Feedback Loops and Systemic Change

We don’t own a car but I drive a friend’s on occasion. It’s a personal decision that for me came down to many years ago giving SFMTA too much money for parking tickets on street sweeping days. Living in San Francisco I just didn’t use my car that often and have been without it ever since.

And because my wife doesn’t like to drive we still haven’t gotten one, even after our daughter was born. We just haven’t been able to justify purchase and maintenance for using one. Luckily we have access if we really need one.

But it’s not possible for most people to operate that way in the United States. We have engineered driving into our housing policies, our transportation infrastructure decisions, and it impacts now at a deep level the decisions lawmakers and people make on a daily basis. That’s the feedback loop we’re in now. And it can be dangerous to step out of it.

In ArchDaily, Olivia Poston discusses these feedback loops and their impacts on our health. She calls it “the spatial consequences of our urban form” which reward further investment into more unhealthy systems. It also puts the burden of healthy lifestyles on the individual. You need to run, eat better, make better choices.

But where I live the choices for health are made easier by our feedback loop. The urban form allows us to save money on transportation, it allows me to walk more which I can totally feel makes a difference on my mood and focus on the days I don’t walk.

But it also belies the fact that these feedback loops are reinforcing in a way that can’t be changed by an individual, they must be systemic. In an excerpt published today in MIT Press Reader, Professor Leah Stokes discusses how she came to the title of her new book “The Carbon Wave”. By creating waves through systemic change that wash away all the individual (carbon) footprints that came before.

We can do things individually. It will make a small difference and does matter, at least for our own peace of mind, but there’s a bigger impact we can have when we change systems, such as the built environment, that create massive feedback loops which initiate path dependence.

And it’s something we know can be done. Berkeley’s Rolling Quads led by Ed Roberts pushed for curb cuts in the city which, when expanded through the ADA, made life easier for parents like me with strollers across the country.

In all of this, I keep thinking back to what Professor Sara Hendren told me about her friends in wheelchairs when we were discussing her book “What a Body Can Do”. “They are only disabled by a world full of stairs.”

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