Expert Interview - Debra Solomon

What does sustainable design mean to you?
The terms 'holistic design' or 'permaculture design' both imply a collaborative approach to the design process with and by the folks that will ultimately be most impacted by the design itself. 'Sustainable design', however, does not tend to offer a whole-systems approach when applied to communities and economies. It has a top-down smell to it. Pity that 'holistic' and 'permaculture' just drip with hippy sanctimony, but I prefer both of these to 'sustainable'. We designers need to re-appropriate both of these terms from our hippy ancestors by using them in collaborative design projects.

How does your work uniquely contribute to this effort?
Since 2006 I have been working with communities on ways to develop more resilient food systems in collaborative design projects (or conceptual art projects, depending on the client). In the Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project we worked with the neighbourhood surrounding Rotterdam Zuid's Afrikaandermarkt hyper-using food surplus from the twice-weekly open-air market, the neighbourhood's professional kitchens and supported by the Afrikaanderwijk's energy and entrepreneurial spirit. Working with existing local social networks and civic (infra) structures means that I am the only one that really needs to adapt or veer from my initial plan. In this case I started out with the notion of creating a 'snackmobile', but the project evolved into a free kitchen. It is 'sustainable' because the project is powered by the individual and institutional desires and ambitions of the community with which I am working. If someone wants to start a small business (e.g. selling fruit syrups and preserves from market surplus) then I facilitate him or her in doing this, providing materials, location adding (the fun part) a platform for experimentation. Often I initiate these desires, or ambitions, by providing an example (the other fun part), showing that something can be done, e.g. distributing homemade pickled vegetables (perishable product extension) or making soup out of vegetable 'dolls' (increasing vegetable sales) that we made on the market days. The examples are playful, and I involve the people that would be good candidates to try something themselves in the fun.

When you imagine a 'sustainable future' what do you see? How do you feel?
One of the main signs of a holistic future is cooperation and innovation at the community level. A sustainable future is not an agricultural, social or economic monoculture. The economies are scaled, e.g., instead of someone just selling flowers, there would be among other things a flower market garden, a plucking garden, a compost producer, an herbal teas and remedies business whose clients include local restaurants and offices.

What is your first impression of the CLEAR project?
Although I like the idea of projects that are living examples of best practice, I am not quite clear whether this village would be set up in a tabula rasa or within an existing city. (…) My personal preference would be to work with the expressed desires from an existing urban community, as this is how most of us live. The advantage of this is that in any existing community there already exist highly effective groups at work on aspects that the CLEAR Village seeks to achieve. Working with these proven examples of success seems to me to be a no-brainer, linking great projects and highly functioning individuals together is what every successful sustainable community project does, from a PTA, to a CSA.
If I were an existing community organisation approached by the CLEAR project, I would only want to work with people that have a vested, personally-driven interest in my community. That is to say, people that actively participate in the community and preferably people that already live and work there. (…)

Do any past case studies (successes or failures) come to mind that we might learn from?
In the Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project in Rotterdam Zuid's Afrikaanderwijk we learned to adapt this food systems project to different ethnicities, with radically different food cultures and ideas about who gives what to whom. Once we started the free kitchen, we needed to address many unspoken issues concerning cultural food taboos and hygiene before even dreaming about producing a specific food product from the local food surplus flows. To make food emblematic of the neighbourhood was not to make food that was locally grown (the opposite was the case) or even locally RESCUED from the waste-bin. Emblematic food (at this stage of the project) needed to express for example that it was PURELY vegetarian yet not too-homemade, prepared in halal/kosher/pure vegetarian kitchens untouched by the hands of menstruating women! We had to express this in our labelling or no one in this neighbourhood would even TOUCH our food, let alone eat it or sell it in their shops.
In the project Foodscape Schilderswijk the goal is to create a Northern European form of urban agriculture in a small neighbourhood in The Hague. Although the project is still in its research-phase, it appears that we will be successful because the entire municipality was prepped beforehand to be on board. Everyone I speak to, every sub-community, school, crèche, adult education organiser, organisation of undocumented farm-workers, politician, but also municipal gardener and housing corporation executive, all of these individuals and organisations seem to have overlapping ambitions and a vision for what urban agriculture could mean for them. When I present my own vision and ask if they would be interested in collaborating, so far everyone has been pro-active.

Does scale matter? Are there distinctions when designing sustainable solutions for a village vs. a city, for example?
Of course scale makes a difference when designing a sustainable (ugh that word!) neighbourhood. There's nothing like frequent and direct contact with the people who are most affected to create a healthy collaborative design. In the Foodscape Schilderswijk project I can easily cycle to my partners and potential locations in one day. It is important that people see my face, and see me physically 'in the hood'. A similar project, in its inception in Amsterdam is comprised by a different set of socio-economic and ethnic groups located in a recently urbanised area that only 20 years ago had been farmland. In this version of my Foodscape work, the participants (housing corporations, locals) don't ordinarily come into contact with each other. This same 'urban agriculture project' will be very different in these two locations.

If you were leading the design of a sustainable village, what would you prioritise, and why? Who would you want working with you?
Mapping existing social networks, green and civic infrastructure, individuals and facilities are always the first priority. I would (and do) make an opportunity map to see what everyone I am working with wants. Once I can see what the existing desires are, I search for overlap, including with my own desires for e.g., a new form of urban agriculture, or a new food product, service or facility, and try to link the willing partners. (I also add some of my own special sauce that comes into being through interaction with the participants.)

The initial period is a sort of 'casting' to find ways to succeed even better at what folks and institutions are already doing, such as an individual teacher at a school with a talent and affinity for gardening, or a neighbourhood that just seems to get along better with each other than the other neighbourhoods, or a municipal nursery with gardeners that maintain healthy networks with local nurseries maintaining local varieties of fruit and nut trees.

I want to work with the stars of the community at every thinkable niche; a mothers' group; someone that just knows everyone at the borough council; the owner of the store where everyone hangs out; the neighbours that already have thriving gardens growing on their façades; or the lady that runs the food bank. These folks are rooted in the community and are already successful.

Is it possible to replicate the design of one village across different contexts? If so, which design elements would remain consistent no matter what? What would need to change on a case-by-case basis?
This prompts me to wonder if the CLEAR Village is about a place with no people in it. I do not have experience in this approach, preferring to work with existing communities. So far, these have all been very different from each other. The one similarity between my projects to date is the level of my own personal involvement on the street level. I haven't had the opportunity to be 'prescriptive' in my design. One process that I continually replicate is spending lots of time talking to as many people as I can during my dynamic research process and making working models with people as I go along. In the case of the Foodscape Project in The Hague, I walk/bike around and find great examples of people growing their own food, of cohesive neighbourhoods and camaraderie. I talk with local officials, folks from the schools and all levels of education. I look for great examples as one thing leads to another in an organic way. When I've tried to 'force' a product, as I did in the beginning of the Lucky Mi project, the process was like wading through cement, but once I let go and just focused on what was really going on and what people actually wanted, the process became easy.

Aside from the technique of 'dynamic research', going around meeting as many people as possible, forging REAL relationships with them, aligning their ambitions, and making working models as I go along, scale and location-location-location radically affect the process of producing the project.

Does culture play a part in the design of a sustainable village?
Commerce is a culture in and of itself. I don't see the necessity to have a 'monocultural' approach to developing a project along only commercial lines. The business people (e.g. shopkeepers) in my project do that part - because they are already skilled at doing it. My role is about imagining different ways of doing things and making models of them that might not immediately be commercial in nature. Proprietary factors and actors are vital to a project's success, but not exclusively so. Artists involved in this sort of work tend to be highly skilled at experimenting in a non-proprietary context. I think there is real value in not always having market forces set the tone for a live experiment. A project as big as the CLEAR Village project would need time to evolve organically. Once again, to gain insight in this area I would study the success of the Transition Town movement. They are very far along in this process, possibly even 'there' already, if there even is a 'there'.

And finally, business models. Are there any you know of that could inform a more robust outcome for this initiative?
My own experiments are still too young to show this, although I have every reason to be positive about this (e.g. Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking). It depends entirely on who is consuming and who is producing. I think that keeping certain parts of a project like this clear of commercialism could ultimately be a great boon to its eventual profitability. In our modern economies we shove the costs and affects on health that come with accessing cheap industrial food onto all manner of people, communities and countries, most of whom are ill-equipped to deal with these costs. Why not defer costs in one area of the CLEAR project to 'subsidise' another area in the project.
CSAs and food purchasing collectives (co-ops) are excellent examples of good business models. There is a CSA near Hamburg DE that produces vegetables, fruit, dairy and meat, asks a seasonal or yearly fee per person (I believe 150€ pp/p month) of its subscribers, and that operates a store where subscribers may take as much as they want. This system sustains the 12 or so people that run the farm and the 250 people that are subscribed to the CSA. I met a subscriber that told me that when there were surpluses in the farm produce, CSA members would transform the food into longer shelf-life versions (like strawberry preserves or raspberry jam) and place it back into the store, instead of let the food in the 'free shop' go rotten.