Deep Water

The day after Christmas 2015, rain didn’t just fall. It spilled from a million buckets; shot down from a million power hoses; rushed at us like a vertical tide, battering even the oak trees. The thunder sounded angry, the mutterings of a tyrant working himself up to the next onslaught. And when John Hoal flipped on the news that evening, the TV weather map glowed red and orange, like somebody had swiped a big sloppy brushful of neon paint down the middle of the country. The weathercaster’s usual drone spiked with alarm as he described tornado activity to the south of the deluge, freezing temperatures to the west, record heat to the east.

All from the same weather event, Hoal thought, shaken by the power of it. This time there wouldn’t be a cumulative swell as days of rainwater drained into the Mississippi. This was sudden, intense. Streams and smaller rivers crisscrossing the metro area could break their banks. Roads would be drowned; backed-up sewage would flood into basements. The ancient roof of H3 Studio, his Central West End architecture firm, was already leaking—he’d gone by earlier and dragged away stacks of soggy, ruined drafting paper. Now water was landing hard and loud in three big blue buckets—he’d have to go in on Sunday and empty them, check for new leaks from spots so crazily unpredictable, he’d be crawling around the roof tarring every joint. Once the skies dried.

At least all the downpipes were disconnected, so H3 wasn’t adding any rainwater to the city’s overburdened sewer system. A rubber pipe channeled the overflow into a little garden area, which was no doubt a pond by now. A good freeze, and they could skate.

Hell, they were already skating. St. Louis, other cities along the Mississippi, cities like Shanghai and Singapore and Tokyo… The whole bloody world was skating along, ignoring how unprepared its urban areas were.

And the ice grew thinner every day. 

If a life that wraps the globe and delves into design, philosophy, politics, city planning, and sustainability can have a single theme, John Trelawney Hoal’s is water.

It’s even in his DNA—the rough waves of Cornwall, home to the ancestors who gave him his middle name. They crossed an ocean and settled in Durban, on South Africa’s golden coastline. At age 6, John would take off by himself, his sturdy sun-browned legs taking him 4 miles to the river, through wild banana plantations full of snakes. Or he’d cut through the garden, past scorpions and iguanas and gossipy monkeys, and walk to the mangrove swamps and rocky beaches, picking his way around the mudskippers and fiddler crabs that swam at low tide.

His grandfather held a post in the ministry of finance, but his father was an architect, so passionately idealistic that he uprooted his family and moved them to New Zealand, as far from apartheid as he could manage.

Two years later, John’s grandfather fell ill and they had to return.

They refused to hire black servants, so John, his brother, and their sister had long lists of chores. John shined all the family’s shoes, polishing so long and hard, the fumes tickled his nose for hours afterward. Complaint was not permitted. Plenty of time was left unstructured, though, and he made friends with black kids who lived in huts near the river and invited them home with him.

In slow, dismaying increments, Hoal was realizing that the design of his country’s physical environment was the very means by which racial segregation had been worked out. Apartheid was not just a social system. It was a designed system.

The Hoals’ less welcoming neighbors chased them back to the river.

Durban could have been a lively mix, filled with Zulus, Bantus, Indians, Dutch Afrikaaners, and British expats. Instead, the white minority had gated itself off from anyone whose skin was darker than vanilla. Even beaches were segregated; you’d see old signs saying “Reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group.”

Pricked daily by conscience, the Hoals never became complacent. But they did live comfortably—their airy one-story house cooled by white plaster and two verandas—in the gentrified suburb of Morningside. John studied architecture at the University of Natal’s nearby campus. Every day after class, he watched his friend Peter go home—on a bus ride three times as long—to the township of KwaMashu, where he was forced to live because his skin was dark. The next morning, Peter would return, and together they would study the principles of design, principles that, a few decades earlier, had been used to lay out the geography of apartheid.

In slow, dismaying increments, Hoal was realizing that the design of his country’s physical environment was the very means by which racial segregation had been worked out. Apartheid was not just a social system. It was a designed system.

It had to be possible, he told himself, to design without tyranny. Without imposing, forcing, a narrow political will. Without imposing one’s own ego, even?

His career started with homes and libraries—single, static buildings—but he thought a lot about their constantly changing context: weather, light, time of day. Soon he found himself wanting to design the spaces around the buildings as well, and then the spaces between the buildings. When Durban decided to redevelop its downtown civic center and beachfront, he jumped at the chance to do something with real social impact, connecting history, culture, and nature in a way that would mean something to everyone in the city.

The city’s Golden Mile is a string of beaches stretching from the mouth of the Umgeni River to the harbor. To restore a key part of that eroding beach frontage, the team used what was then called a sand pump: Sand was scooped up from the main shipping channel and pumped several miles, being released along the way at six pump stations.

Hoal and his co-workers reshaped nature—using nature’s own principles.

Proud as he was of that beach project, Hoal was desperate to leave apartheid’s daily cruelty. “It’s bizarre,” he told himself. “It’s sick. I can’t work here. I can’t be here.” He applied for, and won, a Fulbright scholarship to do graduate work at Washington University.

He arrived in St. Louis in 1987. And because he is too observant to be naïve, he realized the irony almost immediately.

He’d managed to land in one of the most racially divided cities in the U.S.

Incredulous, he checked the segregation index. Sure enough, St. Louis’ number was higher than where he’d lived in Durban. Here, the “zoning” was, ostensibly, economic—but it played out along racial lines.

As he studied urban design, he thought a lot about apartheid, both formal and informal. He analyzed St. Louis’ patterns of development, its points of tension, its fraying boundaries.

If design had been used to institute apartheid, he thought, why couldn’t design be used to counteract it? Why couldn’t cities be rebuilt in ways that erased the old divisions, opening space for diversity, community, and social justice?

Slowly, incrementally, he began to suggest changes.

Hoal stood beneath the Arch and watched brown water surge past, higher than he’d ever dreamed it could rise. Leaking fast through the floodgates, it was drowning the riverfront. He drove south to Lemay and stared at all the houses that had collapsed when the River des Peres burst over them.

Three years earlier, in 1990, he’d co-founded the city of St. Louis’ first urban design department. Now he’d be helping the city figure out how to rebuild all these flooded neighborhoods.

He worked hard on that recovery plan. In 2011, he felt a flash of PTSD when the Mississippi crested again and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blew up the Birds Point levee to save Cairo.

One year later, he found himself standing in the same spot on the Arch grounds, staring at a river so low, barges couldn’t pass.

Hoal rubbed his eyes. He kept realizing afresh just how much power the Mississippi River wielded—and just how wildly its extremes could fluctuate. Growing up in a coastal city, he’d breathed tingly salt air, watched the tide rush and retreat, sensed the ocean’s separate majesty. But here, locked in by land, the notion that a single river could smash its levees, cut itself a new path and engulf anything in the way...was sobering.

Twain and T.S. Eliot had written about the strong brown god of the Mississippi, and Hoal appreciated the poetry. But what stayed to haunt him was one simple fact:

This was not a river you could tame.

Not even a deliberately tyrannical design could best the Mississippi.

After working on the flood recovery plan and then on the Confluence

Greenway, he’d finally begun to fathom the Mississippi’s willful, mercurial temperament. Its need to flow was stronger than any wall we could erect to stop it. Meanwhile, dams and levees did their own damage: Just as rivers needed earth’s sediment, earth needed rivers’ moisture. We’d walled them off from each other and paid a price.

In 1995, called to midwife Forest Park’s rebirth, Hoal rolled up his sleeves and fetched the water. Much of it had been buried underground. And when he dug up old maps, reconstructed the park’s evolution, and overlaid its existing configuration, he realized with a start that the park was flooding exactly where the water used to flow.

“A whole history has gotten erased,” he announced. “The history of the park was the relationship of the landforms and the water, and we need to put that experience back into the park, connect all those isolated, fragmented bodies of water.”

It’s easy to see, on his renderings, how that bright blue meanders and pools and cascades throughout the soft green. If you stand on one of the bridges Hoal designed at Pagoda Circle and look across Deer Lake, toward the S-bend at the end, you’ll see a series of riffles edged with massive boulders. From there the river continues to Steinberg. The chopped-up spots have been stitched together, healed with water.

Forest Park also taught Hoal his best lesson in listening. Worried about moving golf off Art Hill, he’d hired the famed Hale Irwin as a golf course consultant. Irwin came up with the absolutely most efficient, best way to redesign the course. With a happy flourish, Hoal unveiled it to St. Louisans—and back came a resounding no.

Who says no to Hale Irwin over a golf course?

Hoal pondered the impasse, tried presenting the plan in new ways, with more detail… Finally a woman came up to him after a meeting and said, flat out, “You don’t understand. You’ve just eliminated the flat nine.”

The “flat nine” was the part of the course where, historically, African-Americans had been allowed to play after hours. Irwin’s plan ignored an entire social history. Its efficiency was moot. “A community knows itself better than you do,” he reminded himself.

We’re seated at H3’s conference table, a long, cool sweep of blond wood that makes Hoal’s cobalt-blue shirt look even more intense. His eyes are the same color, undimmed by his old-fashioned specs. His tone, as usual, is quiet and contained. But make no mistake: Hoal is rattled—because I am reading aloud a quote from his brother, David.

“He was such a happy youngster, always had a big smile on his face. He should be laughing a lot more than he is these days. He’s had to become so serious, and it doesn’t really suit him.”

Hoal winces: “This is why I didn’t want to give you his number.”

“He says you work too hard; you should just go out and do big landscapes.”

“Yeah, I’m sure he does.” Behind the unfancy steel glasses, Hoal’s eyes are amused—but his jaw’s set. “I’m very passionate about what I do. He might mistake my passion for being too serious.”

David, who’s quite successful financially, also called his little brother “very philosophical.” When I asked for examples, David exclaimed, exasperated, “I think it manifests in his case in a lack of finance! The dollars don’t seem to count. He takes on these projects, and he wants for all parties to be pleased as much as they can be. He can’t half do anything.”

Mara Perry, now director of planning and development for Webster Groves, used to work for H3, and she says that when Hoal traveled to make a presentation, “the PowerPoint was on the laptop and a CD and a jump drive, and we flew with metal easels and foamcore boards just in case—so you could make sure you were never going to disappoint someone when you got there.”

Anabeth Weil led Forest Park Forever during the restoration, and she then hired Hoal to design her condo. When one of the walls was 3 inches off, he said, “It just has to be moved.” This would, Weil learned, cost $13,000. “Once there’s furniture in,” she told Hoal, “no one will ever notice.”

He got over it; they’re still friends. And when they meet for dinner, she looks forward to the quirky little facts that bubble from his curious brain. “When I first met him,” she confides, “I was convinced he didn’t like me.” That reserve, that stubborn undertow. “The longer you know him, the more endearing he is. He’s an individual that wears very well.”

He’s also a walking paradox: a perfectionist who researches like an undergraduate, gathers ammo for his strong opinions, sees with telescopic clarity how he’d fix things…and insists on opening it all up to the mess of democratic group process. His forums go on and on, people spouting off every experience and idea that occurs to them, ideas going up on easels—and many of them finding their way into Hoal’s master plan.

“How do you know,” I ask, “when to stick to your own vision and when to let go?”

He nods before I finish. “It’s a damn hard question,” he says. “The way I’ve always thought about it, in terms of going into a community or going into a landscape, is that you enter while it’s already in process. As a designer, you are guiding and making something come to be, but it’s always fluid. There’s no authority here.”

Hoal picked up a doctorate in philosophy because he hews to values and ideals rather than fixed images. “H3 isn’t Hoal and two partners,” he says. “It’s not about me. It’s about healthy, humane, holistic design. If you can find the principles that allow a place to grow and evolve, you are actually finding its structure, its DNA.” Do that, and the place will keep evolving after you’re gone. If you hit a budget wall, other architects can pick up your plan later. The community can build upon it.

“The wetland area in Forest Park is more beautiful than I ever imagined it,” Hoal remarks, “and different, because the ecology took over, and the sunlight, and transformed it. A greater diversity of plants grew there than I expected; they were taller; the combinations were more interesting. Just north of Steinberg, the birch and willow trees, some grew and some didn’t, and that actually made it much more interesting than the formality I’d planned.

“I’m not Einstein alone in some castle. The sole creative genius is a Romantic myth. What I love is the vibrancy and the creative spark that emerges with a lot of minds thinking through things together.”

Trained in the heyday of designer branding (the Michael Graves tea kettle, Frank Gehry’s Tiffany jewelry), Hoal ignored all that. He insisted on collaboration, wonky process, extended interaction with the public. Because he loathes the murk of politics—the sediment of old ways and automatic assumptions—he encouraged dissent. When he was working on a Carondelet Park plan and protesters stomped back and forth, yelling and waving signs, he stopped the meeting, went outside, and brought the irate residents in to voice their concerns.

Was he always thick-skinned? “No,” he says, a little rueful. “You have to grow that. I’ve had criticism made very personal. But I take that to mean two things: One, I haven’t built confidence in the process of working with us, and two, there’s something deeply worrying these people. Fear in many cases motivates attack.”

They did it on purpose, insisted a group of residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, homeless since Hurricane Katrina. They blew up that levee on purpose to save the rest of New Orleans.

Hoal’s firm had been asked to help create a unified recovery plan for the city. So he brought in academics from Louisiana State University who’d investigated the blew-it-up-on-purpose charge. He also invited a colonel from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to a public meeting.

When the colonel agreed to take questions, a middle-aged man, elegantly dressed, unbent his tall, lean body from a folding chair and stood. “Colonel,” he said in a soft, clear voice, “do you have a wife and kids?”

“Yes,” the colonel said, “I do.”

“Would you move your family back to the Lower Ninth, now that you all have done the repairs to the levee?”

The colonel didn’t hesitate for long. “No,” he said, “I would not. I think the risk is still too high.”

A satisfying jolt of surprise ran through the crowd. Well, now. The man was honest.

Across the Industrial Canal from the rest of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth has always felt flung away, forsaken by the rest of the city. Carved from a cypress swamp, it was settled by working-poor African Americans and immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Germany. The African Americans stayed, and they stayed loyal. During Katrina, lifelong resident Fats Domino, the revered R&B pianist, remained in his flooded house with his sick wife until a Coast Guard helicopter whirred down to rescue them.

In the end, Hoal found residents in the Lower Ninth to be far more progressive than the policy-makers and administrators. At community meetings, he listened as intently as a piano tuner, aware that whatever H3 suggested would affect the economics, the social relationships, the very fabric of their common life.

New Orleans was pure chaos back then: the city pulled up by its roots; recovery money floating by and people grabbing for it, doing anything that came to mind. Young people showed up as if they were riding out to the Wild West for an adventure. H3 was made responsible for four entire districts—Central City, the Lower Ninth, Algiers Point, and English Turn.

Hoal had to proceed with care. If he talked too much about restoring wetlands, people would worry that it was a land grab and the planners wanted to fence people out. At a meeting in Algiers Point, people argued for three hours about whether they needed a study of future flood risk. They hadn’t been devastated by Katrina. Hoal pointed out that they were on a peninsula and needed a second evacuation plan to avoid getting trapped. But they liked their dead-end streets because they “kept a certain criminal element out.” The flood had brought to the surface an angrier version of an old argument between the status quo and development. Hoal recognized that and kept going.

He told people about Valmeyer, Illinois, and how its residents voted to relocate to higher ground after ’93. He talked about rain gardens, about clustering new homes on higher ground around sunken central parkland for built-in drainage. Dutch experts told him they never designed a technical infrastructure project that didn’t somehow improve the quality of life for their residents. This was New Orleans’ chance to get it right, building good schools, a new hospital, and better roads even in the poorest communities so people could rearrange their lives around that solid core.

But the recovery funds were only calculated to restore the previous status quo. So despite the brilliant master plans H3 created, Hoal counts New Orleans as the first project in which his best ideas didn’t prevail.

“All those financial rules and regulations should have, quite frankly, been set aside,” he says. “We didn’t win the war to, say, build a 21st-century school. That would have been an amazing armature for the community in rebuilding that neighborhood.”

New Orleans’ challenge was how to live with water, below sea level, in a city that’s sinking because it’s tried for years to pump all the water out. As its silt, drained of water, compressed, the levees sank, so the storm surge easily overwhelmed them. “The Dutch learned through bitter experience that you don’t necessarily try and do that,” Hoal says now. “You try and keep a balance of water behind the levees, and you live with the water.

“The whole time in New Orleans, I kept thinking, ‘What does all this mean for St. Louis?’ We all live behind levees.”

With a Wash. U. colleague, architect Derek Hoeferlin, he came back and developed a research program called MISI-ZIIBI: Living with the Great Rivers. (Misi-Ziibi, the river’s original name, is Ojibwe for “great river.”) Experts in flood management flew to St. Louis from the Netherlands, and workshops drew on the expertise of hydrologists, biologists, botanists, geomorphologists, engineers, designers, and planners.

They had little vocabulary in common. But one day somebody sketched a barrier island—a buffer for the wetlands—and somebody else got excited and drew on the same sheet, and soon people were hunched over, pencils in hand, making suggestions. They’d found a common way to talk about the Mississippi River Delta.

Its problems started up north, where the Missouri River was dammed and all the silt was held back. Trapped between levees, the precious sediment shot right off the continental shelf. Undammed, the river’s seasonal floods would have dropped enough sediment to form marshes and wetlands all the way down the Mississippi, absorbing the river’s swells.

Instead, the wetlands are eroding. “Every hour, we lose a piece the size of a football field,” Hoal says grimly. “At this rate, by 2100 Louisiana’s protective coast will be gone.” Meanwhile, the seas are rising, and the inflow of saltwater is killing freshwater cypress—the delta’s main defense against storm surges. Katrina proved the need to reestablish the cypress swamps, giving water someplace to spread and be absorbed instead of narrowing into a channel and jetting its damaging force at anything in its path.

MISI-ZIIBI’s research helped H3 win an international design competition titled “Changing Course: Navigating the Future of the Lower Mississippi River Delta.” Hoal’s team would be studying how to reconfigure—and save—the entire Louisiana delta region.

“The Mississippi is a river you can’t engineer your way out of,” he told them. “It’s going to blow at some point. It’s going to find its new course.”

The idea was to shape that course ahead of time—as naturally as possible.

Endless miles of horizon, the sky steeped in violet blue, streaked with gold, dipped in a fiery red-orange where it touched the flat blue water. Seabirds followed the shrimp boat as it glided past the silhouetted scaffolding of a giant oil rig. The captain’s arm swept wide as he said, “Ten years ago, where we are now was land.”

Later, someone living on the delta would tell Hoal, “My back yard used to be land, and now it’s water. We’re watching our houses go.”

He studied the exposed roots of the cypress trees, the wavering reeds that could be gone in a minute, uprooted by little wavelets the wind whipped up. A taller wave—he lifted his outstretched hand a few inches—would rip these silent, peaceful wetlands apart. Land sinking, water rising, barriers eroding—the whole system was setting itself up to be obliterated. Remembering Katrina’s storm surge, he closed his eyes and let the lids press hard against each other, shutting out the damage already done.

To make the delta stronger and safer, they’d have to make it smaller—which was not an easy proposal to people who’ve lived on the delta for generations, extracting a living from its waters. What Hoal calls “the working delta” mixes oil with water: In a single day you might meet a Texan working on an oil rig; a Vietnamese-American shrimper; a French oyster farmer; a Cajun who pulls out his crawfish and crabs live; an African-American who fishes for buffalo catfish and gar; a Houma Indian boatmaker who crafts wooden bateaux and pirogues; a Creole tour boat captain who guides tours through the swamps; an Irish grandmother who weaves nets; a “river rat” who builds catfish traps of tupelo slats. As the delta shrank, all these jobs and cultural ways, all the family histories and jokes and rituals, would be at risk.

But they were already at risk.

Hoal’s team worked out diversions—places where levee doors could open, releasing water and sediment to rebuild the wetlands. What emerged would be the seventh delta, in evolutionary terms, and it would take a century to form. It would be smaller, because, “at the end of the day, you can only take out so much sediment.” But it would make the cultures of the living delta, the working delta, resilient, and it would stabilize the various economies the delta fed.

He spent days studying the Bird’s Foot area, at the lower end of the shipping channel. It was sinking fast, and his team was sure that it would become an island. “It will be very difficult to sustain a shipping channel there,” he said, “and the river will naturally want to break away from that channel. It’s already beginning to crack; there are a number of geological fault lines there. Time will take it out.”

The river would have to change course.

“We create a new Bird’s Foot up here,” Hoal suggested, leaning over a map, his pencil sliding north, “with multiple rivers connecting to the sea. A delta should always branch out—it does that by nature. Today the channel is one line, so all of this”—he swept the pencil across the map—“is starved.”

H3’s first step? To reconnect and nourish the existing wetlands, shoring up their crumbling edges and restoring buffers in the form of cypress trees, oyster reefs, and barrier islands.

And the way they’d re-create the barrier islands?

The same way he rebuilt that beach in South Africa 30 years ago.

With a sand engine.

From that beach in Durban, Hoal moved to a flood in St. Louis, a hurricane in New Orleans, the entire Louisiana delta, the rivers of the world. From tiny city neighborhoods such as Lafayette Square, he moved to a downtown plan, a regional sustainability plan, and resiliency planning for cities around the world. He started out designing houses, then downtowns, and then entire regions, then created a Wash. U. doctorate in sustainable urban architecture—the first in this country, one of a handful on the globe—for tomorrow’s architects.

He looks for vantage points, pushes to see the biggest possible picture.

And right now, it’s the planet.

Earth has passed the tipping point: More than half of its residents live in urban areas. By 2050, two-thirds will. And almost half of the expected 9 billion city dwellers will be struggling with water-related shortages.

Hoal has traveled to Mexico City, which is sinking because of groundwater extraction; to Shanghai, which is sinking even faster because it’s pressing so much weight into the eroding Yangtze River Delta. Singapore is a few feet above ocean level and doesn’t have one drop of groundwater. He’s been to research centers in Stockholm, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Berlin, London—each city confronting its own potential disasters. In the U.S., floods alone are costing billions of dollars ($260 billion between 1980 and 2013, the National Resources Defense Council reports).

“The future of the world is going to be won or lost in cities,” Hoal says. “They are, in my opinion, more important than nations,” Hoal says. “They are the real forces of change—which means the leaders of those cities can have a profound impact.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gets it; his foundation formed the Compact of Mayors, challenging city leaders to think sustainably. The city of St. Louis has signed on.

What else would Hoal have us do?

He leans forward. “Increasingly, cities operate as larger metropolitan areas—that’s how they compete globally,” he says. “We need to see ourselves in that bigger framework, not as these distinct little pods that do everything on our own. For us, the economic entity is the Upper Midwest: Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee.” A look over the top of his glasses. “We haven’t even got past St. Louis city and county.”

There are ways to connect. After apartheid abruptly crumbled in Hoal’s homeland, architects in Johannesburg proposed “corridors of freedom” that would use transport to overcome the city’s spatial divisions. “Maybe you can’t build everything more equitably, but what you can do is make sure everyone has access to where the resources are,” Hoal explains. “Here we have spatially segregated poverty, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be providing equal access to our resources”—for example, a north-south MetroLink.

Another powerful thread? “Use river corridors as an ecological backbone that connects all of our neighborhoods and communities together,” he suggests. “Our communities are this amazing network of tributaries and streams linking patches of forest, prairie, and farmland. If we reconnected that system and made it more publicly accessible, we’d all be linked through that social, ecological, civic infrastructure. That would be an enormous way we could overcome division.”

Not to mention that healthier river corridors would ease the destructive power of floods, which, Hoal’s research indicates, will have increased by midcentury.

He’s silent for a minute, and he looks weary. Then the jaw juts forward; the blue eyes brighten. “There are some hot spots here, and some really, really good people who know what they’re doing. What we need to do is link all those efforts into a bigger initiative, one that has a greater diversity—not just social and cultural diversity but economic diversity—than we have at the moment. The communities that are going to be the most successful economically are going to be those that address social injustices and inequities.” That’s because they use human potential—and land—more efficiently. “If you have parts of your community that are just not functioning, whole swaths of land that are not functioning, it’s the most ineffective system you can have.

“There has to be an openness to difference, to experimentation,” he continues. “We have to know it’s OK to not be completely successful. As a collective, we tend to hold ourselves back. There are individuals who are on fire…”

“But they’re usually from somewhere else,” I finish glumly.

“But that’s OK! It’s good!”

I’ve fallen into the provincial trap, labeling the outsiders. What bothers Hoal—the outsider who makes every place his own—isn’t the passionate newcomers; it’s “all these amazing people from around the world who come to our universities and then leave. This is seriously problematic.

 “Ultimately, to be successful, you have to be inclusive,” he concludes, “and you have to value difference. You fundamentally have to value difference. You can’t build whilst being insular.”

It too easily turns into tyranny.