‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Why does design failure continue despite our untapped human potential?
We have touched on some of the reasons for design failure throughout this book. Among these are 
that we rely on the private sector to provide public goods, we rely on the market to correct market 
failure and we rely on bean counters to correct design failure. When these approaches do not work, 
we assume we need more investment in these failed approaches. Because the reasons for design 
failure are system-wide and integral to our way of thinking, the reasons could be described in many 
different ways. However, some themes we have identified are:
•
If we do not believe we can make net positive design impacts, we will not try. We will not
take direct action to fix things, we will only try to mitigate the damage of status quo systems
with the least change to the status quo.
• 
If we do not take design seriously, we will not develop design capacity, let alone create a place
for ‘opportunity creating’ in environmental problem-solving. We will continue to ignore the 
opportunity cost of poor design and the public benefits of good design.
• 
If we do not believe inaction or non-decision is culpable, or we do not believe that
governments should take direct action for whole systems improvements, bureaucracies will

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Reversing Resource Transfers
continue to pass the buck (‘non-decision’ is just another form of decision).
• 
If we believe that markets are magical, we will not examine their long-term and whole-system 
outcomes, or make people accountable for outcomes – or even make the market work more
fairly (eg through full cost pricing of resources).
Thus how we describe problems and define reasons for the perpetuation of deleterious resource 
transfers will affect our solutions or cause us to go round and round in vicious circles.