Co-creating urban, regenerative futures

Why we can't buy our way to a regenerative future.

"Regenerative Futures"

The phrase had been rolling around my head for a while.

I felt that it pretty neatly summed up the direction I wanted to be heading with my work and life. 'Regenerative' - I reasoned - is the next stage after sustainability:

Degeneration ——>Sustainability——>Regeneration

And 'futures' is, well, the future. Or multiple futures, since there is no predetermined future. I was reading and writing quite a bit about regeneration and so, like a good little millennial, I put it in my Instagram bio as a flag in the sand to indicate my allegiance.

After a while, though, what had seemed like a cute phrase started to annoy me. What is this hipster bullshit though, really? The task of creating a regenerative future is a lot more complicated than dropping a few idealistic buzzwords on social media. It needs a bit of unpacking and grounding, hence the birth of this newsletter.

In fact, 'regeneration' is a blanket term for lots of emerging practises and discourses, such as permaculture, peer-to-peer economics and rewilding, that are starting to map the routes towards a more 'regenerative future', i.e a future more in line with planetary boundaries, where vital ecosystems are restored. It seems like a kind of unnecessary (if you're reading this) but necessary injunction here to say that the way the collective 'we' are living right now is not conducive to life on this planet. This is the Anthropocene, an era when human activity is responsible for the mass extinction of thousands of species per year. 9 out of 10 people are breathing polluted air, soon we may have more plastic in our oceans than fish and the widespread use of agro-chemicals is compromising the longterm fertility of our soil. In pretty much every direction you look, it's not looking good.

In one of his recent newsletters, Mark Manson spoke about how an uncertain future increases impulsiveness. It means we're more likely to go "full YOLO". In the vacuum of ideas or tools to build stronger collective and individual security, we're more likely to just "spend all the money, eat all the food and go to all the parties". Closely coupled with avoidance, a "full YOLO" attitude is a psychological response. We can't deal with the complexity, so we shut down, get wasted and adopt a hyper ironic stance as a coping mechanism.

Many disaffected and burnt out young people are craving more groundedness and security about the future, but there is a void of any real maps or routes of how to get there. Instead, we get aesthetic trends like cottagecore, the popularity in sourdough baking and the revival of home crafts.

Thanks to the technology in our pockets we know exactly what's going on, but the solution continues to be "buy more stuff!" In the space of a few minutes on the internet I can find myself being urged to purchase the apparatus needed to adopt a 'zero-waste lifestyle', buy a new pair of sustainably produced shoes or become a glamorous digital-nomad driving off into the sunset in my eco-friendly camper van conversion. A ‘H&M conscious’ sweater might be a soothing balm for climate and survival anxiety, but if you look closely the ingredients are the same. We can't buy our way to a regenerative future, although they sure as hell are going to try and convince us that we can.

To paraphrase Richard Bartlett, I think that one way that we can avoid going full-YOLO about life on Earth and find some of this core stability and meaning that we're all craving is by taking responsibility for improving a small part of this world, and forfeiting responsibility for the rest. Regeneration is a process, and a regenerative future hinges on the ability of all of us to engage in that process.

So, Berlin, my adopted home, I turn my attention to you.

With its "poor but sexy" reputation, Berlin has become a honey-pot for those escaping other, expensive, market driven megacities. For my MA, I focused on gentrification and housing in London because I felt like I was being priced out of my own home city and I wanted to understand why. In 2018 I moved to Berlin.

We know the pattern so well it's as if it's a law of nature. A regenerative mindset recognises that the narrative of disconnection, domination and extractivism that created a climate crisis is a pattern that will follow us around until the root cause is addressed.

Permaculture teaches us that the solution to an unbalanced system is most likely to be found by standing back and observing what is already happening around you.

While many turn to ‘intentional communities’ and HOMESQUADING, a regenerative future can’t always be about leaving the city entirely. As globally we continue to move towards increasingly urbanised populations, this newsletter is a self-designed learning journey to discover how people in Berlin are dancing, digging and designing their way to a reclaimed relationship to and with the natural environment, and explore the role that urban landscapes and communities can play in building a regenerative future.

Over the next few months I'll be sharing my notes with you, highlighting projects in Berlin building new models and systems to improve food security, create community resilience, establish different metrics for meaning and success and clean up the city's metabolism through circular waste models and waste prevention.

See you next time.