Coevolutionary Design & Resilience Planning
Coevolutionary Design is a uniquely adaptable planning, policy and design framework that we created for the design of communities, community planning, law and policy, and university and government initiatives. Our Coevolutionary Design framework emulates elemental patterns of what Resilience Theory calls the Panarchy and what Biomimicry calls Life’s Deep Principles. The Panarchy is, essentially, the whole of the Biosphere & Ethnosphere (what Harvard Ethnobotanist Wade Davis describes at the ‘cultural-web-of-life’) contextualized over different scales of Time, Place and Pace. From leaf-to-tree-to-forest-to-biome and person-t0-family-to-community-to-law-to-belief-to-myth, or site-to-structure-to-skin-to-services-to-space-to-stuff (Brand 1994), our buildings and communities interact at different scales of Time, Place and Pace. Our work, essentially, applies Life’s Patterns to the Panarchy, to preserve, restore and enhance health and resilience.
Creating a Community Deconstruction Infrastructure is an example of one of our Coevolutionary Design projects. A Natural Law is Reciprocity, i.e., in natural systems, decomposition and return recapture nutrients for the community in ways that preserve life and build fertility. By emulating Life’s Patterns and tying key elements of a Deconstruction Infrastructure to different scales of the Panarchy, a critical path in terms of economic profitability, ecological preservation, and community benefit emerges.
Our Coevolutionary services include:
- Functional Resilience Design & Planning. We assist clients, universities, community initiatives and others to develop projects, plans, and initiatives based on scientific and performance-based measures of sustainability, predominantly in the built environment.
- Sustainability Consulting & Coevolutionary Research. We provide deep research, technical support, and project guidance regarding how to integrate Life’s Deep Practices and Sustainability Science in your organization, business, initiative or project, in ways that optimize both profitability and biocultural restoration.