Finding Pathways for Vehicles of Change

This blog post is going to break from the current Systems Practice focus (most recent post first) of the last two blog posts to update the newest resource additions to the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki. This time though it will also tie them to a location on the recently unveiled Kumu based NCP Wiki Map, that was rolled out over four blog posts and which now has a home on both the NCP blog and wiki. If this is the first time with the NCP Wiki Map then there is a tour which provides a general explanation. 

The NCP Wiki map seeks to develop connections or bridges across sectors. All of the updates in this post are part of or are in some way connected to the Places map but can be followed to Healthy Communities or to Community Ecology. 

It is the resources, available online, found in the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki that are the vehicles for change. The NCP Wiki Map connotes possible paths that could be taken. The posts of this blog are but one rationale or mental model for taken a particular path or using the suggested vehicles, one among many possible. 

The State of Placemaking 2016, brought more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners, and policymakers to chart the future of the placemaking movement structured around ten major issues that converge in public space,  referred to as “transformative agendas.” Placemaking, as a determining aspect of Places, can be seen as being most comprehensively defined by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS).  

In the NCP Wiki Places map, the circled Project for Public Spaces is seen as arising from Places and being related to the more general Community Places. (double clicking a circled element opens up wiki page, clicking “On Kumu Wiki Map” at top of a wiki page opens up the map). It is the wiki page Community Places that contains the blog posts, near the bottom of the page, seeking to define the developing NCP mental model for placemaking.

Place as Social and Economic Engine was one of the first wiki bridge pages and an early basis for developing a mental model for NCP as defined by blog posts listed at the bottom of the wiki page. It was so named, again as an extension of the correction to the same erroneous presumption underlying placemaking, that the strata of the geographic community below the businesses, city hall politics and those residents connected with city hall were of secondary value. While in truth, it is the created physical attributes of a place that are the dynamic foundation or engine of the community’s social and economic generation.

Place as Social and Economic Engine is the home for Strong Towns, who introduced the newest addition VERDUNITY, a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. They started VERDUNITY  because they realized that elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. This was a disruption in their way of thinking, of their mental models. They are now working on changing other people’s mental models of how they think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. More will be said about VERDUNITY in a future post.

Place as Social and Economic Engine on the NCP Wiki Map is seen as a bridge between Place and Economics (access between Places and Economics via a link is in the narrative section to the left). 

The newest addition to Planning the Urban Landscape is New Urban Mechanics, a network of civic innovation offices that explore how new technology, designs, and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all. It could have arguably been put under Community Change Agencies but personal choice and only personal was that these programs were more closely related to the existing underlying physical, placemaking, and political infrastructure of a community. The related blog posts, again listed at the bottom of the wiki page, provide some perspectives on a past effort in Los Angeles history to redefine the larger urban landscape. 

Planning the Urban Landscape approaches Places from a broader perspective looking not from the build up of smaller changes over time but the accumulation of those changes overall. It is seen as a bridge between Places and Community Ecology. 

Under the wiki page Healthy Cities is the recent addition of Bridging Health & Community, an extension of  the previously listed Creating Health Collaborative which aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond institutional healthcare and public health to include fostering community agency, strengthening the field of practice that bridges those in the health sector and those who foster community agency helping to establish the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health. Being able to measure differences in life expectancy by income across areas and then to identify strategies to improve health outcomes for low-income Americans would be a useful ability. Health Inequality Project uses big data to help accomplish this.

The bridge from Places to Healthy Cities, under the Healthy Communities map, is Planning for Healthy Communities. It could also be an element in the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and the Art and Healthy Communities map. Two specially constructed maps that put together a path that incorporated elements that are often placed in silos and considered distinct and separate. 

Taking a higher altitude perspective, the Wiki Bridges Map connects all the New Community Paradigm sectors, including Places, Healthy Communities, and Community Ecology, together. 

A closer look at the pathway for Places indicates that at under the current New Community Paradigm configuration, Healthy Communities and Places are well integrated together but Community Ecology is somewhat isolated. 

Could Bridging Health & Community and Creating Health Collaborative under Healthy Cities be integrated with New Urban Mechanics under Planning the Urban Landscape and extended from Places to Community Ecology integrating the two together more closely?

There are also other deeper pathways that could utilize the online resources found in the NCP Wiki. Under Project for Public Places (click the URL or double click the circled element to open the wiki page) is Agenda Spotlight: Placemaking and Health - Project for Public Spaces.

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people’s health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

It could be an important component of the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and naturally be expanded to be encompassed by Community Ecology. How it is used could be determined in a number of different ways depending upon the needs of a particular community. 

It is believed though it has not been adequately examined that finding specific potential pathways for the utilization of online resources will greatly help in the development of new community paradigms. 

Reimagining and Reclaiming a Place for Us: Olmsted 1930 LA Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches Plan, Lessons from the Past

This last Sunday afternoon was spent in attendance at the Rancho Los Alamitos, Long Beach, CA, to listen to presentations and a panel on the 1930 Los Angeles “Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches” Plan as a basis for a discussion of “A Place for Us: Reimagining and Reclaiming”, which was written about in advance of the event by this blog a couple of posts ago. 

The participants presenting and serving on the panel included from an academic perspective, William Deverell, Chairman of the USC History Department and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, who co-authored Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region, and Stephanie Pincetl, Director of the Urban Center for People and the Environment at the UCLA Institute of the Environment.   

From a media perspective, Frances Anderton, radio host of DnA: Design and Architecture on KCRW and KCRW.com, and Jon Christensen, an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Department of History, as well as nationally published freelance environmental journalist.  

From the brick and mortar development perspective, Alan Pullman, AIA, founder of Studio One Eleven, a division of the international firm Perkowitz+Ruth Architects, who also serves on the Urban Land Institute’s Inner City Council, and Tom Gilmore of Gilmore Associates, who began in 1998 to acquire and rehabilitate underutilized historic properties in the Historic Core of downtown Los Angeles. Noted by the event’s promotional material as a risk-taker and animating force behind Los Angeles adaptive reuse development, his revitalization of the Old Bank District has served as a model for other developers.  

The moderators were Claudia Jurmain, Director of Special Projects and Publications and founder of Conversations in Place at Rancho Los Alamitos and D.J. Waldie, historian, cultural commentator and author of Holy Land — A Suburban Memoir, who also served as a presenter and panel member.

Saying who presented the ideas is important because there weren’t any Powerpoint presentations and the exchange of ideas was plentiful and very fluid.  As usual, this was a new venture with little previous knowledge, even more so relative to the deep knowledge that the panelists brought to the discussion. The issues that were dealt with, whether from the past or today were also more concrete than some of the issues that have been dealt with recently by this blog.  There was both new knowledge acquired and the checking of previous ‘knowledge’ wrongly acquired providing enough to create two posts, one looking to lessons for the future and one, this one, looking to lessons taken from the past. 

The presentation and panel discussion provided more substance to the the 1930 LA Playgrounds, Parks, and Beaches Plan story. The Olmsted Brothers were asked a number of times before they agreed to create the Plan and they warned the good people of Los Angeles Olmsted that it was essential that the political work needed to be done before hand to avoid, what W. Deverell termed, a naive environmental idealism versus politics.  

The actual process of bringing the 1930 LA Plan to realization was not that different from today.  The Hollywood big star of the day, Mary Pickford, wooed the LA Chamber of Commerce resulting in a large number of paid prescriptions from private wealth to fund what was to be conceptually similar to the Emerald Necklace of Boston.  The Olmsted Plan focused around Elysian Park combining landscape planning with traffic planning with the underlying premise that nature or the environment was endless. That myth is now gone. 

The Olmsted Brothers had local input into the creation of the Plan but from local experts familiar with the fauna and territory, not so much from the public it would seem. The Plan was to be paid for by bonded debt and governed by a newly created government entity.

The best intentioned outcome of the Plan was that the LA Chamber was to accept the report and then send out thousands of copies but instead they sent out only 150 copies. The inner Board killed the project creating a power shift by a small group.  Demonstrating as a past example of what has been termed entrenched power by this blog, one LA Chamber member was quoted as having said, “Los Angeles has enough parks.” 

It may have been the realization that the newly proposed government institution would seriously diminish the influence of the LA Chamber’s inner circle of power that was the motivation to kill the Plan. In the tradition of Greek tragedy, that happened anyway with the coming of the Great Depression, making the squandering of a potential resource all the more ironic. S. Pincetl of UCLA spoke of ‘foiled desire’. 

This brings us to two erroneous assumptions that were made the previous Paradigms Lost - Olmsted Brothers and the 1930 L.A. Plan post.  First that the Olmsted Brothers foresaw the problems that would arise from automobiles because they recognized at the time that Los Angeles “has a far wider and thinner spread of population than any other metropolis, and a far greater use of automobiles.” W. Deverell explained that the Olmsted Brothers had a far different perspective of the automobile and its relationship to nature to what we have today. 

They envisioned what has become the rush hour packed freeway system as a series of parkways to which one could escape.  The second assumption, arising from the first, was seeing the past as a far too idyllic reality.  It was pointed out that in the early part of the twentieth century cities, particularly large cities, were still seen as being insalubrious. The automobile, rather than being the source of greenhouse gases was seen in the early twentieth century as a means of escaping the infectious diseases lurking in the cities.  Many of the urban issues we face today would arise a few decades later when the federal highway system would be created and expanded by Eisenhower, starting the Growth Ponzi Scheme that Strong Towns rails against today. 

The negative effects of past acts of either omission or commission cannot be ignored but we need to be careful with putting ourselves or our favorite aspects of the past into too favorable of a light. Cities have faced various system challenges over the years and have come up with a variety of solutions. However, the vast majority of man-made solutions created have been based on mechanistic, usually top down, complicated management structures as opposed to more complex oriented systems, and all at some point in time begin to fail if for no other reason than changes in the environment (total environment not just natural). This includes any that we make today; trouble is that they will likely fail faster. 

S. Pincetl pointed out that the older cities of Europe were built by beasts of burden rather than by machines powered by fossil fuels as were the American cities of the Twentieth century.  Early ages were not only in a different relationship with nature, they also saw their cities as serving different functions from today.  While we work to develop sustainable cities, they sought to built sanitary cities which had an essential function of evacuating waste even if that meant using waterways to do so. 

Water was also seen in a very different light in the earlier history of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles River was once a principal source of water. The Olmsted Brothers seem to have basically ignored it or, as some asserted during the panel discussion, realized that it wasn’t much of a river.  LA River would later though become a source of flooding in 1938 providing the rationale for the building of the Los Angeles Flood Control System.  At the same time Los Angeles was looking for new sources of water to meet growing demands.  The city has celebrated the 100 Anniversary of Los Angeles Aqueduct. Today, our perspective on water has changed and our primary concerns are scarcity and pollution. 

The event at Rancho Los Alamitos began to come to a close when the opportunity to ask one question from the audience was offered.  I was chosen, and though I had at least a dozen, asked a what if question which has no real answer but can still provide a good deal of insight.  What if questions provide a hindsight perspective of what went wrong.  This can be useful when trying something similar and applying it to an unknown future. 

What would have happened if the inner board of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce had not stopped the distribution of the Plan?  W. Deverell believed that because of the paid prescriptions and public support of notables such as Mary Pickford that the Plan had a good chance of being implemented. So one lesson that could be taken is to find ways to break up instances of entrenched power that serve as bottlenecks to beneficial change within the overall system in which we live.  That, however, is a longer term or at least more difficult endeavor.  Leaving the question for a future post, what other lessons can we take from this particular piece of Los Angeles history to use in creating our future. 

Paradigms Lost - Olmsted Brothers and the 1930 L.A. Plan

Up to this point, the endeavor to discover new knowledge and resources with which to create new community paradigms has taken place online. On November 10, 2013, starting at 1:00 p.m., I will be listening to an unconventional conversation regarding “A Place for Us, Reimagining and Reclaiming” with a distinguished (and live) panel of experts at the Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, CA. 

The reimagining of place, whether as community place or social and economic engine, has been occurring since the inception of this effort by exploring for myself previously little or unknown bodies of knowledge such as Placemaking. It is the reclaiming or the discovery that there is something to reclaim from Los Angeles history that is new. 

The telling story of the preeminent landscape design firm Olmsted Brothers, who co-authored the groundbreaking 1930 “Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches,” plan, and their attempt, “to enhance Los Angeles County’s natural beauty and to also, protect its cultural assets and fragile ecologies, by linking the mountains to the beaches through scenic parkways and a necklace of open space across the region.”, and how it was thwarted will be the centerpiece of this unconventional conversation.  

The story of the Olmsted Brothers and the 1930 L.A. Plan were not known to me or I suspect to many others outside the brothers' and related arenas of expertise.  Christopher Hawthorne, architect critic for the Los Angeles Times, started in 2011 writing Reading L.A., which featured 27 nonfiction books about Los Angeles’ past and future built environment. One of those books was “Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region” edited by historians Greg Hise and William Deverell, the later who is one of the participants at the upcoming unconventional conversation.  In his article, Reading L.A.: The Olmsted Brothers plan and what might have been, Hawthorne provides a useful summary of the Olmsted Brothers’ vision unrealized.

Los Angeles has then attempted paradigm changes before our time during L.A. b.c., ‘before congestion’. Can’t say, ‘before cars’ because, according to Hawthorne’s article, even in 1927 it was noted that Los Angeles “has a far wider and thinner spread of population than any other metropolis, and a far greater use of automobiles.” The die had already been cast then. The use of the word paradigm can be defended because the landscape of Los Angeles would have been far different if the Olmsted plan had been followed and the reality that we took another path has had a defining affect upon us. 

This was one of the points were we stopped, as Chuck L. Marohn, Executive Director of Strong Towns has explained before, following the wisdom of our past and began an immense Growth Ponzi Scheme as a runaway experiment.  Is it possible to underestimate the difference that this has made between then and now?  Today, placemaking can be an act of rebellion and one wonders what the reaction of the Olmsted Brothers would have been if someone asked them to build a ‘livable community’ as if there were any other kind that one takes responsibility for designing. 

Christopher Hawthorne informs us, with knowledge undoubtedly garnered from William Deverell’s book, that: 

“What the Olmsted and Bartholomew firms ultimately produced for the Citizens’ Committee was a report –- “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region” -- of astonishing sophistication and farsightedness. Not only did the plan chart the ways in which the region was lacking in open space, it laid out a remarkably detailed plan for creating new parks, parkways and untouchable "reservations." It was careful to tailor the plan to match the singular character of the region, which it noted “has a far wider and thinner spread of population than any other metropolis, and a far greater use of automobiles.” It also proposed mechanisms for getting its various ideas approved and paid for.”

So why did it fail to be realized? According to Hawthorne’s article, “This fate,” the editors note, “was not due to some intrinsic flaw in the plan, nor was it due to a lack of public will, and it certainly was not happenstance. No, what happened in this case was more deliberate, more planned. The Chamber of Commerce and its allies effectively limited circulation of the report and discouraged public discourse.” This suppression succeeded so well that “it garnered almost no public attention. The response, in truth, was a resounding silence.” Okay, somethings do not change. 

What was the motivation of those who had originally given birth to the idea? Again, according to Hawthorne’s article, “It’s not entirely clear. In the end, Deverell and Hise conclude, the chamber’s leaders likely began to worry that the report was a more powerful, persuasive and explosive document than they’d bargained for, and that it might turn into something they wouldn’t be able to control, politically or otherwise.” Does this suggest that a bold and comprehensive vision could inspire the larger community to work together for their own common good?

There is still though a legacy that can be taken from the report according to its two editors, Hise and Deverell.  “It is first of all “a textbook example of the distance that separates a plan, a vision of the future, from its realization.” Second is, “how it reveals the form and meaning, the very definition, of urban space as the product of an ongoing contest.”

I suspect that there was a great deal of aggregated innovation through the Olmsted creative history in the 1930 Plan.  There was not, however, any disruptive force or organizing principle that could change the inertia of the then existing system of economic and political power. 

We are living with the results today. 

“All of these cities -– Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle –- now sprawl all over those once-fabulously beautiful settings. Nature has been pushed to the horizon. Each city has serious traffic congestion, terrible air pollution, a great deficit of parks and open space, and swollen populations. They’re all deficient in profound ways, because they happened so fast. People thought, ‘Well, we’ll do that next year.’ They never did.”

Today, things are moving faster and have become so exceedingly complex that we have to describe the challenges facing our communities as ‘wicked’. 

During the upcoming unconventional conversation on “A Place for Us, Reimagining and Reclaiming”, I am going to be listening for voices from the past.  The Olmsted Brothers again warning, ‘This is going to happen, and this is your moment to do something about it or you’ll miss your chance.’ This time, I hope we pay more attention. 

New Community Paradigms Thinking Requires Systems Thinking

The creating and implementing of new community paradigms is far from easy and this difficulty has been recognized from the beginning of this endeavor. One reason, from a new community paradigms perspective, is getting enough of those making up a community engaged. This means first developing and providing a forum and process of community governance in lieu of the traditional form of local government institutions then getting those who have become disinterested, disenfranchised or disempowered engaged. The question of engagement has been discussed, to some degree, over the last two blog posts.

Developing new community paradigms requires new ways of looking at and thinking about our communities from multiple perspectives. The last post explored the idea of community engagement by drilling down to the individual level of participation. It also alluded to a more global, abstract, systems related perspective, raising the potential of bringing together two separate perspectives helping to make a whole.

The (upcoming) definition of community will be more of a matter of understanding as a system so will likely be more abstract and involve systems thinking in some aspect. This means taking a few steps back to understand ‘community’ and its ‘engagement’ within an environment as a system. Less passion and more analysis but for the purpose of better understanding where the passion needs to be directed.

New community paradigms must not only be able to incorporate separate perspectives (making a whole) but also different perspectives (diverging paths) and conflicting ones. This is not merely to achieve consensus or compromise but also to test old ideas, make new connections and generate innovative ideas. This is far less likely to happen using the standard system of local city governance conducted by most city halls.

This multiple perspective approach is necessary because the challenges facing communities have become increasingly complex. The Economist Intelligence Unit created a report investigating the rise of complexity in business and the challenges that increasing complexity creates. This is true of both the private and public sectors, though it can be argued that the private sector has made greater strides in addressing this than has the public sector.

To understand why, one must begin with there being an important difference between the ideas conveyed by the word complex and the word complicated. The two words are often used interchangeably in regular discourse and each word can be found in the formal definition of the other, but some have adopted using a more unique definition for each to differentiate them as separate systematic approaches.

I have borrowed this refined alternative etymology from a variety of sources. The first being this short TED video by Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity. This was featured in the blog post Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK which recognized the increasing, but not as insurmountable, challenge of complexity being faced by both private and public organizations. Other sources, found in a Google search, approached this from an English language and usage perspective and from more of a systems approach by way of Mike MacDonagh’s Blog.

According to this mode of thinking, complex systems can be seen as being intrinsic having many influencing parts. Complexity emphasizes interconnectedness. What is more important is that events consisting of the interaction of those interconnecting parts are not simply predictable. People are complex interacting in ways based on events and stimuli we can’t predict. Running a large project that involves numerous people as part of an organization is even more complex. Driving a car as an individual within a larger traffic system is also complex, increasing the number of cars during rush hour increases the complexity.

Complicated is more extrinsic and more prone to external influences. Complicated systems are often built upon expert, specialist or professional knowledge. This means that they can’t be done by most people. However, although they might require a great deal of time and skill they are ultimately predictable processes. A computer programming involving a recursive sorting algorithm is complicated, requiring the inclusion of variables, loops and recursion. Not everyone can do it. Regardless, it is still very predictable. Building a car engine is a complicated process.

Complicated should be easy if you can get the right skills properly allocated. Complex is always hard, at least our ability generally to manage it despite what seems to be an innate ability of humans to understand complexity.

Government institutions address the complex challenges facing communities by developing complicated processes. Initially, this makes sense as it provides a means of breaking up a complex challenge into manageable steps, providing the means of creating an algorithmic approach, and allocating resources.

It stops working though when the complexities of the larger system, in which the institution exists, outstrips the capacity of the locally created complicated system. It is made worse if the institutionally created complicated system develops its own inherent hinderances, as a means of ensuring its own survival, making it even more complicated and no longer for the benefit of those it was designed to serve. This can be true of either public or private institutions as reflected in this article by Gluu, a digital agency out of Denmark, on organizational complexity and what happens when Complexity brings paralysis.

We don't see it coming. What starts as a simple idea quickly becomes far more complex than anyone imagined. Before we know it all the good ideas lead to a form of paralysis.

If you look at each of the new ways of working and tools in isolation then most of them make sense. They are introduced by smart people with good intentions. The trouble is that when companies employ thousands of smart, highly paid people and then place them into the pigeonholes of a corporate hierarchy, then people do what they get paid for. From each of their pigeonholes they develop intricate systems, structures and processes that they broadcast to their colleagues.

What happens is that different department functions within City Hall become increasingly siloed from each other, from the public and even the political leadership itself, because of the cultural incentives created over time by the political legacy. Getting anything done, because it is inadequate to the complex challenge becomes increasingly complicated.

This does not have to happen intentionally or overtly, though it does, it can happen gradually, almost imperceptibly, changing the culture of the institution. The institutional processes become unnecessarily complicated and an obtuse wasting of energy from running on bureaucratic hamster wheels rather than addressing the original complex issues because the institution has become a maze of disconnected parts requiring the right map or passwords to get through it.

However, stepping back and embracing complexity provides a better chance of finding a simple answers and likely different and better than any simplistic answer provided by a complicated approach. The blog post Breaking through the complications to face the complexities and coming out whole was an endeavor to at least speak to a light at the end of a tunnel which only then beginning to be charted.

Again, not only do different arenas or sectors need to be brought together in an organic manner so that better reflects the underlying complexity of the issues being addressed but it needs to be done in a systematic manner that creates new opportunities for innovation.

A number of different strategies or approaches have been introduced in the process of building this learning platform for creating new community paradigms. Learning from these has not only provided different and therefore broader understanding but also helped to again bridge previously unconnected areas of inquiry. There is not always agreement with these different viewpoints but they serve to better frame the questions being raised. They have all been featured previously but this time it will be through more of a systems framework.

Strong Towns, led by Executive Director Charles (Chuck) Marohn, is one of the earliest and featured through three separate avenues in the right hand column of this blog. Strong Towns was first viewed as a means of bridging the ideas of Place and Economics. The blog post Strong Towns a closer look leads to a more detailed summary of what they espouse. There are disagreements, including the priority of environmental concerns or over reliance on fiscal metrics as related to community development, but they are still included because according to the Strong Towns philosophy, there are no real solutions to the fundamental problems facing our local communities, just rational responses.

Our local regulatory, planning, financing and engineering systems are designed to work in the Old Economy. If we are to see growth at the local level in a New Economy, all of these systems need to be rescaled to fit the changed reality.

This provides a basis for collaboration while at the same time leaving room for discussion as to what the most rational responses might be. The most admirable resource they provide is a Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf that could be used for community generated grassroots effort to start asking some fundamental questions about one’s community. Strong Towns also sees the economic development of community as needing to fit within a larger system in a financially sustainable manner. Again, plenty of room for discussion as to the best answers but they are asking the right questions.

Another alternative approach to understanding our local communities and economies was considered in the blog post Seeing Economy and Community as Ecosystem Another Way of Shifting the Paradigm. Inspired by a blog post by Della Rucker, Principal of Wise Economy Workshop who wrote So how do we start building Wise Economies? Economies = Communities = Ecosystems it provides for a more organic approach that addresses the increasing complexity inherent in the growth of our communities.

First, we need to change how we think about communities, businesses, organizations and governments. We need to understand that economic vitality depends on the health of a community, and that a community is not a set of separate, unrelated systems – a business district, a school system, a park system, a street system — but an ecosystem.

This concept of an ecosystem, in which the development of the economic system cannot ignore the development of the larger community system. This was also brought out in blog post Breaking through the complications to face the complexities and coming out whole, which discussed Della’s appreciation of Jane Jacobs insights into organized complexity.

It’s an understanding of “organized complexity,” as she (Jacobs) called it – the dynamic inter-relationships of systems, of processes, of self-organization. This was not a mysterious world, but a comprehensible one – it was just a different kind of world than we had been envisioning. A city, certainly, was a different kind of problem than we had thought. And therein she identified a huge obstacle to learning and progress, and one that is largely still with us.

Again, there is a recognition of a more systems based perspective moving from a narrow focus on the amount of revenues or number of jobs to a wider focus on the overall health, economically and environmentally, of the community.

With this type of approach, instead of cities competing for businesses and tax dollars, they have at least the potential working more easily together in collaborating to create healthy cities and livable communities.

This approach even with something as apparently reasonable as creating healthy cities is, however, a challenge to both our planning systems and health approach in fundamental ways. The objective of such an effort needs to be to pioneer new interfaces between health and planning. Although such a focus is local, the impact can be global such as with the World Health Organization's (WHO) creating a template definition of what is meant by a healthy city which can be replicated. WHO also has a global healthy cities project which is not top down but provides more of a template for successful implementation.

The Healthy Cities movement promotes comprehensive and systematic policy and planning for health and emphasizes

• the need to address inequality in health and urban poverty
• the needs of vulnerable groups 
• participatory governance 
• the social, economic and environmental determinants of health. 

This is not about the health sector only. It includes health considerations in economic, regeneration and urban development efforts.

This has been featured in both wiki-pages and blog posts under the wiki-section Livable Communities and not only collaborating to create healthy cities as mentioned above but also Healthy Cities make for Livable Communities bringing this continuing inquiry full circle.

New community paradigms deals with numerous systems, regulatory, planning, financing and engineering systems, water systems, sewer systems and others. All the preceding suggest that a systems approach and more specifically that a Systems Thinking approach could serve as an important component of new community paradigms. This approach was first introduced with the inclusion of the NEW COMMUNITY PARADIGMS SYSTEMS MINDMAP by THEBRAIN.COM.

The newly added component greatly assisted in envisioning new connections and pathways. Explaining the how and why, will be done through this blog. The primary resources will be from the results of participating in an online class on Model Thinking from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor offered by Coursea. The instructor is Scott E. Page, the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics. Model Thinking relates to Systems Thinking, the tactical means to implement strategic approaches to societies challenges. The second resource will be what can be learned from interacting with the members of the LinkedIn Systems Thinking group and the extensive resources that they provide. 

Related Blog Posts

Systems Thinking as a disciplined process for Community Governance

Boomers to Remain Part of the Community Paradigms

Strong Towns, one of the organizations supported within these pages, has recently featured a couple of articles regarding Baby Boomers.  Charles Marohn, better known as Chuck, the Executive Director of Strong Towns, has had a couple of posts on the subject of Baby Boomers.  This is a significant issue for me and a major impetus for creating this blog.  

The first was a Best of Blog series under the StrongTowns.org banner which asked Can Baby Boomers be part of the solution?  The question was posed in a less confrontational manner than an article I cited in my Reader Comments “Generational Warfare: The Case Against Parasitic Baby Boomers”.  

Chuck actually asked two questions.  Are the majority in the Baby Boom generation capable of substantively reforming America's current set of institutions, systems and programs?  

My answer to this question is yes, contingent on understanding that you don’t need the majority, most will remain uninvolved, but a large portion of Boomers who realize a need for change because of where the world ended up.  It is also depends upon Boomers not being isolated or alone in their efforts to create positive change.

Is it reasonable to expect those Baby Boomers with power and wealth, in positions of authority, such as elected office to substantively reform the institutions, systems and programs they came to control?  

First, most Boomers are not in this position.  They are not the ones who created the auto-centric development pattern or failed to fund pension systems.  They are, admittedly, the ones who made what seemed to be the best choices at the time for their families depending upon promises made for working within the system.  Many now see the viability of alternative systems of development and governance.  Many more, I believe, could be persuaded. 

Beyond this, I find the possibility more doubtful.  The problem from my perspective is not one of generations but of systems.  We are beyond the tail end of a system that has far outlived its arguably usefulness for most.  Unfortunately, it is those in power, very often on city councils, that keep perpetuating this system of oil dependent development.  Changing this will require to my mind social forms of disruptive innovation, like radically revising our current forms of municipal city council governments.

The next article, which was more declarative, was at Strong Town Networks on Generational Change (you need to join to see this but it is worth doing particularly because it is now free) which cited an article asserting that, “Behind the fiscal cliff is a struggle between racially diverse millennials and aging white baby boomers”.  In this article, Chuck raises a more philosophical point for discussion.

There is a quip attributed to Winston Churchill that goes something like this: If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative when you are old, you have no brain.  American society seems ready to test that insight.

According to some sources, including Wikiquote, Churchill didn’t say it. Quips often sound good when rolled off the tongue but a little digging can get to the heart of things.

"Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains."

• Often attributed to Winston Churchill ([5]). The phrase originated with Francois Guisot (1787-1874): "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." It was revived by French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929): "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head."

Someone also pointed out that this did not fit with Churchill’s own life. “He entered politics as a Conservative and was a Conservative at age 25. He switched to the Liberal Party at age 29 and was a Liberal at age 35. (He returned to the Conservatives at age 49.)” Further, it can fairly be said that Churchill's political viewpoint and guiding principles did not change radically, despite his twice switching his allegiance.

What is more important for the generational discussion, was that it was put forward during times in history, including Churchill’s, when people had the good manners to pass away at around 60 years of age or before.  Now everyone has to deal with Boomers sticking around for another 20 years of so as one of the larger population bumps in history.  Thereby putting pressure on our retirement systems.  The quip is often put in 20 year segments, liberal at 20 and conservative at 40.  Many Boomers are now 60 bringing on a whole new perspective.   

The biggest question is not whether we should apply this to ourselves as individuals but whether we can apply to ourselves as a society.  Does it bode well for our society to have Boomers become more conservative?  A recent Los Angeles Times article, “Parties' role reversal complicates spending debates” emphasizes the divisions between Boomers and Millennials, as does the article “Behind the fiscal cliff is a struggle between racially diverse millennials and aging white baby boomers”.  I personally found the photo in the article particularly ironic, but that’s just me. 

The 'fiscal cliff' drama highlighted how the small-government GOP now relies on older people who use entitlement programs created by the Democratic Party, which is now favored by the young.

This is dependent though upon following partisan politics and not looking for community based solutions.  There are those making the case that Boomers and Millennials can work together in building solutions to challenges facing our society.  

Sometime ago, during my more personal blogging phase, I also had questions on the role of Boomers in building the future and whether it was a matter of “Boomers Ruling the Old World or Helping to Raise Up a New One”.  I wanted and still want to choose a new one.  

The Gig - FORTUNE on CNNMoney.com had an article “Money v. meaningful work, the battle continues” featuring Tamara Erickson, now Founder & CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates and provided a hopeful scenario of Boomer and Generation Y collaboration in the workplace.  

...Tamara Erickson — one of our recurring Gig experts and president of the Concours Institute — says shows that Yers value expertise above all else, including authority. Meaning that, a lot of the time, we’ll take the old guy with great stories and good advice over the younger one with a big title. So for those senior folks in the public sector or nonprofit world, retaining their Yers may just be a matter of sharing a few tales about the lives they’ve changed.

A Salon article on How to solve the boomer retirement crisis from February 2012 recognizes that, “If boomer retirees keep flooding suburbs, the cost of providing for them soars” and asks “Can we get them to cities, instead?”

For instance, a big issue for seniors is range — how far they can comfortably get from their homes. In cities, that often boils down to where’s the next bench, and where’s the next bathroom? So when San Francisco tears out its public seating to keep the homeless from sitting down (a dubious policy anyway), it inadvertently creates an environment hostile to older people.

  

Again, you have evidence that this should be seen as a systems problem despite it being put into generational terms “You’ve got this whole generation that moved to the suburbs thanks to government subsidies,” says Howard Gleckman, author of “Caring for Our Parents” and a fellow at the Urban Institute. “They got tax breaks for moving there and now they’re staying.” Even city-dwelling boomers — up to 65 percent of them — head for the land of the lawns once the kids move out.

I appreciated and shared that Hazel Borys (@hborys) of PlaceMakers recognized that both “Boomers + GenY want something the housing market isn't providing: 1-3 BR small homes in walkable, transit-rich, job-rich places. #cplan” and should therefore be able to work together on a common future.

An SFGate article from December of the past year asserts that, “Baby Boomers likely no drag on economy.”  While this can be argued, it does make the point of seeing these challenges as opportunities.  

The one question a startup doesn't want to get from its board of directors is this one: 'Why did you leave money on the table by ignoring a market of 100 million people with $3.5 trillion to spend?’

Returning to the How to solve the boomer retirement crisis article and someone to whom the Boomers should have paid more attention. 

“Cities need old buildings,” Jane Jacobs famously wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”  “Chain stores, chain restaurants, and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops … studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies … these go into old buildings.” Her point was that what serves a purpose in cities isn’t always readily apparent. Cities need the giddy energy of youthful upstarts and the stability of middle-aged workers and parents. But just as as we’re surprised to learn that they sometimes need a McDonald’s, we find that they need old people, too.