2
The Three Modes of the
Development Life Cycle and Their
Three Realms of Development

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If you’re looking primarily for specific opportunities to grow or revitalize your organization, business, or community, you may not be interested in spending a lot of time on hypothesis or theory. But developing a new organizational strategy or vision requires a deeper understanding of underlying dynamics than does grubbing for contracts. If that’s part of your purpose, this chapter is for you. Here, then, are two hypotheses to which we’ll refer throughout the rest of the book:

1.Economic development can be divided into three modes, corresponding to the natural cycles through which all life passes: Birth/youth (new development), maturity (maintenance/ conservation), and rebirth (restorative development) (Death, although a part of all natural systems, is neither mode nor cycle; it’s just an ephemeral, transitory moment.)

2.When confined by inelastic borders, growing civilizations, especially those dependent on nonrenewable resources, move through a predictable progression of dominance among the modes: first new development, then maintenance/conservation, and finally restorative development. We are experiencing one of these transitions of dominance right now.

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Besides being more relevant than the traditional sequence of agrarian-industrial-service/information modes of economic development, this sequence of life cycle modes fosters easier and more effective development planning and decision making. Therefore, we will repeatedly reference this three-mode (or trimodal) development framework.

Assuming a civilization survives long enough—and earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, wars, and other such phenomena don’t destroy its creations—maintenance of its new development quickly becomes a substantial economic component of the economy. However, restorative development must arise, eventually achieving dominance, if a society is going to thrive in the long term. When everything is old and developed, only restoration can provide renewal, and the stability that comes with it.

Long-lived civilizations are those that make the transition to renewal before too many critical, irreplaceable assets have been destroyed. They recognize the limits of reasonable expansion, and restoration becomes the primary driver. In contrast, new development-oriented societies are always going “somewhere else,” rather than becoming native to their land and looking forward to a long relationship with it. Like a poorly planned hike, new development-based economies exhaust their food and supplies (nonrenewable resources) and encounter unfordable rivers and unbridgeable chasms (insurmountable obstacles to growth).

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One such obstacle: running out of virgin, uncontaminated real estate. Impossible, you say? Consider the city of Niagara Falls, New York. This economically depressed community has zero uncontaminated real estate available for development. It’s not that their green-fields are off-limits; they have no greenfields. The city must either restore and redevelop previous industrial sites, or die. Restorative development is not one of the city’s options. It’s the only option. The situation in Niagara Falls is far from unique; many other industrialized (or formerly industrialized) cities are in the same boat, and many others are joining them.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) said “All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities” (Letter i. On a Regicide Peace, Vol. V). The observation applies to civilizations, and our new development-based civilization’s propensities are to use nonrenewable resources and raw land. Our sprawl mentality focuses on more, rather than better; hardly wise in a finite world.

Countries that reach acute levels of resource depletion, pollution, infrastructure deterioration, etc., as most have today, usually find that merely strengthening the maintenance/conservation mode is insufficient. When maintenance of the built and/or natural environments is ignored or delayed too long, societies reach a crisis point that forks into two roads: inertia or mode reversal.

As we’ll see in Chapter 3, inertia—getting stuck in new-development mode—leads to collapse from resource depletion, health problems, cultural rot, etc. It’s sometimes a slow collapse, since belated restorative development can retard the descent.

The other fork, mode reversal, triggers a profusion of restorative development. Mode reversal means not just slowing depletion of resources by emphasizing maintenance and conservation, but switching to restorative development, which increases resources without taking up more room (even decreasing our ecological footprint in many cases), while generating goods, services, and profits.

New development isn’t always the initial phase, of course. Many civilizations are birthed in the ashes of war, so their initial growth has a large restoration component. Similarly, a city or society based on new development needn’t be old to find itself suddenly growing a hefty realm of restorative development. Examples would include many modern-day emerging nations (after wars for independence), Chicago after its Great Fire of 1871, and San Francisco after its 1906 earthquake/fire.

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TRIMODAL RELEVANCE

The Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD) used to award contracts for about 15 mi (24 km) of interstate highway work each year. This year, however, it expects to issue contracts worth about $415 million for 142 mi (228 km) of work—the latest in a series of what have been the largest contract awards in the department’s history. The record-breaking contracts are part of the state’s five-year Interstate Rehabilitation Program (IRP), which is designed to reconstruct 380 mi (611 km), or about 60% of the state’s interstate highway system… [and] will cost approximately $950 million.

—Civil Engineering, March 2002

For investors, business leaders, government planners, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) executives, the most relevant aspect of this trimodal development perspective is not how many modes the economy has, but which of the modes is entering a growth phase. The modes, regardless of their number, are never in stasis. Complex, healthy economies are, in fact, usually in a state of discomforting imbalance.

The relative energy of each mode tends to wax and wane with sporadic, unpredictable intensity, but in a predictable progression: a burst of new development, a mirrored bloom of maintenance, and then a long period of continuous restoration. Of course, entropic events, such as invasion, plague, or internal strife, sometimes hinder this natural progression.

One reason for the economic “passivity” of the maintenance/ conservation mode is that it’s dependent on the other two modes for things to maintain and conserve. It’s obvious enough that maintenance/ conservation industries need new development to expand the built environment and to threaten the natural environment. What’s not so obvious is that the maintenance/conservation realm needs restorative development to bring decrepit parts of the built environment back to a useful condition, thus needing maintenance. It also needs restorative development to revive damaged portions of the natural environment to the point where they can be conserved.

All economies have at least some activity in all three modes at any given time. For the United States and other “First World” countries, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the industrial revolution) were clearly dominated by new development, the twentieth century was dominated by new development and maintenance/conservation (those two modes were fairly balanced in overall expenditures in the latter half of the century), and restorative development is fast becoming dominant as 33the twenty-first century progresses. Lesser Developed Regions are basically on the same trajectory, but are often a decade or two out of phase with the More Developed Regions.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

As new development loses momentum, it’s fragmenting into a large collection of niche markets. Simultaneously, the currently fragmented industries of restorative development are moving in the opposite direction, coalescing into a whole.

New development is focusing on ever more remote geographic regions, primarily for the very wealthy and the very poor. Restorative developers are moving in exactly the opposite direction; for example, they are redeveloping, revitalizing, and repopulating the inner-city properties that new developers are “done with.”

Like a pig in a python, the bulk of economic activity is moving inexorably from centuries of frenetic new development toward a frenzy of restoration. Even if we weren’t living on a small world with a booming population (Constraint Crisis), the crumbling of our built environment (Corrosion Crisis) means the bulge can’t help but move into restoration mode. If new development proceeded in a linear, gradual fashion, the transition to restoration wouldn’t take us so much by surprise. But extended orgies of new development tend, as we’ve experienced, to be followed by economic ruin, pathological stagnation, or a sudden, healthful storm of restoration.

Without restoration, to continue the python analogy to its nasty denouement, it all turns to… well, you know (Contamination Crisis). Most of the energy produced by our national economic “digestive process” is wasted by a horribly inefficient industrial system (which also has a tremendous gas problem: witness global climate change), rather than being channeled into rebuilding the “body” of our civilization. We must either convert the “dead pig” of previous development into the “healthy python” of restored worlds—shedding our old ways in the process—or we’re left with nothing but stinky excreta. Well, I’ve beaten that metaphorical snake quite to death, yes?

One caveat concerning the use of this trimodal development perspective: complex systems are messy, often to the point of enduring periods of chaos. The three modes described here are not meant to be viewed as a rigid linear progression. Indeed, there’s a great deal of overlap.

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Whatever predictive value the trimodal perspective might have goes little further than common sense: of course new development eventually declines and hits a point of decreasing returns on a planet of finite size; of course maintenance follows new construction; of course conservation kicks in when new development reduces natural areas to remnants; of course restoration follows age and damage.

Despite its obviousness, government policy and corporate strategy indicate that, amazingly enough, our organizations and institutions are only now starting to internalize this trimodal perspective.