B1. What is a System?

what is a system? If sustainability is a state of a system, what is a ‘system’ then exactly? A system is a dynamic set of actors, relations, objects and things, and all its interconnec­ tions, such as a city, company, community, or society as a whole. All of the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ of a system combined, if you will. Such a system ‘lives’ in reality, like a living organism, which means it exists in time and space, constantly moving, changing, inter­ acting, and shifting. What is and isn’t a system is defined by us, people. It’s not a scientific truth such as gravity, it is a theoretical device we use to think about the world in a specific way. We ‘create’ a system by defining its boundaries, which determine where the system stops, and other systems or the ‘rest of the universe’ begins. We do this to focus and manage the complexity of a certain challenge. Always looking at everything in the universe as one big connected system may be more truthful, but it’s also debilitating. So, we determine the boundary of our system, which is usually a step higher than the challenge we’re looking at. For example, when we’re looking at creating a building, or social service, we investigate the city that this will be in as the system, or perhaps the region, or the country. By doing so, we essentially lift the focus area out of the complex network of things and look at it as if it was a separate entity (yet connected to everything else, but in a more abstract sense). Cities, an event, a region, or our planet, all can be seen as a system. The system does not always need to be defined carefully, especially in the beginning. And, to truly investigate a system, we need to look at it in its entirety. In order to look at all ‘sides’ of the system properly, we investigate it across all dimensions, scales, and in the full spectrum. Doing this is called the ‘integrated’ approach, and we’ll get to the details about how to do this further on.