28 C O N T E X T 1 7 4 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2 SANDY HALLIDAY A short history of good ideas Important ideas that have emerged in one designer’s lifetime raise questions about our current resilience, and the legacy of buildings and practices we pass on to the future. When working with heritage there is value in considering how our professional experience has engaged, impacted, informed and perhaps disrupted our thinking. Here I consider the impact of ideas that have emerged in my lifetime on my approach to design. I start with the Club of Rome. This was a gathering of 30 influential people who first met in 1968 to discuss contemporary concerns. The issues included resource depletion, pollution, waste, disaffection, urban sprawl, wealth inequality, loss of soil fertility and biodiversity. The common theme was problems relevant to all nations, but too enormous for individual nations to respond to adequately.They required a global response. We can recognise all of the issues as more relevant today. This global assembly occurred at an interesting and optimistic time. It was at the end of the ‘green revolution’. The world had experienced a period of unparalleled growth in agriculture. Globally food production had expanded by 30 per cent in 10 years. The Club of Rome identified that the growth had unintended consequences – a 300 per cent increase in the use of pesticides, and a huge surge in use and cost of nitrates and mechanical equipment. Its first report, Limits to Growth, speculated that this was unsustainable. They contrasted this kind of growth with how systems behave in nature.They tend to oscillate. A population can expand when food is abundant, but the increased population puts pressure on the environment and must then contract. The food supply can then recover. In a bad winter, mice live under the snow, owls go hungry and their population falls. In the following summer the abundant mouse population will provide for an expanding owl population. Even the universe expands and contracts. The Club of Rome identified the risk of what they called ‘overshoot’: exploiting a resource such that it could not recover. A system becomes permanently distorted and can not go back to where it was before. Failure is inevitable. The system is broken. The Club of Rome recognised that there is only one Planet Earth and it proposed risk avoidance as the only sensible option. It called for stewardship to seek to stay within the limits of the earth’s ability to cope with the pressures, and avoid overshoot.This gives rise to my Good Idea No 1: ‘Infinite growth on a finite planet is an impossibility’ (EF Schumacher) – unless you are an economist. The implication in design terms is profound. The building industry needs to move away from demolishing perfectly good buildings and instead promote a culture of care, repair, management and refurbishment to maintain our Still showing the scars of the Civil War, the 16th-century Blencow Hall, Cumbria, has been imaginatively restored. (Photo: Blackett-Ord Conservation)
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