In this uncertain moment, this interregnum, I’ve been bouncing around in time and space, trying to prepare for what might lie ahead. I listen and talk, look and draw, read and write.

My serious education in design, architecture and planning began sometime after my formal education ended, when, through both my work and my civic engagement, I started having a physical impact on my chosen community. I’ve read a lot of books on my way to knowing what little I do about making and supporting healthy cities.

To that end, and a while back, I purchased a biography of the French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier, often hailed as the greatest modernist of the 20th century. As I often do at the outset of a nonfiction read, I thumbed through the book’s index for a glimpse of familiar names I might encounter. By chance I noticed several references to “Jews” and, curious, I turned to the first one.

It was 1940. The Nazis had taken over France. Corbu, a Swiss national, stayed in Paris, hoping to garner architectural commissions from the recently installed puppet government of Vichy. In an otherwise optimistic letter to his mother in Geneva, he wrote that he thought it a shame, what was happening to the Jews but after all, they’d brought it on themselves. I read that sentence, closed the book and put it on a shelf, where it remained untouched for 15 years, until the day after this election, when I reread that passage. It begs an uncomfortable question: what role do we have in the hardships that beset us?

I’m not talking about Gaza, Palestine, Judea or Samaria, though I’ve been there and reflect often on my experiences. No, today I’m thinking about Vichy France and what that might look like in Santa Cruz, a community well-practiced in blaming others for its own shortsightedness. And I’m rehearsing all the tough questions we’ve refused to face as we grew evermore closed, privileged and intolerant in our perfect bubble. And I am writing because I can’t accept the inevitability of this future we’re digging ourselves into.

Traffic congestion, water insecurity, racial and economic segregation, tinderbox forests, obsolete and purposely under-utilized residential and urban properties, the steady conversion of homes into transient accommodations for students and tourists, confrontational politics, mean-spirited codes and regulations that have made “sustainability” little more than tools of “exclusivity”; these are all conundrums of our own making that we’ll need to own if we’re ever going to step out of this spiral. I suspect that the only reason we’ve avoided that reckoning is that too many of us are profiting from the current imbalance. But times are changing, populations shifting. We’ve never controlled the market we’re in, only exacerbated it. It’s a shame that we’ve brought upon ourselves.

These days, my work takes me beyond architecture and Santa Cruz, and I’m making new associations. One collaborator, Eleni Kalantidou, works with both immigrant and Indigenous communities in northeastern Australia and writes at the intersection — to use a trending academic meme — of design and psychology. In a forthcoming book, she calls for communities to institute a practice of “repair,” which can only begin with “accountability mapping.” That entails a process of reflection, not accusation, an attempt to recognize precisely where we are, and acknowledge the policies, assumptions and prejudices that got us here, so that we can then learn the skills necessary to establish a foundation for what she and her cohort, Tony Fry, call “sustainment.” We’ve never thought to do that in Santa Cruz. We just jump straight to scapegoating, as if we ourselves weren’t all responsible.

Sustainment is balance, inclusion and humility in the face and in the midst of a suffering, disoriented world. Accountability mapping asks and answers a simple question: how have our own local actions, decisions and biases — so often painted as ideals — contributed to imbalance and inequity in our community? We’ve kept that book on a shelf. It’s time to read it with eyes open.

Mark Primack would like to hear from you at mark@markprimack.com.