Creating living infrastructure, with Jess Miller
Jess is a freelance Impact Strategist. Through her work, Jess confronts and overcomes the most complex and intractable problems facing people living in urban places. Jess’ areas of expertise include environmental systems, specifically urban ecology and urban forestry, and local food systems. She is an advocate for a slow city with lots of active and public transport, character, community, sport, colour and creativity.
What do you love about cities?
The thing I love about cities is that every single one is incredibly unique. I've lived in the city of Sao Paulo, I've lived in Melbourne, and I call Sydney 'home', and in each one of those cities, there's a really specific character that makes that place special and brings those connections together. One of the things I love most about big cities is that they're equal parts messy and chaotic as they are beautiful.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in cities over the past 20 years that matter most to you?
The biggest change that's happened in my lifetime has been climate change. And throughout my career I've come to notice that cities have the greatest potential to really help shape a safer and more resilient future, so cities give me hope. I'm also very aware that the divide between the people who have a lot and the people who don't is getting greater and greater. In the coming decades, this is the thing that we're really going to have to address in meaningful ways. If we don't, I think that's really going to pose some fairly major problems to all of us.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on that has been most important to you?
For the last 10 years, my big mission has just been to get more plants and trees into cities and now I think that we're really succeeding in doing that. People are coming to really appreciate the value of green spaces and trees and plants and gardens. The mission now is to start really thinking about what kinds of systems need to adapt in order for that vision of a really lush, beautiful city to thrive. And that means we have to start thinking about water and electricity and waste and recognizing the really critical interdependencies between these systems. And not only the interdependencies between the systems, but the role that humans play in that, because we are part of those systems.
To be a great ancestor for future generations, what does our sector need to focus on today?
There’s a really interesting practice where every time you make a decision, you have to leave a chair empty and imagine that that chair is occupied by a person who hasn't been born yet. Throughout the course of that decision-making process, there is that moment where you have to look to that empty chair and question what that person would say if they had had the opportunity to speak. I think empathy and imagination are the two things that are really critical to being a great ancestor.
“Every time you make a decision, leave a chair empty and imagine that the chair is occupied by a person who hasn’t been born yet.”
What has to change or be amplified in our system to make these things a priority?
To make empathy and imagination central priorities, I think we could all probably do with a good dose of courage and a recognition that having enough is having enough. I think that would go a long way toward a more equitable and fair future. I also believe investing heavily in relationships is really important. You can't possibly imagine what it's like to lead somebody else's life or what it feels like to be them if you don't really know anybody like that. It comes back to being curious and opening your mind up to other people, really.
What's one piece of advice you would give to emerging urban leaders?
I think this idea of living infrastructure is really important and we have to recognize that things that are conducive to life so clean air, water, shade, culture, music, relationships, all the stuff that make life fun, need to be recognized as having as much, if not more, value than things that are not conducive necessarily to life. As city makers, one of the ways that we can enable that is to create these kinds of opportunities for people to connect, to bump into one another, and to build relationships - whether it's over a conversation about your dog, or your kid in the playground or a garden. That’s where I believe there is a huge opportunity for the built environment to intersect with that kind of softer, more emotional and human part of it, a soul which just deeply desires connection and friendship. That might be a good place to start.
