How Can Landscape Architecture Influence Systemic Change to Achieve Sustainable Cities and Regions

This paper presents how the ideas of landscape, design quality and drawings can influence systemic change to result in sustainable cities and regions. The research related to this paper explores project frameworks and design methods in order to reveal innovative ways and processes for creating environmentally friendly cities and regions that will have the power to adapt and mitigate climatic issues of the future. Through a series of explorations on existing landscape projects and while using a series of stakeholder engagement workshops contacted at a pan-European level the paper examines ways in which systemic change is possible and the outcomes it has in relation to the landscape. Using previously implemented and ongoing landscape projects such as the Room for the River (the Netherlands) and the West Midlands National Park (UK), the paper discusses how bold landscape-led visions influence decision making and support systemic change on a spatial scale. Drawing on experience gained during a series of stakeholder engagement workshops, where the projects of the Tame Valley Wetlands Partnership (UK) and the Urban Farming and Growing Network (UK) were selected as case studies, the research presents key findings and presents lessons learned that can build capacity and improve the understanding and management of stakeholders when it comes to spatial planning and urban design. The paper argues that a new way of thinking in design, policy or governance is not enough if these disciplines act individually. The breakthrough comes when each discipline collaborates with the aim to future proof our cities and regions. By presenting pioneering examples and models giving us tools for a systemic change, the paper aims to demonstrate that large scale developments can be brilliant examples of the new methodologies applied and lessons learnt. This research concludes that systemic change is represented across all levels, policy, decision making, governance, design and implementation if the aim is to deliver a sustainable city.

Bail and Pretrial Justice in the United States: A Field of Possibility

In this review of scholarship on bail and pretrial justice in the United States, we analyze how the field of bail operates (and why it operates as it does), focusing on its official and unofficial objectives, core assumptions and values, power dynamics, and technologies. The field, we argue, provides extensive opportunities for generating revenue and containing, controlling, and changing defendants and their families. In pursuit of these objectives, actors consistently generate harms that disproportionately affect low-income people of color and amplify social inequalities. We close with an analysis of political struggles over bail, including current and emerging possibilities for both reformist and radical change. In this, we urge scholars toward sustained engagement with people and organizations in criminalized communities, which pushes scholars to reconsider our preconceptions regarding safety, justice, and the potential for systemic change and opens up new avenues for research and public engagement.

Towards more inclusive metrics and open science to measure research assessment in Earth and natural sciences

Science's success and effect measures are built on a system that prioritizes citations and impact factors. These measurements are inaccurate and biased against already under-represented groups, and they fail to convey the range of individuals' significant scientific contributions, especially open science. We argue for a transition in this out-of-date value system that promotes science by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. To achieve systemic change, it will necessitate a concerted effort led by academic leaders and administrators.

Integrating Service Learning With Systemic Change

This chapter examines the redesign of the Petey Greene Program (the PGP), which prepares undergraduate and graduate student volunteers at 30 higher education institutions to tutor people in prison. Through a redesign process, the PGP shifted from a service learning organization that only supplements existing prison education programs with volunteer tutors to one that also pursues systemic improvement in educational access for justice-impacted people and facilitates volunteer activism. The chapter explores how service learning programs may perpetuate unjust systems if they are not integrated into systemic change initiatives and offers a guide for using service learning programs as a platform for pursuing systemic change. The case study illustrates how higher education institutions can partner with external organizations to educate justice-oriented citizens who understand and address the structural root causes of injustice.

Focus on Outcomes: Fostering Systemic Departmental Improvements

This article describes how a focus on outcomes can be a tool for guiding systemic change. By focusing on positive outcomes to be achieved, a group can guide its collective efforts toward an ideal future rather than becoming fixated on individual problems to solve. While there is support for an outcome-guided approach in the literature on individual and organizational change, this approach has not been used extensively to support department-level changes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

Panmorphic Crisis: Cultural Rupture and Systemic Change

The systemic community has cultivated a talent for living with perturbation and a graceful approach to not knowing. In this extremely unsettled era of what I am calling panmorphic crisis so much is in urgent need of our attention. In this paper, I discuss some of the many systems in play creating this panmorphic crisis and discuss the impact of changing temporality. Our existing approaches to therapy and the training of practitioners may not be enough to see us out of one era and meet the needs of a new, emergent world. To create a state of preparedness to change may involve some degree of fundamental overhaul structurally and theoretically. I go on to consider approaches to disruption and consider the homeostatic pull towards restorative positions. Crises create opportunities for not only exploring ideas and practices which we take for granted but also for re-organising the cultural foundations on which we build worlds with each other. I reflect on how the myth of return-to-normal is a dangerous agenda when the culture being restored is infused with historical social injustices. In order for systemic therapy and training programmes to make changes that are culturally relevant, we need to study and alter the impact on our work of colonising and pathologising practices and theory. I discuss systemic liminality, its limits and the impact of disruption to our cultural rhythms. Later, I propose the concept of Stolpersteine, stumbling blocks, to help us encounter hidden histories and our prejudices, and offer some questions for us to consider in our undertaking to decolonise and depathologise our practice and theory to meet the challenges of transmaterial living systems.

Complex System Design for Social Innovation in Aotearoa

<p>There is a need for large-scale, societal, systems-level transition to a better and more sustainable future (Transition Design, 2018) promoting prosperity for all and protecting the planet; addressing challenges such as poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice (United Nations SDGs, 2018). Creating change in a world defined by increasing complexity is difficult, and we face an array of these complex ‘wicked’ problems (Conway et al. 2017). In Aotearoa, New Zealand, we need to address these and other ‘wicked’ problems; particularly in their disparity for women, solo-parent families, Māori, Pasifika peoples and people with disabilities (UNESCO Report, 2018). Especially as a bi-cultural nation with indigenous peoples with significant disparities between Māori and Pākehā and growing gaps in most social indi- cators (Durie, 1999). Given the scale and complexity of these challenges, we need to find different ways of thinking, being and doing (Innovate Change, n.d) to address them; in achieving integrative, sustainable and equitable approaches to ‘wicked’ problems we require multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, seeing, being and acting (Adams, et al., 2019). The central enquiry in this research is in these ways of thinking, being and doing across the disciplines and theories of social innovation, systems theory and thinking, participatory and co-design, and complexity theory and sensemaking. It considers how they are and may contribute to radical, systemic forms of social change and the conditions, these may require, within ourselves as practitioners as well as the systems we are looking to change. This research started with and was shaped by insights from interviews held with Aotearoa practitioners operating in spaces of systemic change; including social innovators, participatory and system designers, and public policy and wellbeing economy experts. It provides the research direction for evidence, literature and discourse analysis and emerging critical themes and concepts, proving critical for practice and practitioners within an Aotearoa context. A ‘prototype’ model is presented intending to enable reflective practice in engagement with and contextualisation of the core concepts, considering the key ways of thinking, being and doing those of us operating in systemic social change need to engage with. It is generated from synthesised insights from interviews, literature review and personal critical reflections and experience as a practitioner; shifting the dialogue from one of ‘interdisciplinary’ as working together to ‘integrated’ as being together to contribute more effectively to systemic social change. This can be explored further engaging participatory methods with change agents, practitioners and those with lived experience in systemic change and social innovation.</p>

Complex System Design for Social Innovation in Aotearoa

<p>There is a need for large-scale, societal, systems-level transition to a better and more sustainable future (Transition Design, 2018) promoting prosperity for all and protecting the planet; addressing challenges such as poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice (United Nations SDGs, 2018). Creating change in a world defined by increasing complexity is difficult, and we face an array of these complex ‘wicked’ problems (Conway et al. 2017). In Aotearoa, New Zealand, we need to address these and other ‘wicked’ problems; particularly in their disparity for women, solo-parent families, Māori, Pasifika peoples and people with disabilities (UNESCO Report, 2018). Especially as a bi-cultural nation with indigenous peoples with significant disparities between Māori and Pākehā and growing gaps in most social indi- cators (Durie, 1999). Given the scale and complexity of these challenges, we need to find different ways of thinking, being and doing (Innovate Change, n.d) to address them; in achieving integrative, sustainable and equitable approaches to ‘wicked’ problems we require multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, seeing, being and acting (Adams, et al., 2019). The central enquiry in this research is in these ways of thinking, being and doing across the disciplines and theories of social innovation, systems theory and thinking, participatory and co-design, and complexity theory and sensemaking. It considers how they are and may contribute to radical, systemic forms of social change and the conditions, these may require, within ourselves as practitioners as well as the systems we are looking to change. This research started with and was shaped by insights from interviews held with Aotearoa practitioners operating in spaces of systemic change; including social innovators, participatory and system designers, and public policy and wellbeing economy experts. It provides the research direction for evidence, literature and discourse analysis and emerging critical themes and concepts, proving critical for practice and practitioners within an Aotearoa context. A ‘prototype’ model is presented intending to enable reflective practice in engagement with and contextualisation of the core concepts, considering the key ways of thinking, being and doing those of us operating in systemic social change need to engage with. It is generated from synthesised insights from interviews, literature review and personal critical reflections and experience as a practitioner; shifting the dialogue from one of ‘interdisciplinary’ as working together to ‘integrated’ as being together to contribute more effectively to systemic social change. This can be explored further engaging participatory methods with change agents, practitioners and those with lived experience in systemic change and social innovation.</p>