Community Learning & Regenerative Design

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.