Social and Ecological Benefits of Public Landscape Design
Public landscape design plays a crucial role in shaping the physical and social environment of our cities, towns, and neighbourhoods.
One of the dispiriting of the modern development models is the strong and pervasive influence of elitism on them. We have an ocean of research and scholarship that is churning out mountains of reports and studies. But it has not been able to make a substantive transformative impact on the development landscape. Many of the outcomes have been purely academic. We need more dedicated, courageous, and purpose-driven champions who can creatively apply their core competencies to enhance people’s well-being. Similarly, we need to design tools and techniques that can help translate these insights into effective public policies and professional practices that can sustainably deliver quality outcomes on an exponential scale.
The output in terms of ideas generated and the value created by it is not commensurate with the pace at which the government and donors are investing funds in research laboratories. Researchers are not able to deliver real-world solutions of value to stakeholders.
Most academic work is shared within a restricted community, rather than among policymakers or businesses, and remains largely disconnected from practice. Emphasizing the objective of knowledge Confucius said: “The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it”. Academic research needs to be designed not to win accolades within the fraternity but to discover something new that will have a real social impact and bring science closer to society. Young scientists can help bridge the gap between research and reality.
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We need to reassess our current systems of education, governance, administration, designing and try to understand how we can make them meaningful to the new challenges and their complexities. We have to shift from a ‘one size fits all” approach to accepting diversity as a necessary condition for sustainability. The apparatus set up by the elite has isolated it from the majority. As a result, we keep away those for whose betterment the policies are being designed.
It is now being universally acknowledged that if we want to move the needle on tough problems, reusing the same old frameworks is not good enough. What is needed is to transform the entire development paradigm so that it addresses the new complexities resulting from social and economic upheavals. The conventional development paradigm has not been of much help.
There is a firm opinion on both sides of the ideological divide that the system is broken, and needs to radically change. It is believed to be rigged against people whose condition it is meant to transform. Perhaps this is the reason why we see constant resentment among commoners against “the system” because they do not see it delivering societal progress. Instead, it is siphoning the gains of development to the elite. It is being argued that the people who are most likely to lose from genuine social change ~ the elite ~ have placed themselves in charge of this change, often with the passive assent of those most in need of it. They have devised myriad subterfuges to show they are changing things on the surface while at the same time ensuring that nothing has changed, and the status quo remains.
The elite approach advocates the exclusion of local leaders from community development programmes while the co-opt strategy favours working with them. There’s also “elite control” where local elites positively monopolise development resources that are meant for the impoverished. In a system of multiple elites, no major party has a strong incentive for ensuring that growth is inclusive. Those left behind by the development train are now seeking out alternatives. There is a tribe of development professionals ~ mostly locally bred intellectual activists ~ who are questioning the relevance of Euro-US development policies. They are not just talking about an individual, misguided projects, but the entire model. They believe that development aid merely exports those countries’ notions of poverty, consumerism and wealth to traditional communities, creating an unhealthy dependency. They argue that such aid does more to boost the donors’ economies than to improve the lives of the people it is assumed to help.
The development fraternity, which represents an alternative ideology, feels that to check inequality, ordinary people need to take control, as opposed to being on the receiving end, of economics. Many of the interventions championed by them ~ whether they’re focused on liberalization, industrialization, or modernization ~ have resulted in the exclusion of the poor from a fair share of the benefits of economic growth.
The elite community seems constantly and restlessly in search of a singular approach. The flaw in this system is that each new approach fails to break out of the underlying technocratic and specialised paradigm. The contrast between India’s economic might and the reality of its crumbling development sectors ~ with India ranked among the lowest in the Human Development Index ~ points to what is wrong with our development paradigm.
Conceited professionals are driven by a naïve urge to see themselves solve others’ problems instead of assisting them in fixing such problems by themselves. This approach has seeded many development failures. The right and wise approach is to let the programmes be designed by people who know best what would work in their community. Our role is to get connected, pitched in and hand over future ownership to the local technicians. Consultants are like burnished glass ~ living their whole lives off the reflected glory of the organisations to which they were privileged to provide consultancy. Nevertheless, consultants do have a role to play, and none of this is to diminish the role of pro- fessional outsiders who have successfully immersed themselves in native communities. They have fashioned pro- grammes from the inside out. They have only to reaffirm their respect for the wisdom and ability of those whose lives they hope to improve and remain persistent in this approach.
We also have to do away with our obsession with consultants. Most development academics and professionals have little real-world experience. The underdeveloped and marginalised communities are highly stratified, each one different from the other, and they need development experts who understand the subtle nuances of the dynamics at play in these communities. Intellectual sophistry cannot become a substitute for local-level social and economic engineering.
The consultants stress the larger goals over the autonomy of societies to choose their path, implying thereby that there is only one correct answer. They do not tolerate dissent and also don’t want to concede freedom to local representatives to choose their destinies. They see poverty as a purely technological problem, to be solved by engineering and the natural sciences, to the exclusion of social sciences and native plumbing skills.
Community development cannot become an academic dis- cipline. Universities can’t offer clinical courses on the subject. Leadership in community development programmes is a clinical art and people need the experience to grasp the nuances.
It may not be possible to locate a common denominator for a successful development manager or to lay down a standardised blueprint for a good de- velopment programme from their own experience, but development veterans can spell out the ingredients one may need to be successful. But the practitioners will still have to work out their recipes for blending these ingredients in the right proportions. There is so much cultural diversity even in neighbouring villages that a blueprint for one village may need a drastic change for the next.
Elitism has given rise also to smug techno-utopians, who see potentially revolutionary possibilities in the proliferation of cell phones and other shiny gadgets that appear and vanish with the rapidity of fashion. The promises are very seductive. Technology is revolutionizing numerous aspects of people’s lives, but not for all. We need to understand the challenges, blind spots, pain points, and biases that prevent us from designing and implementing solutions that address a community’s full experience, and not just the process of communicating with each other.
The reality is much harder than we imagine. It is easier to spread technology than to bring about extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. It is easier to purchase a thousand PCs than to provide real education for a thousand children. It is much less agonizing to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before drinking it.
The “technological layer” is only another tool ~ the means to an end ~ and not a solution in and of itself. In certain conditions it may be the most powerful tool, enabling services to be delivered efficiently at scale with great benefits. It has to do with how we use it and how we define the outcomes. The unfulfilled promise of past technologies must caution us against the optimistic advocates of the cutting edge, who believe their favourite new tool is genuinely different from all others that came before.
(The writer is an author, researcher and development professional. He can be reached at moinqazi123@gmail.com)
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