Integrating sustainability practices using the viable system model.

This paper represents an effort to explore the use of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to design human communities that foster adaptation to criteria of sustainability in our natural and social environments. With the projected rise in sea level and other changes that accompany warming temperatures, it seems probable that many communities, even some large cities, will have to be abandoned and their populations relocated. This difficult circumstance could create tens of millions of climate change refugees. It could be met with the failure and incompetence that characterized and still characterizes the response to Hurricane Katrina or it could provide an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that combines a low impact on the environment without sacrificing quality of life. Using the framework of the VSM, three levels of recursion will be explored: the household, the neighbourhood and the city. It will be possible to draw upon lessons learned about building and maintaining cities in different climates and under different conditions over the centuries and from the construction of ‘new towns’ in the past 50 years. It has been characteristic of communities that regularly endured environmental challenges to have fostered means of collaboration and co-operation to address them and to constrain competition within bounds that did not threaten their common survival. There is no shortage of ideas and designs that could be applied but there is not yet either the political or social infrastructure to integrate and implement them. Steps taken in this direction might help to coalesce the necessary political will. The following are proposed as guidelines for design using the VSM. The community and the city's external relationships with the surrounding natural, social and economic environments should be such that they can support themselves while avoiding endangering their own survival and well being or that of their surrounding environments. Their internal operations should be such that an adequate quality of life is available to everyone from the most dependent members of its society to the most productive. They should pursue these ends with a view to maintaining a balance between collaboration/symbiosis and competition and with the fewest restrictions on the autonomy of members consistent with the other guidelines. The VSM can be both a template for design and a framework for discussion of what sustainable communities in a time of climate change might look like. Such discussions would be facilitated by Beer's Team Syntegrity process that he invented as a companion to the VSM. The process provides a whole system, high variety structure that gives equivalent status to each participant and viewpoint. This high level of communication will help to provide the cohesiveness that is needed when choices must be made and hardship shared in order to achieve a new equilibrium with the environment. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]