Society needs radical new models, mindsets and practices to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We need to make wise economic, social and political choices for the benefit of everyone today, so that our collective futures are positive. And, we must do so at speed. 

These Global Goals are the United Nation’s universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The UN says that ‘the creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context’. It is with this in mind that I set up the Expert Interview Series a couple of years ago; inviting leading figures working at the intersection of people, place and planet to share their insights about what we can do to achieve sustainable urban futures. 

Joel Mills is Senior Director of the Architects Foundation’s Communities by Design programme. Joel’s 28-year career has been focused on strengthening civic capacity, democratic processes and civic institutions. His work has helped millions of people participate in meaningful public processes, visioning efforts, and community planning initiatives. He has led public processes, training programs and workshops in over a dozen countries across 5 continents.

Read on to learn about the importance of creating citizen urbanists, developing a shared vision for change but starting small, working holistically, and why Joel believes that the right level of awareness has been built to break the biassed nature of city design. 

What motivated you to develop a career that intersects democracy, civic capacity and community?

At a young age I wanted to work in international development and my first role was working for an organisation dedicated to building democracy around the world. For six years I focused on the structural parts of democracy – elections, constitutions, governance, committee systems in parliament and so forth. The piece that I always found compelling was the civil society work.

I worked in some very stressed conflict zones in southern Africa. The most inspiring case was Angola, located on the west coast, which was coming out of a decades long civil war. Here we worked with civil society and the press, who faced all kinds of challenges, as you can imagine. It was so exciting to see citizens gain their voice and powerful things started to happen in relation to governance. 

When the U.S. presidential elections happened in 2000, George W. Bush won the presidency but Al Gore received the most popular votes. It was all highly contentious and there I was working in southern Africa, receiving criticism about the U.S. electoral process from around the world. At this point, I realised that I needed to do a lot more work in my own country and decided that it was time for a transition.  

I joined The National Civic League (NCL), which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan organisation in the US, dedicated to strengthening democracy and civic engagement. When I witnessed the NCL’s All-America City Award that recognises communities who have collaborated to address local issues and achieved outstanding results, I knew that I wanted to work at the community scale.

Now, over 20 years later, I’ve served hundreds of communities and I love every experience. Each community has a different story to tell, and seeing how inspired they become when they begin working together, well, I live for that every day.

For over 20 years, you have worked with hundreds of communities across continents. This gives you a unique perspective and a sense of convergence as well as divergence. Do you see commonalities between the sites of your interventions?

In the last decade, when I’ve worked outside of North America, the similarity in community dynamics has grown. So, whilst every community is unique in terms of geography, history, culture, traditions… there is commonality when it comes to community dynamics and the kinds of struggles they face. I feel the same tensions and the same dynamics at play whether I’m in jurisdictions in Brazil, Kenya, Canada or the U.S., it’s remarkable.

There is an underlying public desire for urgent positive change, no matter where they live, and greater levels of mistrust toward institutions. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures trust in institutions across 30 countries each year. It’s depressing to see the increasing levels of dissatisfaction and mistrust towards institutions the world over. 

If you are leading at a local level, you definitely feel that pressure and need the tools to work with the community to make positive change. Once there is tangible progress locally, people can feel some hope and then begin to work together on some of the great challenges we face, from climate to housing to biodiversity and so on.

Another commonality I’ve experienced, and always the most inspiring, is the wisdom of indigenous groups and how much they can teach us, for example about connections and commitment to the land, in ways that support environmental sustainability. We need to regather and respect that wisdom. 

Every town and city in the world is impacted by human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss. Is this now a common concern or are people more concerned by other issues such as lack of healthcare provision or play spaces for children?

Broadly speaking, if a community has experienced an event that has been directly triggered by climate, they will be explicit in their concern about climate change. In most places, especially in the U.S., when people are asked about their primary issues the answer will be related to ‘family economics’, the embedded costs that put pressure on people day-to-day – “I’m struggling to make it because of the escalating costs, high rent, transport, unaffordable insurance…”. They may not recognise the underlying complex causes driving the housing crisis, which include climate change, but they understand their family finances.

In southern Oregon, for instance, the state forest department created and published a fire risk map as part of their wildfire preparedness process. This was deemed necessary as mitigating fire risk is an urgent issue due to the increased number of seasonal fires, their intensity and the numbers of houses destroyed as a consequence. However, the backlash was off the charts for a whole range of reasons, including homeowner fear that their insurance rates would be increased or cancelled while the value of their property is reduced, and so the fire risk map was withdrawn.

The U.S. as a whole sees billion-dollar disasters fuelled by climate change on average every three weeks. And as I said, unless an event has happened in their own neighbourhood that impacts them directly, climate change won’t come up initially as a topic of concern. But, critically, it will if you are able to dive into the details because, whether people are being impacted by a heat wave or not, they are impacted by the financial consequences of being in a riskier zone and the entire market is changing as that risk becomes clear.

When you talk of the need for citizen urbanists to co-create sustainable cities for the future, what do you envisage and why is it necessary?

Yesterday I led a workshop for a national network of placemaking professionals from rural communities and this question came up, big time. Why? Because the need is obvious given all of our crises. We cannot sustain the way we have pursued growth and development and therefore must change. However, the way that North American planning processes and structures are designed makes major change difficult.

Here are three examples: we need to stop development on the edge of major jurisdictions and instead we’re seeing the highest growth of development in those high risk zones because of the dynamics at-play and how development happens. Secondly, 75% of the nation is zoned for single family housing, which is neither sustainable nor economical, and that has to change, but zoning decisions happen at a jurisdiction level – there are 40,000+ jurisdictions! Finally, 75% of Americans are worried about affordable housing in their communities but 74.5% of our multifamily developers face community opposition.

So, when I talk about the very ambitious concept of creating citizen urbanists I’m proposing community engagement processes that are deliberative, that expose people to all the information they need to become informed on the issues, which should result in better decisions being made. Citizen urbanists will be equipped to recognise how we need to live, support that and live in more sustainable ways. And for us, that’s a total shift and orientation from where we’ve been for the last 50 years.

I’ve found that there’s a lack of consensus among built environment professionals around project scale and impact. Is it more effective to seek to create a larger scale project, e.g. that has capital expenditure budgeting attached, or start quickly with small interventions and grow projects from the bottom up, e.g. tactical urbanism?

It’s important to have a big vision that includes the key changes that need to be made and an underpinning urgency for change. The way to achieve change is by starting small and building incrementally. As momentum builds, bigger projects will surface and be delivered, leading to sustained change. Unfortunately, as we have seen time and again, betting on massive investment to win significant transformation does not have a high rate of success.

The billion dollar initiatives that promise to deliver everything for everyone, require incredibly complex partnerships, financing, regulatory change…all the things that take years and years. And what happens? They often get five or ten years down the road and circumstances change and they go up in smoke, and communities are left with nothing. I have lived in the same little town for 25 years. We have 25,000 people and have been chasing a massive downtown development project since I moved in. Pre-pandemic we finally signed a contract and guess what? They still haven’t even broken ground because the pandemic changed the financial business models. We’ve given them 20 million additional public dollars to try and incentivise beginning the project, still nothing has happened. It’s the perfect example.

Instead, you start with the tactical projects such as public parks, painted buildings, new seating, the easy things that begin to change the public perception of a place and attract investment. You start with volunteers and donated resources, with that vision in mind, guiding tactical decisions. 

The vision itself needs to be established through a community engagement process. The community decides its values, priorities, aspirations and owns its vision of the future. In that way each tactical public space, street project connects to the next and they share a direction of travel. The vision itself may evolve over time, as people see opportunities that weren’t recognised before, and communities must be part of each step. So, there’s refinement and adjustment as part of the process, to make sure that everything is on course. Without a vision, then that little project doesn’t mean anything beyond itself.

Which organisations are doing interesting work around environmental sustainability, anywhere in the world?

First and foremost, there are thousands of firms globally that are doing incredible sustainable implementation work. One firm that embodies extraordinary innovation and creativity is Mass Design Group. They are a non-profit firm that works in the U.S. and internationally. Their approach is holistic, not just environmental sustainability, as they look at the entire supply chain as well as choosing local materials, supporting local economies and education. Each project’s impact strives to touch the whole ecosystem, right across the board.

What projects inspire you and why do they inspire?

The Freetown the Treetown model is so powerful. Freetown in Sierra Leone, like many global cities, is challenged by phenomenal population growth. They are due to double their population by the end of the decade and there are already over a million people. As so many people are moving into the city for economic opportunity, the unregulated construction and informal settlements are expanding quickly. A result of the expansion is extreme loss of tree cover. The complete loss of trees in one of the rainiest countries in the world is causing massive flood impacts, huge landslides, biodiversity loss and devastating loss of life.

Freetown has a dynamic mayor, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, who decided to engage the community to develop the Transform Freetown plan, which has four clusters: resilience, human development, healthy cities and urban mobility. Part of the plan is an initiative called Freetown the Treetown. Under the scheme, locals are paid to plant, nurture and monitor trees across the city to help establish long-term climate resilience for the community. A key part of the project is the TreeTracker app that lets local growers tag each new tree and then monitor them across planting and maintenance phases. Each grower receives micropayments for their efforts and the project is linked to corporate ESGs and climate commitments, which means the city is selling those investments in trees to corporations and financing this entire system. It’s brilliant!

We are living with the results of what has been well documented as the biassed nature of city design. For example, urban planning decisions that have prioritised the design and construction of roads and transportation systems that mainly benefit male workers, effectively neglecting the needs of women who have different commuting patterns and safety concerns. We know this is the case, what mechanisms are needed to break the bias?

Rightly, this is the topic of a giant conversation happening globally, including in the U.S. The Black Lives Matter movement prompted us to look at equity across the board, and start to examine how we have baked inequity into the whole system and its impact on communities.

There have been some powerful books written about the biassed nature of city design. The Colour of Law by Richard Rothstein is referenced across the planning field in America. It provides an account of how we created the whole system, including regulation, that comes from our history of segregation and redlining, as well as infrastructure and investment.

Each of the built environment professions continues to self-reflect about their diversity, examining the biases that are in place throughout education, from primary school to university. In architecture, when we dig down we find just 600+ black women architects in the United States, and we are a membership organisation of almost 100,000. Across the professions there are major investments in place to change the situation and encourage a broader and more representative group to become professional planners or pursue architecture and so on. 

At the community level it’s much more complex, but we have a range of huge initiatives happening. The Biden administration has made an enormous investment in environmental justice as part of its infrastructure package. The Justice40 Initiative is a national commitment to ensure that disadvantaged communities receive the benefits of new and existing federal investments, in areas such as climate change, clean transit and water infrastructure. There are hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in communities that have been deemed environmental justice communities.

I worked with African-American neighbourhoods in West Savannah, Georgia, who are adjacent to the Port of Savannah. Port-adjacent communities often face environmental challenges that threaten their health. In West Savannah, some neighbourhoods can trace their history of persecution from slavery. When you look at the urban design, you see highway systems that cut communities off from the rest of the neighbourhood, a river dissects it, there are so many ways that the jurisdiction has been sliced and diced. On top of that, the enormous volume of truck traffic gives off levels of pollution that pose a risk to community health and contribute to climate change. Data shows that people are dying because they’re exposed to harmful chemicals in the environment that are coming from that port and industrial businesses there.

Now, because of all the conversations that happened as the result of Black Lives Matter and decades of work leading up to it, millions of federal dollars are being directed at advancing environmental justice and benefitting disadvantaged communities, such as the neighbourhood I just described. So, we are in a position where the federal level, professional level and community level are focussing on the history that has led us to this point which in turn is leading to very ambitious changes in local policy. 

And for me, this all gives me hope that we’re finally building that level of awareness for citizen urbanism to take place and be embedded in our systems across the country.

Thank you Joel for generously sharing your time and being so inspiring. At such a precarious time globally, with turbulent political, economic and cultural crosscurrents, it is important to know that we can make really positive change happen if we make the right choices. You have provided us with a proven approach – ‘meaningful community engagement’ – case studies and tools to help us make those choices. It has been a pleasure to speak with you.