Living Buildings

The Global Warming is Real blog posted a great explanation of living buildings last week:

The concept of the “living building” has now emerged as a new ideal for design and construction. The Cascadia Region Green Building Council (CRGBC)—the Pacific Northwest chapter of the USGBC—defines a living building as a structure that “generates all of its own energy with renewable non-toxic resources, captures and treats all of its water, and operates efficiently and for maximum beauty.” The group has been pushing for adoption of the concept by construction industries here at home, and also helped to launch the International Living Building Institute to promote the concept internationally.

In essence, the call to architects and builders has been answered by over 60 projects that are currently in the "wait and see" phase. Seasonal variations in daylight, temperature and rainfall were the impetus for the one year requirement, which may ultimately help gauge against long-term climate change. What's also interesting are some of the unique challenges created by the comprehensive approach to both planet and people. As stated by Global Warming is Real:

Another challenge is finding materials that meet LBC standards, since many common building materials—such as PVC piping for wastewater transport—off-gas chemicals and have other hazardous attributes... remains confident that costs will come down as green materials, technologies and methods become more commonplace within the general building industry.

And this is where we stand today. We know what needs to be done, but we are confronting logistical challenges from systems and technologies that are based upon artificially cheap energy and materials as well as a long-standing ignorance toward personal health and environmental well-being. We are still a long way from critical mass, where the general populace demands meaningful progress with building technologies. Green sounds good enough, but as Global Warming is Real reminds us:

Over the past couple of decades, architects and builders looking to green their projects turned to the addition of various piecemeal elements to save water here or cut down on electricity there. Those who added more than a few green touches could apply for and get certified by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) under its Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design (LEED) program. While these efforts have been laudable—essentially launching the green building industry as we know it today—they represent merely the infancy of what green building might someday become.

 

BALLE

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is one of my favorite organizations. Their goal is to transform communities for the better by strengthening and connecting networks of locally owned independent businesses, which can then work cooperatively toward a shared vision.

On their website, they speak of cities and towns of every size and political stripe engaged in shared learning. They speak of building community assets like sustainable agriculture, green building, renewable energy, community capital, zero-waste manufacturing and independent retail - what they call the building blocks of Living Economies.

BALLE envisions a time when local economies not only generate community wealth, but also are catalysts for civic action, social diversity and ecological health -- for sustainable communities. It is particularly exciting when they cite success stories like the 3,000-person community of Hardwick, Vermont, which has prospered by creating a new "economic cluster" around local food.

Call me an idealist but isn't this the way it should be? We've got work to do and we can't very well do it alone!

Conflict and Appreciative Inquiry

One of our course requirements at BGI is Leadership and Personal Development (LPD), which runs through six consecutive quarters. Here in my fourth quarter I am learning about a technique called Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The premise is that we are all looking to do our best, based on our own perceived reality. What's interesting is that our realities vary immensely based upon our individual life experience. This is due to our human tendency to compartmentalize these experiences into right/wrong, good/bad, etc. We begin this process as children and by the time we grow up each of us has a laundry list of assumptions, which makes it more challenging to get along with people with backgrounds that differ from our own.

I believe with all my heart that a diverse community is a healthy community, but I also know that a diverse community demands a commitment to learn through AI. This last month I've been both disheartened and moved by the commitment of the BGI community to address an issue that arose last month. Most of us were unaware that the acronym we use for Community Process Time has a meaning that some people find offensive. The announcement opened up a dialogue of diverse opinion, but there were some important voices missing from the conversation. This is an opportunity for all of us to use AI to reach a higher level of understanding and compassion, and I really hope that we do.

ABCD Defined

We were interested in Asset Based Community Development and how it compares to community asset mapping, so I contacted Alyssa at Second Stories, who hosted the event. She describes ABCD as the principle and asset mapping as the tool, and sent me a pdf to further describe the principles. I pasted the outline below.



TWELVE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT ABCD IN ACTION
By Mike Green (mike-green.org)

1.) EVERYONE HAS GIFTS.
2.) RELATIONSHIPS BUILD A COMMUNITY.
3.) CITIZENS AT THE CENTER
4.) LEADERS INVOLVE OTHERS AS ACTIVE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY.
5.) PEOPLE CARE ABOUT SOMETHING.
6.) MOTIVATION TO ACT
7.) LISTENING CONVERSATION
8.) ASK, ASK, ASK.
9.) POSING QUESTIONS RATHER THAN GIVING ANSWERS INVITES STRONGER
PARTICIPATION.
10.) A CITIZEN-CENTERED “inside-out” ORGANIZATION IS THE KEY TO COMMUNITY
ENGAGEMENT.
11.) INSTITUTIONS HAVE REACHED THEIR LIMITS IN PROBLEM-SOLVING.
12.) INSTITUTIONS AS SERVANTS.

Shared Visions

This past Saturday I volunteered to be the scribe for another creative session around diversity in community. What was interesting were the commonalities that emerged from one session to the next. When we design art, we think of an object, plan its construction and present it to the world. The same holds true of many traditional forms of design, including architecture and city planning. Yet the world is changing, becoming smaller as our stranglehold on the planet is revealing its limitations.

As we begin to realize that everything is connected, the need for systems thinking becomes more apparent. The concept of cause and effect is archaic. Everything is part of an evolving system, including neighborhoods. So community design must be acknowledged as an organic process, not something that a government or a developer can reduce to a formula.



I love how this wake up call takes the form of an entertaining video. Clearly, we can't just keep doing things the way we did before. In my humble opinion, we can design all the technology in the world, but if we can't figure out how to work together, live together and grow together we are doomed.

A community is like a farm. Its resilience comes from diversity, while a monoculture is susceptable to all sorts of predators. They key lies in shared values, a diverse asset base, a system for sharing those assets and a commitment to working through the inherent challenges that arise, because that is a given. We're all human and prone to weakness, so we have to work to make it work.

Progress

Earlier this month the White House Blog commended Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood for its "mixed use and affordable housing development and public transportation solutions (which) showed us how regional economic development initiatives can include and foster smart growth".

Sharon Lee, Executive Director of the Low Income Housing Institute explained, “We need to make sure low-income people can live in middle-class neighborhoods not only in distressed communities.We have changed the look of low-income housing. Not only is it well designed, it’s green.”

This begs a question that permeates nearly all of the discussions we have at BGI - "How much is enough?" In regard to Ms. Lee's quote, the question takes the form of "what exactly do you mean by green?". We all love to give ourselves big pats on the back for initiatives that are a little less bad than the ones we had before - and this is how some of our cutting edge developers and builders are defining the current green paradigm, which is best defined here in Seattle through LEED and Built Green. While it is truly encouraging to see not only a change in civic direction but a change in public attitude toward the "green" movement, one shudders to think of the time it will take for us to meet the Living Building Challenge.




What still remains to be seen is how and when governments will align themselves with developers to create and restore communities with both diversity and regenerative components. Sadly, truly sustainable technologies are still far beyond the mainstream, and in many ways both they and the diverse nature of our Utopian vision represent a push against "progress" as defined by our current economic system. More on the economy coming up next...

Diversity Part II

Last week I held my creative session at Re-vision Labs in Seattle with a fabulous cast of participants who brought professional and personal experience to the topic of bringing and maintaining a vibrant diversity in community. We started with a 3 minute brainstorm around the question:

"In what ways might we define diversity"

We came up with 28 types of diversity, each of which would have a positive effect on community assuming goodwill, willingness to learn, motivation to contribute and acceptance of diverse backgrounds, lifestyles and perspectives. Many questions were explored and answered like:

"In what ways might diversity enhance a community"

• We can learn new things
• We can work together toward larger goals than we could achieve individually
• We can share our personal assets - our skills, our time, our knowledge, our possessions
• We can recognize our commonalities amongst the differences and broaden our perspectives
• We become people who are more willing to open ourselves to possibility
• Diverse communities can be a model for world peace

Diversity

I know I've been talking a lot about BGI, but I can't express the gratitude I feel for finding a program that has helped me take forty-seven years of seemingly incongruous experience and find a passion that is completely relevant to who I am.

This blog is an assignment from my Using the Social Web for Social Change class, instructed by Christopher Allen, who is well-known and respected in the field of digital technology and its effects on our social structure. Yesterday, Christopher posted a video by Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist who instructs his own social web class at Kansas State University. That is where I found the video that you see above. I love it because it's a great example of how the social web can bring out the common good in us all - the same common good that I believe we can build through more thoughtful community design.

I am also taking a Marketing class at BGI, where students are teaming up to research 3BL concepts. My team and I are investigating the viability of becoming 3BL developers of regenerative communities. Now there are many amazing concepts and technologies involved in truly regenerative community development, each of which would require a lengthy description. And I hope to discuss many of them in this blog. But I would like to first begin with the concept of diversity, because I have this Utopic vision of the future - a future that is founded upon the concepts that were expressed in the video above, by many people who chose to respond to a simple invitation on YouTube.

Thanks to the generous efforts of the folks at Re-Vision Labs, I now have a venue for an assignment for my Creativity and Right Livelihood class project - a creative session. A creative session is like a mini-brainstorm around a puzzle. Participants with diverse backgrounds churn out ideas in a moderated session with the idea of generating some form of cross-pollination. I chose to design the session around the following question "In what ways might we bring diversity into community development?" The term diversity is meant to include racial, socio-economic, religious and generational diversity, as well as the personalities we all are born with and acquire throughout our lives. Now, this certainly isn't a new idea, but perhaps we can find ways to approach it in a new way.

I would appreciate any feedback you might have. Thanks.

ABCD

The  Neighborhood Notes blog posted an announcement for a workshop this weekend that sounds quite interesting. The topic is Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). I've heard of community asset mapping - the process of intentionally identifying the human, material, financial, entrepreneurial and other resources in a community - and I wondered whether this was a tool that might be used in the design phase of a community.

So I did a little more digging and discovered that there is actually an Asset Based Community Development Institute in Evanston, Illinois. It is part of Northwestern University. They describe their work as follows:

• Building community capacity is at the heart of ABCD’s work. ABCD engages directly with community groups to support their asset-based community development efforts. The Institute and its affiliated faculty also participate in an array of local, regional, and international conferences and workshops as keynote speakers, workshop and training facilitators, technical support providers, and learning participants.

• Using a community-based participatory research approach, ABCD partners with community residents and other local entities to conduct research that helps prepare them to achieve their own community building objectives. ABCD also works with community groups, non-profits, and an array of other institutions to evaluate asset-based community development projects.

• Working directly with students, Northwestern faculty, and other organizations, ABCD contributes to the development of the next generation of engaged civic leaders and community builders.

• Producing community building publications and other resources for practitioners and scholars in the community development field, ABCD contributes to a growing body of knowledge about the effectiveness of the asset-based approach to strengthening communities.

It is encouraging to see a growing interest in the third rung of the sustainability stool - the people.

Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Today is blog action day on climate change, and I want to make a contribution in respect to community. We've heard of green building and know that many planned communities are carefully considering their use of sustainable materials, implementing designs that encourage travel by foot, bicycle and public transportation. Such tools to reduce community footprints are becoming more advanced as scientists discover new systems rooted in biomimicry. 


Tools that enable an interface between designers and community are also surfacing as developers are beginning to recognize the importance of the third leg of the sustainability stool - people. According to Allyson Wendt, managing editor for Environmental Building News (EBN) and author of the new article Building for People: Integrating Social Justice into Green Design, "design discussions are an opportunity to bring attention to issues of social justice, whether by arguing for daylighting in janitorial offices or suggesting that a building pursue LEED points for site selection, alternative transportation, or indoor environmental quality."

Wendt's discussions are critical, yet developers are only one slice of the pie. In the United States, we still have many barriers to entry, namely the artificially low costs of fuel and government subsidized industry. According to Norman Myers of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) in his book Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy, we need to be taking a closer look at the effect that our government policies are having on our progress toward a sustainable future. Such perverse, or black subsidies pose a serious dilemma for the millions of Americans who live on scant resources. They promote the consumption of products that are unhealthy on personal, local and global levels, and often place green initiatives on an uneven playing field.

Without financial incentives, a substantial segment of the American populace will be unable to embrace the lifestyle changes necessary for a sustainable future. Local projects like the Seattle Housing Authority's High Point Neighborhood and the King County Housing Authority's Green Bridge are finding creative ways to address the problem. Thanks to their efforts, the regressivity of a sustainable lifestyle has vanished for hundreds of low-income residents in the Greater Seattle area.

In my next post, I hope to explore how 3BL companies might build upon the success and overcome some of the obstacles that these admirable initiatives have faced.

Regenerative Communities

I'm currently in my second year of a two-year MBA program at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI). BGI is a triple bottom line (3BL) business school whose mission is to change business for good. Over the summer, we formed Marketing teams around entrepreneurial concepts that we will continue to develop over the school year and possibly launch in the spring. My team and I are working on a business model for Regenerative Community Developers, which will focus not only on designing and constructing developments with the latest permaculture technologies, but also on the cultural components that will enable these communities to live to their fullest 3BL potential.

Once embraced only by a fringe element of society, now hybrid models are finding their way into the hearts and minds of a growing number of Americans. Governments are recognizing co-housing and eco-communities  as potential solutions to many of the socio-economic, ecological and fiscal woes of contemporary society. But I believe we have yet to unleash the full potential in these models.

My teammates and I are forward thinking individuals, so we know in our hearts that communities must embrace diversity if they expect to thrive. But knowing something in your heart is not the same as proving it on paper. In my Marketing class we talk about demographics and the importance of honing in on our target market. But what if you believe that integration is the key to communal success? What if you need to target all markets to successfully prove your theory? Our Marketing professor suggested we look for some common wants and needs that our target groups share. So how about this:

We all want and need to feel wanted and needed.

BGI is such a cool school. Not only am I blogging about the idea in my Social Web class, but I'm running a creative session around it for my Creativity and Right Livelihood (CRL) class. My CRL session focus is "In what ways might we bring diversity into community developments?" But that is just the beginning. The necessary follow-up question is "In what ways can communities encourage ongoing integration, empathy and exchange?".

For the purpose of this blog (and my project), I would like to focus on the following demographic groups and explore ways in which we might find not only shared wants and needs, but opportunities in their disparity:

• people who have more money than time
• people who have more time than money

We all know that every demographic group fits in one of these categories to varying degrees, and hopefully we understand that people with more time may also possess other resources of potential value to the community.

So how do we make it work? How do we design communities that consider human resources as valuable as natural resources? All the pieces are out. Now it is time to starting solving the puzzle.

 

Purpose

What is Designing Community? My hope is that it will become a dialogue, where we can discover the limits and universality of an idea that I believe is the key to a sustainable future. The word community will conjure a unique image in each of our minds. So, as practitioners of the most complex language on the planet, why do we have one word to describe a thousand different ideas?

I was watching this hot tub video today, thinking about how our society is constantly in search-mode. It's like there is this understanding that we've lost something, but we can't figure out how to find it. For over fifty years now, our default has been to buy more stuff to satisfy that void.



If you've ever studied economics, you probably understand why shopping has become a national pastime. It is crucial to our GDP, which is required to grow to support our government and boost the image of our elected officials. But I digress. For a great insight into the story of stuff, and why we shouldn't be buying into it, check out Annie Leonard.

What I'm getting at is once we're all shopped out, and we're still feeling empty, where do we turn? For some it is yoga, meditation, religion, family. Perhaps it's sports, travel or gardening. These are all good - very very good. But what if you don't have time for these activities? What if you are so caught up in the grind that there is no time to pursue your passions?

I have three questions for you to ponder:

1. What are your meaningful activities?
2. Do you have enough time for your activities?
3. If not, what gets in your way?