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Abstract
The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating, caring for and repairing the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by a utilitarian positioning of natural environments by economic science. Ecologists have gone further in capturing the interdependence of economies and ecologies with the concept of socio-ecological resilience. Of concern, however, is the persistence of a vision of an economy ordered by market determinations in which there is no role for ethical negotiation between humans and with the non-human world. This paper reframes economy–ecology relations, resituating humans within ecological communities and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It advances the idea of community economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) and argues that these must be built if we are to sustain life in the Anthropocene. The argument is illustrated with reference to two construction projects situated in ‘Monsoon Asia’.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Ethan Miller, Isaac Lyne and Stephen Cairns for the invaluable theoretical and empirical insights they shared which informed this paper. Thanks are also due to members of the Community Economies Research Network, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this special issue for their critical and clarifying comments that have pushed us to be more explicit about our argument. The authors also thank the organizers of the Architecture and Resilience on a Human Scale Conference, University of Sheffield, September 2015, where the kernel of this paper was presented by Katherine Gibson as a keynote.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The Anthropocene is the name given to the newest geological era that follows the Holocene and marks the beginning of human activity as a major shaper of earth systems (Crutzen & Stoermer, Citation2000; Gibson, Rose, & Fincher, Citation2015). Steffan et al. (Citation2015) argue for resituating the start of the Anthropocene from the beginning of industrialization in 1750 to 1950 when ‘The Great Acceleration’ of economic growth and ecological interference took off. The term ‘Anthropocene’ has become increasingly contested, some preferring Captialocene or Plantationocene (Haraway, Citation2015). Haraway (Citation2015, p. 161) argues for the Anthropocene as a boundary event, thus opening up the question of what might emerge (other than dithering) to characterize the era we are entering.
2 As developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Thanks to Ethan Miller for these insights and clarifications (personal communication, 20 February 2016).
3 The move to recognize ‘the economy’ as an historical, discursive creation with real effects, rather than as an objective ontological category (Mitchell, Citation1998, Citation2008; Callon, Citation2007), invites further interrogation of the inclusions and exclusions that constitute modern economic knowledge.
4 The Next System Project convenes essays on many of these alternative economy approaches (see http://thenextsystem.org/new-systems-possibilities-and-proposals/).
5 Jacobs’ discussion of ecologically inspired regional development has been applied at the scale of localities or neighbourhoods by Gibson, Cahill, and McKay (Citation2010).
6 This formulation follows that of philosopher Nancy (Citation2000), but extends his thinking from the being-in-common of humans to the more than human.
7 Other matters of concern where this co-learning is taking place include the rights of food-producing animals, soil health and disease management.
8 Ms Sengkeang, a resident of Koh Paen Island, reports that the bridge has been built every year since the fall of the Pol Pot regime 40 years ago. Mr Kroch Sokheng, also a resident of the island, remembers his grandmother saying it was being built annually when she was born, which places it as a century-old practice. Our thanks to Isaac Lyne and Heng Seanghath for gathering this information and for sharing their knowledge of the bamboo bridge.
9 Michelle Bastian argues that appreciating other (non-linear) temporalities is an important part of reworking narrow Western conceptions of agency and allowing for nature to be rewritten ‘as a powerful creative actor’ (Bastian, Citation2009, p. 116).
10 Thanks are due to Stephen Cairns for discussions over the years about the development of Batam and access to the evolving Tropical Town project. Observations included in this discussion also date from field work conducted by Katherine Gibson in December 2000.
11 For the Tropical Town Project, see http://www.fcl.ethz.ch/project/tropical-town/. While Tropical Town is similar to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena’s well-publicized incremental housing project in Quinta Monroy (Aravena & Iacobelli, Citation2013; Vale et al., Citation2014), there are some important differences. For example, Tropical Town explicitly designs for an integration of diverse livelihood functions into the residential neighbourhood.
12 This is a key objective of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Strengthening Economic Resilience in Monsoon Asia’ (see the Funding section).