Episode #43: HowWeSurvive

David and I, I don’t actually think that we’ve met in person, to be honest with you. So I think we’re that typical example of bridging ties through LinkedIn. And I’ve heard of him through all the work he’s been doing, particularly with How We Survive.

So what does human architectures really mean when you refer to it as designing places that prioritize relationships and everyday connection? Now, I’m going to confess, I’m not an academic, although I’m an adjunct research fellow at Flinders University, but I don’t come from an academic space at all. I’m very practical top 140.

(05:35):

Yeah. So what is human architecture?

David Sanderson (05:38):

I see. Yeah, my background is an architect, I guess I should say. And I think there’s a land about that. I take that as designing and supporting and helping, designing with not for and doing those things. I teach a course, postgraduate architecture course, well, I’ve just stepped down, but I’ve been doing it the last 10 years called social agency. And social agency is around finding your architect students in their fifth year asking questions that are societally relevant. And that means engaging with the girl who I failed to get the photo to show you just now, Renee. I’m sorry about that. But actually supporting people, supporting those people to actually fulfill their lives as much as can be. I suppose that sounds a bit abstract, isn’t it? A more concrete example is straight after a disaster, disaster recovery. We need the immediacy of fire and rescue and the rest to pull you out of the fire or the rest to use that slight dramatic view or out of the flood and obviously essential and vital and lifesaving.

(06:39):

After that point, the recovery situation is more where it’s actually reversing the who’s got the power. It’s actually communities to be in the driving seat of decisioning. That can be quite hard for intervening agencies who are not wrongly in the immediacy of a disaster are required to take a strong lead, rightly so. Yes. But afterwards, give that up please, politely, respectfully, and switch that around. And too, after we find in Australia and across the world, the idea that actually people are not listened to well enough, that those with the T-shirts with emblazoned stuff come in, the community goes quiet and are sort of taught to be heard like followers. And that’s not okay, not because those people are evil, there’s no such thing as that, but actually it’s the wrong way around. And so good resilience, if you like, and good humanitarian architecture, bringing it back to your great question, is around actually shifting the power dynamics.

(09:16):

Now, can I ask again, my next question is around the UNSW initiative, how we survive, works in practice using social infrastructure as a tool to encourage partnership and then local ownership, et cetera. So can you tell us about how we survive? What is it? What have you done? How’s it working? Because I love it. Well,

David Sanderson (09:35):

What a wonderful question. Thank you. You can imagine. Well, just tying into what we just were just talking then and then going to how we survive. People working in agencies, and I count close family members working really good people, but in a system that is not rewarded to actually support process. The deliverables of products, housing, temporary shelters, whatever being seen to be done. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, of course. Well, who wants a system that doesn’t deliver? I mean, of course not about delivery, but the delivery comes at the cost of not engaging in process. And what you get are, we just finished a two-year big research study across Australia looking at post-disaster housing. You get the pods, which again, well intended, no evil here, no conspiracy. Cost the earth, no one knows what to do with them. Absolutely the wrong approach is the summary of a long story.

(10:28):

So how we survive is a modest but ambitious initiative. Our website is how we survive.com. And we’re very grateful that the benefactor Judith Nelson, who supports my job position, provided money for us to give us a high degree of flexibility and freedom for decades. And again, we respectfully have careful stewards of that. And after some years of trying to work out what to do, we came out with how we survive.com. And we are friends in the US and in India and Australia and all that kind of thing. And it’s around putting people’s voices of recovery in the center. So how do we survive? How do we survive? How do you survive? Not the immediacy of the relief, but the recovery. So what we’re doing is we’re building a world map of people’s stories of recovery. We’ve got about 1200 in Australia. We’ve got three, 400 in New Zealand, thanks to our fabulous friends and partners at the University of Canterbury who gathered stuff.

(11:22):

Our good friends and partners in India, Seeds, Seeds India. We’ve got several hundred now in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. We’re about to start talking with the African Center for Disaster Studies in Johannesburg around doing that. So go look at it. You click on it. It’ll tell you it’s not edited. We’ve not done anything. It’s all publicly available information. We’ve now got an AI functionality thanks to our friends at MapAI, which we launched in October at a big event in the state government. And you can look at it and you can say, well, what are the five pressing issues around people’s experiences of recovery? So this is unedited stories of what people think, and that’s really important. So whose reality counts? We are literally putting people’s stories on the map. Again, thanks to our benefactor, we have money for the next 40 years for this to 2063.

why recovery and resilience fail without social design? Because clearly that’s been part of you been designing it from a social perspective as you’ve gone. So why is that so important?

David Sanderson (16:19):

Because it’s the whoserat accounts. It’s the sign there, resilient ready. It’s the people, it’s communities, it’s the rest. We all know this. I’ve never met anybody who would disagree with this, but the systems we have where the power and the money is, doesn’t reward process. And I come back, and exactly as you’re saying, I mean, the great work you’ve been doing, Renee, these last year and years, especially with Daniel Aldrich, who’s a friend to all of us who’s just phenomenal and a real world leader in this, second to none, is around promoting process, the libraries, the ownership, the stuff, the people. We all know this. I’ve never met a Fari or ASO said, of course, but our systems don’t reward that. They probably never will. What we can do, however, is actually make the case to be stronger, to support decision makers with bold initiatives to say it’s a 20-year timeframe and I’m not going to see it in my political time, but there it is.

(17:10):

And there are people who do that. I mean, again, there are angels. Definitely. It’s honest to support. The evidence isn’t enough anymore. We live in a time now where evidence is not cutting it.

what two things would you like to be done differently in the disaster space?

David Sanderson (19:59):

That at state and federal level in Australia and in New South Wales andever else in the world, because I know you get a followership across the world, that it’s very boring. This is an HR issue actually, that your job description rewards process and prioritizes effectiveness over efficiency. So I’ve got to be in my bonnet about this. I was thinking about this recently. So there are five metrics, there are lots of them, lots of different metrics where more successes. Delivery is wrongly equated with being efficient. A success, yeah. Effective. And effective means taking time. Good friends in the RA and the Reconstruction Authority in New South Wales. I won’t name them out of embarrassing them and Julie, but well, yeah, actually I will actually. Heidi Stratford, who’s a senior manager there for many years, the amount of energy she puts into engaging with people and doing things in going places and the rest, and that can come at the disservice to your job because you’re not rewarded for that.

(21:03):

And because she’s on the side of the angels and many other people are, believe in it. But again, those line managers are not evil monsters. They’re reporting to the ministers who are not evil monsters, but actually say, “No, we need to deliver this by then.” And they’re not wrong, but it takes time to use the cliche, it’s the iceberg, it’s all the stuff under it. And if you ignore that, it’ll knock you over when you sell into it.

Renae Hanvin (21:27):

Oh, a hundred percent. And I use the term too, I’m only interested in outcomes. I’m not interested in outputs because I can do anything. Just the long term. I don’t care about the output. I care about the outcome. So that’s everything that we do. That’s what we’re focused on. I love it. And what’s the second one? Is there one more?

David Sanderson (21:43):

Well, I’ll build on what you just said actually. Yeah. In humanitarian aid world, the project management tool is called a logical framework analysis, lock frame. And that was developed by NASA about getting rockets to the moon and the project stops at the output. I’m dovetailing off what you just said. Not wrongly, as it were. It stops from the output. The immediacy of the deliverable based on the money you’ve put in. Great, good. But the outcome could be totally different. So having the timeframe, the thing, the long-termism, we need more people in positions of power with the guts to say no, we need to be long-term. And there are lots of good people. Our current minister is incredibly good at that, thinking long-term, Janelle Saffin, about thinking of long-term investments again on the side of the angels. That can be a voice that’s not heard very often.