Access to Resources - An Urban Agenda, Henrietta Palmer (ed.)

ACCESS TO RESOURCES AN URBAN AGENDA Editor Henrietta Palmer

ACCESS TO RESOURCES AN URBAN AGENDA Editor Henrietta Palmer

Copyright © 2014 the Editor, the individual Contributors and Spurbuchverlag.

Editor: Henrietta Palmer.

English Editor: Helen Walasek.

Graphic Design: Anna Tribelhorn and Johan Cnattingius.

All images © Resources / Royal Institute of Art, except photographs pages 169, 171, 173: © Anagha Paranjape-Purohit, 124–125: © Matt Robinson, 372–375: © Chris Tribelhorn, 34–41, 178–187: © Emil Gotthard and 117: © Karin Tötterman. Illustrations on cover and on pages 8, 9, 43, 50, 57–60, 230, 234, 282, 301, 304, 313, 330 and 340 © Katarina Nitsch. Fuller projection world map: 97, 127, 151: CC BY-SA 3.0.

This publication was made possible through funding from the J. Gust. Richert Fund, The Delegation for Sustainable Cities (Sweden) and through the funding programme for Artistic Research and Development of The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

For information about the Resources programme see: www.kkh.se/mejanarc/arkitektur/en ISBN 978-3-88778-419-5 Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. print run 2014.

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AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg.

For further information on Spurbuchverlag and AADR visit www.aadr.info / www.spurbuch.de The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliografic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de

8

RESOURCES

Henrietta Palmer

10 INTRODUCTION

Henrietta Palmer

Imagining the future 22

VISION

Frida Eriksson

34

TALK: MODERNITY AS A FOSSIL CONDITION, PART 1

42

BEYOND THE CRUNCH – THE CHALLENGES OF

Moderator: Pernilla Glaser

URBANITY IN A WORLD OF GROWING UNCERTAINTIES 48

SCENARIOS TO ENVISION URBAN FUTURES

IN A CHANGING WORLD 68

Karl Hallding

Karl Hallding

USING SCENARIOS TO TACKLE ‘WICKED PROBLEMS’

IN URBAN DESIGN

Philippe Vandenbroeck

City talks 86

SPECIFIC STORIES: EXPLAINING WHY PLACE MATTERS

Michael Dudley

94

BEYOND OIL: SHANGHAI

Michael Dudley

116

THE OLD MAN IN THE NEW CITY

124

BEYOND DESIRE: LOS ANGELES

142

LA RIVER

148 BEYOND DEVELOPMENT: PUNE

Karin Tötterman Michael Dudley & Steven Peterson Jenny Price & Pernilla Glaser Michael Dudley & Steven Peterson

166 CELEBRATING INFORMALITY IN INDIAN CITIES

Anagha Paranjape-Purohit

Rethinking the city 178 TALK: MODERNITY AS A FOSSIL CONDITION, PART 2 188 THINKING IN SYSTEMS 6

Moderator: Pernilla Glaser Henrietta Palmer

198 LIVING IN ‘NEXT NATURE’

Björn Wallsten

204 BEYOND OLD ‘MODERNITY’

Klas Eklund

210 RETHINKING MOBILITY

Steven Peterson

218 LATINO URBANISM: REINVIGORATING MOBILITY AND SPACE IN LOS ANGELES

James Rojas and John Kamp

228 UNDERSTANDING DENSITY

Henrietta Palmer

238 PROSUMPTION URBANISM

Björn Ekelund

250 THE TOOL-HOUSE: TRANSFORMING URBAN SPACE-TIME

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava

262 A SPACE IN COMMON

Henrietta Palmer

278 A MATTER OF SCALE – WHAT SCALE MEANS TO CHANGE

Henrietta Palmer

290 TO LOOK FOR FUTURE PATHS

Maria Andersson

Managing the future 300 WHAT IS ‘DEVELOPMENT’?

320 GLOBAL WARMING AND COLLECTIVE DILEMMAS

Niclas Hällström Folke Tersman

338 GREEN ECONOMY, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 358 SAVING THE PLANET ONE BIT AT A TIME? 368 AN EPILOGUE ON CHANGE

Thomas Hahn Victor Galaz Henrietta Palmer

372 THANK YOU 376 BIOGRAPHIES

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8

Resources This book comes to you from Resources. Resources is an advanced academic programme at the Royal Institute of Art (KKH) in Stockholm devoted to exploring the dynamics of urban change and trans­formations in a time of high uncertainty. It has been running as an interdisciplinary research space at KKH since 2005. Since then, twenty applicants have entered the Resources programme annually to participate in a year-long study of a specific urban environment. Each new group sets the particular ‘tone of voice’ for the coming study.

Arriving at KKH from diverse backgrounds, those joining Resources have one characteristic in common: an acute interest in urban futures and in the lives of urban citizens – their rights, their dreams and desires about possible urban environments. Participants come with an anxiety about the global challenges we are facing. They are young professionals – architects, artists, planners, designers, engineers, filmmakers and photo­graphers – concerned about climate change, the depletion of natural resources and with the growth of cities as it is taking place today.

Resources believes in knowledge of the local context – local conditions, experiences and local trajectories. During the course these are considered as possible alternatives to the market-driven planning that dominates contemporary urban agendas. As local social, cultural, ecological and economical conditions are unwrapped, urban imaginaries begin to emerge. Transferring experiences from local practice to the global context has been for those involved in Resources a counter motion, a sort of resistance to complicating sustainability and to avoid making it a new project of modernism dictated by powerful global actors. Yet fully grasping local conditions demands a knowledge beyond what could possibly be within our capacity as brief visitors to a particular urban setting.

From this understanding and acceptance of our limitations, we thus try rather to translate differences, than to avoid that they ever meet.

Henrietta Palmer, Editor, Professor of Architecture, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm

9

Introduction Henrietta Palmer

This is a story about the urban environment, how we live in it, look at it and interact with it – but also about how, within Resources, we have chosen to frame a discussion and how participants in the programme have addressed the questions that emerge. Cities and Energy, the project presented in this book, was a three-year study carried out from the settings of three of the world’s most energyconsuming nations: China, the United States and India. Initially we asked three questions: How can we live beyond oil? How can we understand the urban environment beyond consumption? and How do we actually define development?

Almost all the values of modern society are connected to the notion of a steadily growing economy. And yet, we are aware that the classic idea of economic advancement is based on resource extraction – of natural and human resources. When the term sustainable develop­ ment entered the global development framework in 1987 we – the citizens of the planet – promised not to live beyond our means, to not 10

INTRODUCTION

endanger the future of our children, to ‘do’ development differently.

But a strange twist has happened since. It has become strikingly apparent that the more intensely words like sustainability are being entangled with urban development, the more rapidly cities are finding excuses to grow in improvident ways never before encoun­tered. The market has highjacked the language of the alternative and twisted it into a persuasive sales pitch. Thus, so-called green eco-communities are increasingly being built more as gated com­pounds, and the eco­ logical and social consequences of the increased extraction of resources, such as metals or the sand used in concrete, are still not addressed as intertwined with urban develop­ment.

Just when we thought we had found a way forward, we were lost again, realizing that even such a basic act as recycling can have drastic socio-economic consequences, such as the e-waste dumps at villages in Ghana and China. We need therefore to create and recreate the making of the city, its narrative and images. And we need to hold these practices and languages tight to us, not making them too easily translatable, losing their meanings and values in the devouring language-making of the market. But, at the same time, we need more than ever new knowledge about the urban ‘becoming’ to be transferred and shared. Urban development cannot be under­stood solely from a national perspective. We are inextricably linked through a global economy where flows of people and goods pass from one urban context to the other. Externalizations and interdependencies 11

INTRODUCTION

must be revealed and understood, socially and ethically. Resources believes that new knowledge is to be found in local urbanisms and in post-colonial realms beyond the western, where urban making and thinking point towards other imaginaries, questioning the dominant orders which are now being unravelled.

What is Access to Resources about? This book presents the discus­ sions that have emerged from three years of Resources and our research about how three different urban environments provided grounds for ideas of the future. The three questions initially posed are of course relevant to all cities, yet they became specific to these particular cities. Hence, looking for solutions beyond oil, we studied Shanghai, since at the time the city had declared it would become the first fossil fuel free city in the world, and advanced systemthinking case studies such as Dongtan eco-city, north of Shanghai, were on the drawing board. Peak-oil became a very defined frontier, much more tangible than the ambiguous concept of sustainability.

Without access to oil – how do we cope? How do we heat, move and produce? How do we replace our addiction to plastics? No more charter tourism or business travel? A number of issues need to be solved radically and our lifestyles to be reconsidered from their very foundations.

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LEVANDE KOLUMNTITEL I ACCESS TO RESOURCES

Understanding our desires as drivers of consumption and energy use, Los Angeles became an almost too-obvious case study, with its culture of high individualism and spectacular gestures. However our findings were very different from what we expected. The essence of a consumption-driven culture is here strongly questioned on the ground by social-economic- and environmentally-driven grass-roots movements, as well as by ethnic communities, who are busy restructuring the urban, creating commons as new realms for interaction. The focus of our study, the Los Angeles River, is emblematic of how a new language – created by artists and activists for re-defining and re-imagining the river – managed to penetrate dominant thinking and planning and shift the current development trajectory.

Consumption is today the essential measurement of economic growth. And growth, in its turn, is sometimes considered as development – development measured by GDP and dependent on huge amounts of resources and energy. India has a tradition of looking beyond western definitions of development. The term Third World came to be used

by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, as a concept for a third alternative to the global dual division of development strategies represented in the postwar era by the west and the east. The setting chosen for a study on development was the city of 13

LEVANDE KOLUMNTITEL I ACCESS TO RESOURCES

Pune. With four million inhabitants, Pune is a rapidly growing medium-sized Indian city with a burgeoning middle-class, increasing social stratification and all the infrastructural difficulties that come along with rapid growth. Here the question of development is present and alarming: what is actually valued as development and against what is development measured?

Resources aims to research drivers of urban change through very framed questions and constantly evolving methods. Thus issues like density, mobility, accessibility, systems, production, participation, conflicts and governance are researched with the tools of storytelling, information visualization, bio-mimicry inventions, so-called radical mapping and, using scenario methodology, all together creating a wide and kaleidoscopic understanding of the urban. However, these concepts are never neutral and the history of urbanism shows how they have been used for different ideological realities and goals, often as a struggle between the state and the private, with different outcomes in the urban space.

As an example, in Los Angeles mobility is emblematic of the idea of individual freedom and the very essence of the city itself. But public transport has always been a conflict14

INTRODUCTION

ing territory, and the difficulties of introducing rail-bound traffic reveals an embedded conflict between the public good and private interests. As another example, one can regard infrastructure as an up-scaling of what was once privately invented and managed, transforming it not only into a public responsibility but also to a public obligation.

The scale and the comprehensiveness of infrastructure is thus an ideological manifestation of the role of the state or the city in relation to its citizens.

This book is written from the perspective of some of these urban issues. We have called them crossroads, urban spatial definitions where we as architects and urban makers could intervene upon change. They are places where change becomes tangible. These crossroads, as interrogated by the participants in Resources, are illustrated with projects from Shanghai, Los Angeles or Pune. To give a more diverse picture of current urban driving forces we asked experts who participated as lecturers in the KKH programme for their perspectives from outside Resources. Their contributions are accompanied by graphic illustrations by the artist Katarina Nitsch or are presented in conjunction with the larger story of images that runs throughout the book. This wider story of images tries to describe in each city what we have found to be important and relevant for our investigations. All images (with the exceptions of the ones where the photographer is mentioned) are either the work or the photographs of the participants or educators from these three particular years of Resources. Since the three projects are seen as shared work and knowledge, no individual authors of images are cited; a full list of participants, however, can be found in the back of this book.

The first part of the book, Imagining the future, is about visions. Frida Eriksson tells us about images of the future and how these images drive the development of the present. We also address the future through scenario thinking. Scenario thinking as a tool or method has become a cornerstone of Resources work as it has also developed inside the programme as we worked together with leading scenario-experts Karl Hallding and Philippe Vandenbroeck. Philippe here maps out the history of scenarios and systems thinking, as well as exploring the need for such tools while dealing with the complexity of nested problems. Scenarios as a method is the capacity to stretch thinking towards the unknown in multiple rather than single ways. This goes against a tradition of urban imagining and architectural thinking where the single ‘strong’ idea is cherished. Karl Hallding invites us to consider the technique of the method and 15

INTRODUCTION

describes the so-called meta-scenario which is set by the two drivers of global change: the increased global temper­ature and the rising cost of oil consumption. These two parameters lead to a normative set of scenarios, of which only one or two are ecologically and socially acceptable. Working with Karl and Philippe within the Resources programme we have tried rather to create non-normative scenarios to open up a number of possible futures, not merely one.

This first section also presents a conversation between Karl Hallding, Eva Alfredsson, Victor Galaz, Folke Tersman, Pernilla Glaser and Henrietta Palmer. Their dialogue tries to unwrap the relationship between fossil fuels and the modern era. This is a framework that brought very different viewpoints to the table. Victor Galaz talks rather from the perspective of the Anthropocene and changes of ecosystems, while Eva Alfredsson engages from the intertwined relationship of oil and economic growth.

Folke Tersman speaks of the moral dilemmas of our time in relation to climate change and Karl Hallding, again, tries to connect futures to the diminishing access to cheap oil. From the perspective of architecture and urban planning, how modernism is connected to the accessibility of oil and how this relationship is manifested in architecture is a topic for further exploration. As an example worth mentioning here referencing the importance of image-making, the highpoint of this representation must be the Archigram image by Peter Cook called the Instant City Airships where the instant wall-less city hovers over the ‘old world’, imagined at the very peak of oil accessibility in the year 1968.1 The second part of the book, City Talks, enters local conditions in a depictive and propositional way. Here is the core of Resources, the imagining that starts from an understanding of the specific rather the acceptance of an overall agreement of what sustainability should be about. Michael Dudley introduces this section through discussing the notion of specificity from a theoretical and contextual reading, but also by addressing some of the work of Resources. The chapters that follow are proposals for each city in focus, drawing on the work of the year’s participants. Michael Dudley and Steven Peterson present the works Syn City, The Fifth Ecology and Pune Matters from a common framework and analysis. Initially they asked: how could these settings be characterized – in terms of time, geography and political circumstances? The second ques1. See for example: http://designmuseum.org/design/archigram

16

INTRODUCTION

tion posed is: what was at stake? What became the research framework? At this point the scenarios as they evolved for each city unfold, followed by a proposed concept and trajectory.

The Shanghai scenario is about the relationship of degrees of density and self-sufficiency. The four scenario proposals imagined are all suggested as plausible examples, but with very different spatial outcomes. In the Los Angeles scenario the idea of accessibility evolved as central to an understanding of the resilient city, and is investigated in relationship to material vs non-material consumption. This relationship is here described through transport. The concept of multimodality, that is the combination of different transport modes, rather than the introduction of only one replacing an existing flora, is an important issue to investigate, especially in a context where many flexible and non-formal transport modes exists. Steven Peterson elaborates further on this discussion in the later chapter Rethinking Mobility.

17

INTRODUCTION

For Pune, the scenario investigated was, again, concerned with material vs immaterial consumption, but here in a spatial relation to the very large – the infinite – and to the very small – the infinitesimal. Here we consciously avoid a normative ranging of the four scenarios but present all of them rather as four possible and parallel realms.

Lastly, in this section of the book a site-specific example from each proposal is presented, followed by contributions from local voices. Thus Karin Tötterman writes about Shanghai from behind the windshield of a local taxi driver who offers his account of the impact of the changing city on his life. Pernilla Glaser interviews Jenny Price about the re-imagining of the Los Angeles River, and Anagha Paranjape-Purohit describes the constant negotiation of public space in Pune.

In Rethinking the City, which follows, the crossroads emerge as systems, mobility, density, production, shared space, scale and accessibility, each discussed by one or two authors. Thus Björn Wallsten, Klas Eklund and Henrietta Palmer examine urban systems of flows from an infrastructural political and metabolistic perspective. Systems thinking is central to Resources and through the years we have stressed even further the need to regard systems as embracing social, economic and ethical perspectives.

Mobility is addressed by Steven Peterson who writes about Pune and argues for the unstraightening of the line, rather than for a perspective of transport effectiveness.

James Rojas and John Kemp discuss the notion of a Latino Urbanism as emerging out of Los Angeles and its site-specific understanding of walkability. The crossroad of density is approached by Henrietta Palmer as an attempt to unwrap the popular connection of density and sustain­ability, to see if and how these two concepts actually support each other.

The idea of the city as a productive space has emerged broadly over the last ten years, especially from the perspective of landscape urbanism and, for example, the practice of urban gardening is taking place in different contexts with different incentives. Here production is discussed by Björn Ekelund who introduces the concept of prosumption as a property of architecture and the city, of both consuming and producing resources.

Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove write from India about the slum-dweller’s home as a centre for global production, revealing a condition for western consumption. Next, Henrietta Palmer suggests how to bring the matter of scale before our gaze, and discuss how it is connected to development as well as to particular ideolo18

LEVANDE KOLUMNTITEL I ACCESS TO RESOURCES

gies. Lastly, Maria Andersson reads the projects of Resources through the filter of accessibility as being paramount for a resilient city. In Rethinking the City the three Resources projects – Syn City, The Fifth Ecology and Pune Matters – are referred to as examples of new thinking and illustrate the texts that are written participants from Resources.

Last, Managing the Future revolves around concrete examples of different trajectories and how possible new policies and mentalities are needed to move towards a shared and ecologically sound future. Niclas Hällström describes how development has emerged as a fixed feature in mainstream thinking and opens up alternative translations of the concept from historical and contemporary interpretations and practices.

Folke Tersman unwraps the moral dilemmas of dealing with climate change and resources depletion, while Thomas Hahn re-positions economics in relation to ecology and punctures some of the standard reflections of sustainability and economy.

The section ends with Victor Galaz who pictures how governance of eco-systems could happen in a networked manner, envisioning a highly imaginable future. Finally, in An Epilogue on Change Henrietta Palmer opens up the idea of the becoming city and its language for our imagining.

•

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Imagining the future

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IMAGINING THE FUTURE

Visions Visions of the future drive the way we live. But where do these visions come from and who directs them? Are our futures at the mercy of multinational corporations which control technological develop­ ment and manipulate our desires as consumers?

Frida Eriksson

I

n my cupboard there is a silver bag with my name printed on it in big black letters. It contains sixty packets of the Transcend Personal Programme pills: ‘Where Science and Nutrition Meet’. They are called Long­evity Products – per-

sonally designed and formulated by scientist, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD. These pills are meant to make me stay healthy long enough to be able to take advantage of the scientific breakthroughs that will ‘radically extend the quality human lifespan’. According to Kurzweil, we are now on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling era in our history – The Singularity.

This approaching epoch marks the emergence of greater-than-human intelligence by technological means, which will result in explosive super-intelligence. We will transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. This increasingly non-biological intelligence leaves us with brains trillions of times more powerful than today.

Human ageing and illness will be reversed, pollution will be stopped, and world hunger and poverty will be solved. Even death will be a soluble problem. In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil turns previous more apocalyptic theories about technological singularity into a more optimistic view of the future of human development.

With existing trends he has predicted The Singularity will probably occur in 2045.

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VISIONS

The pressure from the future The future is a reality that does not yet exist. When we talk about the future it is the idea of it that we refer to. This idea of the future is constantly changing in interaction with the present – influencing each other’s paths forward. Whether we want it or not, we live and act continuously with the notion of the near and distant future. We save for retirement, plan for holidays, make New Year’s resolutions, career moves, take out insurance, embark on education, and so on. We spend a lot of money and effort trying to shape our future.

The ability to imagine the future is one of the fundamental features that separate humans from animals. Lions and tigers run when they spot their prey. They are both stronger and faster than us, physically adapted to exist in worse conditions than humans. Still, humans master the world. And we don’t even need to see the target in order to run – we run anyway. We are adapted to perceive what is coming: the future.

Since World War Two the pace at which the world is changing has accelerated.

Today, with all our global connections, almost everything is accessible to us anytime, in real time, in no time – at least to those of us more economically advantaged in the global community. In this ‘instant’ culture we tend to consider the relevant time frame as tomorrow. Our lives, love, business, values, and not least our happiness, are all determined by our expectations of the future.

For those who want to influence the economics, culture, science and politics of today, the future is an institution to conquer.

The future – a sign of our time The Singularity reflects phenomena in our present predominant political, cultural and scientific landscape. In the Ecological Modernist era of our time, growth and sustainability are compatible. Market forces play a major part in solving the environmental crises we are facing, driving technology and innovation towards breakthroughs. We are experiencing how information technology is being built into our living environments: household devices, transport, medical equipment, the electricity grid. The machine is everywhere, superior and subordinate, master and servant, observer and actor in an increasingly complex network constantly in change.

Some individuals have even chosen to connect themselves to this network by having microchips inserted into their bodies. Not for medical reasons, but in the cause of science, they can now enter the subway without carrying their smartcard. IBM is testing 23

IMAGINING THE FUTURE

what they call a ‘human brain chip’: computers that can sense, interact, perceive and recognize. It has ‘neurons’ which are the foundations of memory and learning. According to IBM, they have now made a key step towards combining the technological with the physiological world, which has been the challenge in developing a computer that behaves like a human brain.

The disillusion of today The prophecies of our time – The Information Age – have on the one hand been those of dissolution, in particular when it comes to all forms of hierarchies: the nation state, bureaucracies… Large corporations are being overtaken by fast growing knowledgebased companies and ‘community-based’ web services. With digital distribution and production technology available to the mass, niche activities have become economically viable. Products and services with a next to nonexistent regional market, now find a significant fan base worldwide. Chris Anderson, author and editor-in-chief at Wired magazine until 2012, describes in his book The Long Tail how the future economy is about selling more of less – the substantial and growing market for the less popular. A typical Barnes and Noble bookstore holds about 100,000 titles. Yet Amazon made 25% of its revenue from the books that weren’t among its 100,000 most popular titles. In other words, the books you wouldn’t find in a physical bookstore constitute a third of the ‘existing’ market. We have witnessed the birth of the Long Tail and perhaps we are experiencing the slow death of the mainstream – the hit, the blockbuster…

On the other hand, dystopias of our time have depicted a world where we, the humans, are diminished to pawns within the control of multinational corporations.

Not only in terms of financial resources, but also for the way they intrude in our own private sphere – even controlling our thoughts. The political power of nation-states is overtaken by larger economic organizations – privately owned and unaccountable.

The public space of the urban landscape is dominated by an exaggerated presence of mass media and information density. Consuming seems to be our only raison d’être, making the wheel spin even faster.

In 2010 Google controlled 44% of global online advertising revenue. It is by far more than the total ad revenue of all US newspapers combined. But Google, unlike newspapers, can track and predict our behaviours and therefore target messages more precisely towards us, the users, who give away personal information. In a not too far distant future when facial recognition technology is further developed, anyone with a 24

VISIONS

camera in their mobile device will instantly be able to trace whoever he or she can capture – our marital status, friends, hobbies, income, and so on, adding further information to our digital record. Our private sphere is being reduced.

According to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman we now, in this globalized era, live in an interregnum. Since the end of the Cold War when the old order dissolved we see no new one in reach. By the old order Bauman meant the hundred years when politics and power worked hand in hand, in the sense that they could achieve things together.

Then economics broke loose and almost all political instruments ceased to work.

While most things that influence us are global, politics have remained national and therefore impotent. In the efforts to reconcile international protocol on climate change during the meetings of signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP meetings), national governments have repeatedly failed. Bauman predicts that the young people of today will spend most of their lives striving to re-marry politics with power. Otherwise we will stand powerless to the negative impacts of climate change, for instance.

Development in the name of what?

‘Since everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose’. This is the caption to an illustration from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) publication of 1950 making predictions for the year 2000. In a retro Fifties living room we see a woman, her hair coiffed and wearing an apron – ‘the housewife of 2000’ – hosing down the sofa. A typical picture of the Fifties. Why is it so difficult to predict social shifts? The ones that fundamentally change our living conditions? The technical achievements of that period making household devices commercially feasible on the mass market played an important role in the liberation of women from being tied to the kitchen – but only in the long term. Just after World War Two economists at Bryn Mawr College reported that the time women spent on housework had increased from before the war. It turned out that rural housewives spent less time on housework than urban housewives. While the number of hours for rural housewives slightly decreased from 61 hours in 1928 to 60.55 hours in 1945, the amount of work hours spent on the household in larger cities increased radically. In 1945 housewives in larger cities spent 80.57 hours on domestic work – the reverse of the results that were expected. Mechanization of the household meant that time expended on some jobs decreased, but also that new jobs were introduced because of higher standards.

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IMAGINING THE FUTURE

“The future is a reality that does not yet exist.

When we talk about the future it is the idea of it that we refer to. This idea of the future is constantly changing in interaction with the present – influe­n­cing each other’s paths forward. Whether we want it or not, we live and act continuously with the notion of the near and distant future.”

According to Ruth Schwartz Cowan of University of Pennsylvania, housework changed after World War One. It no longer consisted of simply routine tasks. Schwartz Cowan describes it as an emotional ‘trip’. ‘Laundering was not just laundering, but an expression of love; the housewife who truly loved her family would protect them from the embarrassment of tattletale gray. Feeding the family was not just feeding the family, but a way to express the housewife’s artistic inclinations and a way to encourage feelings of family loyalty and affection.’

In modern postwar society the idea of the future has been particularly important, mainly focused on technological content. Technological visions, whether dystopian or utopian, have been given names such as Futurama, The Space Age, The Atomic Age, and so on. Launched under different names, constantly reinvented.

The World expos and fairs of the twentieth century served as the prime marketplace for these visions. The most famous of these huge expositions from a European and North American perspective was the New York World’s Fair of 1939. After the Depression there was a need to believe in a new era, one encapsulated by the New York fair’s slogan: ‘Dawn of a New Day’. From European contributors came utopias informed by ideologies such as communism, nationalism or fascism. To counter this, the American 26

VISIONS

organizers needed a dazzling alternative. Financed by General Motors, DuPont, Pan Am and Heinz, the American exhibitors promoted an independent world with a free market. One of the most stunning pavilions was Futurama, sponsored by General Motors. The ideas behind Futurama can still be seen in ‘To New Horizons’, the film that played at the pavilion. It explains how ‘new horizons’ have always brought man forward ‘in a restless search for new opportunities and new ways of living’. It envisions an ideal city in the ‘wonder world of 1960’, re-planned around a highly developed and modern traffic system. Elevated walkways give space for more cars and means of transportation. A continuity of parks, long green strips, surround each community. It is a city from which people and goods can travel in and out with both increased safety and increased speed, thanks to an advanced network of superhighways and elevated expressways.

‘Strange? Fantastic? Unbelievable? Remember this is the world of 1960’ the voiceover explains. Strange? No. Unbelievable? No. Fantastic? Well, fifty years beyond the wonder world of 1960, this vision still characterizes and shapes our cities. But now, with hindsight, we are aware of its side effects: dormitory suburbs, car dependency and sometimes notorious slums. Despite all this, and with new knowledge about the state of the planet, most cities are still being developed after this ideal.

Futurama dressed in leaves Present-day Beijing has six ring roads with a seventh being planned. In the 1990s the third one was constructed and it is by no means peripheral. Within the decade that was characterized by a growing awareness of climate change and a rapid decline in the air quality of Beijing, three more ring roads were constructed. With ‘Better Cities, Better Life’ as the slogan of The Shanghai World Expo 2010 the ambition was to display progressive solutions for the twenty-first century. The Chinese pavilion ‘The Crown of the East’ was a celebration of the Chinese enthusiasm for building better cities and planning for the future. Its theme film ‘The Road to Our Beautiful Life’, directed by Lu Chuan, is an eight-minute celebration of China’s urbanization over the last three decades since the Open Door policy of 1978. In the end there is a glimpse of Chinese cities thirty years ahead, when they have ‘embraced the green and the nature’. The slow pan over a future Shanghai pictures skyscrapers in a forest, a clear sky with twittering birds.

The most striking aspect of the film and the exhibitions of the Chinese pavilion is their 27

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Shanghai.

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IMAGINING THE FUTURE

confidence in the future. This is expressed by the leading roles that according to Chuan represent the ‘Chinese people’s sunshine, energetic, confident and handsome image’. But this image is totally driven by a modernist lifestyle: material wealth, a centralized urban model offering convenient family life in suburbia with a private car. The only difference from ‘the wonder world of 1960’ is that some of its technology has been replaced by more environmentally-friendly alternatives. But one can wonder what point there is in having an electric car when seventy percent of China’s electricity comes from brown coal.

Another appreciated attraction in the Chinese pavilion was the animated enlargement of Zhang Zeduan’s famous 850-year-old painting ‘Along the River During the Qingming Festival’. It captures the daily life of people of the Song period at the capital Bianjing, today’s Kaifeng. Rather than depicting the ceremonial aspects of the festival, the painting celebrates the vibrant spirit of the bustling crowds. The animated 3D version of this cheerful scene represents the quest for urban planning that encourages social gathering and cultural development. But why leave it as a historical reference?

Why isn’t this scene a driver behind a Chinese vision of an alternative future urbanity that is so much needed? Why does the outdated Western idea of modernity and its urban manifestations serve as the number one blueprint for the transformations that are taking place in China and around the globe? As a future for today it is certainly not progressive. Is the old idea of modernity an inevitable vision of industrialization regardless of the knowledge we now have about its disadvantages and damaging effects and its inability to cope with present and future challenges? Or is it the strong interests and forces of those who benefit the most from this type of development that keep it alive?

Determining our opportunity space Future visions have not only driven research and technical development, they have also influenced people, and perhaps first and foremost – capitalism. During modern society’s maturity the future in itself has become a goal.

In the new millennium more and more companies launch their products long before they are available on the market. In his book Nextopia, Micael Dahlén, professor at Stockholm School of Economics, refers to an American study made between 1984 and 2000 which showed that companies offering a not-yet-existing product, releasing a taste of what was to come, increased their revenue with about 14% on average that year. Whether the product really was released during the year or to what extent it sold didn’t matter.

Only the news, the idea of it, the expectations, increased the value of the company.

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VISIONS

“Future visions have not only driven research and technical development, they have also influenced people, and perhaps first and foremost – capitalism.

During modern society’s maturity the future in itself has become a goal.”

The cosmetic industry has also made most of its money on projections of the future, making us consumers believe we will end up ugly, lonely, poor and miserable if we don’t combat the effects of aging and stress. It is not the products in themselves they are selling us, it is the alternative future that is generating billions.

The market of our futures Today ‘the Future’ is an area of business where the tools of prediction are constantly being refined. This field incorporates both mathematic precision and literary talent – from weather forecasts and demographic calculations, via long-term investigations and economic prognoses, to scenarios of the political development of a nation. While prognoses give precise predictions of future situations, well-formulated scenarios are more exercises for the mind to help decision-makers make the right decisions. Prognoses are based on scientific models. Scenarios are the results of reasonable fantasies, the ability to identify potentials and construct persuasive stories around them. As the novelist William Gibson put it: ‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’.

Self-fulfilling prophecies?

William Gibson created the iconography for the Information Age in the Eighties, a decade before the wider use of the internet in the Nineties. The term ‘cyberspace’ was 31

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coined in his short story Burning Chrome in 1982 and further conceptualized two years later in his debut novel Neuromancer. With its ethos and aesthetics ‘cyberpunk’ provided the image of the future in the Eighties. Earlier science fiction had depicted careless technophiles in an era when science was pursued by authorities with a comfortable margin of control. But cyberpunk presented its worlds from below, from street level. The widely quoted line from Burning Chrome ‘The street finds its own uses for things’ describes people’s alternative application of technology. Another slogan that Gibson and his cyberpunk followers picked up from the first Hackers’ conference in 1984 was ‘Information wants to be free’.

Has science fiction in our time become scientific fiction? A prediction that causes itself to become true, due to positive feedback between belief and behaviour?

Changing our mindsets The businesses, organizations and stakeholders that can craft and convey persuasive stories about the future are in pole position. Since there is no reality to match their images against, the more convincing and relevant this future is to the groups they are targeting, the more likely it is to change mindsets and behaviours.

Advertising is about adding value to a product or an idea by changing the perception of it rather than its ‘real’ value. In 1971 Victor Papanek, the father of sustainable design, described the advertising profession as one the most harmful and ‘probably the phoniest field in existence today’. Yes, communication design is an extremely powerful tool. And history has shown it can be used for worse purposes than persuading people to buy things they don’t need. But as a tool it can also be used for the good.

Women’s economic power and the integration of women into the workforce was (and perhaps still is) driven by another image – Rosie the Riveter. During World War Two the American workforce needed reinforcement as war production needed to increase at a time when many men were in the armed forces. One now-famous poster targeted housewives with its depiction of a woman in work overalls rolling up her sleeves and titled ‘We Can Do It!’.

And they did. A state of exception, where economic and moral incentives made women and men get used to the idea that women actually were able to perform the work of men. But after World War Two, women’s growing economic power was not on the agenda any longer as the MIT researchers showed in the way they pictured the housewife of the year 2000.

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VISIONS

Imaging what could happen if the craft of creating persuasive stories were more widely used by people and organizations with an agenda to ‘save the world’ – of doing the good. It seems to be so much easier to imagine the scenarios we don’t want. NGOs and activists working for the good causes tend to point out problems rather than draw a picture of the desirable future they are working towards. In order to gain attention for a particular issue dramatic pictures of misery or devastation are more efficient.

But it is easier for people to act if solutions are part of a future that confirms their needs and expectations.

But that picture might be very hard to draw when focused on specific issues. Or perhaps this desirable future tends to get stuck in an absurd cliché that doesn’t do it justice? One thing that could be important to bear in mind is that missed opportunities are the worst scenarios. Regret is a strong feeling and we are willing to pay large amounts in order to avoid it.

Meanwhile, I swallow my personally designed expensive Transcend pills and look forward to 2045 when we will amplify our creativity with billions of times more powerful brains. Maybe then we will penetrate the limitations of the mind and imagine the unthinkable.

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References Anderson, C. 2006 The Long Tail – Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.

Bauman, Z. 2011 Interview by Marciej Zaremba. Dagens Nyheter, 23 August 2011.

Dahlén, M. 2008 Nextopia. Stockholm: Volante.

Gibson, W. 1982 Burning Chrome. OMNI, Vol. 4:10, July 1982.

Kurzweil, R. 2005 The Singularity is Near. New York: Viking Press.

Papanek, V. 1971 Design for the real world: Human Ecology and Social Change. New York: Pantheon Books.

Schwartz Cowan, R. 1976 The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century. Technology and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 1, January 1976.

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LEVANDE KOLUMNTITEL I ACCESS TO RESOURCES

Talk

Modernity as a fossil condition, part 1

with Eva Alfredsson, Victor Galaz, Karl Hallding, Henrietta Palmer and Folke Tersman.

Moderated by Pernilla Glaser.

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Pernilla: So I want to ask you first to just…We can just go a little round, and ask you, from your particular discipline, to look at Modernism and the driving forces behind Modernism: what are your reflections on what that was, and what were the tipping points.

How did it come about that people one day accepted living in a certain context and the next day it was totally unthinkable, what were those crucial tipping points? Do you want to start, Henrietta?

Henrietta: The crucial tipping points are really hard to find – one needs to remember that Modernism happened at different points in different places.

I mean, for example, in the colonial context Modernism happened after colonialism, so it happened pretty late – from 1947 and onwards, and then it had already taken place in the western context. But I am intrigued by the fact that some ideas that were embedded in Modernism, like the idea of dissolving time and dissolving space – like the Cubist painters whose paintings tried to approach the time-and-space matter – were actually possible because of oil. Time and space were dissolved and oil became the means to achieve this, and this is not a political but purely a mental shift.

I think it is interesting how it happened on many levels. Before time was connected to labour, so when oil-powered machines took over a lot of the labour, man became in a way free, free to do other things – leisure was created.

But time is also connected to mobility and oil made it possible for us to move very quickly. We could create cities where distances didn’t really matter any longer. So that expanded space, since we didn’t need to be close to each other due to the fact that we were moving slowly. Instead we could be very far away from each other. And, also the fact that just the pure matter of energy and heating could take away walls, and we could start to imagine space as un-built but still liveable. Somehow these things go together. I don’t know where we are now and how we should proceed with those mental images.

Pernilla: Oh, but we have only spoken for 5 minutes (laughing). What do you say Karl, what are your reflections about the driving forces around this huge shift that it was?

Karl: I’d like to start from another angle really, and I think that in a couple of hundred years historians will look back upon this time, broadly the twentieth century, as a parenthesis of the modern age, as an era, a very particular era in the development of the world. It is a period that has been defined by a number of different things that have changed; democracy, welfare, government structures, and then the whole explosion of consumption. Consumption of space, of living space, but also consumption of a lot of small or big gimmicks, everything from cars to toys, that have changed our life entirely has been built on the input of cheap energy, we kind of surfed on cheap energy to be able to achieve all these things.

And it’s not only the material part of it, I think. It goes hand in hand with changes in governance and welfare, it’s all one whole concept of the modern.

Modernism is maybe one sub-aspect of that. Modernism is maybe a philosophical, and in a certain sense, architectural approach, but I’m talking about something which is broader – the idea of the modern. And I think we need to consider what comes beyond and prepare for that, because there is no way we can continue in this modern parenthesis, it’s something beyond the modern that we’re looking into.

Pernilla: Victor, what are your reflections on this?

The modern, and the ‘beyond modern’ concept?

Victor: I’m a little on the same line as Karl here, to take one step back and sort of reframe the issue. I mean, what I think is interesting in terms of fossil fuel and modernity is how fossil fuels have allowed us to shape the planet in many ways that is just beyond fossil fuels – basically what we do with the oceans, what we do with land. So there are intricate and interesting interactions between fossil fuels and natural resources and ecosystems in general, once you start reaching the so-called peak oil period that would create new stresses on these other resources on which our whole welfare is based. For me that is the really big challenge.

So the question is: how will that transition look? Will it be a rapid ‘collapse’ sort of shift, or will it be more sort of like a slowly shifting baseline towards something new that we can’t really predict? For me that is sort of the way to frame it, to put it in the context of several support systems on the planet.

Pernilla:: But do we have to be exposed to an apocalyptic reality before we actually take the steps into this change, or is it possible to really initiate the necessary means of change, new systems, and sort of harbouring this notion of not knowing really what it will look like? Is it possible to do that in your perspective?

Victor: I mean, it won’t be like a Hollywood movie, where you have a huge collapse, aliens, threatening…then you see the US president gathering all the people on the planet. What we’re seeing basically are a lot of local, national initiatives, experiments, with people trying to formulate and find tools for an alternative future.

Now the question would be: what are the things that will make this sort of local, diffused innovation start scaling up and create system change? And that we don’t know, really. I mean it depends on what happens at the national level in terms of rules, economics, governance, but also what goes on, on the

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