SUSTAINABLE DESIGN: A CRITIQUE OF THE CURRENT TRIPOLAR MODEL

By «tripolar model», it is referred to the model, often also called «3 P model: Profit/Planet/People» or « 3 E model: Economics/Environment/Equity», which is very widely used as THE reference model for any project in sustainability, which includes of course sustainable design. The origin of this model is well established: its concept stems from the Brundtland Report and it has then crystallised at the Rio Conference in the well known and widely published form of the triangle where the economic, the environmental, and the social factors are supposed to merge, to meet, or to reconcile in the course of a specific project. More often however, the brief happens to be the following: we agree to consider the environmental and social impacts of the project as long as it remains economically viable.

The purpose of this paper is to present a critique of this tripolar model as it is structured and used. The critique is based on two kinds of arguments. One is empirical and follows from observation of failures in sustainable projects which took the model as their theoretical and pragmatic framework. The other one is speculative insofar as it will discuss the analytical and theoretical bases of the model, more precisely the relevance and the pragmatic fruitfulness of its three constituent concepts or domains. It is this second argument which will be specifically developed in the paper. A brief summary of our argument follows.

We consider that it is not correct to separate the economic from the environmental field or domain. As already indicated by their etymology, ecology and economics belong to the same sphere and share the same logics. A science of economy which does not take in consideration its ecological impacts should actually be considered as a sophism and does not reasonably deserve its name. Such an idea of the economy is indeed unthinkable in many cultures. The Economic and Environmental (or the Profit and Planet) poles of the model should therefore be merged into a unique pole, which could be named “General economics”.

On the other hand, we observe that the third pole, corresponding to the social aspects and impacts of the project, is often used as a sort of bin wherein all aspects not directly related with the two other ones can be thrown. As a matter of fact, this third pole usually collects all aspects which are not quantified or rendered with some degree of “objectivity”. We believe that this way of mixing “variables” belonging to different and usually incommensurable logics leads to too much confusion and is not very scientific. We therefore think that what is called the social pole of the model should be more discriminate. Social equity is indeed an important dimension of the system, since one should expect that the riches created by the economic pole (with full respect of the sustainability of the resources) are fairly distributed, not only among the various social categories of citizen, but also in respect of future generations. However, there should appear a domain in the model where the individual and collective initiatives and projects capable of producing the above mentioned riches are discussed freely, since economic life is dependent upon the initiatives and good ideas of projects carriers. To the argument saying that this domain belongs naturally to the economic pole, we contest that their respective logics are of a different kind: the logics of economy is a logics of means, whereas the logics of initiative is a logics of creativity. In other words, there is a kind of determinism in the current model which (mis)leads us to believe that the riches are a sort of (Darwinian) emergent reality of a complex system. We should not forget that this reality is always the product of human enterprise. Both domains, social equity and social creativity, should therefore appear as two separate poles in the model.

In its new proposed form, the model then appears structured along the three following poles (provisional terminology): Economic sphere, Institutional sphere, Projectual sphere.