“Hospicing the old world”: An in-depth conversation with the authors of Sacred Civics

You’ve heard about smart cities. What about sacred cities?

The authors of Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities believe this concept could be the path to more livable, humane, and sustainable cities. According to its synopsis, the book “argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature.” 

Future of Good founder and publisher, Vinod Rajasekaran, sat down with two of the book’s editors, Jayne Engle and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook, and one of its co-authors, Aarathi Krishnan, to learn more about what the ‘sacred’ in sacred civics means, and how changemakers might use this concept to shift narratives in their own work.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Vinod Rajasekaran: Jayne and Tanya, when you thought about this book, who did you imagine it was for?

Jayne Engle: In a general sense, people who care. People who care about being good ancestors. People who want to contribute to change. At the same time, it’s a dense read. This is not light, summer, on-the-beach reading. We tried to make it pretty accessible. It’s transdisciplinary. But yes, specifically, practitioners, policy people, social changemakers. And we did want it to be used in university teaching — we wanted it to be in front of students from multiple disciplines, from urban studies to law to decolonial studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, sociology, design — all of these fields, we wanted it to go to those audiences as well and be accessible to young people. And we are finding a huge resonance with so many young people in this work. 

Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook: All three of us [co-authors] have come from academic spheres. I think we all agreed right away that we wanted to make sure it had some scholarly foundations and rigour, of course, but we also wanted to reach the social changemakers. For me, I was thinking about different cultural communities around the world. And that’s a tricky thing, to have coherent language across the chapters that speaks to and invites in all of these different audiences. We made sure that it’s open-access, as well, so that people of different economic backgrounds or contexts are able to access the book.

Vinod Rajasekaran: Could you describe your definition of sacred civics? What does sacred mean, in the context of sacred civics?

Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook: For me, ‘sacred’ implicitly brings us into our relationships, first and foremost with the earth and the more-than-human landscapes and the beings that we share the planet — our places — with. And then, of course, within our families, our larger kinship communities or systems, our society, and the world at large. When I think about cities, I think of them as living organisms. Thinking about grounding and enlivening the city organism — the innovations, the infrastructures, the institutions that drive urban life — for me, that grounding and enlivening comes from the spiritual or sacred relationships and values that interconnect us. At a practical level, bringing in the sacred dimension represents the potential that people, cities, and societies have to transform and transcend our current paradigms and systems that are unjust, untenable, problematic. Bringing in a deeper consciousness — those real world approaches, pathways, for what it means to centre sacred grounding, life in all forms and expressions, soul, humanism — more-than-humanism — kinship, relationality, agency, justice, relationship, joy, hope for those better futures. When we perceive the earth’s abundance as gifts and, as we say in the book, not as commodities, then our relationship to the earth instantly becomes transformed.

Jayne Engle: One part of the impetus for this book actually came when Sidewalk Labs was proposed in Toronto, because right after that, I wrote an essay, in which I wrote about valuing the sacred in the city. I used the term sacred civics at the end of that. It was about big tech being in the city business and all the implications of that — not just the obvious ones around surveillance and privacy and so on, but actually it represented a loss of a sense of civic agency, a threat to civic democracy, and a sense that we can generativity co-create in communities and that be actually a sacred act. Big tech should not be getting in the way of that. Unique, relational, non-commodifiable, civic spaces, and experiences of civic agency are critical. And that is sacred.

Vinod Rajasekaran: How did you decide whose perspectives mattered the most in terms of including them in the book? These are tough calls you’d have to make. And if you had to add three more, whose perspectives would you add?

Jayne Engle: I think just about everybody in the book could be described as a world-builder, because many of us work transdisciplinarily and many of us also span academia, research, activism, policy, or at least a couple of those. Part of the bridging worlds is recognizing that so many of the institutions, so many of the practices and policies we have today need to die, need to be hospiced. We’re hospicing so much of the old world as we open up space for new worlds to emerge. Pretty much everyone in the book, even if they don’t see it that way, we saw them as people who are doing that. It would be very hard to choose three more, but even those three more would have good pluriversality, and have multilayered identities. 

Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook: We had a Wyandotte Elder and Faith Keeper as part of the book, who was able to bring a very deep, spiritual and wisdom grounding to the book — but also that historical and memory arc, connecting both historical and modern Indigenous and settler experiences, contexts, relationships to the land, places, waters, and practices. But I would have liked to — and might in a future book project — have invited one or more younger activists, changemakers, world-bridging authors to bring forward a more youth-situated perspective on our times now and what is needed for positive radical change that our youth today need step into leadership. 

Vinod Rajasekaran: In the book, you say the practice of foresight is not neutral. We live in a world where everybody wants to be modern, but modernity is often conflated with Western ways of being. How do we reckon with neutrality and modernity being conflated with Westernization?

Aarathi Krishnan: I don’t know if it’s a binary argument. You and I come from countries and communities where, arguably, people would say, ‘It’s our turn now. It’s our turn to have the modern things’. Modern does not equal Western — and the fact that that’s the first thing we go to speaks to the ways our minds have been colonized, and how hard it is to actually reimagine modernity in different ways. It’s not to say that Western is bad, but it’s not to say that Eastern is great either. The message I think is important — it’s a bit of a life’s journey — is to recognize that we are not neutral. Just because we want to be changemakers, it doesn’t mean that we’re good. It doesn’t mean that the decisions we make are not inherently biased. Let’s not accept homogeneity. I’ve seen facilitators, whether it’s innovation facilitators or design facilitators or foresight — whatever — people who are training others — immediately assume that their approach or pursuit is the right one. Not one thing is the silver bullet. 

Vinod Rajasekaran: What narratives do you want this book to reshape?

Tanya Chun-Tiam-Fook: If we really want to think about how we’re going to change the dominant narratives, I was thinking at least partially with a decolonial lens on things, thinking about the pluriversal, the radical inclusiveness that we try to embody and foster through this book. How are we getting out from this rather singular narrative of coloniality, industry, extractivism, technocracy, social and ecological injustice that has come to dominate many of our systems, structures, institutions, and communities — at all levels of our institutions and all levels of our beings as well? How do we then surface, recentre, and really breathe life and vitality into the plurality of different cultural, philosophical, spiritual, social, and economic narratives that come from our different communities — equity- and sovereignty-seeking communities that have been so historically and presently marginalized? How do we have the tools and openness of minds and hearts to build across our communities, disciplines, and sectors? The dominant [narrative] is not the beating heart of our cities — but it gets conflated as city-building and urbanism.

To watch a video version of the full conversation — including more on the concept of ‘hospicing the old world’, how Western concepts have colonized our ability to imagine new realities, and much more — become a Future of Good member today.

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