Another Use for Jazz

Years ago, planner Lawrence Halprin experimented with using musical scores and choreographic notation (as well as the hexagrams from the I Ching) to create a common language for artists, designers, and policy professionals.  The idea of using music as a structural foundation and a metaphor for exploring current issues has reemerged in the work of James Gustave Speth, whose application of “jazz” to community and environmental development provides a flexible, decentralized tool for discussing policy and public action.

Jazz emerged from the work of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which explored the ways in which social systems respond to innovation and development.  Jazz uses experimentation and improvisation to define a voluntary, cooperative approach to environmental and social problems—one relying on flexible, transparent, market-based responses to issues.

Speth’s “Green Jazz” applies this language to global climate change and other environmental issues, arguing that the fluid, complex, interaction of a wide range of community groups and NGOs has led to innovations on a variety of scales, ideally culminating in multinational reform.  

The philosophy reflects, to some extent, the ideals and practices of the conservative side of the communitarian movement:  small-scale, cooperative, pronouncedly nongovernmental responses that would please Herbert Hoover (Speth calls for a reduction in taxes and regulations to spark private reform).  While seen as a promising approach to social problems, the members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development admit that it has the potential to shut out participation by groups and communities that lack administrative or skill infrastructures.  However, its decentralized nature allows a range of freedom and, by its nature, its reliance on coalition building ideally leads to a more positive, participatory style of public action.