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The first one for AiREAS
Today on September 17th 2013 the very first Airbox of AiREAS was installed in the city of Eindhoven (The Netherlands). It was an emotional event for all involved in this co-creating venture.
The emotions were not so much because of the unification of high tech elements inside the box, designed to measure the environmental conditions in the public space up to the smaller detail (ultra fine dust, sizes smaller than a virus). It was more because of the unique unprecedented multidisciplinary way this all had come about.
The Airbox, its design, the location of the boxes in the public space, the real time measurement, the level of detail of the measurements, the scientific research, the transparent nature of making the information available to the general public, has all come about through direct membership interaction between local citizens, the local government, scientific experts and technological innovators. They all accepted the civilian invitation to take responsibility for creating world’s first healthy city together.
This way of working is suggested by a new development, called Sustainocracy. It is a transformative way of addressing our democracy by accepting health to be a joined responsibility above political and economic forces. The acceptance, even by the local government, to become MEMBER of change in an open and transparent cooperative way, is unprecedented in the world.
AiREAS is formally a cooperative and works entirely through the commitment of its partners. It has no personnel, nor buildings, yet co-creates high tech, changes local cultures, modifies local law systems, changes leadership routines and performs purpose driven scientific research. It is a value driven movement that saveguards the values created together, making them available to the world through its institutional partners and directly by creating local AiREAS anywhere in the world through the dynamics of fractal growth. Sustainocracy is referred to as the “transformation economy”.
Initiating civilians: Jean-Paul Close ( founding father of Sustainocracy) anf Marco van Lochem (specialist in complex projects).
Government membership: City of Eindhoven and Province North Brabant
Business members – multinationals: ECN (Airbox development), Philips Electronics (key components for ultra PM measurement), Imtech (Collection Database and mobile app)
Business members: Local entrepreneurs
Scientific institutions: IRAS ( longue and respiratory) University of Utrecht, ITC ( modulation, space observation, allergy) university of Twente, University of Amsterdam (heart and artery)
Local citizen’s of Eindhoven.
For me personally this materializes a dream as it took me over 10 years to define Sustainocracy and make it work in practice. The Airboxes are only a step, significant but not more then a first step. However, as in real life no marathon has ever been run without taking that first step. It is just as significant as crossing the finish line. Healthy city, here we come!
Transformation of States
With a certain frequency I am being asked to revise PhD studies as a totally independent and more or less unbiased provider of critical feedback. When I started to experiment with new ways of viewing society, human behavior and sustainable progress I came to defining Sustainocracy. This I did at first within the scope of transforming the old society into a new one. However, when I got into more profound analysis of the secrets of life and evolutionary patterns in nature, I could see it all coming back in economies and the development of states too. Sustainocracy became not just a transformative practicality but also a holistic approach to ever changing realities in which growth, competition, adaptation and harmony are logical components that surround us all the time but also occur to us all the time.
A recent study of a friend determined that “the democratic State” is capable of self reflection but incapable of transforming itself. The theory of an effective state has been described by many, starting with Plato in ancient Greek development of the early Democracy. The practical reality shows however how ineffectively the concept of “State” evolves by reacting just to circumstances without challenging its own self. “We don’t want vision” our Dutch prime minister reflected recently in an interview “Vision is costly and risky”. The lack of transformative capabilities of a State, that a business does show to have if equipped with the right leadership and need, has to do with the democracy itself, the ancient perceived territorial power, the organization of the state as sole producers and keepers of local laws (Rights? Justice?) and the way people behave when in power. The consequence today is that “the state” becomes impossible to manage, full of contradictions and subcultures, bureaucracy and exponentially expensive. The only way governance and the state seem to be able to react to the need of transformative change is when demolished by chaos and war, interestingly enough caused by this incapacity of change of the State itself.
The modern issue we find is that we are in the process of redefining the meaning of “State”. In the globalization of economic interests no state has full governance over its own territory or population anymore. Natural resources, human migrations, finances, climate changes, transactions, productivity, logistics, interests, etc are all mingled into a patchwork of stressful relationships. These cause many local consequences that need to be addresses by the local communities (global issues, local solutions) but can hardly be influenced or transformed by the local governmental reality. Meetings of G20, G7 and whatever G only show differences and the only commonality being their own individual lack of government stability. It is all a show case of territorial power without content or remains of a foundation. They can try to determine economic growth processes but they cannot divert local crises that occur as a consequence. Stress is building up in the world due to the incapability of the concept of government to transform itself, just like my friend’s paper suggested. The world does not need to change, governance needs to transform. And it is.
I am a happy outsider. I see those governments still act as if they were each Julius Caesar sitting over a territory, playing with the boundaries and determining the rules within their confinements interacting with their own senates that carry “knifes under their robes”. They act as if they are monopolistic leaders over a community when interacting with others while at home they live in chaos and crumbling authority. Their state is no state anymore, it is a legal authority that governs open boundaries and local taxes, reacting to problems rather than facilitating progress and calling out for economic growths to be able to finance their deficits. A new reality is becoming active while the old falls apart. This new reality has has little to do with States, or their governance, accept maybe the blockage of progress it currently exerts over the new reality to which it is locally blind and deaf.
The “new state” is a cooperative, not a local monopoly. The purpose of the territorial cooperation is to create wellness for its residents, not through transaction driven interaction with other countries. To do so responsibility has to be taken together. A “State” 3.0 is a territorial confinement in which 4 key specialized parties interact based on equality, authority and trust and with sustainable human wellness and progress as common purpose. Issues like health, safety, self sufficiency, wellness, food, water, etc are a common responsibility, not a commercial infrastructure accessible to the one that can afford it. It is all accessible to the ones that make it happen, together. Involved in this cooperative are these 4: local government from a common resources and basic territorial regulations perspective, entrepreneurship in terms of creativity and innovation, science for knowledge development, application and education and the local population for the local productivity, cohesion and culture.
This new state than develops a territorial identity of progress and combined content power. It is not about the soil but the human productivity and interaction. In essence this already evolves this way but still is being blocked by the old structures of dominant power, financial dependencies on global economies and lacking true authority due to lack of connecting or commitment to progress, just to power. It is not just government that needs to let go, the other three pillars need to learn how to take responsibility too, rather than avoiding it. We see then a historically huge process of transformation going on where inability of government to change is compensated by the modern and growing ability of the surroundings to gradually demand space and a new relationship. We have a long way to go still and a lot of stress. Meanwhile many people in power in each of the four fragments that shape the “State of Tomorrow” learn that they gain in authority when they let go of power and connect to others to establish a purpose driven regional cooperative. They learn how to behave both in the specialized executive fragment and the transformative cooperative. The more they dare to let go the stronger the community gets.
Precedents here in Holland (and specifically Eindhoven) have a name (AiREAS, GroZ, VE2RS, STIR, etc) as they address specific issues. They are considered by all participants as experiments into a new reality. The entire new way of addressing local responsibilities and growth in a territorial cooperative I have called Sustainocracy as it also redefines democracies. Through all the difficulties around the world we are not just witnessing the “Transformation of States”, we are making it happen together!
Global issues, local solutions, global application
Last week I met with Caroline Hummels, director of the department of Industrial Design of the Technical University of Eindhoven. She gave me a copy of her inaugural lecture “Matter of Transformation, sculpting a valuable tomorrow” in which she refers to the transformative global development of economies. She had used the views of Brand and Rocchi, two senior management directors of Philips, who describe an organic move from industrial to transformative economies.
Interestingly (but not surprising) the 4 steps of Brand and Rocchi coincide with my 4 fields of human complexities even though I see them as all inclusive and not just linear
This linear transformation of economies would be motivated by various global issues. The industrial era has globalized and standardized massive manufacturing and logistical processes, creating a uniformity across the world of retail and consumption. It has been a strong growth arena for financial and business dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, not because of their long forgotten era but their oversized dimensions that will become extinct at the first hiccups in the global economies. In my own model of human complexities I refer to this as the area of “greed”. In the “secretes of life” it is the area of natural unlimited growth.
Growth is only unlimited until it meets competition. Global competition then started to place the focus on the consumer through marketing and positioning issues. Rather than massively producing products the turnaround was that they had to fulfill a need too, connecting to emotional values of a target group. The customers became important and sales got more complex than mere distribution. In my own model I refer here to chaos through competition where Darwin’s rules of the strongest, fastest, most aggressive, etc prosper.
The third phase is that competition hardly produces profitable scenarios anymore. Value has been eliminate through all kinds of techniques while focus had been placed on volume sales and growth. This is never unlimited so a new impulse was needed. Brand and Rocchi call this the “knowledge economy” which in fact we see occurring everywhere now. When competition does not work anymore one needs to become smart and adaptive. Smart means that one needs to seek for ways to be different. In my own model I refer to this as the phase of adjustment. It calls for inner reflection that reaches out to rational but also emotional awareness and applied wit. Business become greener (emotional awareness though applied ethics) and use design and local content (rational awareness though applied intelligence) to distinguish themselves. Local gets into the picture again as opposed the long period of globalization. Terms like glocalization, or my own Local 4 Local 4 Global, appear.
Stop!
So far so good. In all these three natural steps of the evolution of economies we see one commonality. They all develop in a transactional world. The amount and quality of the transactions determine the success of the company and economy. On each transaction tax is raised on which the governments depend for financing their local issues around structuring infrastructures for maximization of transactions. Even though industries have been drawn (forced by public awareness and government regulations) to ethical values such as global warming, pollution, safeguarding natural resources, etc it are still the transactions that rule the game and give rise to manipulation, foul play and criminal practice.
The next step is that the transactional structure of the world economies break up and make way for the transformation economy. This economy is not transactional but based on the acceptance of key responsibilities. The increase of complex local issues of human drama, health problems, climate change, water and food shortages, natural and unnatural disasters with the related societal transformations, call for local attention and applied intelligence. All the technological and scientific knowledge is needed to create local ecological and social harmony when the risk of public unrest or disaster becomes big. I called this the era of search for harmony in carrying joint responsibilities through ethical values of responsibility. The motivation may well be less romantic in the cold calculating worlds of business and politics as they also agree that people without work, without perspective or health are poor consumers and unreliable voters. The institutional self preservation calls for taking responsibility even is this has been contrary to their original nature of institutional self interest.
Global issues need to be addressed locally developing local solutions through applied innovations that can find their way into the world as local dramas and needs elsewhere call out for them. This world is then not just transactional anymore. It is a world where ethical values call for responsibility, cooperation and solving existentialist issues locally first. Solutions that no one has created before and cannot be created by any of the fragmented specializations.
This type of economy is inherently different because it has no transactions to address or taxincome but a common purpose to deal with using the available specializations and authorities. You can’t buy a healthy or safe city, you have to co-create it. It is an investment in awareness, wit, vision on sustainable progress, innovation and togetherness.
When local solutions have been found then they can be globalized through the common practice of growth. Local for local adjustments may be required but the inspiration has been delivered as well as the way to address the commonality of the issues which has a global nature applied locally.
We are in the starting phase of the transformation from a transactional world to a transformative one where both are forced to coincide. The word “transformation” may then lead to confusion because the purpose that is being dealt with demands local transformative solutions that transform the local community itself not just products. But to make it happen also the economy itself needs to transform from transactional to collaborative. This affects the way local government, taxes, legal formats, etc work. It is hence much more complex than the previous fractional transitions and natural selections of companies that adjusted better or faster to the new era intelligently using instruments of growth, competition and adjustment. Now they are called to work together in a new format with new rules and manners. They do not interact anymore through the transfer of products, services, taxes, subsidies, policies. They need to interact together around a local purpose in a multidisciplinary way.
Success is more than just “growth”
That is why I refer to the new type of this collaborative local for local for global society as a “Sustainocracy”. It allows participants to distinguish between the various simultaneous transformations, the societal, economical and the functional that they need to deal with. For a long time, maybe even for ever, the transactional and collaborative structures with co-exist. All participants need to get used to these worlds and the fascinating relationship between them that will cause yet another shake out among organizations and the appearance of new ones. The entire functioning of a society will transform including the way its economies work. A totally new field of organizational intelligence appears that introduces a totally new era referred to as the global shift, a mayor break through in human progress.
In Eindhoven we experiment with Sustainocracy in AiREAS (air pollution and human health) and other purpose driven cooperative ventures. I of course invited Caroline, her students and the University to participate. For them it will be challenging because not only products, industrial designs and infrastructures will transform with their insights. Also society, all institutions and the way labor is organized will undergo changes. Educating students that develop a transformative attitude through self reflection, awareness and professional specializations of change, will demand for other types of labor relationships than currently available in hierarchical structures of volume driven dinosaurs. These youngsters will be the new leaders of change in the setting of sustainocratic ventures that will spread across the world following the global issues for local solutions.
Key responsibilities are taken together!
Jean-Paul Close
2013
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 