How a Canadian mountain resort became a model of sustainability

Let’s face it, very few of us like Monday mornings, but the beginning of last week was truly a depressing wake-up call for me. I contemplated hiding away under my quilt as the alarm clicked in and BBC radio reeled off the latest on government spending cuts and potential job losses. As the commentators considered what cuts of 20% here and 40% there might mean, I thought of our construction partners as Building Schools for the Future was shelved, and wondered about the prospects for colleagues in local authorities striving to implement low-carbon infrastructure.

But thankfully, my day did get better. I’d organised a Forum network seminar with Ken Melamed, the Mayor of Whistler, to talk about how the Canadian mountain resort community is implementing an ambitious plan to achieve a prosperous and sustainable future. For those of you who don’t know, as well as co-hosting the recent Winter Olympics, Whistler is seen as an exemplar in terms of community planning, with a systems-led approach to sustainable development at its core.

A decade ago the Natural Step framework (http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/the-natural-step) was used to inspire, align and guide the community toward a shared vision of sustainability and success. Ken talked about how Whistler2020 (www.whistler2020.ca) lays out a vision, prioritised strategies and  action planning process – guiding strategic planning and actions over time. There is also regular and transparent reporting on progress. Drawing on local and external knowledge, Whistler2020 informs decision-making, optimises use of limited resources and provides a framework for aligning community efforts in a common direction.

Today, Ken talks about Whistler2020 being a ‘living’ plan, driving ongoing progress, and being informed by community members, including local businesses. And this long-term plan is leading to significant change on the ground. We heard about how they used the Winter Olympics and Paralympics as a vehicle to accelerate the journey the community is on. This allowed them to complete 30 green building projects, to showcase clean technologies and green building techniques, to pilot a hydrogen-fuelled bus transit scheme, and to create hundreds of low-impact, affordable homes.

But the key message for me was the role of strong and pragmatic leadership through good times and bad. It’s clear from talking to Ken that he knows that Whistler is on a journey and it’s taken a lot of time to get all the necessary stakeholders on board. Barriers have had to be overcome, cynics convinced and some trade-offs made. But at the same time, Whistler has not waited for national government to legislate or tax, or for consumers to demand change.

Where feasible they have adopted innovation and piloted new ideas. The community has experimented with new ways to finance projects for the long term, and has restructured the municipal government around five strategic priorities. They have a plan that is now city-led, but community-owned. It is proving to be workable and Whistler’s approach is now being adopted by much larger towns and communities across Canada.

True, Whistler has some way to go before it is truly sustainable, and still faces significant challenges as a tourist destination. But there is a clear appreciation that uncontrolled growth is unsustainable, and that adding value and doing more with the community’s existing infrastructure and resources is the way forward.

Some may argue that Whistler is different from many of our communities here in the UK, but I believe that there are many lessons that we can learn about long-term planning, community engagement, innovation and implementation. Perhaps most importantly, I get the impression that Whistler will not be diverted from the long-term path it has set, and will continue to demonstrate the strong leadership and clear sense of direction which many of our partners should aspire to, even in the most testing of economic times. 

I felt a lot better Tuesday morning.

The creative industries are in danger of being caught “napping” on sustainability, according to Lord Puttnam. They risk waking up too late to find the world "has changed out of all recognition".

The filmmaker and politician was speaking at our Creative Industries Sustainability Beacon event, last week - the launch of a challenging project to bring together leaders from the world of fashion, performing arts, film, architecture, design and all the other creative industries, to examine the future of their businesses in a rapidly changing and uncertain world.

Lord Puttnam was “personally convinced that climate change is already the single greatest challenge facing all of us – ultimately dwarfing our present economic woes...” But he said climate change and other sustainability challenges present a raft of opportunities for all creative industries and their  “attitudes and skills… can really help stimulate change.”

This project sets out to help the creative industries understand and seize those opportunities. Water scarcity; energy security; sustainable consumption; population growth; social wellbeing are just a few of the issues which need to be tackled urgently – and, we believe, creatively – for societies near and far to thrive.

Following Puttnam’s opening address, Jonathon Porritt led a Talkaoke debate from the ‘donut of chat’, surrounded by an impressive line-up of contributors (giving Glastonbury a run for its money).

Franny Armstrong kicked off by showing us the carbon footprint of her brilliant film The Age of Stupid. (Haven’t seen it? Get stuck in, you will not be disappointed.) Turns out Franny’s film emitted “one percent of the emissions of the Hollywood film, The Day After Tomorrow”. How cool is that? The film doesn’t lack anything, it’s just as well-made, well-produced and successful (Box office No.1). And therein lies the proof, it can be done. We now have the task of making her model simple and transferrable across the rest of the film industry.

The Age of Stupid - Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

By the virtual magic of Skype, Tim Brown then appeared, from the IDEO studio in San Francisco. As CEO of IDEO, one of the most influential global design consultancies, he’s been in the product and service design world for years. Interestingly, he started out with a confession: that the best part of his career now resides in landfill. The products he has lovingly created over the years have played their part in creating our fast consumption-obsessed world. He now views product design from a systems perspective, something he believes is “important for design but essential for tackling climate change”.

We couldn’t agree more as it becomes ever clearer that we urgently need to change our relationship with the material world to meet the coming resource crunch and deliver low-carbon lifestyles. IDEO’s Living Climate Change website is a place for designers to discuss what they can bring to the debate, and why they should play a fundamental role in finding the solutions we so desperately need.

Frances Corner then boldly answered the debate question, “Can the creative industries lead us to a sustainable future?”, with “a resounding ‘yes’”. As Head of College for the London College of Fashion, Frances at the heart of budding fashion talent. She pointed out that “education has to be part of the way that we address sustainability, otherwise we won’t be able to bring about the constructive persuasion we need”. The new Centre for Sustainable Fashion, which sits within the LCF is working on just that. And their international student awards, Fashioning the Future 2010, are doing a great job at spreading their work far and wide.

“There is absolutely nothing inevitable about the future” said Michael Pawlyn, Director of Exploration Architecture and bio-mimicry guru. He urges us to think about and design the future that we want, not to simply let it unfold. He uses biomimicry, a process that “looks to nature as a source of inspiration for new solutions.” For example, he is exploring the nifty way the Namibian fog-basking beetle stays hydrated in the desert, and using the learning from that natural system in the development of his Sahara Forest Project. He believes designers and architects need to make three transformations: “radical increases in resource efficiency; shifting from a carbon to a solar economy; and transforming from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a completely closed-loop model.”

A Namibian fog-basking Beetle

And last but by no means least, Dan Burgess - ex-Naked Planet, now Pipeline Ideas – took us on a rollercoaster of examples of sustainability comms, including photographer Chris Jordan’s stark images of birds’ stomachs full of plastic waste. Dan feels that many people in the creative industries are “wasting their energy” and should get involved in the sustainability agenda, support the great work that’s already going on and put their skills to good use. He reckons we need to get out there and “agitate”.

Photographer Chris Jordan, using shocking images to make his point.

You’re all invited to have your say and contribute to the online community, where you can watch a video of event highlights and share resources. We’ll be running a series of regional workshops in the autumn and launching the project findings shortly after. Click here for more information on this project.

Britain’s ‘creative industries’ generate £67bn of revenue and are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy. But as well as their economic muscle, these industries have a vital role to play in delivering a sustainable future.

Formally defined as the performing arts, arts & antiques, crafts, architecture, design, fashion, advertising, radio & TV, film & video, music, publishing, video games and software, the UK’s creative industries’ innovation and energy will be key in addressing the great challenges of our time – resource scarcity, climate change, waste, pollution, a growing population and poverty.

We’ve teamed up with the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network to help leading players across these diverse sectors come together to share their knowledge and build a vision for how these problems will be tackled. The project kicks off on 16th June with an event chaired by Jonathon Porritt. Contributions from Lord Puttnam and Sebastian Conran will accompany a panel debate in an innovative, interactive talk-show format with a panel that includes 10:10 and ‘Age of Stupid’s’ Franny Armstrong, IDEO CEO Tim Brown, London College of Fashion’s Frances Corner OBE, Naked Communication's Victoria Brooks and Exploration Architecture’s Michael Pawlyn.

This is no stab in the dark – throughout history creative interventions have driven important social change. The Bauhaus movement championed a design philosophy of fairness and utility, to provide universal access to good design, better housing, and better lives for all. Graphic and film propaganda helped galvanise our nation to successful action during WWII and social marketing over the last 20 years has helped educate, raise awareness and communicate better thinking and acting on issues as wide as anti-social behaviour on trains, healthy lifestyles and anti-smoking.

And already, new forms of social media – enabled by software and IT platforms like twitter, kiva or netsquared – are helping to bridge social divides, connect people without travel and encourage good deeds. Green architecture is now mainstream and many of our flagship examples of building excellence heavily feature sustainability considerations – think the Gherkin, EDEN project, Olympics Village, etc.

But this is not yet universal across all of the creative industries and some disciplines are certainly more engaged and active on sustainability than others. There is also a larger question of whether industries are really leading, rather than following or responding to sustainability.

We think that building a genuinely sustainable future – that is green, fair and prosperous – will need us to inspire and motivate people, businesses, communities and societies to quite radical changes. This is an opportunity, even an imperative, the scale of which we probably haven’t faced before. It offers a fantastic new set of innovation levers to rethink and reinvent the world which is exactly what ‘creatives’ do really well. That’s precisely why creative industry involvement will be key to making this happen. It falls to this generation of creatives, scientists, designers and innovators to imagine a world they want to live in and then build it to last.

We’ll be running a series of events and creating an online dialogue over the next few months – in an open process designed to exchange and capture the best thinking. So, if you’re from either a creative industry or are a sustainability professional, we want to hear from you.

To share your thoughts on the creative industries and sustainability or to find out how to get involved, email Louise Armstrong or message us on Twitter @forum4thefuture.

 

For various reasons, I haven’t been able to watch any of the three TV debates. I saw the endless playback snippets on the news the day after each debate (which quickly got exceptionally tedious) but had no total immersion in any of the live sessions.

It proved impossible to avoid the debates-debate, with endless pre-debate speculation and post-debate analysis. Listening to all the parties and the broadcasters themselves, it’s clear that nobody anticipated the massive media focus on this innovation, for better or for worse (as Scotland’s Alex Salmond has been pointing out more and more petulantly). The TV debates have become the single most influential aspect of this general election campaign.

Yet it was only a few weeks ago that all the pre-election buzz was about the impact of the social media on the election, with a lot of questionably euphoric commentaries that every conceivable kind of web-enabled initiatives and networks would dominate the election debate.

Much of this was ramped up here in the UK after the huge success of Barack Obama’s election team in mobilising vast numbers of people (and donations!) in the 2008 presidential election.

We haven’t seen quite the same thing here in the UK. But there has been an extraordinary foment of activity going on out there, which is quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before – and could prove to be even more important in the event of a hung Parliament than during the election campaign itself.

One initiative that I’ve been a bit involved with is 38degrees, which has recruited an astonishing 127,000 active members in a remarkably short period of time. Between them, they’ve taken nearly 450,000 actions of one kind or another, covering a very wide range of progressive issues and causes.

Right now, its biggest campaign (coordinated jointly with www.Avaaz.org) is to put an end to the scaremongering in the right-wing, pro-Murdoch) press, about ‘the horrors of a hung parliament’. More on that tomorrow, but do please get involved with this campaign today – while there is still a chance!  www.38degrees.org.uk

The culture in which women strain to succeed is still shaped by men. Changing it would benefit everyone.

The Guardian's coverage of women recently has been, well, manly. Natasha Walter is right that 40 years on from the feminist heyday of the 1970s, the prospect of equality opportunity, never mind reality, is as distant as ever. She fails, however, to discuss the real reason women are still having to go through long and miserable battles for equal pay and are opting out from leadership roles in every sector.

Instead of Having It All, we've ended up Doing It All, because, even armed with legislation, the world around us hasn't really changed. Jesus's disciples were all male and Muhammad instructed men to "treat your women well". The culture today in which women strain to succeed is still shaped by men.

Who thought it a good idea to organise working life so that the age of expected peak professional performance coincides with needy teenage children and failing parents? How perverse that paternity man tends to get promotion, while a mother has hers delayed. How infuriating that the Financial Times should profile the top 50 women in business without asking if they got there on their own terms. Or did they assume, like David Hare, that the brutality of power is a given, and that it is women who have to shape up to that reality. This, in essence, is what business schools teach, with all those competency frameworks and aptitude tests on the promotion trail giving preference to male behaviours.

With grim humour the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission's 2008 Sex and Power survey extrapolated the current rate of change to conclude it would take only slightly less time for women to be equally represented in parliament than it would for a snail to creep the whole length of the Great Wall of China (212 years). Snail travel equivalents for equal representation on FTSE 100 company boards are a mere 73 years (Land's End to John O'Groats), and the judiciary, a pacy 55 years (nine times round the M25).

All of us triangulate our family and personal life with our professional ambitions and with "me" time. Under pressure, women tend to cut the "me" corner first – it is the line of least resistance – and put family before promotion, while most men will chisel first into the family corner innocently or cynically assuming women will take up their slack. Which we usually do. All that effort, trying to do right by everyone, and still the grain is against us. No wonder we get depressed!

Haven't we heard enough about how unequal things are for women, and of reading about our agony as we decide that squeezing our values, our way of thinking, working, being, prioritising, deciding, loving, into the manly models of democracy, organisations, social and economic processes is not for us? (Who does David Cameron think will do all his Big Society stuff?). What we need is more analysis of why the way power and control operates in our society is still so antipathetic to women. Power does not have to be brutal, we can organise the way we run our economy and our society so that all can flourish and find satisfaction in every aspect of their lives. What is stopping that from happening?

How come a paper like the Guardian has been seduced into giving more coverage to male politician's wives than to a serious example of sensible female political leadership, the Green party's Caroline Lucas? Because whatever the outcome of this election, what she stands for and the way she does it, has to be a big part of our shared future.

The path to genuine equality lies not in liberating women, but in changing the rules of the game. As former US congresswoman Bella Abzug observed: "Women will change the nature of power, rather than power change the nature of women." Why don't you help us?

This article originally appeared in the Guardian, Monday 3rd May 2010. 

Last week I witnessed two wonderfully windy ‘inaugurations’.

On Friday, I cycled down to the Springbank Community Resources Centre in Cheltenham to ‘turn on’ a neat little wind turbine, precisely 17.5 metres high. Not much wind to start with, but then (thankfully!) it kicked into satisfying action.

This is Cheltenham’s first wind turbine, located in the middle of a newly-regenerated urban park. The driving force behind the initiative is the Hesters Way Partnership, one of Cheltenham’s most effective community groups. It would have been completely impossible to have made any progress on this without the Partnership’s full-on support.

There were of course the usual worries about the noise the turbine would make. The flats and houses all around the park overlook the turbine, and are very much within earshot. Local Councillors got very positively involved, some ‘seeing is believing’ visits to other projects were arranged, and there was a lot of reassurance offered up over limitless cups of tea.

The result is that the community feels it’s their turbine, and are reinforced in that association by the fact that the energy bill for their Resources Centre will be £850 lower every year.

I’d encountered a rather different community operation earlier in the week – on a visit to Eurotunnel HQ just outside Calais.

Obviously a much bigger operation, with a much bigger investment in three 800kw turbines. (It should have been six, but the local planning committee objected!). Representatives of the local community were there in force, not least because of the decision by Eurotunnel to dedicate 10% of the revenues from electricity sales to an organisation called Secours Populaire France – which works with some of the most deprived communities across the country.

Eurotunnel’s got a really good environmental story to tell anyway – and has had right from its creation because of the strict conditions put upon it both by the UK and the French Government. 

More details of this are available in the Eurotunnel Sustainability Report.   

Interestingly, it had taken Eurotunnel almost exactly the same amount of time to move from initial idea about its wind farm to inauguration as it had taken Hesters Way Partnership! French citizens are no more enthusiastic about wind power than they would appear to be here in the UK – despite having vast stretches of not particularly distinctive landscapes with almost limitless potential for windpower – and I know how popular that statement will make me with the legions of French NIMBYs who sound and think very much like our own home-grown NIMBYs!

But there’s one simple message here: the more actively local communities are involved in new wind developments, the greater the likelihood of their success. Even if things still take a ludicrously long period of time to get delivered on the ground.

Imagine a world where each morning, you and your family hop in your self-driving hydrogen vehicle. You program your destination into the digital journey planner, and settle into an onboard breakfast around the table, as your h-pod gets you to where you need to go. After dropping the kids off at school, you leave the h-pod to refuel at the local energy hub while you work in the neighbourhood smartoffice, using avatars to connect with colleagues in a virtual conference room. 

Sounds futuristic?  Welcome to Sustainable Urban Mobility: 2040.

In partnership with Vodafone, FIA Foundation and EMBARQ, the Sustainable Urban Mobility: 2040 (SUM2040) project aims to help key constituencies in global cities – including government planners, urban designers, businesses and civil society groups - find long-term, sustainable urban mobility solutions. It does this  by exploring coherent, plausible scenarios of the world 30 years from now.  By mobility, we mean transport but also the other means of access to goods and services people need in daily lives that may act as a substitute for physical movement – from ICT, to different ways of urban design.

We’re now halfway through the project and at a point where we’ve done extensive research and consulted a wide range of experts and the insights that have come out have been fascinating. Before the scenarios for mobility in 2040 are written and published, I wanted to share some top-line thoughts about how your city might look in the future.

People-friendly cities:  The concept of cities designed for people, not cars, will grow.  What does this mean in practice? Urban design focused on developing local neighbourhoods as opposed to more urban sprawl, for a start. People will increasingly choose to live, work and play in the same area.  The local street will undergo a renaissance, with small shops popping up again, more footpaths, more green space, and efficient, 24-hour use of community infrastructure, such as the local school doubling as a community centre after hours.   

Mobility-on-demand:  When people do venture out of their neighbourhood, they will probably be able to connect much more smoothly and quickly between different modes of transport. They’ll check air quality or traffic conditions on their mobile, laptop or using public access touch screens before setting out. Far fewer people will need to own vehicles – they’ll be able to rent cars, electric scooters, bicycles and other modes at mobile rental hubs that can easily be shifted around the city in response to changes in demand.

The changing shape of the office:  In the 20th century, we got stuck in traffic jams every morning while commuting to head office. Experts expect this to change. We are already seeing more home working and video conferencing. This trend will grow and fundamentally change the way office spaces look and feel. Companies will likely build smaller, decentralised working centres. They may even use existing neighbourhood infrastructure – from the local coffee shop to the community centre – for flexible working arrangements. 

The wired automobile:  The car itself will be transformed.  Manufacturers are already thinking about how to incorporate ICT into vehicles, and odds are that over the next 30 years we will see this trend become much more mainstream.  Expect, more information and entertainment; automated navigation that supersedes bad driving for optimized safety; and cars that are able to communicate with other vehicles on the road.

Inclusive mobility:  Thirty years on, we will still have significant low-income populations, for which tailored mobility solutions will be designed, enabling a greater degree of access to goods and services and more employment opportunities.  The mobile phone penetration in the developing world has already shown us the potential of ICT to enhance mobility for the poor, by providing an affordable, quick way to connect to the market by phone rather than on foot, and by allowing delivery of previously inaccessible services such as banking.

Partnerships redefined:  As the sustainability challenges facing cities grow, and traditional ways of operating become more and more difficult, we will increasingly form hybrid value chains - business models where commercial partnerships are established between businesses and citizen sector organizations (e.g. NGOs) in order to transform markets and meet critical human needs. Government, business and civil society will likely be working together in much more creative, collaborative ways than ever before.  This could include handing over areas of governance to local NGOs and outsourcing operations to local businesses.  Nothing we haven’t seen before – but odds are we’ll be seeing more of it in the future.  

Needless to say, this will not play out across the board. We are exploring different pathways for these trends and the corresponding societal responses through our scenarios. These will be shared shortly our workshops in Mumbai and Istanbul this June, and published in the autumn. We will be sharing updates as we go along, so stay tuned for more!

http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/sustainable-urban-mobility

 

A few years ago I was at one of those dinner parties where you only know the host, but they’re sitting miles away and everyone else knows each other.  Turning to the guy next to me, I played (I thought) fairly safe with the conversation-opener: “So, what do you do?”  He looked at me fairly scathingly said: “I don’t believe we should define ourselves by what we do”, and turned to the person on his other side, leaving me in a conversational limbo in which to reflect my social transgression.*

I remembered this incident this week when I went to an event hosted by nef to discuss their report 21 hours which asks: what if the ‘normal’ working week was 21 hours rather than 40 hours?  People could choose to work longer or shorter hours, but that would become the standard that was expected by government, employers, trade unions, employees and everyone else.

They make a good case for making such a transition.  It would change the tempo of our lives, help break the habit of living to work, working to earn and earning to consume, and therefore help society reduce our demands on the environment.  It would help distribute paid work more evenly across the population, and free up time for a more equal burden of unpaid work such as caring.

There would of course be transitional problems, and it’s not immediately obvious how such fundamental economic restructuring could happen painlessly (although nef do advocate a long transition period).  But on the other hand, we’re going to see the need for economic restructuring anyway in the light of dwindling environmental resources – so it would be good if this could be done in a more positive way, seeing and harnessing the social benefits that such a scaling back has to offer.

But the reason I remembered the exchange above was because – whether my dinner companion approved or not – there is an issue of identity tied up in our work life, and I wonder how this would change with a shorter week?  In his work on needs, the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef has identified nine fundamental human needs which are common across all countries and historical periods, and what changes is how different societies satisfy those needs (good explanation here).

The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the beginning of the 21st century we would be working a 15-hour week as this would be enough for us to meet our material needs.  In Max-Neef’s terms, work should be about satisfying the need for subsistence (i.e. shelter and food).  But instead we work longer and longer hours, and terms such as ‘presenteeism’ – being present at work just to be seen by others to be in work – have crept into the lexicon.  Work has become a way that we satisfy our need for identity.

As we shift to new working patterns how will we satisfy this need?  Many people who work shorter weeks at the moment are saddled with the title ‘part-time’, with the derogatory connotations that they’re not contributing as much, when of course they’re often contributing hugely in terms of unpaid care at home.

So how will we see ourselves in this new world?  And how will we make the shift?  Working less is going to have to be seen as much more, even though it will mean less pay and therefore less stuff and so much of what currently makes up our status, and our identity.

 
*Incidentally he turned out to be a performance poet, and given that I was a trainee accountant at the time I was slightly surprised by his reticence to share this distinctly more interesting career choice.