Private Sufficiency, Public Abundance

The concept of abundance is increasingly deployed as a critique of conventional economics, with a variety of conflicting interpretations. The American Economic Association defines economics as ‘the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives’. A common criticism of neoliberal economics is that it creates artificial scarcity by taking goods that were common and commoditising them, which, in turn, leads to hoarding, exploitation and hierarchical social structures. More recently, some commentators have adopted the idea of abundance to challenge assumptions of scarcity, while others use it to promote deregulated growth as a means of stimulating the economy. These definitions stand in stark contrast to the understanding of abundance in societies that exist outside of Western capitalism. The linguist Daniel Everett studied a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest and once asked how they stored meat after a big kill. The hunter was confused and said that he would invite everyone to a feast: ‘Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.’ 1 1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance (London: Penguin, 2024).   

How might we rethink the framing of scarcity without simply – or perhaps simplistically – advocating for its opposite? This roundtable discussion, which gathered figures from architecture, urban planning, policymaking and healthcare, explored the nuances and polarities of abundance with a view to understanding whether it is a useful framework for the emerging future. The conversation first explored the power of the capitalist narrative and questioned what it would take to tell a different kind of story through the lens of three main threads: social abundance, material abundance and natural abundance. Each of these areas of abundance are very different – and a whole world unto themselves – but in thinking about how they intersect it became possible to see that abundance offers a more optimistic framing device than some of the existing concepts society often feels trapped within. 

Abundance within limits might sound like an oxymoron but this is the essence of all living systems. Abundance and scarcity co-exist: the former creates plentiful ecological niches, while the latter represents a challenge for species to evolve adaptations that make efficient use of those elements in short supply. The philosopher Freya Mathews uses the term ‘conativity’ to describe a key characteristic in nature: species have evolved to further their own existence in a way that also enhances the system of which they are a part. 2 2 Freya Mathews, ‘Towards a Deeper philosophy of Biomimicry’, Organization and Environment 24, no. 4 (2011), 364–87.  Furthermore, she asserts that they follow a principle of ‘least resistance’, which is that they pursue their existence in ways that use minimum energy and create minimum resistance. In ecosystems, excess consumption has been ‘evolved out’ – in other words, species or ecosystems that thrived while using other resources or less energy would have out-competed those that consumed more. 

Leonora Grcheva, drawing on her experience as an urban planner and as a member of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), explained that natural ecosystems provide a useful and necessary framework for considering human needs. As she observed, ‘In Doughnut Economics, we talk about meeting the needs of all people within the needs of the living planet or thriving within boundaries.’ This echoes journalist and activist George Monbiot’s suggestion that we move away from private luxury and public squalor to private sufficiency and public luxury. But ‘luxury’, Grcheva argued, can produce negative connotations and wondered if ‘private sufficiency and public abundance’ might better capture the limitations. 

The idea of private sufficiency and public abundance was one that we returned to during the discussion. Was it powerful enough as a narrative to shape not just economics but policy and community organising? As Grcheva commented, ‘I’ve learned what I underappreciated before, which is the relevance of narrative for everything. You realize the power it holds to motivate people or to gather people around supporting certain ideas and different threads of action.’  

We discussed how the importance of narrative even finds resonance in the so-called scientific disciplines, such as economics. Architect and member of Resolve Collective, Akil Scafe-Smith, paraphrased the economist Mariana Mazzucato stating: ‘in the early days of the discipline of economics, it was actually taught as “political economy”. We tend to reduce the economy to a quantitative exchange when actually, narrative is very much part of economy as an idea and as a discipline.’ Rewriting narratives can be challenging because, in many cases, the stories are deeply ingrained. Akil’s experience in Croydon revealed how the major landowner, the John Whitgift Foundation, ‘had 1,000 years to build their narrative around why they’re justified in owning most of the town centre.’ 

One recurrent theme of our conversation was the fact that there are undervalued forms of abundance all around us in the communities we inhabit. This social abundance offers ways to reconnect people and enhance their sense of agency.  

As a physician, Gillian Orrow has done pioneering work with Growing Health Together (GHT), which focuses on social connection initiatives rather than conventional treatment of illness. She described how scarcity often underlies much thinking about healthcare – the view being that there are millions of patients requiring treatment, limited resources, and this will only get more difficult in an ageing society. This is effectively a sickness service rather than one that truly embodies health and care. At worst, it encourages a form of learned helplessness. In GHT she and her NHS colleagues have worked with diverse groups including local authorities, schools, the police, faith groups, businesses and farmers to co-create conditions for health, leading to initiatives such as ‘Men in Sheds’ and community gardens, which have been transformative in countering the damaging effects of loneliness. Gill has shown that ‘an abundance of care and connection and a diverse range of contributions, creates abundance and flourishing of life’.  

Care and connection are not finite resources – they are capacities that can be grown, almost without limit. Through his work with Resolve Collective, Akil has seen abundance emerge in projects that empower those who have been disempowered. While Resolve often collaborates with underserved communities and young people, Akil stressed that the narrative of so-called ‘feel-good’ community projects can easily be co-opted by the powerful. Such work needs to be accompanied by a challenge to existing forms of dominance: ‘We cannot achieve abundance without really looking at the redistribution of land and of power. … Redistribution must mean disempowering powerful vested interests.’ 

Part of this inevitably comes with recognising the inherent power in communities, if it can be harnessed. As Gill observed: ‘We’re talking about creating abundance in ways that communities uniquely can. … We are just reminding everybody of their innate agency and creativity and how wonderful it is when we connect and collaborate and care for one another and have fun. Then people recognise their own power, step into it and when that coalesces, it’s incredibly powerful. No corporation can stop that from happening.’ 

We should beware of the reductiveness that resulted from the modernist axiom ‘form follows function’ but, as one important strand for rethinking the relationship between architecture and materials, ‘form follows abundance’ might offer a useful challenge. A stunning example of this approach are the houses built by the Maʻdān Arabs in the marshlands of what is now Iraq. They had an abundant, if very unpromising, building material – reeds. These were tied together into small bundles, then gathered into larger ones, long and strong enough to form arched structures. The result was a distinctive architectural language that you won’t find anywhere else – showing how ingenuity and abundance can lead to architecture that is completely rooted in its place. 

Duncan Baker Brown, renowned for his work on materials and the circular economy, described how he spent a substantial early part of his career pursuing this ideal of inspired local sourcing and then realised that ‘there’s this big pile of stuff that’s the anthroposphere. So, for the last 15 years I’ve been trying to prove the anthroposphere is the abundant resource we should be looking at.’ The anthroposphere refers to the mass of material created by humans – concrete, metal, plastics, consumer goods, etc. – only a small proportion of which has been effectively recycled to date. As one example, there is a higher concentration of copper (much of it no longer in use) in many urban streets than there is in copper mines. 3 3 Typical copper concentrations in exploitable ore are between 0.6 and 1 per cent (you need to mine 1,000kg of rock to get 6–10kg of copper). Relative to this, concentrations of copper in redundant cables are far higher.   

In an effort to redistribute what already exists, Resolve Collective, with architecture practice Material Cultures and design–build collective Yes Make, have developed the Material Store, a community-focused factory for the collection, storage, reuse and redistribution of salvaged materials. In Akil’s view, we may find that ‘everything we have produced anthropogenically is enough, as long as we can reuse that continuously’.  

No longer limited to individual projects, the circular economy in the built environment is now factoring into policy. The Mayor of London’s housing plan, for instance, requires new developments to be designed for deconstruction and the use of more recycled materials. Material passports, which document the provenance and carbon content of the elements in a new building, are becoming more common. Meanwhile, there are moves to mandate the use of renewable materials – in France, for instance, all new publicly funded buildings must use at least 50 per cent timber or bio-based materials. 

In 2020, for the first time, the weight of all human-made materials exceeded the total mass of all living organisms on the planet. We need to shift away from the abundances of the twentieth century – from concrete and steel, say, to timber and biomaterials. But we also need to recognise the incredible abundance of what is already in circulation. The group debated whether working within a circular framework was too limited. After all, without nature’s abundance – without the biodiversity that makes life possible – everything else is moot. Gill formulated the role of designers rather neatly as ‘designing conditions for the emergence of life-giving abundance’. 

The biologist E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis made the case that we all have an innate connection with life and that we are happier, healthier and more productive when in regular contact with nature. Joanna Choukeir has seen multiple demonstrations of this in her work on ‘Playful Green Planet’, an initiative that transforms green spaces into ecologically thriving outdoor playrooms and classrooms that grow children’s ecological citizenship: 

‘I’m interested in the abundance of capabilities and capacities that we have to connect and care for ourselves, for others and for nature. We have an infinite capacity to do so, and we see that in small children and how they experience the natural world with delight, wonder and curiosity.’ 

She and her team often encounter the view that there are not enough green spaces in cities. In reality, there are plenty, but they are underutilised. Often, they have found that ‘all you need is a bit of soil’. 

Rewilding – or wilding as some people prefer – has provided inspiring examples of how ecosystems can recover. Rachel Fisher, from the government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), remarked on a common schism between those who advocate contact with nature and those who take the view that people are very bad for nature. This perhaps reflects a worldview that humans can only ever have a relationship with nature based on mitigated damage. The UK government recently introduced biodiversity net gain legislation, which requires developers to replace any biodiversity lost through construction. But the bigger challenge to policy making in this area is, as ever, the silos of government departments. Working across departments to recognise the co-benefits of ideas such as access to nature and biodiversity – for health or food or biomaterials – remains difficult. 

Still, we agreed that similar mindsets could be applied more broadly. For instance, the vexed question of growth could be reframed in terms of planetary health, given that our wellbeing as humans is inseparable from the wellbeing of the living systems on which we depend for the essentials of life, such as oxygen, water and nutrients. It could lead to more nuanced ideas about the kind of growth we want (that which enhances planetary health) and to the view that we should strive for what we see in nature: high levels of growth, balanced with decay and renewal. 

The roundtable drew out useful conclusions about when it makes sense to use abundance as a frame. Most cases of social abundance demonstrate the potential to counter narratives of separation and powerlessness. The fact that this aspect of society is so under-explored demonstrates the degree of transformation that could be brought about with a broader economic perspective. The discussion also clarified some nuances, such as the difference between abundance and excess, and how in some contexts, scarcity can stimulate the kind of innovation that would help societies thrive within planetary limits. For instance, in areas of water scarcity, learning from Indigenous wisdom or from adaptations in other species, we could find ways to use water much more efficiently and cultivate greater connection with the places we inhabit. 

In many contemporary discussions it feels like the elephant in the room is the fact that, ‘the realities of the planetary emergency feel ever starker so how do we bring about these shifts?’ 4 4 A Google ngram search for ‘theory of change’ shows how use of the term has risen exponentially over the last two decades, from a very low base.  This perhaps provides evidence for an emerging metamodern worldview that is more determined to move on from the antagonising polarities of modernity and postmodernity, towards more unifying narratives that engage with what some refer to as ‘conscious evolution’. Just as biological evolution developed through variation and selection of genes, it is postulated that human consciousness is evolving through variation and selection of memes. 

The roundtable produced a range of ways in which the shifts in thinking about abundance could be accelerated as follows: 

• Choosing to be more objective about what is truly abundant and what is scarce (the anthroposphere being objectively the most abundant in mass) 
• Creating spaces and places for conversations that can help to rewrite dominant narratives 
• Using more holistic frames such as planetary health and planetary limits that have an increasingly persuasive logic that challenges the anthropocentric perspectives of global health and endless growth  

The apparent intransigence of the current system can cultivate frustration about the perceived pace of change and undermine our agency, but as Rachel Fisher reminded us:  

‘If you think about abundance of the 20th century – when we completely remade the world to support a petrol-based economy – I’m constantly struck by just what it took to create cities for cars in 50 years. When you think about the amount of stuff that we humans did over a very short period of time, we can unmake it, right? … This is about power. People don’t give up power willingly unless they see a thing that they want more.’