Creating social change has been on my mind quite a bit the last few years. Let's be honest, we have a lot of issues to address, from institutional racism, to the ever growing wealth gap, to our ultimate threat, climate change, and they all require change. My colleague Stuart Shell and I weaved the idea of social change into an online presentation we recently gave to BNIM (3/23/2020) on health and productivity in the built environment. A significant portion of the discussion involved methods (including quantified productivity/health estimates and ethnography) to help facilitate both health/wellness and sustainable decision-making during the planning/design/construction process.

While the technical, evidence-based approaches for achieving health/wellness and sustainability are themselves certainly important, I think Stuart and I are both increasingly driven to address the arguably more important issue of actually facilitating the decisions to pursue them. Nor are we only concerned with the individual project level, but also the larger social, political, and economic spheres of interaction that more often than not constrain individual project level decisions.

Not long ago I wrote an article for ArchDaily about this, and the role the AEC Industry has in creating necessary change (From Australia to AEC Industry Action). And now the destabilization we’re experiencing from the novel coronavirus and resulting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is providing some insights into how we could make needed changes in these larger spheres of interaction (some are covered here - Coronavirus Holds Key Lessons on How to Fight Climate Change).

In many ways the virus and resulting disease exacerbate existing inequities. The greater access to testing that the wealthy, famous, and powerful have is one example (as is their access to higher quality healthcare in general). Another is the risk that some of society's lowest paid workers now face on the front lines, fulfilling critical needs necessary to just keep society afloat. The fact that CEO's aren't now manning checkout lanes, delivering packages, or caring for the elderly or critically ill speaks volumes to disconnects in how society defines value.

At the same time, the virus has created a very real sense of urgency, shared purpose, and unity to address it, sparking rapid change and action, including within the AEC Industry. Though admittedly, there's still likely a significant amount of uncertainty and hardship yet to come.

But the current sense of urgency felt by many building owners, facility managers, community leaders, and others, to address the immediate threat of the novel coronavirus in their facilities will fade once we’re through this crisis. Once we have a vaccine and herd immunity is developed, other short-term considerations, such as initial costs and annual profit margins, will again take precedence. They’ll override decisions to increase ventilation while minimizing energy consumption, just as they often override bigger decisions to pursue WELL Building certification, Net Zero, and the like.

But what if we awoke each day with the shared purpose and generosity that we often have in times of disaster? That many of us are experiencing right now as we face the coronavirus threat? How can we mindfully apply lessons from the behavioral sciences and our evolutionary history to increase this sense of share purpose and generosity, and modify collective values that currently drive our larger spheres of interaction? Values that are currently rooted in the myth of “homo-economicus," disconnected from what’s most important to a sustainably-functioning human society. Can we modify them to reflect the actual relative worth of a health care worker's services versus those of a CEO, or of clean air versus frequent smartphone upgrades, or of Net Zero versus the status quo?

And what role does the AEC Industry have in doing this? Is it through education, application, advocacy, activism - applying what political and economic clout we have in making change? Do we model it to our clients and the rest of the world? Yes, the questions are rhetorical. We obviously need to do all of this.

For example, modeling can be done through such things as participating in the JUST program, a management tool for helping organization's improve their social equity. Doing these things ourselves (here's BranchPattern's), encouraging our clients to do so, and generally advocating that they be done are helpful. A key component of this particular program is transparency, and behavioral and evolutionary research indicates that transparency is one important measure for increasing decisions among an organization, a community, or a society that benefit the group as a whole. It also discourages “selfish” behaviors that benefit individuals at the expense of the group.

And transparency is integral to several of the eight core principles of cooperation discovered by political scientist/sociologist, and Nobel Economics prize winning, Dr. Elinor Ostrom. She found that these principles, listed in the image below, are common to our species – to all groups that are able to successfully cooperate.

If they are successfully implemented, then decisions that benefit the whole group, like sustainable and health/wellness design decisions, almost become automatic. This happens because the focus on equity, on human plurality, shared purpose, and long term, group level factors is embedded within these principles. They are extremely effective because they evolved as a suite of successful group level characteristics during our long evolutionary history living in smaller hunter/gatherer bands – they’re a legacy of our evolutionary past – part of what it means to be human.

Using methods developed by other researchers and practitioners, we’ve begun exploring how to implement them on individual projects - see Blurring the Line Between “Others” – A Practical Application of Cultural Multilevel Selection Theory. Others are also looking at how to scale these upwards to the community, national, and even global scale. See Prosocial World and Evolving a Sustainable Future in the United Kingdom.

The next six to 18 months will likely bring with it a high degree of uncertainty and destabilization, with a period of recovery required. But as I indicated above, it could also bring insights and opportunities for making major structural changes at all levels of society, from the individual project to the globe. We might as well take this opportunity to improve how we interact with one another. Significant changes are necessary to address climate change anyway.

Improving life through better built environments is BranchPattern's purpose. But without addressing the myriad of constraints that exist within the larger spheres of interaction we all swim in, full realization of our purpose is unobtainable. It's certainly not what it needs to be to address climate change. Ostrom's principles and Prosocial World may not be the full answer, but their implementation at the project level, and advocacy for implementation at larger levels, may be a place to start.

We're open to exploring these and alternatives with others, as well as working together for change through education, application, advocacy, activism, and modeling behavior. After all, rapid, monumental change requires collective action.