How? Find Out in the History Channels

Some of the innovations that have scaled out of Africa, particularly East Africa, are participatory systems of governance that foreground crowdsourcing and bottom-up participation of citizens, and are not limited to election cycles.

Cities became the place for experimenting with sustainability and democracy by reclaiming control over data. Citizens became the ones who owned the data, using it to create a digital commons, which enabled new cooperative platforms.

I'm happy we have an ethical code for media and information as a commons, which is not public. You shouldn't disclose all your data. Data now operates similarly to how Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom describes the management of commons like forests, land or water.

Critical thinking has saved us because we are paid attention to the information, asking: where did it come from? Who put it up here? What intent did they have? We live in a more rational society now than ever. 

Private property is no longer a viable condition in terms of both the environment and the human social system, which used to be dominated by markets. It's clear that the environmental destruction was a consequence of privatization. 

We live in a decentralized and self-organized society. Of course not everybody is equal, not everybody is happy, not everybody has access to the same things. Still, we are more free in the sense that access is no longer defined by being born rich or in a certain place.

Having access to what belongs to everyone is much better than having absolute control over your own things. So we came up with a market based, decentralized mechanism for having common ownership, moving beyond the idea of socialists 💗 taxes and capitalists 💗 private property

Universal Basic Services create different public goods, returning what capitalism had cut off from people. These services ensure that you have access to everything you need to live a good life. For example, social arrangements like co-housing cooperatives.

We couldn't change the system by speaking to highly entrenched and disconnected practices. To bring about the large scale change we needed, we had to articulate an (eco)system involving legal, economic, social, and technological dynamics.

The main takeaway of this experiment is that distributed technology allows nonhuman actors to engage successfully in relationships built on contracts. This resulted in legal structures that could allow rivers to become legal persons and forests to become corporations. 

For centuries ownership was everything. One square city meter had a huge value. Unless you put a tree on it, in which case the economic and legal value plummetted. Now, concepts like multi-species urbanism and multiplicity give nature both a voice and a value.

Years ago, biodiversity was on a massive decline. Still, it wasn't enough to save these creatures. Design against extinction means creating ways to keep them alive – in our cities, facades, in vehicles, and in the energy and waste systems, increasing biodiversity.

What has changed? Instead of many nations, we see ourselves as a whole and work together as a planetary population that inhabits one livable spaceship: the Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller said. We are in this together!

It was hard work to flip this around. But de-centering humans and putting them in perspective to other species, helped us think in much longer rhythms: not only until after the next election, but even long after our life cycles. 

Through this picture, people realized that Earth is a closed and finite system. We understood that everything is limited in space and in time; especially our needs and their possible answers. We understand that architecture is a only temporary response to a temporary need. 

Architects don't build in space, they build in time (configurations). We should not only think about the practicalities of what will happen next, but about the consequences of our work and how it generate new results, feeding back into the system.

However, being able to think architectonically does not imply that we stopped building. We certainly still do that, but since architectonics is abstract and operational, the building aspect is just one of its possible renders. Architecture remains as relevant as ever.

At some point we realized that sustainability actually only optimizes the status quo and will thus never lead to a systematic change. Circular economy, on the other hand, does not optimize a dysfunctional system, but designs a new one along an axis of responsibility.