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.
