John Knott: Healing the Garden

John Knott is an internationally recognized leader in urban regeneration and sustainability. Mr. Knott is a recognized thought leader and keynote speaker who joins us to discuss sustainable community development, regenerative economies, and the restoration of the economic, environmental, and social health of cities through the CityCraft process.

Mr. Knott has been recognized as an influential leader in molding the nation’s sustainable development movement through cross-sector integration strategies at innovative development projects like Dewees and Noisette.

For Earth Week, we sat down with John (virtually) to discuss John's philosophy on "Healing the Garden" to restore the world through systems thinking, ethical planning, and the importance of re-learning what our ancestors once knew about humanity's place within the natural world. Through a multi-disciplinary discussion of human ecosystems, social systems, economic principles, and ecology, John lays out clear and attainable mechanisms by which communities can evolve to ensure a more resilient and regenerative future.

The premier episode of the Enduring Curiosity Podcast is sponsored by Enduring Curiosity, in association with the CityCraft Foundation and Solutions Journal.

Show Notes:

Guest - John Knott

Host - Grey Gowder

Music (via Epidemic Sound) - "Deep in the Blue" (Instrumental Version)  by Ingrid Witt 

Produced by Lugus Films Media

Transcript

Grey: [00:00:01] Welcome to the Enduring Curiosity Podcast. I am your host Grey Gowder. Join us as we seek solutions to the challenges facing our world today. Through curiosity, we can forge a resilient future for all life on this planet. The Enduring Curiosity Podcast is a production of Lugus Films Media in partnership with Enduring Curiosity, the CityCraft Foundation, and Solutions Journal. For our first episode, I'm thrilled to welcome John Knott to the podcast. John Knott is an internationally [00:00:45] recognized leader in urban regeneration and sustainability and the creator of the CityCraft process that restores the economic, environmental, and social health of cities. Welcome, Mr. Knott. 

John: Thank you. 

Grey: [00:01:00] So let's get started with, "What is CityCraft?"

John: My philosophy has grown out this idea of "healing the garden" which is about healing relationship with each other and healing our relationship [00:01:15] with God's creation which in that combination... we will actually create a healed world. And so, we believe that real estate and development are the most important professions that affect that because we [00:01:30] effectively the ones that touch every one of these systems and control what causes the impact on those systems. 

Grey: Historically, we've seen development, we've seen real estate, we've seen the way [00:01:45] cities and states manage that as a way to divide or control or disadvantage certain populations, but through [00:02:00] your work and through the work of a lot of others we've seen how that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. What are some some ways that that you personally and others in your field are working to reverse some of those [00:02:15] negative decisions of the past and create a more equitable and sustainable and regenerative human ecosystem? 

John 1: I think a lot of our problems actually come from... it isn't just the issue of [00:02:30] equity from the standpoint of who gets the wealth and how we divide that out. I think a lot of it has to do with- a lot of things have changed in the last 50 or 60 years in certain areas. In some areas, there's the same old story for the last 400 years. There has always been the [00:02:45] other. There has always been someone that's been oppressed, or someone that's been kept out. As wealth as created in general classes that there's the tendancy [that] once you get to that level (wealth or institutions get to a certain scale) we tend to calcify and it's all about protecting that wealth [00:03:00] and the institution. So, that hasn't changed either. That continues to be an ongoing human crisis that we all hopefully try and find some balance in. I think that the way I was raised in business as well as in a family, we were always [00:03:15] taught that the health of the community we are in (across the larger area) was in our direct economic interest. And so if the system was not healthy as a whole it was our vested interest to actually help heal that, so our family has a huge legacy [00:03:30] of being involved not just in the restoration of Baltimore, but in support of hospitals and orphanages and all kinds of nonprofit areas, historically. I think that we have evolved -- the things that have changed recently, in the last 50 or 60 [00:03:45] years, really has its catalyzation as we've started to build these National and Global Systems and these large-scale organizational systems. And what that has done is really aggregate too much wealth and too much power and too much control [00:04:00] and too few hands. And so when I was growing up, we had in Baltimore City and the state around there was no such thing as cross state border banking. But over time, I think starting in the 70s, we started to move in that direction and break that down. [00:04:15] So in Baltimore, when Baltimore city is being revitalized and you created the Baltimore -- the Inner Harbor project -- you had lots of national important businesses, but the controlling decision makers were there. Every city had those people there, and the money in that state and city stayed [00:04:30] in that City and in that state and were reinvested there. So you had Savings and Loans organizations, you had Commercial Banks, you had Trust Banks, and all of those organizations and the heads of those organizations pretty much knew each other. They knew the city and they knew the issues [00:04:45] and they became the leaders to solve problems and work together with a public sector. I'm not saying everything was perfect, but we had control of our resources at that time and could redirect those [resources]. That could never be replicated again; not in the city of Baltimore -- any other City -- unless you might be a Chicago [00:05:00] or San Francisco or LA or New York where you have all of the national or International companies aggregated. But today, for instance, in consumer deposits we're looking at -- what -- six institutions that control 72 percent of the capital and none of that capital is controlled [00:05:15] or decided about in local settings. And so the people are making those decisions are making decisions in places they don't know and about people they don't know, so that's creating a huge problem with allocation of resources and too much of that resource being controlled at one point. The second [00:05:30] point I would make is that we have been so hell-bent on focusing on efficiency, we have efficiently removed the value from everything, and if you look at the Suez Canal fiasco right now, one ship four football fields [00:05:45] long, wider than the Suez Canal itself by significant amount, gets off kilter and throws the global supply chain into a mess. Now, what all of this efficiency focus has done is create a way in which we've [00:06:00] basically thought only about short-term efficiency, only about short-term costs, and we've externalized all other associated costs, which are not included on the cost formula of [00:06:15] any of those companies. They still can make the profit without paying any of that cost. So a lot of the damage that we're doing around the world in -- I haven't really said this before but I've thought a lot about it and I last six months -- we talk here in this country about the evolution of slavery [00:06:30] and we talk about the Great Sin of this country, all our externalization of our manufacturing and externalization of the many products that are no longer allowed to be distributed in this country, like baby formula, are all being externalized to other places. [00:06:46] And we essentially are creating paid slaves, at very low wages in the rest of the world, which is creating all kinds of other impacts and our businesses are operating in less than safe environmental standards, [00:07:01] which would not also be allowed in this country, and we're eternalizing all that cost. So we're creating a huge impact across the globe and our consumers and most of us don't even know that's going on. And so [00:07:16] a lot of the issue here is about awareness and a lot of the issues about diversity of control and ownership and getting more focused on our bioregions that allow us to build too much more Equitable scale. And I think [00:07:31] where there's too much scale there's too much anonymity. When there's less anonymity there's more awareness and there's more accountability. 

Grey: So that segues perfectly into what I'd love to talk to you about -- is the community-based, locally-based kind of contextual [00:07:46] approach to addressing the specific needs and challenges of communities. We see in some places its food access, some places, it's having public spaces, open [00:08:01] spaces, it's pollution in others, it's some places that just simply are built to look like a prison just through bad architecture, bad planning, and in others it's the inefficiency [00:08:17] of transportation and the removal of the Pedestrian from the transportation space. What, in your experience, is is the benefit of focusing [00:08:33] in the localized mindset for for developing cities, and how can we use a how can we use our local stakeholders to help guide us in that process?

John: [00:08:48] First, I would say that our community-based process is fundamentally grounded in the idea that the wisdom of the community that's being impacted is equal to or more important than the wisdom of the [00:09:03] technical capacity of our experts. It doesn't mean we don't have wisdom and we don't have knowledge, but the people in the local community and area are very well grounded and understand because they live it [00:09:18] every day, they know what they don't like, they have a pretty good understanding what they don't like, reasonably good understanding was proper questioning about what they value and what they do like and they have a good sense of what's missing and some of what's missing is actually [00:09:33] been removed. You know historically from that area whether it's a grocery store, whether it's a transportation system like trolley cars or you know rail systems, or whether it's a hospital, or whether it's a police station, [00:09:48] a Library, closing of schools. All of this kind of harks back to a time prior to this focus on efficiency. Carnegie set up, I think, 2200 community-based libraries across the United States. Funded [00:10:03] beautiful forms of architecture and they are in small towns and a neighborhoods that really provided access to knowledge and access to information that these communities never had because there was no such thing as a library system. You had [00:10:18] the Enoch Pratt Free Library System created in Baltimore city which now created access to those and a very robust set of neighborhood Library systems. I experienced that as a citizen and child growing up in Baltimore [00:10:33] City. The amount of local branches of libraries that have been closed to aggregate to larger spaces is stunning and it's in a very short period of time and we did it because of efficiency because this entire idea that we could if we aggregate [00:10:48] everything into bigger schools and less schools, and bigger libraries, there by less libraries, we have efficiency. You have less staff, you have less executives, and we did the same thing. We've gone from footprints and grocery store and neighborhood grocery stores that might have [00:11:03] been 2,000 square feet, to 10,000 square feet, now we're up to 80,000 square feet. And you wonder why people can't -- grocery stores don't want to locate in certain areas, like North Charleston, [00:11:18] because it isn't --doesn't have enough traffic or enough income produced. Well, when you build those kind of stores, you have to have a massive amount of income and a massive amount of people coming which then directly impacts transportation systems and movement and [00:11:33] accessibility. So, I think it's -- a lot of this is also driven by this efficiency idea, but if you study the history of our cities in this country, they grew from the core and they grew from the edge incrementally. They did not jump [00:11:48] these huge leaps we've been doing for the last 50 or 60 years coming out of World War Two. And so, I think that our community-based idea is both by regional-based and by community-based [00:12:04] within the community-based system. We're saying that there is a need to address things at a system scale because we do not believe you can affect change in any system unless you can get to the beginning of the food chain in [00:12:19] that system. So for instance, you don't have to address the entire School District, but you do have to address the K through 12 theater system, not just one school. The justice system is the same way. The ecology is the same way because you can't -- you have to understand the [00:12:34] watershed you're in, not just the stream you're next to. So a lot of our work -- and I'm going to read you something, the conclusion from our Urban Redevelopment textbook that we launched our published in [00:12:49] August 2019 with Routledge Press. It says, "Fundamental to our understanding is that if you do not count a person, an ecosystem, or an existing physical asset or organization, you have assumed no [00:13:04] value and no need for consideration. At the heart of the CityCraft mindset is a process that ensures that we make every effort to count and value all human, natural, financial, and existing physical capital assets in our community. This discovered [00:13:19] access and under-utilized capacity, which formed the foundation for the CityCraft platform, is nothing more than counting and valuing all that we have discarded and pushed aside. It is this foundation that creates a new economic kind of tenacity for a future [00:13:34] regenerative economy." And so we sit in a bio region and we have a community which we're part of within that bio region. the health and safety of our [00:13:49] social community, our brothers and sisters, is directly related to the health and safety and capacity for growth or getting better of our ecosystem and our economic system. They're all interconnected. [00:14:04] You can't make these decisions on national scales because people don't know each other and the only only groups that can operate effectively on a national scale or an international scale are organizations who are controlled very much at the top of the very linear [00:14:19] and very top-down organizational system. And with that then dictates is that anybody else who is underneath that scale at a slower scale has no control over the decisions. And that means very few people are influencing [00:14:34] that decision Matrix. And we I think that is fundamentally at the cause and destruction of the complete collapse of the social metrics in this country over the last 30 years. And we're not -- we don't say that [00:14:49] there shouldn't be national or international firms. We believe that we've always had international trade throughout the world, but it's only in the last 50 or 60 years that we took control away from all of our local communities, our cities [00:15:04] and our states. It has been completely removed. And they have no influence at all.


Grey:  So it it sounds like cities -- the way we approach them, the way we approach the systems that surround them, and our human ecosystems -- [00:15:21] they need to evolve not just to survive the effects of climate change but to survive the the other challenges, whether those are social inequality or economic inequality or any of [00:15:36] the other major stressors that they may experience. What are some areas that we can we can create a short-term [00:15:51] change as individuals as neighborhoods as communities, and what are some ways that we can start looking ahead and making longer term decisions? 


John: Well, the first [00:16:06] short-term decision we need to make is we need to start counting everything. You know our inventory and communication process all about at the system scale level. So like whether it's in West Denver areas with looked like at in say Calgary, Canada, [00:16:21] or Baltimore city or Charleston, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, any of these cities that we've looked at, our regions -- what we want are finding is that there's numerous organizations in these systems-scale areas underneath [00:16:36] the bio region, thousands of nonprofit organizations, that exist all marginal, mostly marginally operating, very few cooperating with each other. Many do not know each other. And if they were wired together in a real community relationship [00:16:51] network, they started supporting each other -- we are finding that you can, actually, by going through that inventory process within doing the inventory themselves under this process -- they're starting to discover all kinds of capacities. The second thing [00:17:06] that we're seeing a lot of is that you look at the way cities are budgeted and planning is done and you know the whole idea that we actually inventory all of our existing roads buildings and police department substations fire department actually make [00:17:21] that part of the capital equation, that goes on in the British system of managing cities and towns was came out of England, originally. You see it all over Canada. I mean, they know exactly what the value of all their assets are, every single one of them, all the utilities, every building. They [00:17:36] actually know what the depreciation value is, what the replacement call said. And they assist this on an annual basis. And so we need to get our hands around all these assets that actually exist. We say in housing only 1% of housing is [00:17:51] created new a year. Well, I can assure you that in the whole public sector world its probably even less than that, dramatically less than that. And so if we're not counting all these assets we have no idea of the economic value of all the renovation improvement [00:18:06] and changes that need to be made, and if we knew that, we'd actually be able to inventory all the human capital that we have in that region and build whole economic system around those people who are not employed, that are homeless, [00:18:21] that are immigrants, or refugees, or people that are that are underemployed, and create an entire economic system to deal with that at the local level. You know, why are we going through a process where we're bidding everything up, all these national regional firms [00:18:36] and not supply networks where bio region by bio region we could rebuild our economies, basically, just on looking at that alone, along with a much more effective transportation system. If you look at the evolution [00:18:51] of our cities over time, you know, we built an entire street car network in city after city after city around this country, which evolved from the core to the edge, and created an entire robust network of transportation and walkability that was [00:19:06] brilliant. And what did we do after World War 2? We tore the whole system up. We, city by city, -- and I won't go into the details of this, but there was a strategy to actually close all that system down build roads, [00:19:21] so we can incentivize a manufacturer of automobiles and make the automobile the primary form of transportation that then started pushing all of our cities bigger and bigger, roads bigger and bigger, people further and further apart, which then multiplied [00:19:36] the amount of infrastructure we had to build the serve those cities, and dramatically reduce density per acre or per square mile of our cities, which dramatically increased our public sector budgets to try and cover this areas -- so it's [00:19:51] a combination of things that we can do locally. And most of the information is at hand. Most of the knowledge is there. It's just that we're not counting and we don't have a strategy to do that. And CityCraft has built the platforms [00:20:06] to do that over the years and has figured this out -- I shouldn't say figured out. We've developed the process and the figuring out is actually by using the process, the community and the leadership, there, figures it out themselves [00:20:21] because they are the best ones because each solution -- there's no such thing as an exact same solution in each bio region and it doesn't apply -- you need to come up with the metrics that are important for that particular region and the skill sets that are needed [00:20:36] for that region. 


Grey: So, let's kind of dive in on on a particular bio region. So, the the East Coast, specifically the Southeast, seems to be particularly under threat to rising sea levels, to climate change, [00:20:51] and the cities along the coast and just inland of the coast are having to re-evaluate where people live, whether or not they continue to honor federal flood subsidies, whether they [00:21:06] prioritize certain forms of infrastructure or others to manage water, to manage storm surge, and to manage the other upcoming problems. How how would you [00:21:21] begin to approach a city like Charleston, South Carolina, which is right on the water, that has been connected to the water for generations, but is under a very real threat from being overwhelmed by [00:21:36] that water? 


John: So the biggest issue we have in the Southeast from a climate change standpoint, other than the pollution effects of all this carbon and health impacts, is effectively [00:21:51] water and it's either the reduction of water -- so our ground source systems are really under threat for available consumable water and that's because we've been extracting all of this water out of our aquifers that then has [00:22:06] then to go to Florida -- and you hear about all the sinkholes and you hear about all the sinkholes across many cities and states -- what you're looking at is a direct impact of removing water from those aquifers that then deplete [00:22:21] the water from that ground infrastructure and then the collapse of that infrastructure of the natural infrastructure is happening as a primary result of that. The second thing that is going on is the increase in water from sea level, [00:22:36] range, storms, Etc. That is dramatically exacerbated because in response -- I want to say it's to malaria and mosquitoes and lots of other things in the pandemic of 1918 -- [00:22:51] there's a huge redirection of the way, we dealt with infrastructure and building new infrastructure, which is very important for storm water and sewage and water systems. And what we did was cover up a huge amount of many your linear [00:23:06] Parks throughout like the city of Charleston and other areas are basically closed down stream beds. And so what we really have to do is de-pipe those areas. The second thing we've done is massively remove trees. And just [00:23:21] the water carrying capacity of an 80 year old tree is unbelievable and it's -- even a dead tree, you know, that has died and still staying there in the forest the entire root system [00:23:36] and many cases connected to other has all kinds of life around it and as we take all the stuff out, we're dramatically reducing the stormwater carrying capacity of the area. So I would say that our first step from an [00:23:51] ecological standpoint is that we have to map and understand our natural systems and how they existed and where they were prior to human settlement destroying them and taking them up and what we have learned across [00:24:06] the United States is You can basically reconnect and re-establish about sixty to seventy percent of those systems and most cases -- unless you're dealing with a city like Manhattan, which is deeply developed, I mean, just everywhere [00:24:22] -- you can reconnect a lot of those systems. And the second thing we have to do is then start really making a huge investment that's way less than the damage is being caused by climate [00:24:37] change, an entire forestry system program, both urban and suburban and exurban, and we have to understand that -- as an example in Baltimore City a hundred twenty years ago, more when the original water system was built, [00:24:52] the city itself, which is an incorporated city, is not part of the county itself which surrounds Baltimore, bought Loch Raven Reservoir, which is in Baltimore County, bought much of the forest system to protect that reservoir in that watershed, [00:25:07] build a system to bring that water into the city, and built the pump systems to do that. They had the wisdom to know that they need to protect that watershed and trees were the things that protect it a hundred and twenty years ago. This is not like [00:25:22] Native American Heritage, even though they knew how to do it. We actually understood that and today we have no clue. We're not making this kind of decision since we're just ignoring what we know that is lost wisdom [00:25:37] that we just need to bring back, and it was a practical decision. It was not an impractical decision. It wasn't about knowing and that same watershed and that same water system is supporting a city that has -- [00:25:52] I forget how many more people than it had backed a hundred twenty years ago -- yes Baltimore has declined from a million down to six or seven hundred thousand people -- that million arrived in the 60s and 70s, not a hundred twenty years ago. And so [00:26:07] I think that's one of the fundamental things that we have -- if we're ever going to get the climate change, we need to really get to that point. And then we have to decide on our land planning, how we're now going to protect and enhance all that as we go forward. Montgomery [00:26:22] County Maryland, where I lived for a number of years, had a fascinating planning system, the National Capital Parks system, but, like, if you bought a piece of land to develop that was 40 acres and 10 acres of that land was along -- [00:26:38] they'd map all our watersheds on all their stream valleys. If you had a property that at that border and included that land, they would allow you to take the density that was on that forest area  and [00:26:53] that adjacent land -- say 10 acres was the adjacent land, if you had a 10 unit to the acre or five units to the acre development zoning right -- you could transfer from that 10 acres to your residual 30 Acres that density. [00:27:08] You didn't lose it. But you had to contribute and keep that land as a buffer to that stream. Now, what has happened, you've gotten much more density on the land you had before you have a park system that's [00:27:23] connected all over the county by trails and everything else and beautiful watersheds and places for the kids to run -- and in many times in that county, they would actually put the ball fields in the land around the Watershed because when it rains, by the way, [00:27:38] you don't play baseball or football, for the most part not football -- I guess they tried to -- but they're using land that's actually not development land to put public assets like that in. And so you're not competing with the private sector or taking resources from the private sector. So, [00:27:53] you've addressed economic competition, you've addressed watershed protection, you've maintained the forest, you're creating parkland right next to your development, so you're driving higher economic value for that developer and the developers infrastructure is actually less now. They're covering less area [00:28:08] and having more in houses per mile or per block than they had before. These are all doable solutions and there's thousands of them that make very good sense and we're just we're caught up in politics and caught up in these narrow-minded arguments [00:28:23] which actually make no sense at all. And what we're doing is destroying the basic environment that we rely on. And this idea that the environment and economics is at war is crazy. Economics is a social science. We as a human being are social [00:28:38] organism and a biological organism. We can't survive as a biological organism without the benefits from nature, period. 


Grey: What I keep hearing from you is the answers [00:28:53] are there, you know, the knowledge is there. The wisdom is there. We just have to be aware enough to recognize it and we have to to be willing to accept that [00:29:08] those answers are there for us to use if we choose to.

 
John: Yeah, and my graduate course I teach at the University of Denver and CityCraft, the first book I start with that they have to read is Brunelleschi's Dome, which is the Dome on Florence. [00:29:24] And if you look at one of the questions I asked them as we as we go through the book, is "how many professions did Brunelleschi represent that we would hire as individual professions today [00:29:40] in designing our building and building?" And it's like 22. So he was the safety engineer. He was a structural engineer. He was the architect. He was the safety inspector. He was, I mean, he was Logistics [00:29:55] guy. The guy was a jewel maker. He's a watchmaker, not an architect or engineer. And the brilliance of that book and in many ways the story, is that a watchmaker in those days[00:30:10] used these very complex systems to make a watch work, in your pocket watches and all and all the gears and interfacing systems. And you had to have a systems mind to actually make that work. [00:30:25] He transferred that systems mind to the built environment. And as a watchmaker who's going to sell any valuable watches, they had to be pretty beautiful in terms of design and long-term functioning. And he transferred that to the built environment. And [00:30:40] to this day, to this day, the span of that Dome unsupported -- the scale of that has yet to be replicated by all our computers, all our Engineers. We have not [00:30:55] been able to replicate that and yet he was able to do it. And so there's an old saying if you don't know your history, you're destined to repeat it. We have just, in the last 50 or 60 years, we have just, like, said -- and it maybe [00:31:10] longer -- It's actually getting up to 80 is because 46 that's 54 and for 75 years for 75 years since World War Two -- we have basically said man, we've got all this technology, we're so bloody smart. We've got air conditioning. [00:31:25] We've got cars and we've got telecommunications and electrification of buildings. We don't have to worry about any of this stuff. We can just ignore everything because we can engineer and design our way on any problem that's there, [00:31:40] and we can actually engineer a way to compete with nature and control it. And the pandemic opened that book and said that is not true. It has failed. And so if we go back to studying -- even back to Roman times, [00:31:55] and study the way infrastructure design strategy the way cities were evolved, study the way civic art was a major part of the way cities were built -- we can have beautiful cities. We can have economically balance cities. We can have environmentally [00:32:10] sensitive cities -- and I'm not saying all the stuff is right even back in the Roman times because up until currently in the environment, in many cases, has been ignored, you know, as part of the system -- but that started the change with the advent of [00:32:25] Barnum and Olmsted and people like Rachel Carson on the environmental impacts of our decision-making on human and natural health, all of that. We have evolved over the last hundred years and [00:32:40] understanding the critical importance of the environmental system to our human health and to the health of the planet. So I think we've got a real shot at doing this right. We have to teach regenerative thinking and we have to teach a regenerative learning [00:32:55] process and decision making process and that's --CityCraft has committed a significant amount of my time to that in the last 10 years. So, we really believe that we need we need to have many many more regenerative thinkers and leaders and also that are community-based. Don't [00:33:10] fall into the trap right now to become the regenerative expert. Because, again, the wisdom is in the community. The wisdom is in the place, itself. And the wisdom is in the history in many cases. Its that we need to recover and then make decisions with the [00:33:25] community in balance so that we're informing how the social community should be organized and how any decision we make economically about what should be placed in that local area or large-scale Regional area in the context of the health [00:33:40] of the bio region itself -- if we have a water depleted area, we don't put water consuming assets as investment assets in that area. If we have lots of human resources available, we should be developing approaches to use those human resources as part [00:33:55] of the economic system. That they have good paying jobs, good productivity, and contribute to the health of the region itself. So, I think that we need to get back to growing our food more locally and creating the urban farming system and the production [00:34:10] of our food and processing that food within the defined region, not just produce it here and then ship it across the world and bring it back. 


Grey: Well, Barnum is credited with saying, "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's [00:34:25] blood and probably themselves will not be realized." It sounds like we need to make some big plans. We need some big ideas. And we need them quickly. Do you see those coming from anywhere? [00:34:40] Are you seeing any anything out there that that you think "Okay, this is something we need we need to do." 


John: You see a lot of them. It's just that you have a lot of people shooting things down. Okay, there's more people shooting things down, [00:34:55] than there are that are producing those things, but and that's been a lifelong problem. But it is particularly a problem now because the control of our system is in so few hands and the access to the capital, there's so few to build these dreams. But you do have people [00:35:10] like amazing architects and designers like Bob Berkebile and Harry Gordon who have done a lot of our work in the last 30 or 40 years. Those individuals and their firms have done amazing work over the years to really lead us into a new future about [00:35:25] how we design and those were two of the six people are really move the aggressively in AIA, the creation of the the LEAD system and approach to Green Building, and also the creation of the living building standard, which actually came [00:35:40] out of Bob Berkebile's firm. And I've worked on a lot of these things myself because I was one of the early developers that was working in this area and just because of knowing them and I've learned an enormous amount from them. I believe very strongly that vision and passion [00:35:55] do attract resources and rarely do the resources attract vision and passion. And that I think that the great, the big, idea of the response to CityCraft, in general, is really positive in the communities that we go to because we're thinking at a larger scale [00:36:10] and we're getting people involved in the decision-making process not as charettes, but as part of as if they were intimate to the planning urban planning and development process itself in gathering the information, being part of the scientific [00:36:25] teams figuring all this out, giving them decision influence and control. I think that people do want to have an imprint on their environment. I think a lot of the ideas that around Food Systems [00:36:40] and urban Food Systems that we've been very much involved in as we started to get in some of these neighborhoods in areas -- and I shouldn't say just say neighborhoods but these systems-scale areas -- we're seeing amazing response by multiple organizations who didn't originally work together [00:36:55] to come together and actually connect themselves and their disparate organizations and various locations to create a large-scale food system from for from producing the resource to consuming it and every business in between [00:37:10] that really get excited about that idea and we see tons of immigrants and people living in Lower income communities who get dramatically excited about the idea of producing their own food and creating small-scale restaurants -- [00:37:25] We call them restaurant but food trucks are restaurants -- but small-scale areas that can actually produce an income for them and bring the cultural heritage of their food into the mainstream. And, I mean, you have people like Mimi Silbert who created the Delancey Street Foundation [00:37:40] in San Francisco. It's the most successful alternative-sentencing prison re-entry program in the United States by far. And and she did it out of whole cloth, but she did it based on valuing the people who were in that situation and used [00:37:55] them as the teacher, you know, "Each one teaches one." So the expertise and the people who run that organization which we replicated in one of their sites -- I'll never forget the guy, forget Mike's last name, right now, and there was a they found out [00:38:10] about what we were doing and they had a meeting at the harbor club and I met this guy and was only the after the third meeting, man, I thought he was a non-profit executive and, you know, really smart and he had all...certainly had graduate degrees and all, the guy was former felon and [00:38:25] a very interesting background. And it was, you know, she deeply believed that it wasn't her that was going to solve this problem and that the expertise resided in the human beings themselves, and just because by the grace of God, they got caught and I didn't. She [00:38:40] brought them back into the system because she valued them as human beings and their skills and ability to be productive in our society. There's a lot of good ideas on the social side. There's lots of good ideas on the environmental, ecological, [00:38:56] restoration -- you have guys like Storm Cunningham who wrote the book The Restoration Economy, and Paul Hawken really launched a huge movement with Blessed Unrest. There's lots of people writing and there's lots of people acting that have really big ideas and [00:39:12] we've been fortunate to get to know a lot of those people and they have become part of our own work on our network over the years. So I don't think there's a shortage. I think what there is is a problem fundamentally with who's in control [00:39:27] and that the control of the system has gotten to such a larger scale and the control the capital that needs to be accessed is such a large scale that it's become a real impediment. So for instance, take in [00:39:42], I mean, money is a big part of this this problem. And so, some of the highest wealth in this country is controlled by Pension funds, Municipal and Union Pension funds and State Pension funds. Now all the money [00:39:57] that goes into those Pension funds comes from the employees that are working within the municipality or the state and yet because the advisory services that they employ to advise them where to invest, they're generally being told that they shouldn't [00:40:12] reinvest that money in their local community where that money came from because that doesn't meet quote "the fiduciary standards" and have too much -- So their money is moving all over the world. Well, why does that work... well that works really great for the intermediaries and for all the brokers [00:40:27] because they get fees up and down the system for doing that. But the idea that you can't invest the money in the same place where you got it from to recycle that Capital into that region and create less costly ways to bond finance [00:40:42] your public buildings, less costly ways to make access to Capital that restores areas and invest in business in those areas -- they're investing in -- Pension funds are investing in business enterprises all over the world. Why don't they just do it mostly in their own Community? I mean, they're [00:40:57] going to know the people. The people are going to know them. We're gonna have a lot better shot at assessing character and they're also going to have a pretty good idea of whether things going to work or not. And so it's this whole idea of efficiency and scale and massive systems [00:41:12] that are controlling are at the core of the problem we have to address. 


Grey: So regeneration, regenerative design, regenerative systems thinking are a core element to [00:41:27] your work to CityCraft, to the entire idea of how we need to go about solving a lot of the issues that are facing our communities, our world, the natural world, the human world. [00:41:45] How do you define regenerative thinking and what are some models that we could look to better understand that? 


John: The example I use a lot [00:42:00] to get people to understand regeneration -- I mean, regenerative means the capacity to create more life, more abundance -- a great examples and oak tree and the oak tree drops thousands, if not tens of thousands [00:42:15] of acorns into the soil that it has been part of creating through its own life cycle, decay system and rebirth every year. And that one tree, every year, is [00:42:30] creating more and more capacity, year after year after year. That's what regenerative thinking is about. It's not less is more. It's not less bad. It's about creating a healthier system [00:42:46] in the bio-region we're in that enhances the health of the economic system, the health of the environmental system that we depend on, and the health of the social order. The idea is that the the natural landscape [00:43:01] and the land itself and the ecology is actually is the frame. So, you map that ecological system pre-human settlement and you let that inspire where and what [00:43:16] to do. And I think a really great example of that in an affordable housing situation -- an entry-level housing situation -- is the Oak Terrace Preserve community in North Charleston where you had essentially an abandoned, [00:43:31] or close to abandoned, World War II temporary housing site that was built by the Navy for with essentially portable mobile housing at the time -- not mobile but manufacture structures -- sitting on piers [00:43:46] without a foundation, wood water lines. The area is being closed down. It had... it was a very very dangerous area, 50 percent vacancy. Had all kinds of every imaginable type of house and every [00:44:01] ill-conceived -- not ill-conceived -- but problematic element of a society you could find there. And you had all kinds of pollution. The state was going to shut it down because the wood water lines were breaking and all this the storm, you know, the sewer lines and everything -- and [00:44:16] across the street, you also had a closed gas station and all kinds of environmental contamination issues. But at the same time that that same 55 Acre Site had 900 plus trees on it, I mean, centuries-old and massive [00:44:31] massive trees. So we started with the trees and did an inventory of those trees from A through F and decided to keep everything. I think it was A through E -- was either A through E or A through D. But keep all of the trees. [00:44:46] We then studied the Watershed itself and what the carrying capacity was or wasn't. There was very little current capacity in that area other than the trees, itself. And we figured out how to let the land and [00:45:01] the water systems and the trees drive our land planning. And so we, literally -- what would be looked at as a new urbanism site design style, really was grounded [00:45:16] in the Ecology of that place and maintaining those trees in place and designing it (that site) to carry a 2-inch storm event right on the site itself and that was accomplished by using permeable surface alleys, distributing [00:45:31] your infrastructure in the alleys, and because the primary surface was actually bricks that can be pulled out, you could access that infrastructure without tearing up roads and just relay them. You had rain gardens and constructed Wetlands on every lot and the land plan [00:45:46] of the built housing was dictated by the trees. And we got the zoning approved so that the houses would move back and forth not line up like soldiers based on a tree location. And so when you drive down these streets it looks like this [00:46:01] place has been there a hundred years. But before we develop the land -- and we knew what we were going to remove and alter -- we literally pruned the tree roots and the trees themselves and stabilized him for a year before we did anything. They'll allow the trees themselves [00:46:16] to stay healthy and that -- so a lot of times when you're developing, you destroy a lot of trees. They call it the law of unintended consequences, but it really isn't that. It's really we didn't even ask the question, [00:46:32] "Are these trees going to actually live if we tear up the root system because we don't even know that there's a root system that's alive and well way beyond the tree itself." And so that those tree -- each tree at that scale -- I forget the amount of [00:46:47] water it can hold within an individual tree. It's massive. So, the storm water carrying capacity of that site was never reduced. It was actually dramatically increased. And then we got approval to tear this gas station [00:47:02] down remediate and turn that site into a constructed wetland, which then the water from those rain water systems and overflow would feed into that constructed wetland which treated the site and that [00:47:17] when that was built and launched in I'm trying to think what if they were it was like -- I want to say 2006, 2007 -- when the first houses were being built -- might even a little later in that little earlier. I'm not sure. [00:47:32] You're talking about a hundred 139,000 entry-level price into the 2000s for a pretty nice townhouse and single-family houses. I'm trying to remember now. I think the [00:47:47] town and the single-family started about 180 or something like that. I mean it was and it's a been a very very successful community, but but it's that type of planning and that type of thinking that can allow us [00:48:03] to really recover our neighborhoods build new neighborhoods. But again, we're building in the context of an existing sitting in it. We're not like leapfrogging and going someplace else. And so every decision we make so for [00:48:18] instance, there are decisions that we've been part of, as an example, on a building that was in an inner-city area 40% of the employment from that community came from the neighborhoods. And this is back in the 1980s. We used those jobs as a [00:48:33] way to enhance the economic order in that community and provide more of the resources that came out of that building to go into the community. But at the same time we were using that as a way to train people to do [00:48:48] construction work. I mean, one of the huge problems in this country is access to human beings that have artistry and have the skills to do this, all the different things that we create in the built environment. And one of the most significant areas of growth [00:49:03] in the construction industry is ecosystem restoration and corrective work to rebuild our natural systems, storm-carrying capacity, and essentially we can de-pipe even [00:49:18] from stormwater piping a lot of our cities to actually use nature to actually carry that stormwater and manage it. And believe me, it's a hell of a lot cheaper once it's done than to tear up a concrete pipe and replace it. And we're creating multiple benefits from that. [00:49:33] Nobody ever went to a to a storm water drain to celebrate a birthday, but they certainly go to a stream bed, you know, with an adjacent parkland to actually have parties and eat out and join [00:49:48] each other and go through nature and learn all kinds of things. You can't learn much from a water pipe. And all of those different benefits accrue, so I think that a regenerative mindset thinks that every [00:50:03] element of the system that they're part of. If you're creating a building you have need people to build that building. Those people are employed. Can those people -- if you're in an economically depressed area -- can those people come [00:50:18] from that community itself? Can we make decisions -- like, I believe in like we talked about low-income and affordable housing -- if there's any form of housing that needs to be stronger, more durable, and healthier [00:50:33] than any housing we build its low income housing. And yet the worst stuff we build with the least durability and the least longevity and the highest replacement and maintenance cost and materials that [00:50:48] tend to be more toxic than a lot of other places are always affordable housing. Now some of that stuff toxicity thing is change dramatically across the entire built environment, but it is, you know, the instead of asking the question, "Why don't we have [00:51:03] affordable housing," or "what causes the affordable housing problem?" We keep asking, "How do we build it cheaper so people can afford more?" Well, the problem is where we put this housing. As an example, if there's no transportation system and there's no access to [00:51:18] food or other services that they need, whatever they have to do, they've got to get in a bus or have a car and a lot of people in this country, including middle-class families, historically have been spending more on cars and insurance for those cars than they have on a mortgage, than on rent, in their homes. [00:51:33] And operating costs in these communities of buildings, because their energy and efficient and aren't well-maintained, are outrageously high. So there's all kinds of components to and that's why you have to think [00:51:48] as a system. You can't think about affordability as just the materials of the building or how less a much less labor you use to produce that building you have to think in terms of all the pieces you're connected to. 


Grey: So, [00:52:03] one of the first things I'd love to expand upon in in your answer is the idea that, whether it's affordable housing or its other civic structures, [00:52:18] seems like we're not really building things to last anymore. Why is that and how do we get back to that? 


John: It's two reasons efficiency and short term. [00:52:33] You know, we're thinking about what it cost to build something now versus what it costs to maintain and operate that building over the next 30 Years. And 30-year period 90% of cost is going [00:52:48] to be in its operating life. And many times in our public sector -- it's starting to change, and even private large-scale organizations that are NGOs or are in the even in [00:53:03] the private sector of had historically separation between operating budget and our capital budget. So the idea that you'd actually spend more money or capital budget to reduce. Your operating budget is like illegal, particular in the public sector. And so [00:53:18] because of this whole focus on short-term and bidding out everything and designing everything to the lowest cost, we have effectively just forgotten everything and the only thing is governing our decision-making is how do we make a cheaper. [00:53:33] And as a result of that we've created a built environment that looks ugly, is uninspiring, doesn't last cost too much to operate, and essentially is unsustainable because many of the times we then just tear it [00:53:48] down build something else. If you look at how the efficiency model that we've gotten into, for instance, on retail and hotels -- drive down the highway and stop at a Holiday Inn or put a blindfold on drive down arrived, You know, go to Calgary [00:54:03] go to South Carolina. Go to Alabama go to Montana, you know, you'd have no idea where you were because that that model is because of efficiency is built in and created so that everything's [00:54:18] the same and over and over and over again and it has no relation to the climate, no relation to the bioregion, no relationship to prevailing winds, no relationship the storm issues, and we wonder why we have so much destruction. And I think that that, to [00:54:33] me, is again the fundamental driving point, and if you look at schools look at the schools that were built before 1940, look at the schools that were built, and even some today, but more readily look in the schools that were built from say 1960 to 1980 [00:54:48] or 90, schools that were built prior were on public main public roads, they were civic art. They're gorgeous. They're built with very durable materials, have some tremendous capacity to be reused not only as schools [00:55:03] or as housing or any number of other things, office buildings. The schools were built in that other 40-year period have very minimum adaptive reuse, have very low value in terms of their [00:55:18] durability and capacity and design, them with such that nobody really wants some anyway. It's a mindset shift. This is the beauty of all this is it's a mindset shift, which we talk about a lot and that's what we teach to how the creates that shift. And the other part of this that's [00:55:33] so beautiful is that we shifted 60 or 70 years ago, politically, governance, and budget, and management across the sector, so essentially, we designed the outcome that we're getting and to some it was predictable. To many others it wasn't. [00:55:48] It was a law of unintended consequences, a lot of people like to say, but we designed it that way which means we're fully capable of designing a different way. So the inspiration, to me, is we're in control. We're in control of the situation. We are in this is, not out of our control, [00:56:03] because the problem was created by us, not by anything else. It was created by us and we have the capacity to change it.


Grey: So looks like we're winding down a little bit here on time. So I'd love to [00:56:18] just close by asking what are you working on now or what's next for you? What has you excited about about the next part of your work or city craft or [00:56:33] something like that? 


John: I'm excited about two things. One, I'm excited about -- I now have, I don't know, 50 or 60 students that have graduated. My graduate program at the University of Denver -- [00:56:49] phenomenal regenerative thinkers all across the engineering, architecture, development, real estate, but also public education, social work, all kinds of different disciplines that are thinking that way. [00:57:04] Their energy, their passion for this is unending. I'm excited about the young leadership we have. Kat Rodriguez is running our CityCraft Foundation, and Andy and Mike who are running CityCraft now into the future. And I see myself [00:57:19] as really being -- I'm around. I see myself, I call it, "being behind not in front," but it's really to use my time to write and to teach and to act [00:57:34] as a mentor in many ways and still be present in our decision-making, but that's opposed to being in the role of maker and running everything. I see myself as really using what I've learned over all these [00:57:49] years to get behind a whole new generation of people and to create way more regenerative thinkers that we have to. That's what I'm excited about, and I think I'm also really excited about the new energy around CityCraft [00:58:04] and CityCraft Community Partners, which is really trying to drive this new focus on governance and the new focus on regenerative capital systems. And I think we're starting to see progress in those areas. And I think [00:58:19] there's -- what I'm seeing as I step back there is -- I've stepped into a different role, not step back, I think, is probably the way to say it. But I think that everything that I've learned allows [00:58:34] me to know where the many mistakes are. I'm able to look at situations that the younger leaders are looking at in CityCraft and give them the wisdom of all the mistakes I made and what I've learned having made those mistakes. [00:58:49] But I do think that -- I don't -- I'm not going to say I'm excited about the pandemic but what I really am excited about is that what the pandemic has revealed. And I think that pandemic has finally revealed to people [00:59:04] that we're pretty screwed up and that's a lot has got to change. We cannot go forward after this without making enormous changes and I think it's a whole but the potential for a mindset shift has [00:59:19] never been better. And the potential to really get people to understand how important nature is to us as a species and as a community. And how important what we call our -- [00:59:34] What's the term were using a pandemic, our... not most important where we whatever by our "essential workers?" Well, if all these people are essential workers, it seems like they should be paid as if they are essential workers, and they should be protected [00:59:49] as if they're essential workers because we've certainly seen what happens when they aren't. And I think it's maybe a new day in terms of the way we look at the economics of our system shortchanging all those people [01:00:04] because of efficiency purposes and lower-cost the first time, so that the cost to wear now -- and I don't I think people knew that we were going to spend five trillion dollars already on trying to respond to this craziness and and we're going to be spending [01:00:19] about a lot more than that. They could actually figure out that we've done a few other things differently over the last 20 or 30 years by valuing those essential workers and compensating them promptly and organizing assistance better we wouldn't be spending [01:00:34] all this money. So I'm I'm very excited with what that that that revelation portends for us in the future. 


Grey: Well, I share your excitement in that and I'm thrilled to see what happens next with [01:00:49] CityCraft Foundation with the communities you were partnering partnering with. And how we can continue to learn from from that work and from the writing that you and the other members of City craft are doing on Solutions Journal, on the blog [01:01:04] there. They're just always fascinating insights. Thank you so much John for being here and for sharing all this wisdom with us today.

John: Thank you, Grey. And I think I should have said I'm even as much excited about it -- a young person like you who's got [01:01:19] this amazing vision for your documentary production company in terms of creating these documentaries around the wisdom of aboriginal and local communities all around the world that prove that people [01:01:34] who are local actually have the answers for us and have living examples. So congratulations on all the work you're doing. 


Grey: Thank you, John, for joining us [01:01:49] and thank you to each of you who tuned in for the first episode of Enduring Curiosity. Curiosity is the greatest gift from our childhood and key to solving the world's most pressing problems. Join us again in two weeks as we continue [01:02:04] our conversations with thought leaders, innovators, and storytellers working to transform our world. Until then, my name is Grey Gowder. See you next time.