Future Here Now: We live in human ecosystems - and we need to build them.
SIgnals
Most of us know intellectually that we are interdependent on other people - our neighbors, people who make the products we use, the other folks on the street when we’re driving and hoping they won’t swerve into us. But as children of the Industrial Era, we’ve also imbibed a solid dose of Cowboy mindset. It’s easy for us to say that intellectual stuff I just wrote while also living by an unexamined belief that we’re totall unique, individual, independent.
And that can badly tangle us up when we are trying to address an issue where our interdependence has to take front and center.
These three stories show us just how deeply our one-shot, ipso-facto assumptions can sell us out when we don’t intentionally deal with the interconnections and the multi-dimensional elements of the real life human experience. We’re at a point in human history where we have to plan for multiple causes and effects — in part because it’s our job to fix the situations where not accounting for the human ecosystem has created a whole new set of problems.
The Bilbao effect
Bilbao, Spain, transformed itself from a Rust Belt - style derelict to a center of cutting edge art and culture. But it wasn’t easy, and that didn’t happen simply because they dropped an Frank Gehry-designed avant-garde building into the place. Instead, Bilbao built a multi-faceted human ecosystem, standing on five pillars to frame it out.
The problem, as Resonance notes in this article, is that too many other cities didn’t pay attention to building the ecosystem part - they dumbed the equasion down to “Big Fancy Building Make Magic,” and the magic party of the recipe didn’t materialize:
Many cities have tried to replicate Bilbao’s success, often with disappointing results. The Millennium Dome in London and failed Guggenheim branches in other cities serve as cautionary tales. These examples underscore that the “Bilbao Effect” isn’t achieved simply by plonking down an iconic building and hoping for the best.
Successful cultural investments tell a story about the place—its past, present, and future. This approach to placemaking through culture requires a delicate balance. It must respect and build upon local traditions while embracing innovation, attracting international attention, all without alienating the local community.
Crucially, these investments should be seamlessly integrated into broader urban development plans, enhancing existing infrastructure and complementing other city initiatives.When done well, it creates a virtuous cycle: a strong cultural identity attracts visitors and investment, which in turn reinforces and evolves that identity.
You don’t fix a food desert with a grocery store
I have observed or been a part of more initiatives to install a grocery store in a food desert than I can count (a food desert is a place where healthy food is hard for residents to access, usually because the places that sell healthy food for a reasonable price are too hard for them to get to). And I’ve seen more than a few of them falter and close up. Thanks to this great reporting from Pro Publica, I understand why a little better.
The article focuses on a new independent grocery store in Cairo, Illinois, but it draws on national research. And the findings give the lie to what many of us planners believed: if we build a store with healthy food in a food desert community, the food deserts will no longer be a desert. As with most things involving human ecosystems, the truth is nowhere near that simple:
“The main concern with them is prices,” said Dossie, explaining why some Cairo residents haven’t done much shopping at Rise. The 32-year-old mother of five was unemployed before she became one of the store’s first employees. She shops there to support Rise and because she doesn’t have a car, but she wishes it could offer discounts like chain grocers. “I know, me personally, I have a big family and I need to be able to get bulk for a cheaper amount.”
Her concerns are backed up by an emerging body of academic research suggesting that the conventional wisdom about how to overcome food deserts — building stores in underserved areas — overlooks the fact that prices matter as much as proximity. For all the benefits the opening of a store can bring to a community, if it can’t compete on pricing, it will struggle to survive.
This whole article is an essential read, especially if you work with local business and revitalizing disadvantaged communities. As with many other issues, reality is much more complex than our favorite solutions.
Unexpected connections: child sugar consumption and adult wages
One of the things we have to grapple with in human ecosystems is that seemingly unrelated issues often turn out to have strong connections to each other, making it all the more important to solve the one so that it doesn’t make the other worse. After all, we all know that sugary snacks aren’t good for our kids’ health. But as this study found, consumption of sugar correlated to lower wages when the kids eating them became adults:
Two economists from the University of California, Berkeley and the RAND Corp. used the end of sugar and candy rationing in the UK in 1953 to study what would happen later in life if kids under the age of five ate too much sugar. The researchers published their preprint results with the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Researchers were able to compare the outcomes of people who were born just a few years apart but had very different amounts of sugar in their diets. This was possible because people quickly started eating sugar and sweets after rationing ended, but they didn’t change consumption of other foods.
The researchers looked at children whose parents had similar health profiles and came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. The post-rationing adults were more likely to develop chronic inflammation, diabetes, arthritis, and other long-term illnesses.
In addition to the effects on health, too much sugar early in life had an effect on how well the children did in school and how much money they made as adults. Adults born after rationing ended were 18.5% less likely to go to college and 16.6% less likely to have a job that required a high level of skill than adults born into sugar rationing. This also meant that adults who were born after rationing were less likely to accumulate wealth than their older peers.
To be sure, correlation does not equal causation. But there seems to be enough data in this study to indicate that the effects of the human ecosystem can impact us across decades - affecting our ability to contribute economically, not just our health.