TriStateCity or TriState Sustainocracy?

We live in an era in which we are invited or forced to reflect about our reality from new points of view. For some this is fearful or threatning but once in de habbit of doing it the reflection becomes hopeful and inspiring. My own awareness brought me to the 5 core human values that a society needs to honor structurally in order to avoid humanitarian, ecological and economic instability and crises. When these 5 core values become leading a totally new functional society model appears, one that I called "Sustainocracy" and put into practice every day by establishing sustainocratic ventures that are characterized by multidisciplinary projects that need to restore those values. You can read about it in our publications of AiREAS, a cocreation platform for healthy cities using air quality and health as innovation triggers.

Someone else recently presented also a new way to look at our surroundings. This person is named Peter Savelberg. His presentation took us mentally to the development of megacities around the world. He showed pictures of cities in China and India as fast growing conglomerates of 20 to 25 million people. We registered in 2015 over 30 of such megacities (defined to be cities with a population of over 10 Million). The commonality of those cities is:

• They develop under one single executive directive
• They compete among each other and the rest of the world for the enormous amount of resources they need to sustain themselves and their growth.  
• They grow using the capitalist model of financing themselves and for their interaction with the world.
• They are huge building sites of cement, tarmac and glass.
• They all cope with severe pollution

From a Sustainocratic point of view these megacities are financial hotspots that use their capital to plunder the rest of the world. Meanwhile their gigantic dependence on resources from outside the city make them extremely vulnerable. 

Then Savelberg confronted us with our micro-thinking in Holland and central Europe with communities of 250.000 to 1 million people that we tend to call "metropoles", each with their own executive and political priorities. This shows a significant contrast with the megadevelopments elsewhere in the world. Are we loosing the competitive battle due to our micro-behavior within an old, maybe obsolete mentality of dominance in the world? Then Savelberg zoomed out into space to look back at Europe using the NASA picture that I used in this article. At this distance we see in Europe two large and illuminated areas. We see no bounderies, no minimalistic thinking, no microscopic political islands. We just see huge patches of human activity as if it were megacities.

His analysis went further and identified a uniquely mixed structure of rings that converge with Amsterdam and interchange large areas of nature with urban development. If we look at our own region, in which Eindhoven is right in the middle, we can identify a huge metropool  of 30 Million people and an internal market of 150 Billion. Looking at it from this perspective our region is more than capable of leveling up and exceeding the other conglomerates. The analysis of Savelberg even went further and looked at the facilities, infrastructure, connectivity and productivity in the region. The map became astonishing and admirable. If we consider the regional development of the central Europe of the Netherlands of the last 200 years under one large umbrella the region shows much more robustness and sustainable potential than those quick rising centers that developed in just 20 years time. You can look at the TriStateCity of Savelberg here.

TriState region and Sustainocracy

The question arises whether we should keep up with the competitive battle between the cities or the global conflict between greed and a new perception of sustainable ethics? Economists will refer to ethics as something for pussies while environmentalists and anthropologists would refer to capitalism as devastating instrument in the hands of criminal minds. Either way both realities exist and have reached a stage of real tension. Each megacity is vulnerable due  to its dependence on resources. It's only strength seems to be the ability to generate cash through speculation which in turn creates its own inflation. From a human complexities point of view the megacities have everything to loose, against climate, resources, moral justification and sustainable progression. Aggression is likely to grow, not just among those regions but also inside the megadevelopment through ghetto forming, differences between rich and poor, influx of migrants, etc.

Another option is to assume Sustainocracy as source of inspiration for further development and transformation. The different circles of the Tristate analysis of Savelberg shows the combination of urban and rural landscapes in a sort of harmony. This can be further enhanced by developing the regional interaction through the 5 core values in which local self sufficiency is as important for resilience and economic renewal and innovation. Rather than projecting the Far East fast megacity development as point of reference for our own TriStateCity evolution we could take our Sustainocratic core values as point of reference and create our Tristate Sustainocracy that can inspire India, China and other conglomerats in the world. As such we at AiREAS and STIR already are a point of reference that is being taken serious by many regions in the world after the Proof of Concept is made known through our communication and publication channels.

When disaster struck in the Netherlands in 1952, after a flood hit the country and 1500 perrished, the country developed into a worldwide center of expertise in water management and regional protection. Now, while disaster strikes with the consequences of greed and capitalist dependence we develop into a worldwide center of expertise in the next evolutionary step of our human development. Sustainocracy is accredited as award winning innovative peer 4 regional eco-system development. 

In the pictures we see Sustainocratic processing in action through multidisciplinary project tables that address the core values together.