Recent months have seen a quickening of news items around the risks posed by adverse climate change. There is now a tangible questioning of an economy built on expectations of infinite growth in consumption; growth fuelled by the need to put investors’ capital to productive use.
This light on the horizon is coming at a time when it seems Government can focus on only one thing at once. Perhaps this issue is as much a challenge to each of us as individuals, families, businesses and institutions. A challenge to think our way through to the new understanding of consumption and needs this climate change mitigation era needs.
This challenge is really about values. It’s about being aware of what we value and being prepared to build a lifestyle model around those values rather than the ones others, particularly through advertising, have furnished a world view about. And isn’t it strangely empowering to feel ourselves in this place?
All of a sudden, those consumer goods – a larger house, a bigger car, the freedom to travel anywhere around the globe, the lure of fashion – start to lose their attractiveness. We see behind each there is evidence they bring harm to people and to places somewhere in the world… and now, increasingly it seems, to us.
This desire is empowering in other ways; the economic model of “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap” seems to force itself onto the business models of all largescale suppliers in the market, like the airlines and the supermarkets, because it’s how competition works. Now, especially among the under 30’s, there is a tangible willingness to build small businesses that have creative distinctiveness and product or service quality as higher goals than turnover growth.
Recently, I attended a networking event of young businesses being supported through a Business Acceleration Hub managed through my local University of Bath. How interesting to see these businesses set up deliberately to work in the bottom-up end of the economy, trying to get to grips with this challenge of climate change mitigation. One, the inspiration of a plumber to deliver advice on simple energy use reduction options for those on low incomes. Another, a charity offering a free thermal imaging camera service to householders to highlight where energy use reduction methods can be most economically directed, and to the same ends. Another, a developer whose first ambition is to bring forward developments of self-builder households and, through this, build communities taking their sustainable lifestyles into their own hands.
Each is recognising this climate change mitigation challenge has to be addressed at every point of our social, economic and political worlds – not only in building the next ‘must-have techy gismos’. As a long-time practitioner in the built environment change disciplines, I puzzle that so much business development funding sees success only in technological outputs – in new software, a new app, a new technology to make something work faster, or recycle data more.
To me, the real challenges are in “systems thinking”. How we can come to understand with fresh eyes why the global economy came to work the way it does and thereby, why we get the built environments and the lifestyle constraints we do. We have built that economy on a set of values that go way back into the origins of early international trade – the carbon-fuelled foundations of the 18th century Industrial Revolution and the European empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, the position America found itself in gave a unique opportunity to spread its brand of consumer lifestyle convenience around the world.
Now, as we are increasingly living in towns and cities, society’s understanding of the drivers and consequences of built environment change and its global impacts lacks a unified academically-based conceptual model. Viewed from outside, such a conceptual model appears much more apparent in other fields of study, such as ecology or medicine. We have a statutory planning system that acts as the gatekeeper of developmental change. But our understanding is less well formalised in the drivers and the dynamic forces that act to bring about urban lifestyle change.
Yet the built patterns of circulation, land use and built form of the established built environment impose lifestyles and consumption patterns upon all of us.