WE ARE SPURSE
We promote social, ecological and ethical transformation through art, design and community organizing.
SPURSE IS
a creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. We work to empower communities, institutions, infrastructures, and ecologies with tools and strategies for system-wide change.
Drawing upon our diverse backgrounds that span the fields of science, art, and design, we utilize unique immersive methods to co-produce new ecologies, urban environments, public art, experimental visioning, strategic development, alternative educational models, and expanded configurations of the commons.
URBAN ECOLOGY, FOOD
SYSTEMS AND RESILIENCE
Today most people live in cities while imagining nature is something that is found far beyond the city limits in vast wilderness tracts. Contrary to many of our historical assumptions cities are functioning ecosystems full of complex species interactions. Soon seventy percent of humans will live in megacities , and thus environmental change and the struggle to preserve life on this planet begins right under our feet where we live. We need to reinvent cities, economies, cultures, commons, and our multi-species urban models.
Fundamental to this is eating — all life is eating. How we — and everything else eats shapes the planet, ourselves and our communities. Currently, on one hand, we live in poisoned cities, with food deserts, within a highly dysfunctional food system, while at the same time for us eating is also one of the great pleasures in being alive. Food and eating is something that activates the best in us and we believe that by catalyzing this great change can happen — beginning right under our feet.
COMMONS AND COMMUNITY
We, and everything on this planet, live interdependent lives. While we might live very different lives, in very different worlds, we are fully dependent creatures. For us, this shared dependency is the COMMONS. The commons is not a simply space or a physical object — but a set of practices and relationships that cross worlds and species to allow for all life to be possible —thus to speak of the commons is to speak of community — multi-species community.
Models of scarcity, private ownership, development and commodification undermine both the commons and community. our interest is in the collective production of new forms of commons and community.
WORLDMAKING AND OTHERS
To adequately deal with what is happening today — from extreme inequality to climate change — requires of us profound acts of creativity. Our current way of doing things is a fundamental part of the problem.
How we engage with the world, each other, and our selves needs to change. We need to collectively invent new forms of commons, degrowth, new worlds and multi-species ways of organizing our selves.
EDUCATION AND TRANSFORMATION
Nothing changes if we don’t learn new things in different manners. How do we learn the critical and creative tools, processes, practices, and habits to become collaborative agents of real-world change? Over the last two decades as we have worked with communities, organizations and ecosystems we have developed novel and effective ways to learn and activate creative and transformative models of change.