Conversation with Tim Smit

Thomas:
We're fast approaching COP15 and there is more and more awareness that time is running out for us to react to climate change. What do you think the greatest challenge is for us all in tackling climate change and what do you think the greatest challenge is for CLEAR Village?

Tim:
2050 is a very artificial date, but one which the world has bought into as the date by which we need to shrink our carbon footprint by 80% of what it is now. I think the challenge is to get people thinking in new ways in order to move away from both complacency and the feeling that it is not possible to react in time.

CLEAR Village is working to do this and its challenge will be to prove that it is more than just a sustainable village on its own but that it is an experiment that can then be exported when things have been proven to work. That way, it can ensure its survival in tough economic times and can be part of the solution.

As time starts to 'run out' there is ever more support for projects that work with the intention of being scaled up to meet the needs of many places, not just one… Projects that are open source and which create learning that can be exported and easily made available. That is what is most needed.

Thomas:
That is exactly what we want: to combine open planning, participatory tools and community dialogue and make it exportable to anywhere. In fact, we prefer the word transferable. We are choosing the village scale so we can do it effectively - we need to firstly scale down to then scale up. We want the first village to be the proof it can be done and then others will follow.

Tim:
We can say we have four pillars upon which our civilisation relies fundamentally: climate security, energy security, food security and water security. Historically we know that if any one of these were to become dysfunctional, it would create a situation of social collapse. This would lead to government collapse. Then, the certainty of a global trading system would disappear as governments turn in on themselves either for protection from the outside or to quell uprisings in their populations.

What is unique today is that normally deadlines for action are human deadlines that we choose to meet or miss depending on circumstances. The problem we have now is that because we are used to being able to postpone things, we are unable to handle the fact that this is a date set by nature. If by 2017, the world doesn't stop its current carbon usage, we will experience the collapse of one or more of those pillars. As such, in terms of planning, we need to evolve the debate beyond it being about hippies and make it about institutions. Institutions need to make their planning adaptable at speed to meet needs. There is a new urgency to the debate.

What is good about the CLEAR Village Lab is that it provides a place where people can play and test. It is a really important thing to be able to build physical models that people can play with to understand what needs to be part of the village. There should be a checklist that goes through the physical and emotional needs relevant to a village to see if people have catered for all these needs. If you have all the boxes ticked, you're on the right track, but if you've left out disabled people or poor people or whatever, you're not. Many architects and engineers miss this philosophical/ethical aspect. They deal with the technical issues but leave out the social issues.

Maybe we are being too grown up. We maybe need a bunch of jelly moulds to build a city or town on a beach and if it doesn't work you start again, using the metaphor of building cities on sand. Look at the creativity of children - how do they work? You need things that are cheap that make people smile that are clever in their thinking but not necessarily clever in their makeup. Kids like to touch and smell and feel. We need clever but incredibly simple models that people can mess about with. We often make things too complicated even when you're thinking simply. You almost need a child's imagination.

Thomas:
We want Lab participants to do just that -to grow away from the intellectual blocks imposed by their professional backgrounds. The point of the CLEAR Village Lab is to enable cross-fertilisation between professions, to allow people to break the moulds of their industries for three days and have their minds opened to different ways of doing things that come from other professions. This will feed into the third day, which is very much about critiquing the way we plan spaces today and then looking at how we want to do it tomorrow. It's very important to stress the different backgrounds of those involved with the project, but also to see how many links there are between CLEAR and other projects.

Tim:
I heard recently that the difference between man and nature is that man has a phrase 'eat or be eaten' and nature has a phrase 'eat and be eaten'. I think it is an example of how much we need to change our thinking in order to build a successful model.