This post will discuss
the concepts and ideas of community, community learning, and regenerative
design discussed by David Eisenberg, Etienne Wenger, Frank Young, and Fritjof
Capra. In my attempt to synthesize their
ideas, I try to include real world examples that relate to the concepts
explained in the readings and attempt to connect their thinking.
In Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems, Etienne Wenger
introduces the idea of communities of practices- that communities reflect
collective learning. In communities of
practice members are “bound together by their collectively developed
understanding of what their community is about…members build their community
through mutual engagement” and communities of practices have communal resources
(i.e. language, routines, tools, styles, etc).
Wenger can also be tied to Capra’s thinking about communities. Both view communities as living learning
systems, but Wenger does so without a biology metaphor. Communities of practice need to connect with
other communities of learning in order to share knowledge to become a
breathing, living, social learning system.
Wenger explains
boundaries of communities of practice as fluid and come about from “different
enterprises; different ways of engaging with one another; different histories;
repertoires, ways of communicating, and capabilities.’ Wenger suggests there are four types of
brokers between communities: boundary spanners, roamers, outposts, and
pairs. Many organizations recognize the
benefits of having roamers, who go from place to place sharing knowledge and
making connections, and create roamers through organizational policy. For example, the United Nations and other
large organizations require that staff move to a new post after a certain
number of years. This encourages
knowledge sharing and boundary bridging at each country office.
With the widespread use
of the internet, communities of practice can now be virtual and global. The web represents a huge advantage for
developing communities of practice as well as bridging across boundaries and
linking similar communities that may be widespread globally.
Frank Young and Keiko
Minai’s structural approach to community ecology presented in Community Ecology: A New Theory and an
Illustrative Test, view communities as units of evolutionary change uses ‘population
health’ as the criterion for successful adaptation. This moves away from the Darwinian idea of
the strongest survive, which has no sense of community. Essentially, Young and Minai believe that
communities have a natural capacity for problem solving and without it
communities would cease to exist.
Young and Minai
describe structural differentiation as the “degree to which specialized
knowledge is ‘stored’ in the diverse occupations and organizations of a
community.” This can be seen as how
tightly knit a community of practice is.
Wenger would say that the higher the structural differentiation, the
higher the need for brokers to connect communities of practice.
Regenerative design, as
David Eisenberg explains in Regenerative
Design: Toward the Re-Integration of Human Systems within Nature, goes
beyond the popular term sustainable design, which Eisenberg criticizes as only
going as far to slow down environmental degradation, to not only stop
environmental degradation but to reverse it by integrating design with nature. Human systems need to be designed to obey the
laws of nature- gravity, thermodynamics, biology, and ecology- so that human
systems can “co-evolve with and enhance the evolutionary capability of natural
systems.”
The John T. Lyle Center
for Regenerative Studies at California State Polytechnic University is an example
of regenerative design; it incorporates the laws of thermodynamics into its
design. One of the buildings has south
facing windows for heating in the winter and shading and evaporative cooling in
the summer while another is built into a hill which helps regulate the
temperature year-round. The center also
incorporates vegetable gardens, fish, compost, manure, on-site wastewater treatment,
and bio-gas digesters into the compound.
The Center for Regenerative Studies is a hands on learning environment
which brings Capra’s inner-city gardening project with elementary students to
the university level.
Eisenberg says,
“We
see that buildings and settlements are not ‘objects’ or assemblages of
technologies and materials, but amalgamations and concentrations of many
systems with energy and material flows, not unlike living organism with
metabolisms (electric lines, solar resources, materials, prevailing winds, soil
health, ground water, roadways, social network systems, etc.”
Like Capra, Eisenberg
employs interdisciplinary thinking by using biology as a metaphor for
communities. Both Capra and Eisenberg
view communities as a living system; Capra uses the cell as a metaphor and
Eisenberg describes electricity, water, materials, etc as the ‘metabolism’ of
the community.
Eisenberg also relates
design to the natural system by encouraging humans to recognize that “natural
systems have the self organizing capability to health themselves- if we let
them.” He suggests that we need to
realign our ideals and activities so that both human and natural systems have
the ability to self heal. We can view
Eisenberg’s idea of regenerative design as going beyond the idea of community
ecology presented by Young and Minai, which focuses on human systems, to
integrate human and natural systems into one community.
Eisenberg disagrees
with the human ecology view that the environment is everything outside of the
community and stresses the need to include the environment and nature into the
community. Young recognizes that the
exhaustion of resources and natural disasters are threats to human ecology and
that “all current environmental threats reflect the past impact of community
activity.” Eisenberg’s solution to
environmental threats is to design using the rules of nature to reduce those
threats and to reverse the exhaustion of resources and environmental
degradation that exacerbates those threats to communities.
