The Joel Mills interview: sustainability, innovation, place and technology
Society needs radical new models, mindsets and practices to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We need to make wise economic, social and political choices for the benefit of everyone today, so that our collective futures are positive. And, we must do so at speed.?
These Global Goals are the United Nation’s universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The UN says that ‘the creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context’. It is with this in mind that I set up the Expert Interview Series a couple of years ago; inviting leading figures working at the intersection of people, place and planet to share their insights about what we can do to achieve sustainable urban futures.?
Joel Mills is Senior Director of the Architects Foundation’s Communities by Design programme. Joel’s 28-year career has been focused on strengthening civic capacity, democratic processes and civic institutions. His work has helped millions of people participate in meaningful public processes, visioning efforts, and community planning initiatives. He has led public processes, training programs and workshops in over a dozen countries across 5 continents.
Read on to learn about the importance of creating citizen urbanists, developing a shared vision for change but starting small, working holistically, and why Joel believes that the right level of awareness has been built to break the biassed nature of city design.?
What motivated you to develop a career that intersects democracy, civic capacity and community?
At a young age I wanted to work in international development and my first role was working for an organisation dedicated to building democracy around the world. For six years I focused on the structural parts of democracy – elections, constitutions, governance, committee systems in parliament and so forth. The piece that I always found compelling was the civil society work.
I worked in some very stressed conflict zones in southern Africa. The most inspiring case was Angola, located on the west coast, which was coming out of a decades long civil war. Here we worked with civil society and the press, who faced all kinds of challenges, as you can imagine. It was so exciting to see citizens gain their voice and powerful things started to happen in relation to governance.?
When the U.S. presidential elections happened in 2000, George W. Bush won the presidency but Al Gore received the most popular votes. It was all highly contentious and there I was working in southern Africa, receiving criticism about the U.S. electoral process from around the world. At this point, I realised that I needed to do a lot more work in my own country and decided that it was time for a transition.??
I joined The National Civic League (NCL), which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan organisation in the US, dedicated to strengthening democracy and civic engagement. When I witnessed the NCL’s All-America City Award that recognises communities who have collaborated to address local issues and achieved outstanding results, I knew that I wanted to work at the community scale.
Now, over 20 years later, I’ve served hundreds of communities and I love every experience. Each community has a different story to tell, and seeing how inspired they become when they begin working together, well, I live for that every day.
For over 20 years, you have worked with hundreds of communities across continents. This gives you a unique perspective and a sense of convergence as well as divergence. Do you see commonalities between the sites of your interventions?
In the last decade, when I’ve worked outside of North America, the similarity in community dynamics has grown. So, whilst every community is unique in terms of geography, history, culture, traditions… there is commonality when it comes to community dynamics and the kinds of struggles they face. I feel the same tensions and the same dynamics at play whether I’m in jurisdictions in Brazil, Kenya, Canada or the U.S., it’s remarkable.
There is an underlying public desire for urgent positive change, no matter where they live, and greater levels of mistrust toward institutions. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures trust in institutions across 30 countries each year. It’s depressing to see the increasing levels of dissatisfaction and mistrust towards institutions the world over.?
If you are leading at a local level, you definitely feel that pressure and need the tools to work with the community to make positive change. Once there is tangible progress locally, people can feel some hope and then begin to work together on some of the great challenges we face, from climate to housing to biodiversity and so on.
Another commonality I’ve experienced, and always the most inspiring, is the wisdom of indigenous groups and how much they can teach us, for example about connections and commitment to the land, in ways that support environmental sustainability. We need to regather and respect that wisdom.?
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Every town and city in the world is impacted by human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss. Is this now a common concern or are people more concerned by other issues such as lack of healthcare provision or play spaces for children?
Broadly speaking, if a community has experienced an event that has been directly triggered by climate, they will be explicit in their concern about climate change. In most places, especially in the U.S., when people are asked about their primary issues the answer will be related to ‘family economics’, the embedded costs that put pressure on people day-to-day – “I’m struggling to make it because of the escalating costs, high rent, transport, unaffordable insurance…”. They may not recognise the underlying complex causes driving the housing crisis, which include climate change, but they understand their family finances.
In southern Oregon, for instance, the state forest department created and published a fire risk map as part of their wildfire preparedness process. This was deemed necessary as mitigating fire risk is an urgent issue due to the increased number of seasonal fires, their intensity and the numbers of houses destroyed as a consequence. However, the backlash was off the charts for a whole range of reasons, including homeowner fear that their insurance rates would be increased or cancelled while the value of their property is reduced, and so the fire risk map was withdrawn.
The U.S. as a whole sees billion-dollar disasters fuelled by climate change on average every three weeks. And as I said, unless an event has happened in their own neighbourhood that impacts them directly, climate change won’t come up initially as a topic of concern. But, critically, it will if you are able to dive into the details because, whether people are being impacted by a heat wave or not, they are impacted by the financial consequences of being in a riskier zone and the entire market is changing as that risk becomes clear.
When you talk of the need for citizen urbanists to co-create sustainable cities for the future, what do you envisage and why is it necessary?
Yesterday I led a workshop for a national network of placemaking professionals from rural communities and this question came up, big time. Why? Because the need is obvious given all of our crises. We cannot sustain the way we have pursued growth and development and therefore must change. However, the way that North American planning processes and structures are designed makes major change difficult.
Here are three examples: we need to stop development on the edge of major jurisdictions and instead we’re seeing the highest growth of development in those high risk zones because of the dynamics at-play and how development happens. Secondly, 75% of the nation is zoned for single family housing, which is neither sustainable nor economical, and that has to change, but zoning decisions happen at a jurisdiction level – there are 40,000+ jurisdictions! Finally, 75% of Americans are worried about affordable housing in their communities but 74.5% of our multifamily developers face community opposition.
So, when I talk about the very ambitious concept of creating citizen urbanists I’m proposing community engagement processes that are deliberative, that expose people to all the information they need to become informed on the issues, which should result in better decisions being made. Citizen urbanists will be equipped to recognise how we need to live, support that and live in more sustainable ways. And for us, that’s a total shift and orientation from where we’ve been for the last 50 years.
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