Putting Systems Change in Place

We know that systems change is necessary to meaningfully address climate change, growing inequality, social division, and our other interrelated crises. However, the path to doing so has often been elusive. Systems change can get disconnected from what people are actually trying to do, its principles and goals can be abstract and difficult to operationalize, and systems change practices are often framed around a singular problem like homelessness or teen pregnancy, instead of seeing how larger systems lend themselves to multiple problems.

My goal in writing Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Communities, and Local Economies Through Systems Change is to demystify systems change and provide a practical and inspiring guide to making our places and thus our world better. Connected to Place provides a fundamental, actionable, and holistic roadmap to transformative change. It starts with an understanding of what is holding our status quo systems and human behavior in place—power, culture, land use, and silos influenced by corporate capitalism.

The systems change framework featured in Connected to Place builds on these understandings by offering systems-oriented strategies that can serve as a launching point, guide, or lens for evaluation for any place-based initiative. I’ve used it in multiple collaborative projects. Individuals quickly grasp the four featured systems change levers—shifting power, resetting culture, transforming land use, and leveraging other systems—and apply them to their place-based work. Planners, government leaders and staff, advocates, funders, educators, and others invested in social change can use Connected to Place to align what they do with systems change and increase their impact.—Matt Biggar

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Within one decade, the city of Paris underwent a massive transformation of its streets and transportation system. From 2015 to 2024, Paris closed more than one hundred streets to motor vehicles. These streets have become spaces where people can safely and joyfully walk, bike, roll, and gather as a community. In addition, close to fifty thousand parking spots were removed to make room for over eight hundred miles of bike lanes, bike parking, and a robust bike share system. By a ratio of almost 3 to 1, more people were biking than driving in the city center by 2024. Sidewalks have been widened to encourage more walking. Paris is showing cities around the world how to end car dependence and promote well-being and health through active transportation.

The positive impact on the environment and people’s lives in Paris has been substantial. Parisians now breathe 40 percent less polluted air. Paris is taking the climate crisis head-on by dramatically reducing transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE). Spending less time behind windshields, people are becoming more connected to each other and their neighborhoods. Their personal health benefits from the physical exercise and the clearing of one’s mind that occurs when individuals walk or bike. In addition to the environmental, social, and personal benefits, studies show that more people walking and biking increases shopping at local businesses. Paris has made pedestrian infrastructure near shopping centers and retail districts a priority. The benefits extend to children and youth who can more safely walk and bike to school with cars banned from most streets surrounding schools.

An explicit aim of Paris’s government is to have “fifteen-minute communities” across the city, in which individuals have all the amenities they need within a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride from their homes. These neighborhood features include places to shop, eat, and work, as well as spaces for connecting to community and nature that boost personal well-being. Sidewalk trees and urban gardens have been planted. Near where many Parisians live, the roads along the Seine River have been converted into places for strolling, relaxation, and activities. The production of local food on rooftops and in other underutilized urban spaces is another part of Paris’s metamorphosis into a fifteen-minute city.

Paris’s changes have been dramatic, but the French capital is not alone in reinventing itself as a healthy, community-centered, and environmentally friendly place to live. Regions, cities, and communities worldwide are making bold moves to address the climate crisis, restore community bonds, and reinvigorate local economies.

In this book, we’ll unpack the why, what, and how of these positive developments using a systems lens. Pushback on these reforms varies from place to place, but change everywhere faces resistance from the status quo. A systems-change approach is needed to overcome these barriers. The systems-change framework detailed in this book can be applied to regional and local initiatives and is aimed at changing how people live, as reflected in the Paris example. Changing systems to change human behavior is the pathway to creating the world we desperately need and want.

The systems featured in this book create the physical, economic, social, and cultural conditions that shape human choices and habits.

Place-based systems are those anchored in the communities, culture, and natural resources of a particular place. They support people living in interdependent ways with each other and nature. By utilizing local and regional resources to provide what a population needs, people better understand natural resource limits and are motivated to conserve and protect nature. Place-based systems encourage people to spend time and energy in their local context, which facilitates the rebuilding of local economies, the strengthening of community life, and the restoration of nature. In contrast to corporate capitalist-based systems, place-based systems facilitate sustainable, equitable ways of living.

Place-based systems correspond to the major dimensions of daily life:

• Housing is available and affordable in mixed-income, mixed-use communities.
• Local businesses provide meaningful work and shopping for people where they live.
• Active, community-oriented, and pollution-free transportation modes are easily accessed and safe.
• Community spaces are safe, car-free, and vibrant.
• Nature spaces are abundant, accessible, and nearby.
• Regional, healthy, and seasonal food is available and affordable.
• Building energy is regionally harvested from renewable sources, and conservation and efficiency are default choices.
• Consumer goods are regionally made, shared, repaired, and recirculated with minimal waste.

These systems operate synergistically at varying geographic scales to influence how people are housed, work, play, get around, use energy, eat, and consume goods. They add up to mixed-use neighborhoods and self-reliant regions that enable people to live, work, shop, and recreate locally. With sufficient affordable housing, communities are mixed-income and more people benefit from the opportunities and amenities within them. These place-based systems provide a road map for reorienting society around the places where people live and improving the well-being of the environment, communities, and people.

The Paris transformation can be viewed through the lens of place-based systems. The transportation system has become less car-dependent and more oriented around active forms of transportation that connect people to community and nature in daily life. Nature and community spaces have expanded to make it easier and more enjoyable to live connected to place. Growing more local food is augmenting the place-based food system.

We can meet and overcome the challenges of the twenty-first century with place-based systems. When housing, work, and transportation systems support traveling less distance in daily life and instead immerse people in nearby surroundings, we reduce GHGE, conserve natural resources, and strengthen the social fabric. Nature can be restored, and social interaction can flourish through nearby community and nature space systems. Regional and local orientation to building energy, food, and consumer goods systems requires us to confront ecological limits and thus reduce material and energy consumption while building stronger local economies and reducing inequality. Paradoxically, our most significant global problems can be solved effectively in our local context.

The need to regenerate nature, community, and local economies provides both the “why” and the desired outcome of place-based systems change. The relationship among corporate capitalism, how people live, and our crises helps us understand why systems change needs to be focused on human behavior and diminishing the influence of corporations on it. The promise of living connected to place to promote people’s well-being and regeneration provides a direction for systems change. Yet place-based systems that support living connected to place are just an idea unless we understand and can apply the “what” and “how” of systems change.

Place-based social movements to change how people live are not new. The Transition Movement is helping cities, neighborhoods, and communities to become more resilient and just through vibrant, localized ways of living. Approximately twenty-five national hubs support more than one thousand Transition groups across the globe. The Slow Cities Movement includes chapters in 301 small cities and towns across thirty-three countries and territories. This movement prioritizes eating local food, shopping in locally owned stores, reducing waste, and connecting people to the sources of their water, food, and consumer goods. These movements are supporting people to live connected to place.

These models, respectively supported by the Transition Network and Cittaslow, offer guidance through principles, ingredients, and requirements. For example, the Transition Network outlines seven essential ingredients for community transition: healthy groups, vision, community involvement, networks and partnerships, practical projects, connecting with the larger movement, and reflection and celebration. Although these elements help define an approach to transformative change at the local level, they are not grounded in a systems-change approach.

Determining how to deploy systems change starts with understanding what is holding current systems and their associated problems in place. Applying behavioral science and analyzing corporate capitalism’s hold on our systems provides that basis. Across the systems featured in this book, we will see how corporate capitalist interests have used power, land use, and culture to create the conditions that shape how we live. Learning from corporate capitalism, we can turn these factors into systems-change levers.

Systems-change levers answer the “what” of systems change; in other words, what exactly do we change about systems to produce a different pattern of human behavior? To change these systems, we need to shift power, transform land use, and reset culture. A fourth lever—leverage systems together—breaks down silos and creates reinforcing feedback loops, making it possible to create broader and deeper change. These four levers harness the insights of behavioral science by changing the physical, economic, cultural, and social conditions that organize everyday life and lifestyle choices.

The changes in Paris involve all four levers. Power has been built among advocates and like-minded residents. Their power has influenced the leaders of the city and overcome resistance to the removal of car infrastructure, where the auto industry and its affiliates hold much power. Land use has been transformed, including the expansion of public space, streets flexed to non-auto uses, bike parking, and rooftops and other land being adapted to food production. The cultural embrace of cycling has been significant, with many people riding bikes who had not previously done so in the city. The culture has been reset through mechanisms such as highly visible public bike-share stations all over the city that normalize cycling. An approach of leveraging the transportation and community spaces systems together has led to streets that now prioritize biking and walking and serve as places for communities to gather.

Knowing “what” to change is necessary but insufficient to enact systems change. We also need guidance in the “how.” The examples of systems change in this book reflect four key catalysts that make systems change happen: strategic collaboration among organizations, systems-oriented government, place-based education, and personal change. In Paris, the city administration under Mayor Ann Hidalgo played a particularly catalytic role in place-based systems change. Well-run collaboratives can put pressure on the government and other institutions to change and directly create change by bringing organizations together to strategically enact initiatives. The catalytic power of education and personal change can directly impact communities while also readying people’s hearts and minds for systems change.

Each lever and catalyst has a limited impact on its own. Systems change happens when they align. Power, land use, and culture across multiple systems can head in the same direction when collaboration, government, education, and individuals pull these levers together. From this momentum, transformation unfolds. Lives of placelessness become centered by connection to place. Regional and local self-reliance replaces external economic dependence. Communities become less vulnerable and more resilient. Nature degradation stops and reverses into restoration. Exclusive enclaves become inclusive communities. People feel inspired to move forward with these changes because of their profound impact on their well-being, building more collective will for further change.