Preface
Nature has provided for the infrastructure and basic services to support human life, and has even
subsidized our profligate Western lifestyles. Now, however, we have exceeded the Earth’s carrying
capacity. We have also exhausted the cultural and social viability of many resource-rich, but
impoverished countries and colonies around the world. This unilateral relationship between humans
and nature must be reversed.
Fortunately, urban design and architecture could undo much of the
damage of past policies, actions and developments. However, genuine sustainability will require
more than social change and ecological ‘restoration’.
It will require increasing the total amount of
ecosystem goods and services, as well as increasing the health and resilience of the natural environment.
This book contends that the built environment can create the infrastructure, conditions and space for
nature to continue its life-support services and self-maintenance functions. Development can provide
greater life quality, health, amenity, conviviality and safety for all – without sacrificing resources,
money or comfort. For it to do so, however, we need a new approach to the planning, design and
management of our built environment. What we will call ‘Positive Development’ would actually
expand the ‘ecological base’, meaning ecosystem goods and services, natural capital, biodiversity and
habitats, ecological health and resilience, and bio-security. It would also expand the ‘public estate’,
meaning the substantive democracy that ultimately depends on equitable access to, and expansion
of, the ecological base – the means of survival.
Our current methods for addressing sustainability challenges are shaped by institutional and
intellectual frameworks that reflect negative, defensive attitudes towards the environment. Negative
impacts are seen as inevitable, so we only aim to slow the pace of environmental destruction. The
belief that we have no option but to ‘trade off’ nature for social and economic gain is deeply engrained.
We assume the best that sustainable development can do is provide (short-term)
social
benefits
that compensate for long-term
ecological
losses. Traditionally, policymakers and environmental
managers have thought they were dealing with sustainable development issues by merely monitoring,
measuring, managing and mitigating the predicted negative impacts of future plans, policies and
designs. However, creating environments that are socially and ecologically productive requires
breaking out of our mental cubicles and undoing what has already been done.
Towards that end,
this book provides:
•
New paradigms and design concepts that enable us to
expand
future options, increase
resource security, increase human and ecological health, and improve life quality for all.
•
New design criteria, review processes, assessment tools and design methods that shift from
narrow ‘input–output thinking’ to design that
supports
natural systems and communities.
•
New
approaches to analysis, assessment and management systems that move from mitigating
negative impacts to multiplying
positive
ecological and social synergies.
•
New approaches to futures planning methods, strategies and incentives that do not just
prepare
for a grim future, but increase the means of survival and
meaningful
life choices.
A critique of ‘best practice’ planning, design and management systems forms the basis for new
methods and processes to facilitate design and innovation for net Positive Development. We will
call this
positive
approach ‘SmartMode’ (short for Systems Mapping And Re-design Thinking Mode).
It is intended to reverse negative attitudes towards the natural and built environment, and provide an
analytic framework to help us reverse the impacts of
past
development by design. SmartMode aims
to help us leapfrog the intellectual and institutional barriers that are entrenched in the foundations
of urban and regional planning, natural resource management, and even ‘green’ urban design and
building. It challenges vestiges of negative thinking in green design criteria, standards, benchmarks,
rating tools, reporting systems, planning strategies and design methods. Alternatives to each of
these are suggested to help de-couple environmental impacts from economic growth, but also to
add value
to the public estate (at a net economic gain). This may, however, only be possible through
community-based initiatives, to which industry and government must contribute, but which they
must not control. The suggestions are collated in the last section to provide a generic framework to
guide more positive
forms of community planning, design and decision-making.
Positive Development
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