Sacred Civics - Building Seven Generation Cities
Abstract: Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature. The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love—matters. Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities.
The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love—matters.
Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities.
From intro chapters:
Sacred civics invites us to question why cities exist and to deconstruct assumptions about how we build them and why. As a practice, it involves deep listening, unlearning and relearning, and daring to challenge and change dominant paradigms. Sacred civics applies a relational worldview to city building that sees cities as complex organisms comprising social-ecological systems and webs of relationship. This spirituality draws on Indigenous teachings and worldviews and recognizes the agency of people and nature.
The dominant narrative of cities as separate from nature reproduces itself in cultural artifacts, including on screens and in books. It pervades cognitive models across traditions, and even futurists rarely represent cities in decades and centuries to come with nature as having any agency. And while there are wonderful exceptions to this lack of urban–nature imaginary, they are notable for their relatively small number.9 Sacred civics is intended as a galvanizing invitation and a cultivation of capability to transcend the persistent, cultural narrative of separation and its continued reproduction in the space and imaginaries of cities.
The technocratic tendency to reduce cities to categorization by issue, sector, discipline, or component parts helps with analysis, study, and prediction, but does little to create collective imagination and raise expectations about how differently cities could be conceived.
Three core arguments underlie our sacred civics thesis: (1) cities are critical sites of societal transformation; (2) holism, including attention to the sacred, is needed to help upend dominant patterns that shape current city building; and (3) enacting a sacred civics means honoring higher order responsibilities and accountabilities.
At the heart of current societal crises is the Western addiction to a certain worldview of globalism that stands in opposition to the global solidarity, or internationalism, that flows from common-good or pluriversal worldviews We need to evolve worldviews that foster core values of promoting human dignity, of respecting and being in reciprocity with nature, and of nurturing and regenerating the commons.
Suggests commoning is a key approach to upending private property relations.
Ch 3: Demonstrates how Urban Indigenous Peoples across Canada are working to decolonize and reclaim cities and public spaces to imagine and self-determine the worlds they want to live within.
Ch 4: Julian Agyeman and Kofi Boone situate the Black Commons in the contextof Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities which shows the need for Black communities to build new kinds of wealth and wellbeing that can support their ability to thrive.
Ch 5: addresses critical and growing issues regarding the mismatch of masses of people subject to precariousness and extraction of existing power structures and elites, the financialization of urban life, and the growing divide this represents for mega-cities everywhere. Engaging some of the practices of outward movement employed by youth in Jakarta’s working-class urban core, the chapter considers the configuration of collective life on the run.
Ch 6: Ginger Gosnell-Myers argues that if urban cities represent the identity of modern civilization and the power of that civilization, then the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous know- ledge from cities is a perfect illustration of contemporary colonization in modern form.
Ch 7: In her chapter, Aarathi Krishnan argues that the practice of foresight is not neutral but is conditioned by our cultural values, our economic systems and our capacity for collective imagination. She presents an emergent approach to the decoloniality of foresight that requires us to interrogate and repair the deep systemic levels of oppressions that have marginalized and minoritized so many.
See intro chapter for further summaries of chapters - 17 in total. Last chapter is co-authored by Indy Johar.
Reading these chapters reminded me of this article by Jenny Price that I love: www.thebeliever.net/thirteen-ways-of-seeing-nature-in-la/ as well as this book whose intro chapter I recently read that shows how colonial property law changed relationships to nature in the making of Calcultta: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/empire-and-ecology-in-the-bengal-delta/4741DB240F1EACD9E1AFDDDFD9EE74AA