Imagine we designed our cities on Seven Generations principles - actively stewarding our places for the future
We always like to find rich treasures in the digital commons… and we found something here with the freely downloadable full edition of a new compilation called Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities (PDF downloadable here). The Seven Generations concept comes from Native American tradition, as they explain below:
Seven generation cities are based on the Seventh Generation Principle, which is emblematic of Indigenous philosophy, ceremony, and natural law. This principle has lived through the teachings and lifeways of a multiplicity of Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and is derived from the Gayanashagowa or Great Law of Peace/ Great Binding Law, the Constitution of the Haudenosaunee Five Nations Confederacy (later six Nations) that was passed down by Peacemaker.
The Gayanashagowa forms the governance, ceremonial, spiritual, and social foundations of the Haudenosaunee Peoples, and the Seventh Generation Principle particularly articulates this ancient philosophy:
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
The thickness of your skin shall be seven spans—which is to say that you shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Your heart shall be filled with peace and good will and your mind filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the Confederacy.
With endless patience you shall carry out your duty and your firmness shall be tempered with tenderness for your people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodgement in your mind and all your words and actions shall be marked with calm deliberation.
In all of your deliberations in the Confederate Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self-interest shall be cast into oblivion. Cast not over your shoulder behind you the warnings of the nephews and nieces should they chide you for any error or wrong you may do, but return to the way of the Great Law which is just and right.
Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground—the unborn of the future Nation.
A sacred philosophy and pillar of governance for many Indigenous Nations, the Seventh Generation Principle has also inspired broader contemporary thinking and policy on sustain- ability, especially regarding long-term decisions about harvesting and use of lands, waters, and natural resources.
It requires us to be more truthful about the world we are leaving behind, and more generous, intuitive, and futures-minded in our city building and reworlding for current and subsequent generations.
Models of sacred civics leadership can co-create seven generation cities that require each of us to be caring and responsible stewards of the lands and waters at the foundation of cities, and accountable to future generations in our thinking, decisions, and actions.
The range of voices collected in this book are thrilling - particularly because there are names on the “secular” side of the case that many readers might recognise from these pages, like Tessa Britten from Participatory City in Dagenham, the commons evangelist Michel Bauwens and the urbanist Indy Johar. They’re in dialogue with a host of other, holistic urbanists from the Basque Country, Tonga, and indigenous peoples in the Americas.
The book has many scripts for action and reframing of how we act in cities, but this seven-fold plan of action we found particularly useful and guiding:
Pathways of Praxis to Awaken Seven Generation Cities
Based on wisdoms and cultures of commoning, Indigenous-inspired teachings, Afrofuturisms and other traditions, we can learn to invest in and care for natural and built civic assets of cities as what are today shared homelands for most of humanity.
The following pathways of praxis can help bring the foundational keys to civic life. The outcry and increasing momentum—particularly by younger generations—for social, ecological, and climate justice; radical inclusivity and self- determination; and transformative systems and paradigmatic change in cities across the globe is manifesting in tangible ways through inspiring forms of embodiment and action.
We’ve grouped these as seven pathways of praxis.
1. Becoming Good Ancestors
Imagining cities of the future as hubs of creativity, innovation, conviviality, wellbeing, and prosperity for forthcoming generations of peoples and natures, how can we work together to build reciprocal and conscientious forms of city building, urban land stewardship, and civic engagement that contribute to the enduring vitality of cities?
As descendants, we can learn to be good ancestors by maintaining the original instructions and sacred duties that our diverse cultural ancestors enacted through their sacred roles and responsibilities. Being conscious and responsible caretakers of the Earth, placekeepers, and city builders is good medicine for urban communities, ecologies, and public spaces, and lays a spiritual foundation for seven generation cities.
2. Reconstituting Sovereignties and Treaties, and Lawing Together
Since time immemorial, Indigenous Nations around the world have exercised their inherent rights, responsibilities, and legal and governance traditions as the original sovereign nations over the lands and natural abundance of their territories. Their diverse ways of visioning and law making were and continue to be guided by the natural laws of the land and all aspects of life, including water and land stewardship, food, health and medicine, education, and economy.
Shared leadership and decision-making processes and structures, and distribution of roles and responsibilities vary depending on the particular cultural and governance traditions of each Indigenous Nation. Indigenous lifeways, rights and relationships of reciprocity with land (as opposed to unilateral land use) and land guardianship (not ownership) need to be better recognized and embedded within settler governments as foundational to transformative reconciliation processes and public policy more generally.
3. Commoning and Futuring with Wisdom
When we strip away the status quo conventions that define current urban development, we see that cities are living, thriving organisms interconnected through a mycorrhizal-type network of relationships and flows that enliven and sustain natural and civic systems.
If we recognize the agency, inherent rights, and sovereignties of natural systems, then the concept of human ownership and control of these life systems and beings becomes untenable. Through a sacred civics lens, city-organisms comprise many diverse social, digital, and infra- structural commons that should be accessible to all residents, and collectively stewarded and governed through participatory frameworks and according to commonly developed rules and protocols.
While natural, social, and digital commons provide many resources or gifts for communities and cities, they must be activated through the social relations of decoloniality, social and ecological justice, and participatory community action and governance. Indigenous perspectives on commoning bring us to the heart of collective guardianship and property regimes, placekeeping and the interconnected relationships that bind people to land and place, and to a stewardship community.
Commons thinking and practices mirror the principles embodied by Indigenous treaties and covenants, Afro-diasporic models for mutual aid and cooperatives, and many diverse cultural examples of collective property regimes, farming cooperatives, community land stewardship, and knowledge and data commons.
As such, commoning provides a culturally relevant model for restoring a land base in cities to urban Indigenous, Black and other racialized and displaced peoples, in order to support all facets of their wellbeing.
4. Expanding Human Capabilities and Flourishing
Obscene inequality in cities is rising. Even in countries highly ranked on indices such as the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), there is still a high level of spatial inequality within most cities. Many factors contribute to this, including the increasing financialization of urban life, and the dissonance of the logics of government actors whose rational interests are typically to keep expectations low among their constituencies.
That said, a growing number of visionary possibilities can address these challenges, such as establishing new shared value creation models, such as the Black Commons, and decolonized foresight and participatory futures practices.
To counter the financialization and dissonance in ways that support human capabilities and flourishing new local governance mechanisms are needed such as civic assemblies and mayors or commissions for the future (e.g., a city-based adaptation of the Wales Future Generations Commission).
Such examples can test new cosmolocal value creation models and provide for positive improvisation to enable co-creation of new or renewed social covenants and operating systems (the crowdsourced constitution of Mexico City is but one example of this).
5. Reconciling and Repairing with Indigenous and Black Peoples
In the spheres of urban planning, placekeeping, tech, and innovation, movements are growing to ensure Indigenous cultures, approaches, and futures are reflected through city building, design, and the innovation economy driven by the commitment of Indigenous practitioners and ally institutions to advancing reconciliation.
Aligned movements among Black-led groups are also burgeoning across the world including #BlackLivesMatter (BLM), which grew significantly during the pandemic period and following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. Alongside these movements, there are growing responses and calls for increasing efforts of reconciliation and reparations with Indigenous and Black Peoples.
Mechanisms include City of Reconciliation frameworks (e.g., City of Vancouver), adoption by governments of the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (such as in South Africa and Canada).
In the US context, reconciliation is being pursued by Black communities as a critical strategy toward reckoning by the US state regarding structural racism and racial violence. US President Biden’s recent Infrastructure Bill, for example, has invested specific funds to remove racist infrastructures, and a number of city mayors joined forces in 2021 to create a network of Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE).
6. Transitioning from Ego- to Eco-centric Perspectives
Anthropocentric narratives of human mastery and dominance relative to the natural world are deeply ingrained in urban systems. Cities have largely been shaped by the social, political, and ecological realities of distinctly human worlds, privileging resource-dependent corporate interests and technological innovation often at great cost to the health and integrity of ecological and climate systems.
How do we decenter “human” in urban policy so that there is a more integrated and holistic eco-centric focus on cities as whole social-ecological systems, comprising a complex, interconnected multiplicity of natural systems? Nature-inspired and biomimetic design and infrastructure can revitalize and hybridize innovations based on ancient or emerging technologies from around the world.
Cities can be designed to resemble and function like extensions of the natural world of which they are part, with healthy organs, arteries, and connective tissue. Cree Elder, architect and city planner Douglas Cardinal and other renowned Indigenous architects and designers have created exquisite works that emulate natural landscapes and communities they reside within; are energy and water efficient, and re-presence cultural values, identities, and practices.
7. Infrastructuring with Imagination and Accountabilities to Earth and all Peoples across Time
Societies and civilizations live or die by the infrastructure they build. Many infrastructures are no longer fit for purpose, and in some cases, they are on the brink of collapse. What are the social, ecological, cultural, economic, physical, and institutional infrastructures that we need to create and build for this new age? And how can they be built in ways that exemplify global soli- darity?
It is rare for modern cities to build with imaginaries that extend for seven generations or with a sense of responsibility to the many billions of people who will, hopefully, dwell here in the future. Cosmolocal infrastructuring provides a vision and mechanisms for collectively solving mutual sustainability problems. This takes place by means of planetary mutualization of knowledge, in which local places contribute to and benefit from other communities’ sharing open knowledge, technologies, design, and hardware.
Infrastructuring with imagination through working with artists and others on participatory futures processes has great potential for producing decolonized and wise strategic foresight practices. Assessing infrastructure investments through lenses of climate justice, future generations, and feminist and decolonizing values will be foundational to building seven generation cities.
In a similar vein, wellbeing cities is growing as a rubric to center infrastructures of deep care for the common good. Transforming urban commons infrastructures—social, physical, and digital—to improve wellbeing, compassion, care, shared wealth, and participation in deep democracy exemplifies sacred civics in action.
Critical questions to address in assessing how to build forward include: What does decolonized, emancipatory social and civic infrastructure look like? What learning, scaling, and financing architectures are needed to build more robust and systemic social infrastructure for seven generations that communities anywhere can adapt to their contexts?