Darryl Condon on embracing the journey of our time—dignifying people and the planet as one.
Reflection
Five years ago, I wrote an article for Sustainable Architecture and Building (SAB) Magazine called Social Sustainability in Practice. Back then, our practice had begun to define a framework for social impact as a strategy to re-orient sustainability. Our goal? To shine light on the often-missing social dimension.
I saw it as a chance to call our industry to action. I was frustrated with how the emphasis on environmental performance in sustainable design too often ignored the importance of social relationships, cultural beliefs, and political structures. To strengthen our approach, I proposed a social impact framework, which we have been experimenting with on our projects and evolving based on what we learn along the way. But, despite measurable progress in using the framework, broader progress has been slow. My frustration persists. Architects and city builders who used to be comfortable addressing social impacts have since looked away. We can no longer ignore our responsibility to the social aspects of design. It’s time to re-engage.
One thing I regret from that 2015 article is any implication that what we then called ‘social sustainability’ was more important, or in any way disconnected, from the environmental discussion. As I reflect on those words, I’m reminded of the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future. In defining sustainability with simplicity and purpose, that report set the course for the formal practice of sustainable design. In the Chair’s Foreword, Gro Harlem Brundtland eloquently describes the environment and social life as one and the same:
“But the “environment” is where we all live; and “development” is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable.”
The Report goes on to confirm that sustainability is not a state, but a rather a process of change. It reminds us that the process is complex. It’s not easy or comfortable. Reflecting on the challenges in our journey to define and evolve our social impact framework, this statement lends comfort: it’s a process. It’s complex. It’s difficult. We have evolved our thinking, but still have work to do.
As I write this, Vancouver’s City Council just voted to adopt its ambitious Climate Emergency Action Plan, which offers a glimmer of hope that we are heading in the right direction. We wrote to the Council in support of the Plan, which boldly connects all strategies to equity. We are hopeful it will have ripple effects on climate policy around the world. Specifically, positioning it within an understanding that the health and flourishing of the planet is inseparable from that of people.
I hope that by sharing our journey, others will feel inspired to share theirs too, and together we can contribute to the design community’s knowledge base.
Why are Social Factors Important?
Design creates value. That value is determined by the systems, structures, priorities, and expectations in which we work. So, in these contexts, design is about values, and to assess them in practice, we need an integrated approach to sustainability. It helps us ask “what are we sustaining?” and gives us a chance to reframe the aspirations of our projects. It pushes us to embrace the social performance alongside environmental performance.
This reframing also helps us identify when our processes and strategies to maximize social and environmental performance are aligned and amplify each other. For example, factors we thought would improve climate resilience are proving important in supporting safe, healthy social connection during the COVID-19 pandemic—such as weather-protected outdoor gathering spaces and active transportation infrastructure. But, sometimes these strategies are at odds, requiring critical and creative approaches to decision-making and prioritizing.
To maximize positive impact, projects need to examine the unique values, challenges, and opportunities of their context, and create context-specific strategies and responses.
These are crucial to individual project success as they help us better solve problems across the project.
Even more effective are policy and governance shifts, which hold great power to prioritize integrated approaches to sustainability action and are most scalable across multiple projects. Through such policy and governance shifts, we’re seeing cities and industries improve how they meet climate commitments, catalyzed by large-scale systemic change, not incremental change. To contribute to this impact, designers and planners need to also become policy change advocates.
Learning and Unlearning
In the five years since the SAB article, the world has continued to change in ways both familiar and unimaginably strange. Our design context is being shaped—as it always has—by current political, cultural, and natural events. In the wake of a global reaction to Black Lives Matter and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, we must challenge ourselves to face the impacts of colonization, discrimination, and unconscious bias.
We know we have a long way to go. We are committed to learning and unlearning to understand how privilege has shaped our work, and how we can use design to increase equity in the communities we serve. Through a culture of content sharing, we benefit from the collective curiosity of our full team to learn and grow. Being aware of current and emerging thought leadership is central to our practice but acknowledge that much of this thinking is rooted in belief systems that have long existed.
Decentring our perspective
The following three themes explore the notion of ‘decentring’. Each strengthens, influences, and helps evolve our understanding and beliefs about sustainability.
- Decentring Whiteness
Acknowledging and dismantling the ways humans have constructed race and racism, their histories, and their enduring realities for billions of people can be daunting. Architects in Canada, North America, and Europe have finally begun to accept that architecture has a race problem. The profession has been, and remains, overwhelmingly white. The lack of diversity is based on a legacy of conscious and unconscious biases that continue to shape inclusivity and access to public and private infrastructure. - US Architect Bryan Lee Jr. of Colloqate has spoken extensively on the concept of design justice. He notes: “For nearly every injustice in the world, there is an architecture that has been planned and designed to perpetuate it.” In Canada, we must also face up to our troubled history with the erasure of Indigenous people, their lands and their culture. Indigenous change-makers like Ginger Gosnell-Myers (Nisga’a and Kwakwak’awakw) and Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) are shining a light on how people can work and design in a good way that acknowledges the wrongs of the past while moving toward a new future. We’re also inspired by the reconciliation work being done in New Zealand, where representatives of Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects and Ngā Aho, the society of Māori design professionals, signed Te Kawenata o Rata, a covenant that formalises an ongoing relationship of co-operation between the two groups.
- Decentring Humans
Humans tend to place themselves at the top and centre of things. Just look at how we treat nature and the environment. As advocates for design inclusivity, we’ve recently been pushed to think even more deeply about what that means. Matthew Hickey, Mohawk Architect and Partner at Two Row Architect, operated from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario, describes a concept he calls ‘universal inclusivity’. He challenges us to extend inclusivity beyond human identity to encompass ‘not just every-one but every-thing’. This notion “goes beyond physical abilities, race, gender, and into species, climate and the land itself.” It helps us answer how we can create more equitable places and cities when the built environment too often reinforces artificial hierarchies, and what design could look like if we were to also value non-human life. Repositioning ourselves within broader systems is crucial, because:
“All of these big questions reflect the same philosophy – one that removes us humans from having domination over the land and places us in an equal partnership with the world around us. Decolonizing the way we think about design and architecture and the processes by which we create the built environment begins with taking humans off the top of the pyramid and placing them as an equal part of a circle.” – Matthew Hickey
Decentring humans helps value interdependence with other agents in our local and planetary systems, restructuring and re-orienting the power and relationships in those systems.
As practitioners who recognize the value of the human-centred design movement and emphasize the social impact potential of our work, it may seem paradoxical for us to embrace this belief. But we’re realizing that to decolonize our community and space-based practices, it’s one of the most important.
Decentring Economic Value/Profit
We’re inspired by economist Kate Raworth’s theory of Doughnut Economics. Its memorable name and simple diagram capture a robust philosophy of balance—and a way of challenging our economic systems that value neither human life, nor the life and finite resources of the planet. Raworth advocates the ‘safe and just space for humanity’ exists not at the centre but between two key realms—our necessary social foundation and our ecological ceiling—and is achieved by creating regenerative, distributive economies.
Her model is compelling. It is based on Johan Rockström and the Stockholm Resilience Institute’s 2009 publication of the Nine Planetary Boundaries Framework, and again in 2015. Their work determined safe operating space for humanity from the preceding decades of earth system science. Raworth’s model then layers the boundaries of social conditions into the planetary boundaries, based on the minimum social conditions established by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. It is within these social and planetary boundaries that we may find a safe and just planet.
The model rejects the pursuit of unbridled profit that degrades all life on the planet while exacerbating the concentration of obscene wealth in the pockets of a few. It reinforces the integrated approach to sustainability where social and environmental performance are no longer separate.
We see the challenge and goal of this model as learning to stay within this healthy middle space. We achieve it through dynamic strategies and negotiation of methods and priorities—much as a thermostat functions by keeping a room temperature fluctuating within a specified range. The middle space balance reminds us that our economic systems and structures are constructs we have created. Therefore, we can re-create them to have different goals and embedded inertias.
Where we’re heading
One tool we continue to use to guide our work and conversations is our evolving Social Impact Framework. We are developing this tool as a shared open asset. Within this framework, we are strengthening our approach to integrated sustainability by bringing our understanding, shared language, and social impact performance accountability closer to that of environmental performance. It reflects learnings and questions we’ve collected over years of work and research. It emphasizes equity and dignity, building on the work of countless others and highlighting voices, organizations, and projects that have influenced and inspired us.
To further guide our adventure, we have defined three imperatives—Include, Enable, Connect. Each of these contains twelve categories that outline how social impact relates to design and its cumulative effects over time. From ‘sense of belonging’ to ‘enjoyment’ to ‘social and cultural life’ to ‘transformational governance’, each category contains indicators for which we are developing process strategies, design strategies, and assessment ideas. The framework helps our clients with project visioning and goal setting, and we’re working with research specialists and other collaborators to develop assessment methods to better understand links between strategies and outcomes — with great effect.
Beyond supporting discourse, we’re investing in positive impact in other ways. Our firm is taking on anti-racism work through training, structured learning challenges, and internal policies and procedure reviews. Our Artist in Residence program and HCMA TILT community events, such as life drawing classes, remain important parts of our culture. We have established internal Action Teams—some focused on compassion and curiosity—that allows staff to explore a host of related initiatives. We are expanding the types of projects we do related to engagement and inclusivity, and we will continue to advocate for climate and community-focused policy change locally and nationally.
The Journey
Pursuing an integrated decentred approach to sustainability will no doubt create discomfort and ambiguity. We’re prepared for that. We know we must adapt to it and, ultimately, embrace it. We are past the point where we can attempt to design sustainably without bringing race, class, and colonization into our everyday work.
This is the journey of our time. There is no soft, euphemized way to put it. It is hard work, and there is no tidy conclusion or endpoint. But progress is achievable, and we can all contribute to the journey. The challenge is to be persistent as we evolve our goals to be increasingly equitable and just, and to dignify all people and the planet.
To do that, we must do it together, by sharing ideas, actions, and resources while supporting—and challenging—each other to be radically accountable along the way.
Darryl Condon is interested in design that acts as a catalyst for positive social change. As Managing Principal at Vancouver based HCMA Architecture + Design, his leadership has led to highly innovative public spaces such as community centres, pools, recreation facilities, fire halls and libraries across Canada. This work has been recognized by numerous awards, both national and international. After 30 years of practice creating these dynamic, engaging and effective spaces, Darryl is asking ‘what’s next’. The intent is to push, think and break away from preconceptions of conventional practice at every scale, to maximize the impact and potential of projects and collaborations. Darryl is a registered Architect (Architect AIBC, AAA, SAA, OAA, NLAA, AIA) and a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.