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.