When I was younger, I had the sometimes-inconvenient habit of saving everything – artful cardboard packaging, empty spools from thread, those funny little pie-tin-shaped paper covers keeping the drinking glasses in hotel rooms clean (do they still use those?) – driven by the vague notion that whatever I collected would someday come in useful for . . . something.
I’d become convinced at an early age of the idea that nothing was really trash. In the right place, at the right time, in large enough quantities, anything could be useful – just google “dryer lint art.” This way of thinking stretches way beyond everyday choices like recycling; In my work as an author and artist, architect and urban strategist, student of and advocate for sustainable systems, this concept has come to repeat itself as a powerful trope, illuminating all sorts of efficiencies that create healthier, more productive, more satisfying and more inspiring human experiences.
In California and Hawaii, I traveled and learned to build communities from the dirt on which they stood and to shape the land according principles of permaculture, mimicking natural systems where waste materials in one context became valuable resources in another.
When I began working with teams to build large-scale sculptures out of recycled metal for Burning Man, where discarded materials find new life and friendships are built over hundreds of hours in the piece-by-piece creation of unfathomable works of art, I came to love the idea that litter was referred to not as trash but as MOOP — Matter Out Of Place.
This naming speaks to that lifelong love of collecting, embodying a simple but potent concept: anything that can be out of place also has the potential to be in place — we can generate value and eliminate unwanted objects simply by reframing them, changing their situation or their relationship to each other.
These same principles can be applied in the urban context — to physical things like waste streams and energy usage (the consolidating of which will only become more automatic as databasing and big data analysis become more second nature and intrinsic to our daily operations) — but to less tangible and easily identifiable resource streams as well. In the fields of urban innovation and social entrepreneurship, we are beginning to rearrange the components of modern society to create new modes and systems that increasingly emphasize efficiency and synergy over consumption and competition, to the benefit of all. It’s not so different from those biological principles I mastered, and eventually led workshops in.
Many of the trendiest new urban forms - start-up spaces, business incubators, all those coworking spaces and even some coffeeshops – fill a variety of roles for the public, fostering new ways of interacting and promoting networks that, like healthy ecosystems, support growth. But at their simplest, many of these spaces take on the role of collector: adding value by grouping things (in this case, people, ideas and resources) in new ways.
This concept, inherent in the natural world, where matter is constantly broken down and rebuilt into new ways, holds the key to innovation in the man-made world as well. Those growing networks and databases allow for materials exchanges that help industries sort and use all kinds of raw resources which would otherwise go to waste. On an individual level, they provide an easy infrastructure for sharing everything from tools to cars to couches for the night and homes for the week. Used to their fullest, they might enable the trading of underused capacities of all sorts.
A parallel process is taking place in physical space, with a slow return to models arranged around the density and mutualism that sustained communities for generations. Renewed investment in city centers and the movement toward transit oriented development are obvious examples, but it’s a movement that filters all the way down to urban innovations that push for more and better public amenities, creative events where leisure time is “shared,” rather than provided to an individual user in a private home, and other structure like pop-up retail where barriers to entry which might otherwise be too high to allow an individual entrepreneur or artisan to participate in the market are lowered.
Collecting people for a given cause can also have unexpected, generative effects. Our modus operandi for generations, recognized by social and cultural critics across space and time (From Karl Marx to the incindiary creator of the Zeitgeist movies, Peter Joseph, to psychologist Jean M. Twenge, whose recent Generation Me describes how today's young people are more driven and entitled – and unhappy – than ever before) has been to seek individual fulfillment through competition and consumption. But, as these critics have commented, finally being able to look so much of what we thought we wanted in the face has left us so unhappy, prompting the question, maybe all of this striving and getting and owning isn’t really all that fulfilling.
The open source movement centers on sharing and collaboration as a “greater than the sum of its parts,” game, and in many industries, such as fashion, which have been “open source” since before the term was coined, the lack of copyright or other intellectual property protection does not hinder the proliferation of ideas, but rather enables it. More importantly, we may find the collaborative or communal model more emotionally sustainable, for most of human evolution we did things in small dedicated communities, where individual compensation took a backseat to the entire community’s continued well being. Psychologists are repeatedly finding evidence that we are chemically and psychologically hard-wired to find satisfying group interactions more nourishing to the psyche than success-based individual actions, even when the outcome of an individual or competition based event is good for the individual.
Of course, there are only so many “winning” scenarios to go around – that venture-capital deal or promotion – so even if an ambitious individual can amass a record of successes and derive happiness from it, such a scenario tends to invoke a “fixed-pie” model with regard to other competitors and to environmental and social externalities. By contrast, collaborative models rely on everyone participating in a project’s success, which can effectively “grow the pie,” creating more efficient workpaths, more prolific and beneficial new models, more creative solutions based on a wider swath of participants, and a more powerful and satisfying end result.
Doubtful that participating as a tiny individual in a large group can be as satisfying as being the star of the show? Ever participate in a flash mob? It’s a silly example, but the impact of the spontaneous, authentic, exuberant interaction – though the majority of the participants possess no special skill – is arguably far greater than, for instance, a high-cost dance performance by professionals in a theater. And while, elsewhere in these pages I’ve lamented how the rush to participate in open-source or trendy innovation has at times led to the eradication of a skill or the diminishing of a particular expertise, the flip side of that argument is that the total “mass” of what’s produced is greater, with a greater dispersal of utility, than in most situations involving true expertise – the line between audience and performer is broken down, and everyone comes away feeling that they’ve participated.
It’s what makes Burning Man Burning Man, where there are said to be “no spectators,” and where everyone participates in building a larger-than-life experience through innumerable small contributions, be they in cooking, building, engineering, massaging, fortune-telling, solar-panelling or what have you. But Burning Man is certainly not the only populist art movement to buy into the theory. Nearly a generation before anyone built anything on Baker Beach, Peter Schumann was busily spreading the Cheap Art Manifesto through his Vermont-based Bread and Puppet theater company.
When groups of volunteers collaborate on projects at Burning Man (though the same is true in many other contexts), it is often for no payoff other than the satisfaction of seeing the project born into the world. But what motivates participants during the day-to-day operations required to conceive, plan, and construct some of those truly monumental works of art may have more to do with the day-to-day environment than with a vision of the final product. Working hard among likeminded creative individuals, learning new skills, and enjoying a flexible and supportive working environment are all powerful motivators, and show up in all kinds of social ventures with no quantifiable payoff for the individual. Volunteering to build a community garden or hold a bakesale or carswash – even if you are not the direct beneficiary – has a social value, just like the quilting bees and barn raisings of yesteryear.
All of which speaks to the Matter In Place ideology: there is a reason that barns were raised and quilts were bee’d in big groups – not just that many hands made the work lighter, but that they also made it more fun. These sorts of events were social occasions for the community, and the ‘fun-factor’ acted as a commodity to pay for the input of capital – time and labor – that was freely donated.
As eye-roll-inducing as it may be to describe this process in terms bland enough to be borrowed from Economics 101, we’ve become so automatically and unthinkingly dependent on consumption-based modes for our entertainment and social stimulation that it seems non-trivial to describe how satisfying group interactions could slowly begin to stand in for that CD purchased or Pay-Per- viewed. The also non-trivial result is, of course, a stronger overall community with a richer social structure and more resources to go around.
It’s a model that applies not only to artistic caprices, not only to community enterprises, but to all manner of human endeavors. It’s the coworking space that prompted this musing through its commitment to providing not only the ability to share physical resources, but more importantly, mentorship, community input and cross-pollination.
Ask any collector: it’s a careful act. Amassing things, yes. That’s the creating efficiencies part of the story. Ten people sharing one printer in a communal office is better than each person buying their own. But collecting is also about creating a narrative. You pick and choose objects that support each other, that multiply the power of those numbers by the quality and type of their interactions, the contrasts and repetitions, to create a story that otherwise couldn’t be told. And that is where participating in community trumps individual ownership or success any day.
