RRRethinking the Possibilities: from Blank-Slate to Adaptive Reuse Solutions

Worldchanging, one of my favorite sites (and books) published a thought-provoking story by Alex Steffen October 26: How Can Bright Green Cities Thrive Without Capital?

In the article Steffen considers that the combining factors of rapidly-increasing city populations, younger demographics in those cities, and the lack of credit due to the global credit crunch may lead to creative and sustainable solutions.

"For much of this decade, some of our most beloved sustainability solutions have been blank slate answers: new cities built from scratch; new technological solutions for swapping out pieces of unsustainable systems with imagined replacements that would be less unsustainable (hydrogen cars come easily to mind); new massively-scaled alternatives for depleting fuels and materials. But blank slate answers demand capital -- lots and lots of it, at that -- and that capital is going to be hard to come by. That doesn't mean that innovation is dead, or that green tech and clean energy are over. They aren't.


What it does mean is that the kinds of innovations we most need, and which will be most widely adopted, might involve both a reinterpretation of the possibilities of the cities we already live in -- adaptive reuse on a massive scale; the reclaiming of unused spaces and the ruins of the unsustainable; a willingness to experiment with regulations and codes -- and a preference for new kinds of projects that can be capitalized in new ways, ways that lie beyond the capacities of microcredit and community commerce but escape dependence on large investment banks."

I find this exciting. Most innovative solutions are born of constraint. Art has form, and part of the challenge for an artist is to channel their vision through the constriants of that form. Similarly, we are forced to be more creative when credit is tighter and the materials at hand are limited. Good news! As our collective sense of urgency increases, more people will join the conversation to create new approaches to address shared problems. We might even get a truer form of democracy as a result.

Edward de Bono on Intentional Creativity

This week I discovered a blog ( http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/blog ) that focuses on the work of Dr. Edward de Bono, someone whose name I first heard through my Creativity and Right Livelihood class this quarter at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

Below is an excerpt from the blog of Robert Heller at Thinking Managers, who posted these thoughts of de Bono's on 11/20/2005.
They are very much in alignment with my intention of my own work.

• We need to match skills of analysis with an equal emphasis on the skills of design 
• We need to do as much idea-work as we do information-work. We need to shift from an obsession with history to a concern for the future
•  We need to emphasize ‘operacy’ as much as knowledge. The skills of doing are as important as the skills of knowing
•  We need, for the first time, to realise that creative thinking is a serious and essential part of the thinking process
•  We need to move from our exclusive concern with the logic of processing to the logic of perception (from rock logic to water logic)

I will be spending some time processing these ideas. How to integrate this approach into everyday life? How to support others in these ways of thinking/rethinking? In a way, these are affirmations of the importance of Right-Brained approaches, which are surely neccessary if we are to solve the global problems we face which were largely created by Left-Brained solutions.

What do you think?

In what ways might we...rethink, reimagine, recreate the world?

RRRethink.


The idea is simple. We want to create something that doesn’t add more STUFF to the world. We want to SUBTRACT stuff. Stuff like plastic and cardboard that end up in landfills. There are a lot of costs associated with this one-use stuff, some of which are easy to track and some of which aren’t. Some of these costs are paid by all of us.

If we can subtract some of the bad stuff, then we can create the net impact of adding more of the good. Like trees that continue to be trees instead of cardboard. And the beauty and oxygen that comes from them. Plastic can be used in more intelligent ways than we use it now, given proper design and some re-thinking.

This blog is about rethinking things.

Why RRRethink? Because it resonates with the three RRRs we already know so well: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And it ties in with the entrepreneurship project I am pursuing this year at Bainbridge Graduate Institute with Cheryl Schneiderhan, Jim McRae, and Brian Trunk, and the business name we have coined for it: RRRepeat.

Not so much thinking outside the box as rethinking the whole box.