John Thackara on Slums as Design Inspiration

I was at the centennial celebration of the University of Michigan's Taubman School of Architecture and Planning this past weekend, and was treated to a wonderful address by John Thackara, among the highpoints:

Just as biomimicry learns from millions of years of natural evolution, we can adapt the social innovation of other times and places to our present, ultra-modern needs.

For example, a lot of people already know how to live more lightly than we do. Hundreds of millions of poor people practise advanced resource efficiency every day of their lives. That’s because they are too poor to waste resources like we rich folk do.

Design schools should relocate en masse to favelas and slums. These informal economies are sites of intense social and business innovation

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Paul Hawken reckons that over one million organizations, populated by 100 million people, are engaged in grass roots activity designed to address climate and other environmental issues. This worldwide movement of movements flies under the radar, he believes, but "collectively, this constitutes the single biggest movement on earth”

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Big companies, and governments, are also readying themselves for transformational change. I promise you that strange bedfellows will be teaming up in the near future.

Eugenio Barba calls this “the dance of the big and the small”.

Of course, the whole text is on John's Doors of Perception blog.