A conversation with urban pirate Cam Perkins
Cam Perkins (He/Him) is the Director and Chief Misfit at Urban Pirates NZ. Cam talked about the meaning behind the secret to a good sourdough, the role cities play in addressing climate change and the future of Tāmaki Makaurau
What is the secret to a good sourdough?
Ah the secret to a good sourdough is scales - through COVID, I was trying to figure out how to make sourdough and I didn’t have scales, and so I was looking at a recipe and trying to convert grammage into volumes and I was getting all sorts of weird outcomes - so scales is the 1st one because it is basically a chemistry experiment.
And the 2nd one, is understanding that you’re working with a living breathing thing - your sourdough culture is alive, you need to take care of it. It’s like a little family member, you need to feed it, you need to keep it happy, and if you keep it happy you will keep your bread happy.
Why the term “pirates” - It’s become quite a theme…?
I think pirates have been quite a theme throughout my life - I grew up sailing and from a very young age my dad pushed me out onto a boat and onto the waves. But the thing that really fascinates me about pirates is that they are a small group of people who were able to build up a huge brand that really changed society at the time. Many pirates were people that were disenfranchised with the system that they were living in - and forced to live in - so they were all about changing the status quo.
At times the pirate sort of brand tends to polarise people, because of the way that pirates have been depicted in the past - there's no denying that there was a history of blood and guts - some really scary stuff, but there's also some quite amazing societal change that happened, in the way that pirates looked after one another. For example, they were the first group to really have social security - within the pirate code, there was an agreed amount that you would be paid if you lost a leg or an arm or an eye, you would be looked after by your pirate family, I feel like, it's a time that we need some pretty radical societal change. So the pirate thing is about having a bit of fun and goes back to my sailing roots, and it also goes back to unpicking this dumb system thats taken us down a hole we don’t want to go.
What is your favourite city?
I’ll go with the first place that popped into my mind; Barcelona is the place that I keep going back to. That place just goes 24 hours a day, it's really beautiful to walk around - amazing density and incredible culture - so Barcelona is a real go to for me.
When trying to create change on a large scale, what are some of the main challenges and barriers that you face?
Human behaviour - straight up: people are very fearful of change and right now people are very stressed as well. When you look at it from a psychological aspect people don’t have a lot of cognitive ability at the moment to be thinking about a different future. The biggest challenge is simply talking to people about what change looks like and convincing them that they can do it - we need to create a movement!
The key to massive change is to build a movement with people - so you need to find your champions in organizations. However, what we often see is that champions and change makers are people who may not have a lot of power and license in organisations - so it's about empowering these people.
It’s about building this team of people who have the same vision - and using the right messaging that can really cut through all the crap that people are hearing everyday. And within this change making process you have to remain hopeful and give people hope! It’s infectious, people showing a vision and a hope for the future - you really want to build a movement around that!
How has urban planning and urban design changed in a post-covid era?
It’s given people a glimpse of what change could look like - it's made a lot of people question what life could be like - it's not massive but it's like “oh I didn’t need to drive to work but I can hear birds... and the sky is clearer”. It’s also starting to change land use in terms of organisations looking for office space - trusting their people to be “productive” during the work day at work, and also challenging this notion of what work is and what it looks like.
I think it will certainly change the relationship between a city centre and a suburban centre. We're starting to see more people hang out in suburban areas because they’re at home during the working day and they’ll go to a local cafe instead of a city centre cafe under their big office.
Do you think this will mean the rise of 15 min cities?
Absolutely! The whole idea of the 15 minute city is that you are close to all the things you need and you can get there really easily - and that's inherently linked to our carbon emissions, our health and wellbeing and the systems we live in (ecological systems). It means consuming less and in particular having more time to live life - instead of being in a car or a train for an hour.
Yeah it's a bit ridiculous how much of our lives we spend commuting!
Yeah It’s a lot, and furthermore, it’s not cool from an equity perspective. People who travel the furthest to work tend to have lower incomes - and so we’ve created this system where we’re locking people into a really inequitable way of life and that sucks. That’s not the way it should be. We really need to change that.
So the 15 minute city sounds great from a time POV but it's also a massive equity thing when people have better equity, when they’re happier and have better wellbeing - they have the time and space to think about what the future could look like and organise and think about their place in the system. I think that's a really interesting way to think about what a 15 minute city could look like.
Following on from addressing inequity, climate change is one of the biggest inequity issues - what role would you say that cities play in addressing climate change?
I suppose you can look at it from a number of different ways,
Number one - consumption: If you look at the amount of materials and resources that cities consume,cities are massively energy hungry beasts, originally set up as places for people to gather and trade, but now they’ve turned into this great big busy bee worker hub which consume a whole bunch of energy during the day, however, in the evening many people leave the city - not many of us live (particularly in New Zealand) in cities. That's a bit of a weird construct, so how do we make cities better to live in for people - safer, healthier, more affordable. So that we’re consuming less and we’re a lot more connected. This is the consumption conundrum in cities - reduce that and you start to reduce your footprint.
Second is the behavioural approach - by 2050, we’re going to be 70% urbanised across the world - so that’s a really good opportunity to think about how we can change that many people’s behaviour. So 70% of the earth's population will be living in urban areas - that's a really good opportunity to say let's move around differently to 70% of people in the world. Change transport, change cities, change the world - transport is the unlocker. Cities have become these massive carbon emitters in large part because of all the transport movement everyday - so transport would be my third thing in addressing climate change.
To summarise, reduce all of the stuff we consume, get more people thinking about different ways to do stuff - through behavioural change and then looking into transport - less movement, cleaner movement, healthier movement!
What do you envision for the future of Tāmaki Makarau?
The name for a start is a really good clue - Tāmaki Makarau as a place, when you look into that meaning it’s the place of a thousand lovers, desired by many, and there's a reason for that - the Hauraki Gulf was so plentiful and gave so much life and was so beautiful (and still is).So we need to get to a point where we are thinking regeneratively, as the people who are living here, we are the stewards of this place, this system is what supports us. We really need to change the way that we view this natural world around us, and really focus on repairing it and bringing it back to be full of life. That takes quite a massive change, that's a huge thing that you can’t begin to understand where to start, but you can’t let that stop you, you just need to start somewhere.
Another aspect would be reducing our carbon and methane emissions - so for me where I would start would be with transport as that unlocks so much stuff: it unlocks ecological health, wellbeing, safety, equity - that’s the first thing, for me that’s absolutely where we should start.
What's next for you?
There’s times during this journey of helping people with change when you really need to look after yourself. You need to be really careful about your own resilience, if we as changemakers are not here to do that then no ones gonna do that.
I keep on thinking about what I want to do that is not work related - maybe work at a pizza shop where I can roll dough and think about where I can recharge. I’ve got a trip planned coming up to go to Tasmania in a couple of months time, just to really go off grid. And I’m also trying to find a place to live that's a bit more rural and green. I find that living in the city I don’t get enough green to recharge - we need more green in our cities, but until then...
The big thing on my mind is how I maintain momentum and how I look after my own mental health, because it can be difficult working within the change making space. Furthermore, I think it's important
to help people understand that this stuff is hard, and it's okay to be vulnerable about how difficult this work can be. It’s a pretty stressful time to be a human so we need to identify our fellow change makers and support one another!
Naked Accounting Testimonial
I was recommended to Naked Accounting by someone who I really respect - Carol Green (who’s an amazing illustrator and bike rider - she’s super cool). When I was talking to Carol about what I was doing she said, “You need to talk to Naked Accounting”, and when I met Robert I was like - Woah, accountants can be this cool?! - this is someone that I would want to hang out with, let alone someone who can help me set up a business. It's an accounting agency with a social purpose that's aiming to make the world better, like how cool!