What can art bring to soil care?

Kris — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 15:38:31 +0000

This three-way dialogue – Karin Fink, Marguerite Kahrl, and John Thackara –
took place on the occasion of
HABITAT: THE RELATIONAL SPACE OF BEING
at Simondi Gallery in Turin
(September-November 2024 HABITAT)

Marguerite Kahrl: The collective exhibition Habitat: The Relational Space of Being probes the visible and invisible networks surrounding and connecting living systems. It provides an opportunity to reflect upon advocacy and embodied experience as we consider how to repair and maintain the infrastructure on which we and other nonhuman entities depend. For example, soil health is the foundation of our habitat and health, yet this vital connection has often been overlooked. While some people maintain a distant relationship with soil and may consider it unclean, we now understand that soil microorganisms are essential for the evolution of our gut microbiome and immunological resilience 1. How do we determine our soil’s health 2, and what insights can we gain from it as we reframe our relationship with the natural world?

John Thackara: This exhibition has been a timely incentive for me to reflect on my own changing relationship with soil. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life as an author and curator trying to understand why we humans continue to trash the planet with such careless abandon. Several decades on – I’m a slow learner! – the notion of a metabolic rift between us humans and the living world now makes good sense. We’re cognitively and culturally separated from the living systems we live among. Seen in this way, I don’t think that I “maintained” a distant relationship with nature. Rather – along with a few hundred million of my fellow over-educated humans – I was preoccupied with other concerns – and these concerns existed mainly in my head: ideas, concepts, arguments, language, reputation, and money. The biggest revelation for me is that we don’t have to argue for a better relationship with nature or provide evidence that it would be a good idea. Those relationships are innate in us all. We just need to do it – reconnect. There’s soil a few centimeters under these typing hands. A few meters from this desk, I can walk on soil in my bare feet. I just need a trigger to do so. And that’s where art comes in.

Karin Fink: I believe that we have gradually distanced ourselves from the natural world, prioritizing intellect and technological advancements. Now, we long for a connection with nature and wilderness. Slowing down and incorporating our capacities could help us create a different presence in the world. Human curiosity and willingness to build and explore (which triggered the distancing development) are still necessary resources. By combining technological, infrastructural, and organizational abilities with a slower pace of life, both as individuals and communities, we could make room for a different way of living. The current societal and ecological crisis presents us with many uncertainties, and we can learn something from the field of soil science.

The Swiss government writes: “In Switzerland, the majority of soils recorded to date are agricultural soils. Today, however, sufficient qualitative soil information is only available for around 13% of agricultural land, which means there is no solid ground for making decisions on the sustainable use of soils. In 2020, in addition to adopting the Swiss Soil Strategy, the Federal Council therefore also issued a mandate for nationwide soil mapping.” 3

Why do I quote this? I find it interesting that even in 2024, soils are a big unknown to us humans. Even more, it makes me quite hopeful that the government is willing to explore and expand its range of knowledge. The program is quite costly, and the Swiss Confederation is willing to pay for it. Bruno Latour sketched this out in Down to Earth:

“What to do? First of all, generate alternative descriptions. How could we act politically without having inventoried, surveyed, measured, centimeter by centimeter, being by being, person by person, the stuff that makes up the Earth for us?” (…) We must agree to define a dwelling place as that on which a terrestrial depends for its survival while asking what other terrestrials also depend on it. (…) It is a matter of broadening the definitions of class by pursuing an exhaustive search for everything that makes subsistence possible. As a terrestrial, what do you care most about? With whom can you live? Who depends on you for subsistence? Against whom are you going to have to fight? How can the importance of all these agents be ranked?”. 4

These questions help us gain a better understanding of soil and learn how to navigate when the knowledge produced by industrialized society is being reconsidered. We are beginning to recognize its limitations. As Latour writes, “We need alternative descriptions.” What might these alternatives look like?

All that mapping – of soils or relations – might make us see, but what will make us do? What will make us heal the metabolic rift? And in what ways? We are trained mappers but need to be trained healers. And here, art can build a bridge… What might contemporary mapping of the unknown look like? How can we draw from human curiosity, the love for building and creating and making, and the desire to achieve more? How might art help us process it?

JT That Swiss government statistic is startling: “qualitative soil information is only available for about 13% of agricultural land”. That number raises questions: what does ‘qualitative’ mean? And why does it matter that so much land remains so thinly understood?

I would like to think, Karin, that your government recognizes that soil care and repair are not just technical matters but also social and cultural ones. If that is correct, then I commend a new word to your colleagues that I recently discovered— “ethnopedology” 5 . It’s a research practice that compares local people’s knowledge about their soils to scientists’ knowledge.

There’s enormous interest and investment at the moment in planetary observation at different scales – from satellite observation to microbiome analysis. It’s now becoming possible to monitor every forest, every tree, and every city block on Earth on a daily basis. Its advocates say such real-time ecological dashboards can be a game-changer in planetary care. I’m not so sure. For me, it is a contested question whether (or not) exposure to more (and new kinds of) data causes citizens to behave differently – for example, to care more for their local soils and ecosystems.

MK The process of mapping data supports policy-making and enables us to gain insights that can help us protect our ecosystems. However, to change our behavior, we need to do more than simply rely on short-term measurements and analytical tools. The need a variety of responses to transform our culture and explore new forms of shared action and coexistence. Many artists and designers have taken up this challenge with local projects emphasizing care, repair, maintenance, and adaptation of the commons. We must move past observing the climate crisis to feeling it in our bodies and processing this with actions. Collective actions can help us untangle colonial paradigms and shift emphasis from ‘rational knowing’ and power-over dynamics to ‘embodied knowing,’ intuitive skills, connection, and touch.

This new paradigm of action is showcased in “The Great Repair,” 6 , a publication and traveling project examining the contradictions between growth and ecology. It addresses how architecture can be a reparative force for the socioecological crisis and investigates whether repairing politics and aesthetics from a decolonial, feminist, and posthuman perspective can offer a meaningful alternative. Kader Attia, one of the contributing artists/curators, touches on repair as a form of agency.

“Thinking about repair has become a tool for revealing the ways in which we are all still living in the colonial laboratory. But I think it is important for research into this topic to always begin with a physical object or tangible context – an object, a building – and then slowly branch out into theoretical reflection. Not vice versa. What often happens today is that we theorise a lot and then grasp for examples that incarnate what we are arguing. It is like the idea of care. We talk about care, and then we organise dinners. We should organise the dinner first and get in touch with the materiality of that tangible experience. And then, slowly, through a collective individuation process, we share ideas and feelings and dare to imagine.” 7

I see ethnopedology as one of Latours’ “alternative descriptions.” It combines local and scientific knowledge about soil while acknowledging different cultural conventions, perceptions, uses, and management styles.

For Irrigators: Underground Conversations, I built and buried irrigation vessels in neighbors’ gardens to investigate and share irrigation and cultivation practices. Within a 10-km radius, I noticed significant differences in soil types, management, and absorption. The objects served as a tool to access local knowledge, build soil fertility, create a network of users, and showcase their diverse gardening techniques.

KF We have enough knowledge about our soils and the ecosystems at risk. Nevertheless, I still see the old ways of observing, mapping, and charting as a way to learn about the otherness of an entity (a body, a system?) like soil. I watch scientists take their samples – to do so, first, they have to access the land and converse with the landowners and farmers. This “nationwide” exercise is as much about gathering data as it is about conversations between different worlds. As you, Marguerite, did in Underground Conversations, I hope that the scientists not only measure humidity and pH but also collect information about the long-term observations from the people they meet on the land. Setting out to chart the unknown territory of soils is as much about the storytelling as the facts. Over time, a picture of the land will emerge, revealing areas where the soil needs restoration or protection from erosion and where the chemical properties are out of balance and need rest. Repairing soils is extremely time-consuming, sometimes requiring decades to replenish. To overcome such long periods, we need good stories to tell – stories that pass on knowledge about what is going on in a specific patch. Objects like the irrigation pots may act as a reminder.

JT It’s not about more data or less – it is about the social contexts in which data is collected, discussed, and acted upon. The same lesson applies, I think, to discussions about ‘nationwide’ and ‘local’. We need to operate at both scales. I recently met someone involved in efforts to clean up Chesapeake Bay in the US – a forty-year-long effort. More than 200 organizations are involved in just one platform, Choose Clean Water. After years of people blaming each other for causing the problem, a focus on hyper-local stream repair seems to be providing common ground. Finally, instead of talking about nutrient reductions in a Bay many miles away, they can talk about improvements in streams where their kids and grandkids play. According to Karl Blankenship, in the piece I just read, the following actions are local, too: targeted areas are typically stream segments that are only a couple of miles long and drain watersheds of 1,000–5,000 acres with 10–15 landowners. 8 Acts of care are local and embodied – but when many of those actions are added together, the results can be system-wide.

MK Social context matters. Community engagement is crucial for local development, but what happens when it is driven by fear of pollution, outsiders, climate change, or maintaining privilege? What if we genuinely had to adapt to our chosen habitat? How can such hyper-local repair acts influence the “Not in My Backyard” movement- which opposes or resists change in communities? Dr. John Todd, the founder of the New Alchemy Institute (NAI) 9 , believes that by combining the knowledge accumulated in the last 100 years, we can achieve things we never thought possible. He emphasizes that “we don’t have to invent anything; we just have to pay attention to what’s been learned.” 10 NAI interpreted ecosystems, such as the ‘living machine,’ to filter water by imitating the functions of marshes, ponds, and streams. This type of design can help us sense whole systems and their qualities, patterns, and potential.

So, how can we pay attention and become enchanted to act? This is where artists come into play. With their ability to question, confront, engage, and captivate, we may better understand and interpret our habitat and its environmental and social contexts.

NOTES

1 Marja I. Roslund, “Scoping review on soil microbiome and gut health—Are soil microorganisms missing from the planetary health plate?”, British Ecological Society, (2024): (online).
In besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10638 (last accessed 01/08/2024)

2 We have discovered that soil and human gut bacteria share functional similarities. Soil-tasting ceremonies or the Museum of Edible Earth could be interesting parameters to monitor and accentuate this relationship.

3 Karin Fink translation from bafu.admin.ch/bafu/de/home/themen/boden/fachinformationen/bodenkartierung.html (last accessed 18/07/2024).

4 Latour, B. (2018), Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Paris: Polity Press.

5 N. Barrera-Bassols, J.A. Zinck. “Ethnopedology: a worldwide view on the soil knowledge of local people,” ScienceDirect (2002): (online). In sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001670610200263X (last accessed 25/07/2024).

6 The Great Repair – Politics for the Repair Society (online).
In archplus.net/en/archiv/english-publication/The-Great-Repair/#article-7081 (last accessed 15/07/24).

7 Kristina Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia”. The Architectural Review, (2024): (online).
In architectural-review.com/essays/profiles-and-interviews/interview-with-kader-attia.(last accessed 15/07/24).

8 Karl Blankenship, “Will A Focus On Stream Health Help Boost The Chesapeake?” Bay Journal (2024): (online).
In thebaynet.com/will-a-focus-on-stream-health-help-boost-the-chesapeake/ (last accessed 22/07/2024).

9 newalchemists.net/publications/new-alchemy-1971-1991/(last accessed 22/07/2024).

10 Steve Rose, “The New Alchemists: Could the Past Hold the Key to Sustainable Living?” The Guardian (2019): (online).
In theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2019/sep/29/the-new-alchemists-could-the-past-hold-the-key-to-sustainable-living (last accessed 22/07/24).

Caring for Place vs Systems Thinking: Can They Meet?

Kris — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 12:31:38 +0000

Systems thinking, regenerative design, and all things transition, are on a roll. Hardly a day goes without a new course, project or platform adorned with some combination of those words. The Club of Rome, for example, just launched a System Transformation Hub to ‘drive systemic solutions in in Europe’. Switzerland’s ETH has announced a Master of Advanced Studies Designing Regenerative Systems. The Royal Society of Arts has started a podcast called Regeneration Rising. And the fast-growing Systems Innovation Network is publishing a stream of (excellent, and open source) tools to “help to revolutionise our way of looking at the world”. My in-box contains dozens more examples.

Then, last week, I had “Wait A Minute!” moment. As I began to update my Designing for Life in Practice Handout, I noticed a curious thing: among these thousands of inspiring people, hardly any describe themselves as a ‘regenerative designer’ or ‘systems thinker’ or ‘transition practitioner’. It’s the same in our Open School for Village Hosts or the Urban-Rural projects. The world of systems thinking shares a different language from the world of those who care for place in practice.

Another anomaly stands out where these two worlds meet – thinking about systems, and caring for place. The uniqueness of place is hard for systems thinking to cope with. Systems thinking aspires to be – well, systematic. But blueprints, canvases and method cards are thin on the ground – literally – among place-caring practitioners. The mismatch here is that mainstream science, management – and therefore funders – need project outcomes to be predictable, controllable, and verifiable. That’s how technoscience works. But that’s not how life works in places.

In addition to divergent languages (between systems thinking, and caring for place); and on top of the unmeetable need of funders for replicability and scale; a third dilemma concerns project duration. Running short workshops is standard practice in design research – I’ve done many place-based workshops myself. But places, I’ve learned, run on different timescales than universities – or living labs run by researchers. It feels wrong, now to take a group of experts to a locality, spend an intense few days on site – and then we visitors pack up and go home. Reconnecting with place needs to happen continuously, and over the long-term.

Can these three mismatches be fixed? I think the answer is yes – and that the MeetUps we’re hosting this year are a good place to start. Don’t come if you’re looking for pre-cooked answers – but they are a good place and time to explore pathways towards them. To judge by the projects people have come with in the past, this space between systems thinkers, and those who care for place in practice, is fertile ground for conversation.

So, if you’re a mid-career professional, or postgraduate student; are curious about what designing for life can mean in practice; and are working on a live project, thesis, course, or book; well, do check out thackara.com/meetinfrance

Design for Multi-Species Cities

Kris — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 16:23:05 +0000

Contents
1 BACKGROUND READING AND VIEWING
2 THREE OPPORTUNITY AREAS
A] Soil Care, Composting, Fermentation
B] Trees, Microparks, Edible Forests
C] Microbiome Inspired Green Infrastructure (MIGI)

1 BACKGROUND READING AND VIEWING

Bottom-Up Biodiversity (John Thackara text, 1,500w) also Biodiversità dal basso verso l’alt
http://thackara.com/place-bioregion/bottom-up-biodiversity/ + Chinese version PDF

From Microbe to Bioregion, Designing for Life (John Thackara Video, 20’)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb2saRte9BE&t=301s]

Relational Ecology and Design (John Thackara Video, 45’)
Takeaways: sustainable design is about relationships, not just transactions; it’s about care, not consumption; sustainable design means care for all of life not just human life; these better relationships – between places, communities, and nature – can be enabled by social infrasructure, which we can design.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqjfPuLVo_w]

Design for Multispecies Cities (results of this workshop in 2022)[https://thackara.com/civicecology/design-for-multi-species-cities/]

Sharing The Land With All Life (Rebecca Hosking, 35’ video)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJeeTDgIEm0]

 The historical roots of our environmental crisis (Lynn White jr 1967 text)[http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/lwhite.htm]

What does green infrastructure mean to you? (Kate Raworth, 5’ video)  It’s not just the metric of money.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ime4XO9-oGg&feature=emb_logo]

2 THREE OPPORTUNITY AREAS

2A] Soil Care, Composting, Fermentation

Soil Care Network | Soil Talks  (dip into one or two of these talks)
https://www.soilcarenetwork.com/soiltalks

Soil Care, Dr Elaine Ingham 
https://www.bostontreepreservation.com/blog/2021/4/1/compost-tea-and-the-soil-food-web-with-dr-elaine-ingham

Berlin as a Farm: The case of LebensMittelPunkte
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.913412/full

Depaving Guidelines (143 page guide, pdf)
From the Horizon 2020 REGREEN project on nature-based solutions in urban environments in Europe and China
https://www.arb-idf.fr/fileadmin/DataStorageKit/ARB/Articles/fichiers/regreen/REGREEN_Report_3.2_IPR.pdf

Butyrite pathways
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020323173
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33684759/

Business-2-Place (B2P) Copenhagenize
https://copenhagenize.eu/project-gallery

Urban-Rural Exhibition China – Soil Zone (PPT)
The slideshow (link below) explains how the story was told in words and images.
1. The soil, and us, are one systemThe health of the soil, and the health of people, are the same story.
2. “From the Soil” (book cover: classic Chinese text)
3. The ecological restoration industry (Society of Ecological Restoration).
4. Most Ecosystems Can Recover in One Lifetime. Example: Loes Plateau, China
5. The Ten Elements of Agroecology: At its heart, the idea of a farm as a whole system, or organism.
6. The ClimateTech wiki, and the booming AgTech scene,
7. Soil Restoration: Four indicators of healthy soil: structure | microbial life | nutrient density |
8. Five farming methods
9. Five Citizen Actions
https://www.slideshare.net/johnthackara/urbanrural-exhibition-shanghai-november-2019-john-thackara-personal-slides?qid=7d8c9ff8-5a17-431e-a0e2-da7fbd2ce354&v=&b=&from_search=1  Farmer Live Streaming (Alizila article)  https://www.alizila.com/taobao-helping-farmers-reap-gains-in-livestream-boom/

2B] Trees, Microparks, Edible Forests

Microforests
https://www.sugiproject.com/projects

Tree Care As A Product Service System
Billions of trees are being planted around the world – but who will look after them, and how? New kinds of equipment and diverse disciplines need to be involved in Tree Care.Possible actors: @dmmclimbing @TreeKIT #arborist @TreekitARB[http://thackara.com/learning-design/arborists-arising-from-tree-care-to-tree-camping/]

Replacing streets with parks
Running a ‘find-and-replace’ over the city, replacing streets with parks
https://www.nesta.org.uk/feature/rethinking-parks-visions-future-innovation-parks/

Urban Nature Atlas
The richness of urban biodiversity in what used to be regarded as useless wastelands is documented in a growing number of platforms. The Urban Nature Atlas contains more than one thousand examples of nature-based solutions from across 100 European cities
https://naturvation.eu/atlas

Urban wastelands? (French article)
Unrecognized , unloved, belittled. However, studies carried out throughout Europe show that neglected spaces can incorporate the greatest urban biodiversity in flora and fauna.
https://reporterre.net/Les-friches-urbaines-sont-d-etonnants-reservoirs-de-biodiversite

The Fifteen Minute City In Images 
https://www.paris.fr/pages/la-ville-du-quart-d-heure-en-images-15849

Fringe Farming 
New opportunities for peri urban farming in fiveUK cities.
https://www.sharedassets.org.uk/resources/fringe-farming-2021

The bird-friendly city[https://naturecanada.ca/defend-nature/how-you-help-us-take-action/bfc/resources/?]

2C] Microbiome Inspired Green Infrastructure (MIGI)

Microbiome-inspired green infrastructure’ (MIGI) + Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative (HUMI)  Jake Robinson
“Promoting connections with nature — including the microbes many of us currently shun — should be a key part of any post-pandemic recovery. strategy. Our cities are often lacking in biodiversity. As a result, urban dwellers are far less exposed to a diversity of health-promoting microbes. We set out a framework for construction projects so that multidisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners can explicitly consider environmental microbiota in design and construction contexts, thereby increasing ecosystem functionality and public health”[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341284747_Microbiome-Inspired_Green_Infrastructure_A_Toolkit_for_Multidisciplinary_Landscape_Design https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/9/2/40]

  Invisible Friends | Jake Robinson
https://www.jakemrobinson.com/

Bacterial Urbanism, Ann Whiston Spirn
“Cities, and the people who live in them, are part of the natural world. Cities are habitats. Cities are ecosystems. And urban ecosystems are dynamic and interconnected. Ecological urbanism weds the theory and practice of city design and planning with the insights of ecology – the study of the relationships between living organisms and their environment and the processes that shape both. It’s an approach that necessarily interacts with other environmental disciplines, such as climatology, hydrology, geography, psychology, history, and art”
http://annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/spirn_ecological_urbanism-2011.pdf

Invisible City Life: The Urban Microbiome (Marina Alberti)
Since microbes are invisible to humans, we tend to underestimate their importance in maintaining ecological and human wellbeing. Microbes play a key role in the function of ecosystems. They contribute to biodiversity, nutrient cycling ,pollutant detoxification, and human health. In urban ecosystems, microbes account for most of the biodiversity and are major agents in nature’s material cycles and food webs ). Thus the sustainability of cities over the long term is inextricably linked to microbes and their evolution.
https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2014/12/03/invisible-city-life-the-urban-microbiome/

Microbial Metrics and the Multi-Species City, Kevin Slavin, Elizabeth Hénaff
Ninety nine percent of all life on earth is invisible to the human eye, both unnamed and unnoticed. Cities are filled with people, and these people are in turn filled with billions and trillions of microorganisms. Over the past decade, this notion has become familiar through the popularization of the so-called “human microbiome,” a unique microbiological ecology in the gut of people. But does New York have a gut biome? Is it different from the gut biome of Tokyo? Lagos? Hyderabad?
https://www.aiany.org/architecture/featured-projects/view/subculture-microbial-metrics-and-the-multi-species-city/

From Control, to Kinship: Ecological Restoration in a More Than Human World (JT video 20’)
“The true potential of AI is to help us reconnect with the living, and the real:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYHUYEnjPfI&t=249″

The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities (Didi Pershouse)
https://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Care-A…

Microbes and Social Equity (30’)
Dr Sue Ishaq founder of the Microbes and Social Equity working group, discusses microbes, broccoli, scallops, the digestive system of cows, food deserts, spatial planning, and social equity. It adds up to another to-do list for all of us in regenerative design.
https://video.maine.edu/media/%E2%80%9CMicrobes+at+the+nexus+of+environmental%2C+biological%2C+and+social+research%E2%80%9D%2C+Dr.+Sue+Ishaq/1_otisjuzm

Multi-Species Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, Christoph Ruppert et al (solarpunk book)
Cities are alive, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, landforms and machines. What might city ecosystems look like in the future if we strive for multispecies justice in our urban settings? In these more-than-human stories, twenty-four authors investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world, placing characters in situations where humans have to look beyond their own needs and interests. Set primarily in the Asia-Pacific, these stories engage with the serious issues of justice, inclusion, and sustainability that affect the region, while offering optimistic visions of tomorrow’s urban spaces. https://www.worldweaverpress.com/blog/cover-reveal-multispecies-cities

D Other John Thackara Content
Blog, PPTs, Case Studies, Handouts: http://thackara.com/
Publications: http://thackara.com/publications-john-thackara/
 Talks on video: http://thackara.com/talks-on-video/
Slideshares: https://www.slideshare.net/johnthackara
Twitter: @johnthackara
FB: https://www.facebook.com/thackarameetup