Next Steps - Moving Onward

Last week I accepted a transfer back to the WSP business in Australia, via New Zealand - I will be wrapping up in Cape Town over the course of November, moving during December and starting in Auckland in January 2013. I will be taking on a role with WSP Asia Pacific in the Built Ecology team, with a focus on Future Cities, business development and project delivery.

During the course of the second quarter of 2013, Lyn, Riley, Kai, Kura, Pixie, Pucca and I will move back across to Sydney to settle for the next season of our lives. Two adults, a baby, two cats and two dogs will be making the trek across the Indian Ocean and then back across the Tasman Sea.

Needless to say; this decision has taken a huge amount of thought and processing, weighing of pros and cons, and planning. The move may come as something of a surprise to some of you, and perhaps less so to others. Some have already expressed their disappointment at our departure, while others have asked "What took you so long?"

I would like to take this opportunity to share our motivations for the move, our hopes for this next season and some reflections on our three years back on this crazy continent, Africa.

As I write this, I am sitting staring out over False Bay as dusk becomes night, enthralled at the scale and beauty of the setting we have been fortunate to live in these last three years. Life on the cape peninsular is of an aesthetic quality unmatched anywhere I have ever been. It is taking a force of will to pull myself from this view and consider a new stage of life in perhaps less majestic surroundings.

We are saying goodbye, for now, to family - grandparents (and great-grandparents) to Riley, cousins and friends - in the knowledge that the world is a smaller place than it once was and we will live near you again one day; but knowing that these goodbyes are gut-wrenchingly difficult none-the-less.

I am leaving colleagues and clients in a market where green buildings have become more established than when I arrived in 2009, the Green Building Council of South Africa has matured and many businesses are in a state of transition to bring 'sustainability' closer to the main-stream. I have been most fortunate to have had the chance to work with each of you, and the learning curve has been huge. I hope that you have benefited during this season even half of what I have.

I am certainly planning to retain strong ties with the African business, so please do stay in touch - I will post updated contact details once I'm settled on that side, although you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter (@richpalmeris) in the meantime.

There are a wide range of factors pulling us back to Australia - personal and professional. In short, Lyn and I have a vision for our lives and for Riley's childhood, and at present, the next step of that vision looks most doable in Australia (not forgetting the sojourn in NZ on the way). A combination of culture, support networks, friends in the same life season as us and the ability to live a 'connected' urban life-style are what we're looking for in this new season. The new professional opportunities that have recently come onto the table have also tipped the scales towards a move.

Following the launch of Future Cities Africa next month, I will be looking to do the same in the Asia Pacific region - Asia is already seeing the first wave of 'future' cities, and it will be an exciting market to be a part of. It is also where my journey on urban sustainability started, and it will be exciting to return.

It would be a lie to say that everything has been easy over here: market, culture and circumstance have each played a role in shaping some of the biggest challenges of my career in these last three years. For those taking the sustainable design agenda forward on this continent, I'd like to share a few things observations (or lessons learned) from my time here...

■      Shift to integrated design processes as soon as possible - the compartmentalising of professional disciplines is deeply entrenched in this market and runs counter to foundational principles of sustainable design.

■      Consider alternative fee arrangements to the ECSA fee scales as they provide substantial disincentives for passive design. Spec-ing the same expensive kit as last time from a catalogue is not in clients' best interests, the environment's best interests and it is not engineering. Viva passive design, Viva!!!

■      Support the Green Building Council of South Africa! Green Star will only get better with your collective input. Keep it as simple and focused on design as possible.

This continent desperately needs people to tell a new story - a story of peace, poverty alleviation and equitable and efficient resource use. The built environment can tell this new story, but you're going to have to transform our industry to aim higher than it has before.

Finally, to friends, colleagues (old and new) and clients in Australia and New Zealand: I am incredibly excited to be coming back, and pushing new boundaries in urban sustainability with you all. Watch this space for Biomimicry, Future Cities and Living Buildings; it promises to be another awesome journey...

-RP

Things to Come - an exercise in preferred futures

At the urging of my insightful better half, I recently indulged in a bit of back-casting, the particularly useful preferred futures tool I have recently been exposed to. In essence, it involves describing a the place you want to end up, then working backwards to now, with the goal to build a path that might get you to that destination in time.

So far I've had a go at the first bit, which I'm sharing in the hope of working through the second bit. It is framed from a career perspective; however the vision I have for my work life is a fractal of a bigger picture I believe is important to meet some of the challenges we face in our urban environment.

The picture is tri-partite - a three-legged stool of sorts - each 'leg' a theme which has typically stood alone, but which could/should be integrated for a more holistic approach to cities, and a more satisfying work life.

These three 'legs' are: Design, Education and Research.

Of these, the weakest link in the context of future cities is the one between design and education - which is where I'd like to make a professional home for myself. Both also need to be underpinned by research though, asking new questions of urban infrastructure and the built form.

I have explored many of details of the three legs in previous posts: trans-disciplinary design (here), thresholds of critical mass for urban density (here) and alternative infrastructure for African cities (here) among others.

When I look at the things that bring me the most joy in work, there can be no question that they are interactive design in a team of specialists responding to a resilience brief; and teaching people about sustainability and design. In both, the joy of telling a new story, of creating a new path and bringing people along on the journey is paramount.

I want to spend the majority of my work time either teaching or designing. Where possible, I would like to teach and design in an environment where the experience contributes to a transformation in the way we all look at the world and our place in it - experiential design.

And all of this must be partnered by strong ties into research... The challenges for our urban spaces are changing and growing at a rate that our conventional knowledge transfer mechanisms are insufficient. We must have new institutions that allow us to nimbly adapt design and education to relevant research... Eudaimonic institutions (economist and blogger Umair Haque has written extensively on institutional reform to support lives ‘lived meaningfully well’, or ‘Eudaimonic’ institutions – an excellent post is here, and I’d recommend reading his book “betterness” too).

So what do these new institutions look like?

My immediate response was to look for the cities research institutes at leading universities (UCT African Centre for Cities is my local example) and find a teaching/research post with the freedom to provide design advice too. Another might be to work within the consulting engineering sector and partner with research and education institutions. Yet another might be a start-up offering new approaches to design such as Biomimicry? I've considered all of these at one time or another, but they all seem to be locked into our existing, failing institutions...

And now I prefer to think that the answer is a combination of each of them: pulling together the best of our design consulting, research and teaching institutions, and packaging something more agile, useful, resilient... meaningful. I'd like to start some crowd-sourcing on what this institution might look like in more detail and who might want to come along for the ride.

Please share specific questions or lead-in points to the discussion in the comments.

Earning a Living

I was recently asked to write an essay on the following statement and questions: 

“As of June 2010, 55% of Americans were “unsatisfied” or “very unsatisfied” with their jobs. And in 2011, a study of 5,000 millennials between the ages of 16 and 24 found that young people aren't focused on becoming famous or creating enormous wealth. On the contrary, their hopes for the future revolve around making a contribution to society and staying in close touch with family and friends.”

“Why are so few people fulfilled by what they do for a living? Why are young people today less inspired by a traditional career path? How can this situation be improved?”

Here are my thoughts...

Modern (western) society, and especially so the USA, has emerged as a culture of individualism and 'meritoracy' where the pursuit of personal financial wealth (and lifestyle security) has dominated our cultural discourse, often at the expense of higher order values. While both individual accountability, and personal reward for expertise and endeavour are important attributes, without the broader societal values such as the collective good, environmental health, the arts (for their own sake, not just for fame and fortune) and the broadening of our understanding of the world, they have driven our society to be incredibly extractive. My experience is that being self-centred, extracting from those around you, does not lead to an especially fulfilled outcome without a hefty dose of self-delusion.

In your question, when you say 'what they do for a living', I gather what you mean is 'what they do to earn money'; and I think perhaps part of the problem is this fundamental association of 'money' with 'living'. Having the means (money) to do the things that you want to do in life is important, however many young people entering the workforce today are beginning to realise that securing the means to living well is less important than actually living well, so we are seeing a global readjustment in values and what we mean by 'living well'.

So, briefly, I think so few people are fulfilled by their careers because our culture rewards a very narrow set of values; and people, when they're honest with themselves, actually have a much broader set of values.

With respect to the 'traditional' career path, its major draw card was always long-term job security. That, and the naive belief that one's work was beneficial in helping to 'build the economy'. People would put up with an unfulfilling job because it allowed them to picture a future - educated kids, a nice house, a comfortable retirement. The global financial shock of 2008 pulled the security rug from under the feet of many people entering the workforce. Traditional careers didn't offer the security they once did, and they were soul-destroying to boot. This has been partnered by a global realisation that the institutional status quo does not serve us especially well, and has not for some time - corporations have proven themselves untrustworthy and profit has proven itself unprofitable. It's hardly surprising that people are uninspired by most of the options that are on the table.

So, what to do? Well, my first thought is to bring the 'living' back into 'earning a living'. The workplace must become begin to reflect the values that most real people have (honesty, generosity, integrity  etc) and not just their vices (greed and fear). When one's career feels like an extension of life, and not one's life becoming just a bit-part of a career, then we may see people get broadly more satisfied with their places of work. A work place that adds many layers and types of value - health, well being, understanding, wealth and allows others to benefit too, now that may be a place which inspires.

Another step to improvement would be to start to assess success on the basis of higher order wealth. If companies are assessed on their performance in terms of health, education, research, art and music as much as they are on financial profit, then I can almost guarantee that they would become more fulfilling places to work.

So, I believe there are some institutional changes required to push wider reporting than simply financial (so-called triple-bottom-line accounting) and create a global balance sheet for higher order capital (social, environmental, human etc)  and make it an industry standard, and more importantly, a value shift within organisations to being to reflect actual value rather than just financial value.

The Age of the Generalist

Over the last few weeks I have been struck by how stuck professionals are in their expertise... The most confronting of late has been the medical profession with whom my wife and I are working towards the birth of our first child; negotiating our way between the mid-wife-led natural birth community and the conventional medical fraternity of obstetricians, medical aids and hospitals. Both camps seem to lack the flexibility of thought to adapt and allow us to walk a path between them, drawing from each side as it suits our particular need and preferences.

This same inflexibility of thought is something I have witnessed in the engineering profession and it appears to be of epidemic proportions in our 'specialist' areas of knowledge. Our modern approach to most things has been focused on increasing levels of specialisation to the point where there are few real mavericks/thinkers/jokers/game-changers left on the implementation side of life. By the time a professional can call themselves that (read engineer, lawyer, doctor etc) they will have studied and/or been a candidate-whatever for at least 7 and as much as 10 or 12 years... No wonder they feel the need to hold that hard-won ground so fiercely...

And in this stagnant marsh of specialist turf-war thinking, the shining lights are the people who can tell the whole story, bringing in the relevant areas of detail as required, but all the time keeping a broad narrative which reflects real life in all its complexity. It is these yarn-spinners who are the real hidden gems, who keep our disabled institutions limping along with promises of a new story.

In the sustainable design business we spend a lot of time talking about integrated design, yet our approach is still heavily focused on specialists each doing their bit (while at least talking to each other) – we have not yet leveraged the power of true generalists and story tellers in our approach to design. In other words, we are getting to grips with multi-disciplinary approaches, but haven’t yet got to the trans-disciplinary approach of those disciplines which pursue an understanding of societies, communities and eco-systems and can put design in context. And context, my friends, is everything.

Which is why I'm looking forward to a new age; the age of the generalist... I want people who have enough understanding of the details to keep the specialists honest; but as a priority are able to provide context to design. We should look in the fields of anthropology, ethics, peace studies, ecology and the arts for those thinkers with the breadth of understanding to ask not just what is possible, but also what is right, appropriate and fitting. People who can describe our preferred futures in broad terms and help navigate the path to get there.

Looking Ahead: Living in Interesting Times

I am really not a fan of New Year's celebrations – I'm usually disappointed at best – so this year's quiet evening was something of a relief. However, corny as it may be, resetting the calendar does come with some opportunities to take stock and look ahead. And so, while I'm not quite in 'resolutions' territory, I do certainly have some thoughts looking ahead into 2012 - a year that has been steeped in end-of-times rhetoric, and seems to have some promise of global systemic change.

In short we live in 'interesting  times'.

Yesterday I had a request from a local member of our 'green buildings community' to pick my trends in the green building industry for 2012. However, if I actually try and predict what's going to happen in the green property industry in  2012, I may depress myself horribly with the 'realism' of contracting markets and economic strife or end up with egg on my face come December when everyone is sitting pretty. The truth is, I have no idea what’s going to happen this year. So I'm going to pick five trends on what I'd like to see happen in 2012 instead.

1. Accurate Accounting: Working to a Balance Sheet of Higher Order Wealth

I have just finished reading 'Betterness' by Umair Haque (@umairh). It is a compelling read and is sparking thoughts like a Guy Fawkes bonfire... Two of which are the need for a comprehensive balance sheet that addresses broad capital and then to explore how we can build higher order wealth instead of depleting it - internally and externally.

So, one trend for 2012 I'd like to see is companies, governments and institutions building balance sheets that add human, natural, ecological and social capital (among others) to our existing financial balance sheets.

2. Rio + 20: The built environment to stand front and centre

2012 marks the 20 year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit where Severn Suzuki made such a heartfelt call to action (you can find it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsDliXzyAY). Rio '92 kick-started the UNFCCC process, of which COP17 in Durban is the latest disappointment (see previous posts). However I am hopeful for Rio 2012, as it allows a wider lens than just climate change and hopefully a less politically charged space for agreement.

The focus is going to be more on the pro-active pursuit of a green economy than on commitments to reduce economic activity (which is the intractable space the COP process finds itself). While I have been sceptical of the reality of the built environment being successfully included in the COP process, I think it has a chance to stand front and centre in the pursuit of a green economy.

Furthermore, Rio 2012 is a point of reflection for environmentally conscious people everywhere - and reflection is a much-needed thing in our business. I was only 11 years old in 1992 and South Africa was an isolated space still. Despite the 2002 conference being held in Johannesburg, it did not have the profile it perhaps needed at that stage and slid under the radar somewhat. So this is the first global conference since I started my career at which broad sustainability issues will be the core issue.

3. The move to passive

The local industry has woken up to Green Star, but developers still wince at the cost premium (despite the wealth of evidence that 'green' pays). Cash is likely to be tight this year, but public expectations for sustainability are unlikely to slow... So I see insistence on 4 star Green Star ratings (and perhaps even 5) within conventional budgets. I also imagine the spectre of rising energy costs will put huge pressure on building systems design (if you think we've seen the worst of it, watch this space).

Both of these will necessitate a move towards passive; buildings which can continue to operate comfortably without forced ventilation, mechanical heating or cooling or artificial light during the day. Passive buildings can tick the 'green' box, the CAPEX box and the operational risk box, but require particular forethought and flexibility in conventional design thinking.

4. Policy move to resilience and adaptation

Most of the talk around climate change has been framed in terms of mitigation. As the impacts of our current near 1°C rise in temperature start to bite in 2012 we'll see resilience and adaptation move to the top of the agenda in developing countries.

For our industry, I would like to see this start in planning, urban design and city infrastructure circles. New urban renewal projects could make it a priority, red tape could be cut - I can only hope that someone at City takes up the fight with Eskom to address decentralised power generation - and urban ecology and agriculture become core themes for successful planning approval. A 'green door' policy at council would certainly go a long way to getting these in place.

5. Adaptive re-use and refurbishments

As cash gets tight, I would love to see a trend of creative refurbishment of buildings in the mainstream property sector. Old offices to new passive green buildings, warehouses  to funky new office space and power stations to public markets and museums (these have all been done before - please blow my mind with what you dream up).

There is so much literature on refurbishment and so many bad all buildings to improve.  Surely this is the largest untapped market for sustainable design in the country? I think 2012 may be the year someone takes advantage of that niche..

So, there you have them... I hope that was just a little bit useful, and that it gives some insight into my vision for sustainable cities in 2012.

SAWomEng Leadership Series: Ethical Leadership in Engineering

SAWomEng is an organisation that supports and provides mentorship for women who are planning to study, are currently studying or have recently graduated engineering degrees - a cause that I have huge respect for. One of their initiatives is a leadership seminar series, with the current topic being Ethical Leadership in Engineering. Ethics, leadership and engineering are three concepts that I have grappled with - with mixed success - over my career to date, and it is heartening to see them addressed in a forum with the transformative potential of SAWomEng.

Sustainable design often gets lumped together with ethical engineering, and, while I see the connection to some degree, my expertise in design does not automatically translate into expertise in ethics. This lack of experience in the philosophy of ethics notwithstanding, I was invited to sit on the panel for the Durban and Cape Town legs of the seminar series. What an opportunity to challenge and be challenged on some of the most difficult decisions that face professionals in their careers!

Let me be clear here. I am not an expert on business ethics (or any other kind for that matter). I'm not really even an expert in engineering. And despite my career aspirations, it would be somewhat misleading to call me a "leader" either. But for all this, I'm still going to share my experience of the Durban workshop in the hope that it will raise awareness of some of the ethical challenges that face the current and future leaders of our profession.

So... Ethics. Leadership. Engineering.

I must start by stating that ethics is not a fuzzy, soft, do-goodie subject. It is a philosophical field of enquiry in its own right and there is an established academic and professional community who specialise in it. My first piece of advice for any leader in business is to invest in formal training in business ethics from people who really do understand the topic.

That being said, I'll add my own thoughts on some of the ethical challenges facing modern engineers, which might apply beyond the field too. There are so many areas in modern workplaces where one’s values are challenged. The purpose of this post is not to explore scenarios (which range from corporate governance to HR to whistle-blowing and more), but rather to show how the institutional structures which engineers depend on are not sufficient to navigate the areas where a sound understanding of ethics are needed.

At present, ethics in engineering is governed by professional codes of practice and references to national or international standards and norms. These codes of practice govern appropriate behaviour between professionals, and provide a sound basis for normal day-to-day work. One example of the type of guidance they give is appropriate circumstances under which a professional engineer can review and comment on the work of another professional engineer. While this is essential in governing work between peers, it doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance for difficult ethical decisions. When a colleague has been treated unfairly by management, the Engineering Council of South Africa’s (ECSA) code of conduct has little guidance on how to react.

Corporate governance guidelines are another set of rules by which people in business judge ethical behaviour. The growth of public companies required business leaders to be bound to certain levels of disclosure and behaviour as they were responsible for the investments of others. In South Africa, the King Reports are the benchmark for corporate governance and their focus is on integrated reporting and disclosure. These are important for investors and analysts, but again do not provide clear guidance on personal decision-making along ethical lines. It is possible to comply entirely with corporate governance requirements, and yet still act in an unethical manner.

A third often-referenced guide for ethical decision-making is the company “vision and values”. My employers have values of ‘sharing and supporting’, ‘pride and passion’, ‘trust’, ‘innovation’ and ‘sustainability’; which are typical of the sort of values espoused in corporate reports and are all good and well in their own right. However, they are also not especially useful as a reference point when faced with difficult decisions. What does “pride and passion” mean when dealing with a case of reporting internal corruption?

There are two specific areas where each of these guidelines falls short in my opinion:

·         The first is at a human level, looking at how disempowered people within an organisation are treated and standing up for them when they are at a disadvantage.

·         The second is looking at the world (as was highlighted by my co-panelist Dr Shamim Bodhanya), looking at how the business responds to social, environmental and gender justice issues.

  

On each, ethical leadership requires action on the basis of a set of values that go beyond the rules and regulations which govern current business behaviour. Broadly, my feeling on ethical decision-making is closely linked with one’s willingness to ‘speak the truth to power’ – a phrase that has come to define the current term of Thuli Madonsela as South Africa’s Public Protector.

Ethical leadership and decicion-making requires a personal set of boundaries for acceptable behaviour, and the courage to speak up when those boundaries are crossed. Most importantly, it requires those boundaries to be set up before an incident arises, as the pressures to conform when faced with difficult decisions are often large - and the consequences can be career-defining.

When asked about where to look for useful guidelines on ethical leadership, I was rather stumped. There is no universally accepted ‘rule book’ for ethics, and individual decisions are always going to be heavily influenced by the cultural context of the individuals involved.

My only advice is to spend time in quiet reflection on the type of person you want to be; for the faithful to use their faith as a guide; and for everyone to spend time in community – I believe that one's ethics are best understood as being developed in collaboration with/interactions with others. A simple test for ethical decision-making could be: “Would I want my grandmother/mother/spouse/friend to find out about this?” If the answer is no, then there’s your guide.

If you’re in Cape Town on Saturday the 19^th of November 2011, please come and join us at UCT for the final workshop – I would certainly value a lively discussion and debate on what ethical leadership in engineering means in South Africa at this time.

More details can be found here: http://www.sawomeng.org.za/events/sawomeng%40network+leadership+workshop.htm

Musings on Design

When we come across the term "design", the first things that spring to mind are often fashion, the "egg chair" or those really strange looking lamps that my best man has in his apartment; mostly beautiful items to fill our houses or clothe ourselves. Occasionally concept cars will occur to us and once in a while beautiful buildings. But seldom gears, ductwork, concrete slabs or steel beams. Yet it is these behind-the-scenes elements of engineering design underpin our experience of the world - every day, in every way.

At university, my degree - mechanical engineering - included a core major of mechanical design; gears and the like. In many ways it was a very dry (and extremely technical) subject. No left-of-field characters, no champagne and to be honest, not much beauty. Having worked in a consulting engineering environment for a number of years now, I have seen the same trends professionally. Other design professionals are passionate, "creative" types, but many (not all) engineers seem to be turning the handle on a design sausage machine - producing technical systems that meet the clients requirements at the lowest cost, but seldom anything more. Further to this, many are stuck reproducing designs that have been done before, without questioning alternative paths.

I can hear the screams now: "but meeting the clients brief at the lowest cost is precisely what being a professional engineer means!!!". Well, I challenge that - as professionals we must meet our clients brief, we must do it responsibly in terms of cost (it's not our money after all); but we must also add to the world - beauty, heart, functionality - helping our clients to a new brief if necessary.

This blog is about how that lack of spark in engineering design is because we only get taught the last step: the design process, but never the preceding two: purpose and function.

But back to design.

The technical design process is the sausage machine; a set of rules and thinking patterns that match theory to a particular problem. It's a powerful machine and is why engineers are often referred to as problem solvers. It goes something like this:

Step 1: briefing - establish/clarify/inform the design brief

Step 2: concept design - identify and screen a range of early design concepts

Step 3: design development - refine the design concept selected during the concept design stage and establish the operating parameters

Step 4: detailed design - refine the design details and produce drawings for manufacture

Once this process has been undertaken a number of times for the same type of system, the early stages can be neglected as the experienced engineer already knows the answer, so all that remains is the detailed design - matching the already-decided design response to the local situation. Only very occasionally do the assumptions that inform the brief at the outset get challenged or revisited. And that is my main challenge with how we're taught the design process- all the effort goes into getting the details right, but so little goes into challenging the underlying inputs into the design process. Fortunately, the sustainable design evolution (we're still far too mainstream to consider ourselves revolutionary) is one process which is starting to question those underlying assumptions. And the first of those is unpacking the function we're striving for through design.

Function.

The first insight I had into the importance of function was a course I did on Biomimicry in September 2010. At the heart of the biomimetic design process is identifying function. This skill is something drilled into zoologists from very early in their careers, and was even drilled into me in high school biology classes: when studying an organism, it looks the way it does because it does a certain thing. Form fits function. If you want to interrogate the form, then you must understand the function.

The Biomimicry Guild have produced a taxonomy of functions to guide the process of design by Biomimicry. This is an excellent tool for beginning to look at any design problems from a functional perspective; some specific functions from the taxonomy are:

- to attach permanently,

- to protect from thermal shock,

- to capture energy.

The full list is far more comprehensive and forms the basis for the brilliant online resource www.asknature.org. Similar briefs in a conventional engineering approach would be to require the use of a particular glue or rivets (instead of the function of attaching something permanently); insulation (instead of protecting from thermal shock) or a solar PV system (instead of capturing energy). We have become so bound by the precedent of our professions, that many engineers have lost the ability to identify function in the first place. A common design brief in my field where function is often ignored, is the design an air-conditioning system instead of a system to maintain occupant comfort, or a system to provide fresh air to occupants.

Another reason why identifying function is important is that multi-functional systems are becoming increasingly important in sustainable design. It is no longer good enough for a water treatment system to simply reduce the impact of effluent that is expelled. To work in the cities of the future, it must now provide a source of energy, a source of fertilizer, a source of recycled water and become a node of biodiversity. We cannot hope to get multi-functional design right until we are well practiced in the art of identifying function.

Function must come before design. If design answers the how? then function must answer the what?. But there is something that must come before function. And that is the why? The purpose for which we are designing.

Purpose.

Again quoting a man who has given me a glimpse of the way forward for my profession - Bill Reed at the Green Building Council of South Africa conference 2010: "All systems have a purpose". When you look at a bicycle, it is clear what the purpose is; the purpose informs the function and the function informs the design.

Unfortunately, most of the modern commercial building projects that shape our cities are founded on the purpose of financial return. The purpose of the building is to generate revenue for the listed funds which invest in them. Not to foster innovation or build a functioning city; but to make money. Whereas in most of the truly inspirational buildings of our time the purpose was broader - to set a benchmark, to be a landmark, to build trust in institutions or to heal a nation. In comparison, the purpose of making money seems an awfully shallow one on which to base the cities in which we live, work and play.

And so, I believe we need to start championing a new purpose. A purpose that comes more from the heart and less from the pocket. A purpose that might allow us to actually create true value and prosperity, not just for the rich. While the generation of wealth won't ever come of the agenda, we must start designing our buildings with the purpose of healing our communities and regenerating the natural systems which keep us alive.

If developers and financiers are too locked into their status quo to see the need for this, then it is our responsibility as professionals to begin to do it anyway. We can start with the purpose of our business - is it to simply create shareholder value, or can we aim a little higher. Do we exist to add value to communities to end poverty? We can challenge the purpose of our projects, or at least approach them with (true) purpose. We can stop seeing the complexities of community and ecology as in convenient extras to report on at year-end and start to build them into the very fabric of what we do.

Ultimately, the purpose of our businesses, our buildings, our cities, our communities and our own role is of a metaphysical nature. The big question of why we are here. Far be it from me to answer that - there are far better qualified people to do so than I - but I do tend to agree with Bill's answer to the question: our purpose is to love. And how do we, as engineers, love? Well, in the immortal words of Theodore Roosevelt; "do what you can, with what you have, where you are".

We can impact the technical systems of the world’s cities such that they do not entrench the status quo of exploitation, inequality and environmental degradation. We can do it with our skills, our training, our systems and the influence that comes from being professionals.