Chapter 7: Changing the Environment

Inclusion tells you who belongs in the room. But it does not tell you what the room looks like — what incentive structures shape the decisions, what information architectures determine what can be seen. Even the most diverse assembly, inside a broken architecture, will agree on the wrong thing. The question is not only who is included, but what they are included in.

In Venus, Florida — a town so small it barely registers on the map between Lake Placid and Sebring — an old man spent six decades building a future that never arrived. Jacque Fresco surrounded himself with scale models of circular cities, monorail systems, and geodesic structures that looked like they'd been airlifted from a civilization two centuries hence. Visitors drove down unpaved roads past cattle ranches to reach his compound, where, in a domed building filled with hand-built architectural models, a self-taught industrial designer in his nineties would explain, with the patience of someone who had been saying the same thing since the Truman administration, that the problem was never the people in charge. The problem was the charge itself — the architecture of incentives, infrastructures, and information systems within which any person, however well-intentioned, would produce approximately the same results.

Fresco died in 2017 at the age of 101. His Venus Project continued under Roxanne Meadows, conducting tours and seminars, transcribing all 2,959 recordings of his lectures. But the organizational vehicle has diminished — the detailed proposals and transition plans have largely disappeared from the website, replaced by archival activities. Critics describe an "unspoken collapse." The pattern the Revolution chronicle identified applies with painful irony: visionary movements centered on a single charismatic figure often struggle to outlive that figure. Even movements that diagnose the organization gap can fall into it.

But here is the thing about Fresco that outlasts his organization, his scale models, and his increasingly dated renderings of the future: his diagnostic was right.

The insight can be stated simply enough. Revolution that changes operators within the same architecture reproduces the same problems. Replace the king with a president, but keep the incentive structure that rewards short-term extraction, and the president will extract. Replace the CEO, but keep the algorithm that maximizes engagement through outrage, and the new CEO will preside over the same outrage machine. Replace the dictator with a committee, and if the committee operates within the same information architecture, reward systems, and physical infrastructure, the committee will eventually behave like the dictator — or be replaced by one.

This is what the earlier chapters of this chronicle formalized as the Fresco test: does a proposed transformation change the architecture, or just the personnel?

The test is not Fresco's alone. Institutional economists like Douglass North and Daron Acemoglu reached the same conclusion through different methods — that institutions (the formal and informal rules structuring human interaction) persist with remarkable tenacity, and that changing leaders within persistent institutions changes far less than anyone involved would like to believe. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus captures the same pattern from sociology: the dispositions people acquire by living within particular environments shape behavior in ways that survive changes in conscious intention. The convergence across disciplines — a futurist in Florida, economists in Cambridge, a sociologist in Paris, all circling the same insight — suggests something more than opinion. It suggests a pattern.

The question this chapter asks is what to do with that pattern. If changing operators is insufficient, what does changing the environment actually look like? Not as utopian vision — Fresco's resource-based economy remains underspecified in ways that matter — but as design principle? What does it mean, concretely, to redesign the conditions under which people make decisions?

Start with the ground beneath your feet. Literally.

In the 1960s, Robert Moses was reshaping New York City with the confidence of a man who believed that cities should be designed from above — highways driven through neighborhoods, superblocks replacing the tangled organic life of streets. Jane Jacobs, watching from her window on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, saw what Moses could not see from his planning office: that the apparent disorder of a living neighborhood — the short blocks, the mixed uses, the buildings of varied age and purpose, the sidewalk ballet of shopkeepers and children and old men watching from stoops — was not chaos to be rationalized. It was an ecology. The built environment was not neutral backdrop; it was the medium through which community either flourished or died.

Jacobs's insight was architectural, but its implications were political. The problem with Moses's urban renewal was not that the wrong person was doing the planning. A kinder, more community-minded planner executing the same design — highways through neighborhoods, superblocks replacing streets — would have produced the same destruction. The architecture itself severed the feedback infrastructure of community life. Streets that enabled casual surveillance made neighborhoods safe; superblocks that eliminated street life made them dangerous. Mixed-use blocks that brought people together at different hours created vitality; single-use zones that emptied after business hours created wastelands. The environment was the message.

Decades later, the Danish architect Jan Gehl would prove Jacobs's intuitions with data. When Copenhagen reduced car traffic and widened sidewalks, pedestrian activity increased measurably. So did street-level commerce. So did reported social well-being. The city did not tell people to walk more. It did not launch a public awareness campaign about the benefits of pedestrian life. It changed the environment — and the environment changed the behavior.

Consider desire paths: those unofficial trails worn into grass by pedestrians who choose the route that actually serves them rather than the one the designer laid out. Every university campus has them — diagonal cuts across carefully planned lawns, shortcuts between buildings that the architect imagined people would walk around. Desire paths are feedback made visible. They are the built environment's version of citizens protesting: the design doesn't match how we actually live. Urban planners who pave desire paths into formal walkways are practicing feedback-preserving design. They are listening to the information the environment generates and adjusting the architecture accordingly.

Now consider the opposite: hostile design. Benches with armrests placed to prevent sleeping. Spikes on ledges beneath overpasses. Sloped surfaces outside shops. These are also environment design — but in the service of exclusion rather than inclusion. They change behavior not by creating conditions for flourishing but by making conditions intolerable for the unwanted. The Fresco test is necessary but not sufficient. You must also ask: whose environment is being changed, and for whose benefit?

The principle extends far beyond physical architecture. The most consequential environment design of the twenty-first century happens not in concrete and steel but in code.

Social media algorithms are, arguably, the most powerful choice architecture in human history. They do not dictate what people believe. They do not censor opinions or mandate viewpoints. What they do is subtler and, in some ways, more consequential: they shape the information environment within which beliefs form. An algorithm optimized for engagement will surface content that provokes strong emotional responses — because strong emotions keep users scrolling, and scrolling generates data, and data drives advertising revenue. The result is an information environment that systematically amplifies outrage, polarization, and sensationalism — not because anyone decided to amplify these things, but because the architecture incentivizes them.

Change the CEO of a social media company while leaving the engagement-maximizing algorithm intact, and you have failed the Fresco test. The architecture produces the behavior. The operator is, to a significant degree, irrelevant.

This is why platform cooperativism — a term coined by Trebor Scholz in 2014 — matters as a design principle, not just as an economic alternative. Platform cooperatives are digital platforms owned and governed by their users and workers rather than by external investors. Stocksy United, a stock photography cooperative, pays artists fifty to seventy-five percent of license fees and gives them governance votes. Fairbnb, a vacation rental platform operating across twelve European countries, donates half of its booking fee to local community projects chosen by the host community. These are not charity projects bolted onto extractive platforms. They are platforms with different architectures — different ownership structures, different incentive systems, different feedback loops between the platform and its community.

A 2023 OECD study found that platform cooperatives produce better working conditions but face persistent challenges in scaling. A 2024 peer-reviewed study confirmed that they function as "market challengers," reshaping competitive dynamics even without achieving dominant market share. The pattern library would predict both findings: the feedback-preserving architecture produces better outcomes for participants (the feedback principle working as designed), but the scale trap means that cooperatives struggle to compete with venture-capital-funded platforms that can subsidize growth with investor money and capture network effects through first-mover advantage.

The lesson is not that platform cooperatives are utopian fantasies. The lesson is that changing the platform architecture produces different outcomes — and that the obstacles to scaling cooperative models are themselves architectural, not inevitable. They are features of the economic environment (venture capital's structure, network effects, regulatory frameworks) that could, in principle, be redesigned.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein gave this family of insights a name in 2008: choice architecture. Their book Nudge formalized the observation that how options are presented systematically affects which options people choose. A cafeteria that places fruit at eye level and cake at the back sells more fruit — not because it banned cake, but because it changed the choice environment. A retirement savings program that makes enrollment the default rather than requiring opt-in dramatically increases participation — not because it mandated saving, but because it aligned the path of least resistance with the desired outcome.

Nudge theory was adopted enthusiastically by governments worldwide. The UK established a Behavioural Insights Team — the "Nudge Unit" — in 2010. Similar units followed in the US, Australia, Singapore, and beyond. The appeal was obvious: change behavior without coercion, improve outcomes without mandates, redesign the environment rather than regulate the inhabitants.

But the critiques matter. Three have emerged with particular force. First, the effort to opt out: nudges that are difficult to reverse constrain autonomy in ways that may not be immediately visible. Second, affective influence: nudges that exploit emotional responses bypass the rational deliberation they claim to support. Third, non-transparency: nudges that operate without the chooser's awareness raise legitimate questions about manipulation.

The deepest critique, though, comes from applying the Fresco test to nudge theory itself. Thaler and Sunstein assume benevolent choice architects — wise designers who arrange options for the public good. But who designs the architecture? If the answer is governments, the question becomes which government, accountable to whom. If the answer is corporations — and in practice, the most consequential choice architectures are designed by technology companies — then the architecture serves the designer's interests, not the chooser's. The environment shapes the operator, including the choice architect. The recursion is inescapable.

The concept of "self-nudging" — designing one's own choice architecture rather than having it imposed externally — represents a partial response. But it raises its own version of the problem: the self doing the nudging is itself a product of its environment. There is no Archimedean point outside all environments from which to design them.

This is not a reason to abandon environment design. It is a reason to democratize it — to insist that the governance of design is as important as the technique of design.

Kate Raworth drew a doughnut on a whiteboard, and it became one of the most recognizable images in twenty-first-century economics. The outer ring represents the ecological ceiling — the planetary boundaries beyond which environmental damage becomes catastrophic. The inner ring represents the social foundation — the minimum conditions below which human deprivation becomes unacceptable. The space between — the doughnut itself — is "the safe and just space for humanity."

What makes Raworth's framework relevant to environment design is not the image but the implication. Standard economics asks: how do we maximize growth? Raworth asks: how do we design economic systems that keep human activity within the doughnut? The shift is from optimizing a single variable to maintaining feedback between human systems and ecological limits. In October 2025, Raworth and Andrew Fanning published "Doughnut 3.0" in Nature — a peer-reviewed tool tracking thirty-five indicators from 2000 to 2022, transforming a snapshot into a monitoring instrument. Amsterdam adopted the framework in 2020 to guide decisions on housing, food, energy, and transport.

Raworth's framing is environment design: the goal is economies that are "regenerative and distributive by design" — systems whose architecture naturally maintains ecological and social feedback rather than requiring constant corrective intervention. This is the Fresco test applied to economics: don't regulate growth after it breaches boundaries; build economic architectures that don't incentivize breaching them in the first place.

The same principle appears, with different language, in permaculture — originally an agricultural design philosophy developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s, now expanding into what practitioners call social permaculture. Its three core ethics — Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share — frame design as relationship rather than extraction. Its first principle — "observe and interact" before intervening — mirrors the feedback principle from the Governance chronicle. Its emphasis on systems that self-regulate echoes Stafford Beer's Viable System Model from cybernetics. The convergence across agriculture, economics, governance, and systems theory points toward a deep structural pattern: environment design that works — in any domain — preserves and works with feedback rather than overriding it.

There is a problem that haunts all of this, and intellectual honesty requires naming it.

Who designs the environment for the environment designers?

If behavior is shaped by environment — if this is the pattern the evidence supports — then the designers' behavior is also shaped by their environment. A urban planner raised in car-dependent suburbs will design for cars. An economist trained in growth-maximizing departments will design for growth. An algorithm engineer working in an attention-economy company will design for attention capture. The environment shapes the designer before the designer shapes the environment. The recursion does not resolve.

This is not a flaw in the Fresco test. It is a feature — a feature that reveals why environment design cannot be reduced to technique. It must be coupled with democratic accountability (who decides the design?), ongoing feedback (is the design working for those who live within it?), and the mature uncertainty the Philosophy chronicle established: confidence in the principle, humility about any particular application of it.

The Fresco insight remains analytically powerful: changing operators within the same architecture reproduces the same problems. But the insight itself cannot be the architecture. It is a diagnostic — a way of seeing — that must be embedded in participatory, feedback-preserving institutional processes if it is to produce results that differ from the results it diagnoses.

Fresco built his models in Venus, Florida, and they were beautiful. Circular cities with integrated transportation, resource management, and communal spaces — visions of a future organized around human need rather than market extraction. The models gathered dust as Fresco aged, and after his death they became museum pieces more than blueprints. The organization that carried his vision contracted rather than expanded.

But the insight composted. It entered the pattern library of people who never heard of the Venus Project — urban designers who build for pedestrians rather than cars, platform architects who structure for cooperation rather than extraction, economists who design for boundaries rather than growth. The Fresco test lives not in his organization but in the question it teaches you to ask: are you changing the environment, or just the people standing inside it?

The question is simple. Answering it honestly is the hardest design challenge of the century.