ABSTRACT
My main argument for a vocabulary of co-evolution is that the conventional vocabularies of either technology orientation or behaviour orientation cannot adequately describe certain cases of significant achievement toward sustainability, such as Hasselt or Fürstenfeldbruck. If this claim can be supported, it follows that either approach alone is also limited in describing and therefore proposing future cases. Feenberg makes exactly this point in regard to any deterministic philosophy; and both the technology and the behaviour orientated approach are deterministic in some respect. ‘Determinism … makes it seem as though the end of the story was inevitable from the very beginning… That approach confuses our understanding of the past and stifles the imagination of a different future’ (Feenberg, 1995b, p7). A planning-related thought experiment illustrates this point. Imagine someone who has never heard of mixed-use zoning. If this person encounters a mixed-use area in the real world, she will have difficulty finding an appropriate word to categorize her perception, much in the same way a child cannot fit a triangular wooden shape into a sorting block that only has a rectangular and a circular hole. The resolution (as in screen resolution) of her perception-space is limited to two drawers – one is labelled residential, the other industrial. These two elements also constitute her decision-space because if such a person is asked to devise a plan for a new development, she can only assemble the components she has available into a split-use proposal. Someone who is familiar with the concept of mixed-use would probably recommend rethinking the binary question ‘should we put residential or industrial here?’ In the same way, I recommend rephrasing the question ‘do we need better technology or more moral behaviour?’ to ‘would it help if technology and behaviour co-evolved?’ I make this suggestion because the concept of co-evolution seems better suited to accommodate certain shapes of reality – such as those just described in Belgium and Germany – than traditional linguistic templates.
