A final post this week to draw together the long form posts into a simple flow.
Across these posts I’ve explored how infrastructure shapes the metabolism of the economy, the insufficiency of system resilience on its own, and how mindsets shape our view of infrastructure.
Taken together they suggest a simple flow for thinking about regenerative infrastructure.
Mindset>Brief>Ideas>Tests>Iterate
Mindset
We start by using the Changing Mindsets motif to challenge our assumptions about infrastructure
Brief
We create a brief that moves beyond delivering infrastructure efficiently to seeing infrastructure as part of what enables humans and the living world to thrive together.
Ideas
We fill our Kalideacope with two libraries:
- Resilient systems architecture
- Ecological participation patterns
And we turn our Kalideascope with an additional library:
- Regenerative mindset prompts
Different combinations generate new possibilities for infrastructure design
Tests
We test the ideas against three criteria for regenerative infrastructure:
- Metabolism — does the system operate within ecological limits?
- Ecological participation — does it strengthen living systems?
- Resilience — is the system well structured?
Iterate
Keep going until the idea meets the brief.
Or we change the brief to a better brief because the brief we first thought of is almost certainly not the right one.
And that shouldn’t be a surprise because regenerative infrastructure is not the conventional way of thinking about infrastructure. We should expect the thinking process to be hard.
These tools are here to help.