Their first commercial project was a shoe store built from almost 100% surplus materials. The shoe fitting benches are made of surplus wood with a conveyor belt from a supermarket counter centrally in between. Shoes are displayed on former Audi100 windscreens.

The firm’s design process works to rethink the functionality of a thing, and to understand how it could perform a new function once it has served its initial purpose. Superuse has distilled this process into 16 different ‘flows’ that enter and exit buildings and cities. Each project begins by mapping these flows and then examining where the flows interconnect. The ideal design solution is one where the flows intersect, overlap and take advantage of one another, leading to a wholly integrated design product.

Superuse doesn’t restrict themselves to discarded building materials; they take into account all the resources and waste streams of the city. Surplus food, energy, water and traffic are all grounds to rethink and redesign.

We were lucky to spend some time with Jan Jongert on our podcast, Social Design Insights, where he gave us a window into the incredible “blue” economy of the future. Listen to the episode below.

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In addition, the company has expanded to safely collect other streams of organic waste including kitchen, agricultural, and municipal organic waste that pollutes the environment and contributes to harmful greenhouse gas when left in the open. This waste, along with sanitation waste generated in urban informal settlements is transported to Sanergy’s organics recycling plant for treatment and upcycling. Three key products are then manufactured from the waste: insect protein through the rearing of black soldier fly larvae, organic fertilizer through thermophilic co-composting, and biomass briquettes through compression. These products solve yet another critical challenge that our world faces today – food insecurity and changing climatic conditions. 

Even though 80% of Kenyans rely on agriculture for their livelihood, a sustainable supply of quality agricultural inputs is lacking. Feed millers/livestock farmers face significant shortages of proteins, and in particular, animal-based proteins, while horticultural farmers lack organic fertilizers for their crops. In fact, poor soil health has been named among the top challenges causing low farm yields for most farmers. In addition, local industries face inadequate options for sustainable green fuels for their operations.

Sanergy’s closed-loop circular model promotes regenerative solutions while creating green jobs and significant carbon offsets and removal. Every year, the company removes 50,000 tons of sanitation and organic waste, offsets 20,000+ tons of CO2, and is serving 4,000+ farmers who see a 30% increase in yields from using Sanergy’s agricultural inputs.   

Sanergy currently has goals to expand its organic waste management services across Africa and Asia and offset more than 1,000,000T of carbon emissions per year in the next decade.

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Beyond just food production, the garden brings together the diverse interests of the low-income, largely immigrant neighborhood and has become a platform for knowledge exchange. It is open to everyone; there are no personal or private vegetable beds. In return, no one can harvest their own crops for themselves. All the vegetables produced are grown to support the entire garden. Most participants are amateur gardeners, taking part as a form of hobby. 

Everything is grown in Euro pallets, shipping containers, disused rice sacks, and tetra packs, so the garden can be moved and set up again at another site whenever needed. This mobility allows a relationship with schools, universities with agriculture programs, and community organizations looking for new ways to address health or integration issues within the neighborhood. 

Over the years, Prinzessinnengarten has become a major attraction. Every season, around one-thousand volunteers help with the gardening, and approximately 40,000 people visit the garden annually. The concept continues to challenge the city of Berlin and beyond, raising questions about space, authority, and urban ecology.

Ten years after its founding, the land lease ended. In 2019, the original garden was transported to a new and larger location, a cemetery in Neukolln. Currently, the Prinzessinnengarten spreads through the cemetery, in between classic and slightly dilapidated graveyards with cracked headstones. Exuberant greenery and well-maintained vegetables grow either in raised beds or soil, distributed at three different spots.

We had an opportunity to speak with Marco Clausen of Prinzessinnengärten about how they came to pioneer a form of mobile gardening, and the positive impacts it has had on their city on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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Nance’s practice is organized under two structures: Spontaneous Vegetation and Social Ecologies. Through Spontaneous Vegetation, she communicates visions of the future of land and soil. She hosts a monthly podcast of the same name showcasing those whose work, like her own, merges activism and art. Her books, The Ground Rules – A Manual for Deep Mapping and Bioremediation of Soils and The Soil Keepers, bring together a decade’s-worth of interviews with leaders in soil healing and land politics. 

Social Ecologies L3C acts as an umbrella for a variety of ecological and system-regenerating projects, trainings, workshops, and consulting jobs both nationally and abroad. Social Ecologies offers soil and compost assessments, consultations in bioremediation strategies, hands-on workshops in soil health and fertility, and compost system buildouts.  

Nance’s work has received extensive national and international media coverage. Among other things, she is referenced in Leila Darwish’s Earth Repair and Sandor Katz’s The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. She won the 2012 Utne Visionary Prize and has been a two-time finalist for the Curry-Stone Design Prize. In addition, she has lectured broadly in museum and university settings with leading thinkers including Timothy Morton. Most recently, she was the subject of the independent documentary Weedeater.

Currently, Nance splits her time between Little Village–a densely packed, urban neighborhood in the heart of Chicago–where she facilitates The Soil Keepers, a 60-hour certificate training in community soil science, and fifty acres of land in the Driftless Region of northwest Illinois, where she stewards a prairie, cultivates medicinal and edible plants, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises quail, and grows seed for an indigenous food sovereignty project. 

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They begin this process with community engagement, wherein multiple meetings are held to gather diverse ideas. These meetings are a form of collectivization, wherein original cartographic and visualization tools are developed to help all participants arrive at a shared project vision.

Currently, the collaborative is curating the Landscape Biennale of Versailles under the title “La Présence du Vivant” in the Potager du Roi. There, they also have developed a collaborative garden as a temporary piece, called “Le Potager des Autres.” 

In September, after the Biennale, the collaborative plans to initiate other gardens by distributing plants they call “Bosquets Voyageurs.” Some of these plants will be planted in base 217 in the periphery of Paris at a former military airport that they hope to develop into a public park. The rest of the plants will travel to “Foret Demain,” a 3000 sq meters urban forest near Paris.

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The center has developed a four-pronged approach, emphasizing design, master planning, policy and education, and tools (which include educational games and the creation and testing of building materials). Fisk and Vittori have set up solar hot water heater production for poor towns in South Texas, planned sustainable villages in Nicaragua and China, and created several dozen building materials. In the early 1990s, the pair also helped to create Austin’s city-sponsored green building ratings program—the first of its kind in the world and a model for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system. 

Other projects of Fisk and Vittori have ranged from collaborating on an eco-friendly renovation of the Pentagon to groundbreaking planning and design approaches for healthcare facilities, integrating a health-based design approach into green buildings, and designing adaptable building systems for disaster relief and ecovillages based on a re-design and re-engineering of the ubiquitous shipping pallet (conceived as manufactured from hemp). 

In 2006, Metropolis Magazine recognized Fisk as one of 14 Visionaries and in 2008, Texas Monthly called him one of “35 People Who Will Shape Our Future.” In 2015, Vittori took home the Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainability, and in November 2020, she received USGBC’s Kate Hurst Leadership Award, which recognizes inspiring women for their outstanding commitment to advancing green building. 

We had an opportunity to speak with Pliny and Gail at a special live episode of our podcast, Social Design Insights, where they shared with us and the audience some of their strategies for global change. Listen to the episodes below.

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Prinzessinnengärten is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

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Nance Klehm is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

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Superuse Studios is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

The post 44 | The Blue Economy of the Future appeared first on Curry Stone Foundation.

Gail Vittori and Pliny Fisk introduce our hosts to their work, thinking at multiple scales about how to live & work ecologically.

The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

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