The Power of Place: Why is Place so important to creating regenerative economies?

Humans have a powerful role to play on earth. During the period when we’ve been caught in the trap of the mechanistic mind that has dominated our culture and economy for so long, we've just forgotten what that is. What if our role is to be systemic catalysts and stewards of life on earth instead of of extractors of life in pursuit of purely fiscal wealth and temporal power?

Place is the scale at which life works. Life evolves and develops – not on a global scale – but within ecosystems and bioregions that are distinct wholes in which there are networks of relationships that are interconnected, mutually reciprocal and constantly work to create the conditions conducive to more life.

In each of those ecosystems and bioregions, there’s a unique pattern of biology. Each place has its own unique characteristics, patterns and flows of culture, history, ecology and geology. There is some property of life that exists in these places that determines the kind of people who gravitate towards it. There is a unique energy field and a core essence to each Place which - when looked at through the lens of living systems thinking - is what calls a culture and economy into being.

Those unique place-sourced patterns of life have regenerated and renewed place by place by place for billions of years. If that is the scale at which life works, surely it's worth considering that the human system - part of life's rich tapestry - should consider designing at the same scale? When we look at life through this lens of living systems, and note the scale at which life works and thrives, it suggests to us that working glo-cally – locally but in the context of our current globalised system until it shifts and changes – might be a better approach to creating thriving economies.

Principles for Living In Harmony with Place

If we consider when the human species last lived in total harmony with the land and place, in partnership with the planet’s natural resources, we need to stretch back to the time of hunter-gatherers. Anthropology suggests that most sustainable human societies had a few foundational pillars that we still see today among the indigenous peoples who survive.

They lived within the constraints of the material flows of their locality, and only used things that could be replenished in their natural cycles. So they didn’t chop down more trees that would grow again. They didn’t farm the soil to depletion. They built homes from locally available materials — which may have been dirt, mud or timber. They made their clothing from locally available materials, from animal skins to dried woven reeds. They sourced or grew their food in ways that did not damage their environment or destabilise the climate. They didn’t grow monoculture crops, they used a form of what today we call permaculture. Almost all sustainable cultures were place-based, regional in scale and did modest amounts of trade with neighbouring cultures.

No one is suggesting that 7.7 billion people can return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. What we need to do is explore how to weave some of the intrinsic qualities of the times in which we lived in balance with the biosphere, with the modern global, advanced technology-driven economy in which we currently live.

Towards G-Local

The movement towards more localised economies has been gaining traction for some years. The bioregional movement, regenerative agriculture communities, eco villages and ecosystem restoration projects have steadily grown more prominent — particularly in areas where there are still original indigenous communities. Yet they have been seen as fringe and experimental by mainstream economics and perhaps, until recently, without a scale-linking model the drives robust economic practice in the way scale-linking patterns have shown what maintains the health of the biosphere.

Leading thinkers such as Daniel Christian Wahl author of Designing Regenerative Cultures, bioregional economists such as Molly Scott Cato, visionaries such as Pamela Mang and Ben Haggard of Regenesis Institute— and many others — have highlighted the value of localised economies:

“We need to reinhabit the Earth as living expressions of the ecosystems in which we live, and we do so by aligning with life’s essential pattern of creating conditions conducive to life. As expressions of, and participants in, the community of life we are capable of healing our communities and the places we inhabit. We can not save the world, we can only save places. The regeneration of planetary health can only happen ecosystem by ecosystem or bioregion by bioregion. Dr DC Wahl.

The primary reasons for re-localising economies in our current situation are about transition and resilience. Our global economic system is highly dependent on fossil fuels to maintain the level of transportation of goods around the world and to drive the energy needs of industry and society. Nothing could have illustrated more clearly the need for a rapid transition to renewable energies than the current crisis caused by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Decades of believing it would be possible to 'do business' with Putin's increasingly autocratic regime have left many economies - most notably Germany - scrabbling to change energy policies at very short notice. Which they are in fact doing - proving once again that human nature's flawed instinct to only do what is absolutely necessary when your back's against the wall, almost always prevails.

Although all modes of transport are looking at a shift to renewable forms of energy, the fact remains that most cargo ships, the vast majority of land and air transport continue to be powered by fossil fuels. We need to dramatically reduce the distance products travel. Re-localising economies goes some way towards the net-zero ambitions contained within the Paris Agreement.

Does this mean no Peruvian blueberries on the store shelves all year round, and no Mexican avocados on toast for breakfast served on the marble worktops imported from Italy that Europeans have become so used to? Possibly. But what it really means initially is starting to look at how we reimagine what can be sourced closer to home — even if that means reinventing whole industries. It means every economy creating zones of employment locally — where feasible — as a primary choice. For example, ensuring that it is possible to source as many components as possible for the construction of a new housing estate, from the local bioregion.

Local production would create greater resilience to the increasing number of systemic shocks from extreme weather and events such as the current pandemic. Many of us noticed during the first wave, how quickly innovative local food suppliers and tradesmen adapted to the new circumstances and made it possible — particularly for rural inhabitants — to get access to fresh food without having to travel into town to larger supermarkets for example. Local manufacturers who were not dependent on complex global supply chains continued to produce useful goods as their capacity was uninterrupted.

Provisioning and the Land Ethic

It also requires a fundamental look at how we share what is produced from the world’s resources — land, water, oceans. Where is the majority of profit held from those avocados produced in Mexico for consumption in Europe? Where is the majority of profit made from the cocoa beans harvested in West Africa for the chocolate delights we consume in vast abundance in Europe, US and now Asia too?

Perhaps most importantly, it would help to bring home right onto our doorsteps the devastating consequences our global economic activity is having on ecosystems and habitats around the world that we never see — from the palm oil plantations of Indonesia to the soy fields of the Amazon. Might the impact of a more localised economy encourage a different perspective on consumption if we renewed our connection with provisioning from the land that surrounds us — at least to some extent?

Social Political Psychological and Spiritual Benefits of G-Local

Whilst the primary driver of re-regionalising economies might be the global ecological crisis we face, we should not miss the very real benefits to social, political, psychological and spiritual life that regional economies might offer. We also face considerable human crisis particularly in Western economies such as a rise in disconnection with work, increases in depression, suicide and self harm, alienation of families and inter-generational connection, lack of trust and loss of — whilst deeply craving — a sense of belonging.

What if we could recreate a modern sense of what was once described as ‘the rural ethic’ through greater connection to place? How could a new focus on place-sourced economies help re-establish a trust economy and raise identity and pride? What industries are we missing that could be derived from the specific qualities of a region we inhabit?

Whilst many of have become used to categorising farmers as ‘endlessly complaining’ or ‘over-subsidised’, that misses the nature of the relationship between the land and work ethics. The work of farmers, despite modern mechanisation, is relentless. Unlike in the industrial environment, you cannot negotiate better terms of work or relationship with weather, wildlife or land. You cannot demand a 35 hour working week from wind and rain.

Of course returning to the drudgery of peasantry or doing away with workers rights and protections is not what we are pointing to, nor are we suggesting there is not real rural poverty and loneliness. Neither are we employing any kind of romanticism that takes away the hardship of working on the land. Yet there is something beyond the transactional relationship of the office worker that is embodied in those that connect through their work with the land that encourages greater flexibility, resilience and adaptability — the qualities we most admire in successful entrepreneurs.

When I first acquired 30 acres of land to live and work with horses in the early part of the 21st century, I started a journey that peeled away the onion skin of ‘civilisation’ from working in the city of London for 15 years and rekindled a sense of openness, honesty, depth and trust that was hard to achieve in the push and shove competitive work of global brand strategy.

We can also see from successful local community projects, that a sense of accountability arises from doing business with people you actually know and live amongst. That locality of customers fosters high ethics and trust between people at the highest level of responsibility and care. In early hunter gatherer communities, to be rejected from the clan for poor behaviour usually meant death. In the 21st century that kind of accountability for being a good citizen is many layers removed from place through the offices of corporations, lawyers and global commerce.

Equally there is something important about crystallising the identity of place you live in, that gives confidence and positivity to individuals and business alike — without encouraging parochialism and within the context of the global market. The distinct identity of Provence in France gives value to its exports and thriving local economies that are at least, in part, provisioned locally. The identify of Scotland adds value to its spirits, food and tourism economy whilst providing its inhabitants with a rooted sense of belonging. That is not to suggest that local economies should always be focused on export opportunities; rather than should be focused first on local provisioning. It does however provide an appropriate window for a thriving economy beyond a mere brand narrative.

Expressing our Role in Place

In her latest book Indirect Work, Carol Sanford describes the living systems worldview as starting "from the assumption that all living things have their own agency and purposes. There is no need to impose our will or idea of what they should be. Instead, our work is to cultivate the humility and receptivity that allows us to understand what they are striving to become. From this understanding, we begin to discover an appropriate role for ourselves within their process of becoming. Our work shifts to evolving the infrastructures and instruments that will enable them to develop for themselves the capabilities they will need to make their own contributions to some other entity’s becoming."

And if that might be true how do we uncover our unique role in our unique place? Or the role that our projects might play in the development of our place? In regenerative development, our process for doing that is called Story of Place.

One of the wonderful things about humans is that we are built to think and understand the world in stories. We naturally make connections when we can see what has been happening in our place as an ongoing story with a character development with a plotline moving in a particular direction.?We see the interactions and relationships, we understand who supports who. When we can see a story of each place through time that reveals the innate character and quality of the place, we can discern a pattern which will inform its next stage of evolution.

By looking at ancient patterns in the land, the deep relationship of people and land formed through thousands of years, we see what makes a place bio-culturally unique. These patterns shape what kind of biological expression is possible but also what kind of human beings are attracted to the place. Seeing those patterns coalesces the ability to start to engage and pull people together with a common vision for where they want to go.?It can serve to create a field of meaning and caring; there is no barrier too high or too tall that stops people from making the changes that are necessary when they feel they are doing meaningful work.

• We look for Core Patterns and Processes of how life has evolved biologically, ecologically, culturally and economically.
• We look for Core Values that have always been espoused by the cultures in this Place.
• We imagine into a Core Purpose that this Place can play in evolving the capacity of the systems in which it sits that grows from th patterns, processes and values we find.

Life has quite a limited palette of core patterns around which it evolves. We’re going to look at just a few and what that means for how we design the new story of place – and therefore narrative and economy.

In my recent keynote in Jersey in the Channel Islands where I was invited to share some ideas on identity, I shared a couple of observations about the story of place on that island that might give rise to a new way of thinking about how they could design their future identity and economy from the inherent patte of ecology, culture and economy that have existed there which illustrate a little of the process.

One of the core patterns in nature are streamlines which are created by flows of ice and water across land. Almost all patterns involve the intersection of two different forces that come together. Water and Land in this case.

You find patterns of flow where there are or have been glaciers. Rivers. Ocean currents. Economies where flow patterns dominate the ecology are often outward looking and export oriented.?The world’s 12 most entrepreneurial cities are all based on estuaries – the ‘edges’ where two ecosystems meet – land and ocean. Jersey is a unique place of tidal flows both in terms of height – with its double tidal pattern – and the strong flow of currents that speed through the Channel.

There are also wave patterns where wind meets the surface of water. Great ocean swells are created by spiral patterns of wind – hurricanes and typhoons – which bring those swells into being. We also see waves as sand dunes and mountains where the wind passed over sand, and tectonic plates meeting cause waves and ridges to rise up.

Wave like economies tend to be long term & self correcting through tecnological innovation that results in long term prosperity. The economists amongst you might recognise that pattern in the Kondratieff wave.

What other economies are there in the world where wave like patterns exist that might shed some light on how we might think about the future of an island like Jersey? Switzerland is a land-locked island that has some real parallels with Jersey. It is a financial services economy. It’s operates independently. Its core process might be "Squirrelling Safety and creating Networked Security".?Curiously both nations are first movers when it comes to assisted suicide.

There are scatter patterns in nature that look random but they’re not. They enable camouflage, hiding, security.?But because they look random, they hide the power of their relationships to each other. Each is precisely placed at equal distances apart. The island of Jersey has the most highly concentrated variety of geological types I have ever seen in an island of this size. When we think about the diversity of rock on this island and the pattern of culture over time, there is no question that the ability of Jersey to absorb diversity whilst also creating a haven of all kinds throughout its history – not just financial – is a unique attribute of this Place.

I haven’t mapped it but I have a sense that if I did, the relationship between the variations of rock on this island might be exponential in size. In the many different spiral patterns that exist in nature, gross spirals have exponential precision. With our scientific minds we know them as Phi and Fibonacci sequence.?Cultures and economies of gross spirals tend to punch above their weight. Though often small in size they have disproportionate impact in what they choose to do through a very efficient use of resources. When we think of Jersey's financial services industry, the way in which the Jersey cow is currently supporting the revitalising of agriculture in Rwanda, and the small but punchy jersey royal potato, we can see an economy that punches above its weight - whether or not you agree with its role as a tax haven.?

Nets are another core pattern in nature. Nets – unlike all the other patterns in nature are not patterns of growth and flow but rather contraction and tension. A spiders web holds its home in place; which is also how it captures food. Nets are safety nes, security, harbours, havens and places of privacy. Ripples are also nets. When a water drops onto the tension of a still surface, it sends up perfect spheres every time. What if in the future Jersey thought about itself as a different kind of net or haven? And move from a havening net in place to building capacity for others to create environmental, economic and social havens – in other words its role would be building capacity for resilience for others?

Many years ago I heard Stephan Harding of Schumacher College in Devon ask a question that has been bugging me for ages: "What would an economy look like that was consistent with living systems principles?" By focusing our economic attention on Place, we take an important step towards creating thriving living systems by recognising the scale at which life has succeeded for 3.8 billion years. By seeking new stories and strategies from the patterns of place, we find a way to incorproate the evolution of the living system around us into our own.

The Economy of Place is a series of articles by Jenny Andersson that are edited parts of her unpublished book. If you would like early notification of future releases, please register at Really Regenerative — Economy of Place.

Our online learning journey Power of Place for Regenerative Place-making is now open for registration and begins on April 21st 2022. We take individuals and teams from cities & regional authorities, place-based brands, architects & construction professionals, land owners and food producers, tourism professionals and venue owners, land/river/coastal regenerators and on a journey to design a project in their Place based on living systems design.

Further reading and indebted thanks to learning from:

Designing Regenerative Culture, Daniel Christian Wahl

Regenerative Development, Pamela Mang & Ben Haggard

The Bioregional Economy: Land Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness, Molly Scott Cato

Bioregionalism, Michael Vincent McGinnis

Green Swans, John Elkington