Common Place No. 29

Thoughts about the New Midcentury Common Place No. 29 | Winter 2021

In thinking—speculating—about the coming midcentury, the Bay Region was my starting point, but as I wrote this, I saw that I needed to range further. The result is a work in progress. What prompted it was the proximity of the midcentury, and my friend Richard Bender's comment that 30 years is an interesting timespan to consider both the past and the future. I also realized that, God willing, my grandson will be his father's current age at the midcentury and his father will be slightly older than I am now. They can judge best if this has any merit.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE NEW MIDCENTURY

Thirty years seem like no distance. Where we are now, 2020, is what people tried to foresee in 1990.

And yet 30 years is a real distance. The Institute for the Future, when it tries to illustrate how things will be in 10 years, limits the changes to 15 percent of the present. That suggests that in 30 years, almost half of what we accept today may have changed. Looking back to 1990, I wonder if it's true—if 2020 is that different? Then I look around. How would we depict what's changed? It's subtle, much of it. In the next 30 years, some more visible elements may catch up.

The Bay Region is squeezed by a tax regime that exempts the main source of its wealth from paying adequately for the public realm. We're more or less a colony of the tech oligarchs, and the public goods and services found in equivalently large economies— the region's is comparable to the Netherlands—are badly frayed in consequence. Education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and transit are substandard.

The market delivers world-class quality to those who can afford it. Workarounds abound, but there's a threshold below which people fall off the map. The pandemic showed both the extent of the precariat and the possibilities of addressing their plight. But the tech oligarchs resist the public sector because they see it as bloated, ineffective, technologically backward, and unsustainably, unjustly overpaid.

Public sector retirement costs are eating into the operating budgets of their employers, setting up a conflict between the priorities of their constituents and the promises successive governments have made to their employees' unions. At some point, budget crises and voter rebellions will force the issue. My guess is that this will happen in the next decade. It will be a compromise, but the result will be more money for the public realm, since by then everyone will recognize that too much is going unsupported.

The public realm is an ecosystem. This is relevant to the Bay Region, which today has more than 100 separate jurisdictions and relatively little regional leadership or governance. This gap magnifies the power of the state's executive and legislature. The balkanized nature of the region makes it harder to chart its own course and resist top-down overreach.

While the cities aren't strangers to this dilemma, it cuts into their ability to deal with issues that benefit from regional and local cooperation. It leads cities to try to solve regional problems unilaterally or to push problems onto other cities without contributing to their solution. In the absence of regional leadership, no one can step in to adjudicate or allocate funding equitably and strategically. The mechanisms for that are lacking, but necessity may force their invention.

These are our realities. Thirty years will leave many of them in place. The tendency of any look ahead is to speculate, an activity that pokes at current borders and sometimes breaks through to realms of desire. I can imagine how intransigence at one level might whet appetites elsewhere for the extension of diktat.

Intercity transit might arrive as a China-organized package, priced to sell at the state level and imposed top-down the way BART was, decades ago. Housing could be a similar story—a Singapore-style embrace of towers for those the market doesn't serve, with a revival of housing authorities under state control. In short, a top-down scenario that partly supplants local control to solve a problem quickly and cheaply. This assumes that California will continue to be strapped for funds, despite its wealth, and any of that wealth that's tapped will insist on such wholesale solutions.

Affluence will dictate how local communities are impacted, despite efforts to level things.

This is one scenario of speculation. It could be otherwise—a workers' paradise or continued hell for those below one threshold or another: circles of hell that get progressively, precariously worse. I think hell is more likely than paradise, despite California being imagined often in terms of the latter. What's possible is to lean more toward one than the other.

Paradise is how it felt to me on arrival. And despite everything, there's a persistent honoring of the basic elements that make the region what it is: the ring of hills that are still identifiably hills, not Hong Kong's Peak; the importance of the bay itself as a unifying presence; the drama of the Gate and the coast as it fans out to meet the Pacific; the way nature appears suddenly, like the canyon you encounter coming down from Twin Peaks toward Glen Park or the way arterials in the East Bay end in hilly parkland. The balance of settlement and nature is in rough balance.

This balance is less well understood at the level of fabric—the pattern of neighborhoods and districts.

The fine grain that arose before World War II gives way to different townscapes and cityscapes. Some of it works—I was surprised by the lower Folsom Street corridor, west of Spear Street, an urbane stretch that attracted young families. Whether they stayed after the pandemic hit is another question, but initially the area had real street life and interesting buildings, an improvement on earlier redevelopment there.

Urbanity in the Bay Region is a fits-and-starts affair. Dogpatch, which was redeveloped extensively after the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan was adopted, is okay, but missing the community-serving parts the district was promised: a school, a library, and a park, for example. The balance is tipped in favor of the market—what the market delivers. This suggests that unless the city acts as a countervailing force, the market will resist being held to account. And cities tend to lack memory or perhaps consciously forget.

In a conversation in 2019, the San Francisco architect David Baker commented that what the market produces in San Francisco is getting steadily better, because both city staff and would-be buyers or renters absorb the lessons the best development offers. Ironically, subsidized housing often serves as a model because it's planned and designed with the involvement of the community around it, including potential residents. Unlike market-rate multi-unit housing, usable open space is prioritized along with facilities that support communal use. Market-rate housing prioritizes unit size and positions amenities as lifestyle options for individual residents. It takes its cues from other market-rate projects rather than from the cues of the locals. Even the lower Folsom Street corridor, while better than its predecessors, is a collection of building by name architects who drew on their own precedents elsewhere. The Transbay, Rincon, and Mission Bay areas replicate tropes.

With a few exceptions, there's no originality.

What's depressing is how the originality goes unrecognized. When Stanley Saitowitz designed an early modular housing project for RAD Urban in Berkeley, the Zoning Adjustment Board, failing to grasp how good it was—and what a miracle this was— tried to modify it for the worse. The OMA incident, with the Planning Commission turning down a Prada store in Union Square that broke with the banality of that district, has left us with Foster's Apple Store there as yet another high-style replicant. Urbanity doesn't require originality—the Bay Region is mostly a product of pattern books—but it benefits from it.

The fabric that arose from patterns drew on artisan creativity and the examples architects set with larger houses and important buildings—all in conversation.

Urbanity is formed in part by this visual dialogue, and the many more generic buildings here have little to say to us or to each other, a baleful influence.

Austerity amid abundance is the setup. It's led us to underinvest in childcare and education, belowmarket and threshold-of-market housing, transit, healthcare (including mental health issues), and managing the commons, whether it's in town or in the country. What's available reflects the affluence or lack thereof of the community in question. The affluence of the Bay Region has no bearing on this, which is remarkable considering its wealth. Every year, the discrepancies seem to get worse. By 2050, will this be reversed? Doing so means prioritizing public goods and services to increase their quality and accessibility. Social mobility depends on this. In 2020, our poorer communities are being set adrift.

We need a regional government. As it stands, the region is caught between its cities and counties, which only loosely cooperate, and the state and federal governments, which disregard it. Regional government risks being elite and unaccountable to voters, another layer of bureaucracy, expensive and ineffective. But without it, the region is invisible.

Horst Rittel's observation comes to mind. Rittel noted that the problems that vex us—"wicked," as he styled them—are symptoms of larger problems. If our region finds itself caught between adjoining layers of government, empowering it may not accomplish much. By thinking of the region as an ecosystem, we may be able to temper the interactions of these layers so they stay within their natural boundaries and yet collaborate as they tackle these vexing problems. It may free us to move beyond the solution space that our current political process imposes.

That space doesn't lend itself to the resolution of our vexing problems. In Berkeley, a friend told me, elected officials are enjoined by a state law from speaking informally in group settings. Formality is the rule, in the name of transparency, but it stifles conversation and collaboration. One reason for the rule is that too much rides on the elected officials to whom we delegate authority. The rule reflects past abuses, but—as always in politics—the cure seems worse than the disease. Ceding power might help loosen things without inviting corruption. (It seems clear that tightening things hasn't stopped it.)

Too much falls on government. Berkeley's City Council's agendas are legendary, the meetings lasting into the night, with the controversial issues deliberately taken up when most citizens have gone home. The Legislature takes up bills its members don't understand, with cities, towns, and citizens struggling both to decipher them and make their opinions known. Yet these bills cut through local prerogatives in the name of affordability, equity, and other catchwords. They often free the marketplace to bypass local review and mandate actions at the local level without providing any state funding. If we have 110 jurisdictions in the Bay Region, it's partly because so many activities are tied to public entities accountable for their direction and running. This is the essence of the ecosystem, and sometimes the sheer gravity of a vexing problem forces jurisdictions to come together, to converse and collaborate. Does it have to be a pandemic, an earthquake, wildfires—a catastrophe no one can ignore—to prompt this?

I would like it to be different. Of course, it will be different, as 2020 is different from 1990, but how does that difference compare, say with 1950 versus 1920? The year I'm writing this, 2020, resembles 1920 in that the world was emerging from another pandemic, but its backdrop—World War I—was the more terrible. Our backdrop, 2014 to 2020, marks the rise of Tea Party and its shading into Trump's darker regime. As we emerge from it, its dank spirit lingers, first hanging around and pretending it can undo its defeat, and second by asserting its return to power. It may be good to be dogged by it, a reminder that we ignore stifled lives at our peril, all of them.

We could use the first 10 of these 30 years to fix aspects of our democracy that get in its and our way.

Getting rid of the Electoral College; tempering the Executive's unchecked power to do harm; limiting Congress's obstructionism; making individual rights more consistent; righting the balance between citizens and corporations; ending the latter's hold on legislation and the shell game they play with state and local taxes; reforming public sector pensions-the list could go on, and tackling them so they don't fester into crises would be a useful break from 30 years of logjam and half measures or none at all.

The last midcentury gave us a modern world.

What the modernists envisioned 30 years before came to be. Some still look back at it nostalgically, furnishing apartments and houses with its minimal aesthetic. Two friends are restoring a midcentury modern house with willful purity. "Like rebuilding the Ise Shrine," I told another friend. Now even the word modern is tainted by its history, losing sight of its original meaning as contemporary. As a child of the midcentury, I've had trouble with this shift.

Modernism in 1920 fought free of stylistic wars fought across the 19th century. Pugin's polemic for Gothic over the neo-classicism he saw around him struck me when I read it as being like the polemics against the stagnant modernism of the 1970s lobbed by postmodernists, but dissent predates this, All the movements had the same idea: to breathe some life back into modernity by getting past it—post-it.

Modernity was attached to objects, including machines. Buckminster Fuller saw through them, first to lightness and ultimately to a shift in spacetime toward time—objects that time can inhabit; objects that long to be ephemeral, weigh nothing.

What do we call this impulse, this era? We still need the world the moderns envisioned, and their minimalism is still pertinent. Can we take it further?

One aspect of it unexplored by our predecessors is the move away from the petroleum-based economy.

It's implicit in nuclear energy, which at the last midcentury emerged as a peaceful use for this thing our scientists worked so hard to develop as a trump card within the existing framework of warfare. But the side effects of that option—calamities and waste that are sufficiently untoward that even despots have blinked—make other approaches more sensible. Now that we see conclusively the rising cost of dithering, the hunt is on for revamping civilization head to toe.

Coal, oil, and natural gas continue, but their days are numbered. As the options' performance improves, the shift will accelerate. Life will reorganize itself.

Modernism had 19th-century antecedents. This is Walter Benjamin's argument, and it makes me think about the roots of the dominant themes of 2050. In 2020, along with our benighted politics, covid-19, and the growing havoc of global warming, our focus is on artificial intelligence as our animating engine.

Some years ago, I used the term iHumanity to argue that we, individually and collectively, make "tech convergence" happen simply by using it within the space-time of the everyday. By using it, we stretch it beyond what its inventors and proponents foresaw.

We make it work for us, bend it to our will even as it tries to nudge us, snitch on us, or actively oppress. It knows more and learns fast, so it may cull many of us if it comes to that. Others will connive and survive.

This view of artificial intelligence is dystopic. It reflects a top-down view, but my thesis suggests that bottom-up will be the real driver of innovation in this realm, co-opting new developments in the service of an iHumanity that leverages them to extend its own capabilities and capacities. Life always finds a path in between dystopia and utopia, while that hell and paradise are closer to each other than to the everyday we try always to make a haven of the ordinary. As I wrote to a friend, Hestia is the only reliable god of that panoply; she honors Pascal's admonition.

The Anthropocene is under attack. We have to secure an everyday compatible with planetary life.

This impulse has deep roots. Some who we think of as modern, like Thoreau, were attuned to our actual context and how our actions—building railroads, for example—impose our shortsighted priorities on an order we disregard. Disrupted, that order responds in ways that can disregard us at a massive, inhuman, and annihilating scale. We experience this scale in any case—the planet's order unfolds oblivious—but our actions can make things worse. In traditional societies, the response was often to live minimally.

The countervailing responses were to erect signs of our dominance and transcendence, and link our fate to higher powers, accepting the world as transient while ensuring that we ruled over others meanwhile.

Some became postmodern first and then began to shift to another era. Others are barely modern. All are contemporary, living more or less similarly even as the differences between us we insist upon grow shriller, backed up by threatened or real violence. Is this simply a contemporary era, muddling along even as so much divides us? We struggle to look the parts.

The most expensive and the least expensive looks are indistinguishable now. This seems to be by design.

This is likely an interregnum. The would-be striders of the planet may continue to jockey, but the spectacle of their jockeying grows old, not least to those in whose name they claim to act. Regional parity, our immediate situation, makes it clearer who has and hasn't lost the plot. People are more willing to point this out and act on it. Devolution is popular.

Scotland wants out of the UK in order to stay within the EU, seeing a better future in an independence that works within that larger framework. California doesn't have an EU on tap, but its natural affinities are with the Pacific Rim. Things could change.

These changes look past 2050. They point toward a North American region that divides into coasts and heartlands. Their federations may remain, but the unitary nature of their external relations and internal policies will start to break down. By midcentury, we may see the beginnings of a Great Accommodation, a willingness to live with our differences, agree to disagree, and find common ground around specific realities. Planetary realism is likely to be one. The limits of hegemony may be another. Chairman Xi's efforts to recreate the East India Company will falter, are already faltering, on the growing resistance it's encountering, both from client states unhappy with the terms and competitor states unwilling to give in to China simply to have access to it as a market. The attitude of Australia and the EU exemplify this. Play by 21st-century rules or risk isolation is the message.

China has two ambitions, global and regional. It defines its region at the expense of countries it saw historically as subsidiary. Its global ambitions rest on a Pax Sinica of trade and military might, drawing on the postwar US example and testing it regionally.

But the region it wants to dominate is now peaceful.

There's little appetite for a China-led coprosperity zone or Chinese warships based in southern ports.

And the mess China has made of Hong Kong is all the rest of East and Southeast Asia needed to see. If China invades Taiwan, it won't be the cakewalk of Putin annexing the Crimea. Even he seems to get that taking the rest of the Ukraine would freeze Russia out of Europe and the Americas. Taiwan would cost China more than that. The main danger is that Chairman Xi is as bad a card counter as Trump.

Some advice gets through, the price of giving it gets steadily higher in terms of personal risk. Xi is like the Thai King, in essence—minus the trappings, but similarly insulated from criticism and ready to round unexpectedly on his critics. They will disappear or speak openly from abroad, much as dissidents did as the Soviet Union as it lurched into sclerosis, one five-year plan after another. The CCP will wreck China's tech sector in the same way it's wrecked Hong Kong, convinced it can do so with impunity.

At midcentury, China either will have seen a second wave of liberalization, post-Xi, or will be ruled by aging CCP hangers-on as an insular project that masks its decline with displays of power and acts of repression that founder amid endemic corruption.

Some will make out like bandits, as they say.

My grandson, born in Hong Kong, will be 45. His cousins, our granddaughters, will be in their 30s. In thinking about the midcentury, I think about them and the situations they'll find. My oldest son was 15 in 1990; his brother was 7. How is the world they live in now different from then? The rise of authoritarian governments, our own included, is one difference. It has erected barriers, even as trade, investment, and business try to work around them. Some of them rest on a popular reaction to the unequal way the profits of these activities are divvied up, how whole classes of people get short shrift. That the authoritarians only pay lip service to them hasn't dented their popularity. Trump came closer to winning a second term than anyone predicted, despite incompetence handling the pandemic. The long boom produced the employment and Trump just made it possible for the profiteers to keep more of it. Wages stood still.

But he said aloud what they wanted to hear, blamed everyone but them for their problems, and "cracked heads"—even the heads of small children—to show he "meant business" and was "the man for the job."

I wouldn't have predicted this in 1990. The last great divide was around 1968, here and in Europe—a youthful rebellion against their elders. Solidarity prevailed in Poland and eventually Gorbachev pulled the plug on the Soviet Union, but what followed was mostly the squandering of those heady moments. An exception is Helmut Kohl in Germany, who held his breath and went for reunification at vast expense. It stands out as a good move that put Germany at the center of the EU. Will it hold? The shadow of that legacy is the desire for diktat and fascism. We have that same problem. I wonder if it's the legacy of the things that divided us from the start: ambivalence about democracy and about the relative power of the center and the parts; race as it attaches to power or excludes people from it; willful ignorance of history; and a tendency toward tribalism and individualism.

But back to these three concrete examples, the progeny of my progeny. I find that I'm optimistic for them and, by extension, for their cohorts. We're passing through a period of "working through" a great deal that was present in society but not as churned up as it's been with Trump at the helm. It's there in a way that's undeniable—the prerequisite for dealing with issues that arise every 50 years or so, to be resolved yet again in the wake of a fresh crisis.

My mother died in 1990, 30 years ago. I awoke with this thought. She died at 75 and felt herself deprived of what she assumed to be a longer life, based on the longevity of her grandfather and her father. It was not to be—I also remembered how she disregarded her doctor and let her cholesterol go unchecked, leading to the stroke that led in turn to her death from pneumonia four months later. I felt bad for her, this lingering, half-paralyzed death.

As she contemplated her death, she seemed to look ahead, regretting that her grandchildren would grow up without her. A slowly emerging poet, she may also have regretted not having time to find her voice or channel it reliably into words. When she first had her stroke, I visited her. In the course of our conversation, more of a monologue on my part, she revealed a mind unclouded by her stroke. She also told me that my marriage was fortunate. At the time there was sufficient turmoil that while I agreed with her, I wondered. Events have proven her correct.

In the talk I gave at her funeral, I noted that her life took in both the Russian Revolution and the end of the Soviet Union to which it gave rise. She went through the pandemic that followed World War I and had an interesting life with my father, living apart from him for several years in World War II, when he was in Europe, and then abroad with him (and sometimes with us) during his working years.

Since I'm almost 74, her age at death seems close. Both my parents died in their 70s. It's hard to know about mortality. It seems to be genetic, but it's never clear whose genes are in play. My mother's grandfather lived to be 97, I think, and her father was 86 when he died in a car accident. But my father's father was 76 and he was 79. What seems certain is that I won't be present at midcentury, as noted. But then you never know. "Work as if immortal," I've often written, quoting E.M. Forster, and "Treat your body as separate," to cite the Tao Te Ching. Making it to the midcentury isn't why I'm writing this. To speculate about it is partly to bridge the gap in time.

Thirty years isn't a typical expanse of time that planners use. It's likely that the midcentury's allure won't be felt until it's closer, but 30 years remains an interesting horizon, distant enough that things will visibly differ in certain ways, but close enough that vast differences—colonies on Mars, e.g.—aren't likely. An outpost on Mars, though, seems possible.

We measure time in terms of life and death. Once we realize our mortality, diminishing returns attach to our sense of self. Once we asked impatiently, "Are we there yet?" Now we wonder how much time is left. Life's end is like a brick wall terminating a steadily narrowing passage—vast when we began.

The idea of Heaven that Thomas Cole painted in his commentary of men's lives restores that vastness.

A midcentury, viewed 30 years away, is a kind of Heaven, too, a marker on which to project hopes and dreams. This despite the provisos mentioned. What we hope and dream is important even if unrealized.

It sets an agenda that can be revisited, to ask where we are with it, whether there is unfinished business or something else took or is taking precedence. Any date in the future can have this quality, of course. I pray for Trump to stand down as Anne Frank prayed for Hitler to be gone—a leitmotif of her diary. Give us this day, we pray, glad to be alive, that it's not worse.

What Heaven, then? Will it really be 30 years of tension between socialist and fascist inclinations?

The idea that Trump might run again, that even worse men are on the horizon, is depressing, but at the same time there are women, mostly, advocating a Green New Deal. Their vision is a work in progress, but is at least a vision, not a nightmare of misogyny, repression, willful ignorance, and pseudo-science— everything that has typified these last four years.

Suppose we look back from an imagined future.

This is one way to speculate about 2050—how the previous three decades would be summed up by a 50-year-old writer who remembers being a student during the pandemic and the aftermath, but then lived on through everything that followed. We could paint this retrospective in different hues.

Let's begin by supposing that Trump claws his way back in 2024, running with Pompeo, and they set up a duopoly on power that keeps the Trump children in the picture and plays the constituencies Trump has gathered—especially men, a category that cuts across race and ethnicity, gathering that swathe of Americans who went to high school or community college, live outside the left-leaning metropolises, and favor closed borders; Russia over China; racial separation; traditions rooted in popular Christianity and reflected selectively in federal and state laws; an America First approach to trade, aid, and alliances; personal freedom over practices recommended by the medical and environmental sciences, and the deregulation of industries that support the regime.

Power will shift back and forth, but the rightleaning populists will control the Executive or Congress, checking reform and advancing itself.

Because it faces continued, vociferous opposition, it will move in the direction of Russia, controlling the dialogue and openly harassing perceived enemies.

This is one scenario, but here's another. Instead of ceding the populist terrain to the Republicans, the Democrats under Biden take up the Green New Deal and consciously address those of all stripes who were passed over by the pre-2016 establishment. Instead of Trump's inflammatory and pandering rhetoric, the populist Democrats will act. Its actions will aim to build social mobility by taking the public realm seriously, working closely with state governors and city and town mayors to coordinate efforts and make sure that the direct and indirect support reaches the people it's intended to help, and not be shunted off to pay for layers of bureaucracy and its pensions. A populist Democratic Party needs to slay its sacred cows by enacting top-down reforms and negotiating settlements whenever the math doesn't add up and lax practices overburden the present and the future.

The tone of the populist Democrats needs to shift from hectoring and patronizing to taking on a pragmatic "let's get this done and here's why" way of speaking that assumes the good will and ambition of the hearer. The goal is not to dumb society down and make it beholden to the state—the populism of the Trump Republicans—but to raise all boats, with short=, medium, and long-term programs to do this.

True populism recognizes that every cohort has its issues and possibilities. For working adults, staying employable is crucial. That means childcare, transit, lifetime learning, healthcare, and a safety net. If working life these days is 50 years, it means a fund that provides security thereafter. For young people, it means the best possible education, a way to enter the job market quickly—for example, a civil version of the military that provides training in return for a commitment to help run parts of the public realm.

Democratic populism will be informed by the experience of social democracies and also of welfare capitalist city-states like Singapore. They will study what works and what doesn't, recognizing that it has to work well in an American context. In pushing for a new "brand" of populism, the Democrats may force the Republicans to rethink their own. By acting in concert with states, cities, and towns, the Democrats can build a bipartisan network that can get things done in ways that are directly responsive to regional and local concerns, and make the whole network accountable, not just the leadership. The problem of logjam—an opposition party digging in its heels—can be worked around and the opponents isolated.

I've emphasized the front end, and it would involve the Democrats breaking with some of their own unproductive habits, especially their ties to big business. One way to break that habit is to end run the Supreme Court decision that gave business an outsized voice. It won't stop everything, but it will stop the enormous and pointless flow of money into political campaigns—a good start. But what impact might Democratic populism have over the next 30 years? What would be a visible sign of it in 2050?

One good measure is the comparative situations of different categories of Americans. Will women and men be paid equally for the same work? Will the opportunities for social mobility and advancement be widely shared or still mostly a sign of privilege?

Will the public goods and services that make up the public realm be accessible and consistently good, whatever the income levels of those using them? Will obvious signs of social breakdown still be the norm or increasingly the exception? What are the trends?

Trump populism connects the human game that the psychiatrist Eric Berne called "Ain't it awful?" (in his 1964 best seller, Games People Play) with socalled solutions that pin the problem on a scapegoat and try to marginalize, suppress, or eliminate them.

Ending the gameplaying and scapegoating will take time, but comes down to identifying and working on the real problems that are currently overlooked or paid lip service by our still-largely neoliberal state.

Democratic populism would focus federal and state programs on complementing the market by addressing those areas where it falters: long-term thinking and investment; ongoing stewardship of public land (federal, state, and local, with the aim of consolidating those efforts and giving them a reliable revenue stream and the ability to share resources); and ensuring an adequate base of support for the public realm, including a minimum income and the revival of and investment in public, i.e., accessible education, healthcare, housing, and transit, along with other socio-economic supports.

To bring this full circle, federal, state, and local governments might in time define and empower the regions to manage their own public realms. Regions would receive federal block grants to do this, with federal taxes supplanting state and local taxes as their main revenue source. Corporations would pay their fair share, no longer able to shop jurisdictions.

On Twitter, "ambience" is dismissed. "Urbanity" suffers the same fate, while big and boxy buildings containing as many boxlike apartments as possible are extolled. It's easy to picture this reductive vision.

But these are the qualities that make a setting distinctively itself and, at a larger scale, endow it with character. How this is achieved can vary widely. Sha Tin New Town in Hong Kong's New Territories, which I saw in 1994, looks out at mountains. The view is each unit's ambience, while the arrangement of the buildings and their connection to local civic life and transit links to Kowloon and Central are Sha Tin's urbanity. The towers aren't uniform, unlike comparable developments in China and elsewhere, so there's a bit of visual identity for the residents.

The fact that Sha Tin stood out—Tunney Lee, our guide, said it had the population of Boston—also set it apart as a regional landmark. How much of this is true today I'm not sure, but it suggests that even at a mega-scale and in the context of mass housing, these qualities are achievable if providing them is a goal.

Part of the reductive argument is that housing is too expensive because it's burdened with "extras."

Recent legislation lets developers, if they provide a modicum of below-market-rate (BMR) units, avoid zoning and code requirements that, while they might add amenity, urbanity, or improved performance, also add to the cost of construction. This would be okay if the housing were designed to make it easy for residents to upgrade them—the frame-and-infill of Dutch housing, for example, where both owners and renters install their own floors (or not), because the house is essentially an unfinished shell, not unlike an office building before fit-out. But that's not the case here. It's just an invitation to cut corners. The result will be stripped down and boxy, like the "plastic" apartments of the 1960s and 1970s: crap, in short.

When you build crap, the community begins to look crappy. Crap buildings lead to deterioration because the people who live in them are clear that whoever built them could care less. Some buildings of the 1960s and 1970s managed to aspire to higher quality, and they've been renovated to be better.

They have what architects call "good bones." That costs more, but it pays off in the long haul. Buildings are for the long haul—my pattern house, built on spec, has been occupied since 1902, with different people making it better because it has a bit of amenity and urbanity, as does the neighborhood.

Estate-like revamping is a look near me. I noticed it while walking—older houses whose owners put in elaborate fences and gates, formal front gardens, and other visible signs of wealth, inviting intrusion but attempting to stave it off. (One sign noted that the dog bites and the owners cannot be responsible.) I mention this to preface thoughts about the evolution of style between now and 2050. What's the look for a new midcentury? Will it be minimalism again, or the ostentation of wealth masking as good taste? I always come back to Veblen, with his nose for how the wealthy hide their ostentation from themselves.

The penchant for thin, tall residential towers is threatened by people's fears of elevators—a fear that extends now to more conventional verticality. It's likely to die down as the pandemic is tamed, but the fear of contagion may linger, especially among the old, for whom influenza is an equal threat. I expect that the elevator companies are developing ways to filter the air in cabs, just as airplanes must be upping the ante on their ventilation and filtration systems.

There's also global warming to consider. So far, the built world around us seems largely unaffected.

People are warier of property along bodies of water and in areas prone to increasingly bad weather. This can mean hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. Cities are likely a better bulwark against them, unless their locations make them inherently vulnerable, but the desire for proximity to woods and water won't abate.

Building products and systems are likely to play into the changes we'll see, accommodating themselves to the predominant building forms. Will form follow function, developing new styles from resilience?

There are examples even now, like houses raised off the ground because of flooding. Styles emerge as the functional move resolves itself aesthetically and finds relevant antecedents. Simply raising the house may give way to something more interesting.

Urbanity to me is this innately human response to the initial moves to address a problem, whether it's the lack of affordable housing or the threats that global warming poses. The example of communal housing in Vienna, going back to the 1920s, and more contemporary models in Western Europe and here, too—enlightened work by architects who value urbanity—may yet save cities from being ravaged by reductive buildings. William Morris set himself against this same problem, manifested as Victorian era tenements. This tension will persist, I imagine.

Will envy and covetousness persist? I see these as the twin sins of this faux-Progressive moment, when even younger writers I admire tweet about using eminent domain to seize suburban mansions and turn them into affordable housing; and when the school districts here work actively to penalize their best students while depriving all their students of childcare and K–8 education that would allow more of them to do their best work. That work needn't be tipped toward higher education, but that system too needs reforming, with more of it supporting work and letting people learn as they go rather than take time out and rack up debt even in public institutions.

It takes time to make a life. Life rarely falls into your lap, despite the fairytales the media reports. A robust public realm supports social mobility over the cycles of life, helping people make headway and to recover from reversals, whatever their cause. The Buddhist idea of "start where you are" should be the premise. The prison system should focus on this. It should give its "graduates" the help they need to make their way in the community, not fall back into conditions and situations that will undermine them.

Raise the floor, in short, and don't hinder or attack those who climb higher. Privilege counts for much less than people imagine. Hence the saying, "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations."

The only legacies that stick are the examples elders make and their commitment to raise and educate their children to carry it forward as best they can.

There are societal obstacles to communal and personal progress, worth fighting to overcome and eliminate. They never entirely go away—someone is always getting the short end of the stick. Working to address this is the duty of governments, institutions, and businesses. The public realm exists to give that someone a leg up. But it also exists to give society as a whole a strong underpinning, to "raise all boats."

These purposes are closely linked, complementary.

Working against the latter works against the former.

The baleful nature of the Trump Administration lies most of all in its disdain for this responsibility.

Its sole aim was to benefit itself and pander to those it pretended to benefit, throwing bones and blather, and giving license to these followers to act on their own initiative to perpetuate an "open season" on those it painted as enemies. Trump's government had no sense of a public realm at all. It's crucial that the new government take steps to secure it better.

Envy grabs inequality by the wrong end. The focus should be on raising the floor—funding a strong public realm with affordable and accessible public goods and services, and real safety nets for people at the different stages in life when they need them. In reality, everyone has to give something up to realize this, but the commonweal shouldn't be at the cost of what people can achieve or in lieu of providing for themselves and their families. Hence "a floor" and "a safety net," not a substitute for achievement or a leveling undertaken for political reasons. Leveling is a form of envy and condescension if it holds people back from achieving what their capabilities allow.

The public realm should be a life companion that aids your young parents, gets you started well, makes sure your primary and secondary education is good, helps you recover from mistakes you and your parents made, provides ways in to adult society that recognize you and they may not have a worked-out entry, provides supports so you have a roof over your head, have access to healthcare, can afford to get to work, and are protected from ruinous calamity. It's not a substitute for the need and the responsibility of working on your own and your family's behalf, with some of it going toward the commonweal. A simple tax on what people earn, and an equally simple tax on what businesses earn—taxes that provide a floor to which the operating income of public goods and services can be added, but with the proviso that the fees involved are tuned to ensure that affordability and access are maintained, that no one is excluded because they or their parents are too poor.

Pursue this agenda for 30 years and differences should be evident at midcentury. It won't be perfect, but it will be better than it is now, when the public realm is frayed. (I'm writing here of a U.S. context.)

A commonweal should reform criminal justice so it no longer substitutes for societal failures to deal with the public realm's gaping failures to deal with mental illness, missing public goods and services, and the corrosive effects of everything government ignores, including the environmental and human damage that inevitable arises in their wake. A better midcentury also hinges on making this a priority.

And this is the point: to tackle inequality head on by strengthening the public realm, ensuring that it's properly run and appropriately funded, aims for a consistent standard, serves the cause of raising all boats, not tearing anyone down for reasons of envy.

The future feels bipolar in 2020. Trump lost, but as I write this, he's still claiming he won. Those claims have raked in $250 million and counting from his alienated and credulous supporters. His version of populism drew substantial backing from voters despite everything they knew. Democratic socialism is the closest thing currently on offer that resembles a left populist movement. In California, a state that is dominated by the Democratic Party, left populism is hindered by the neoliberal left—exemplified by State Senator Scott Wiener and by think-tanks like SPUR and the Terner Center that support him. That they are neoliberal is made clear by their funding sources and the market-friendly, mandate-heavy legislation they put forward. Waving the flag of affordability and accusing their opponents of racism, they override local decision-making to benefit their backers while propagandizing that these benefits will trickle down.

Right populism draws it energy from people's abhorrence of the neoliberal order. The neoliberal left is the latest incarnation of that order, striving to eke out another electoral season of payback to those who fund them—real estate and cannabis, but also the Tech sector that looks to them to forestall any meaningful state or local tax on their presence. Left populism draw its energy from people who finally see through both the neoliberal smokescreen and the running scam that right populism proved to be. If it attaches to democratic socialism, I believe it has the best chance of delivering a 2050 worth living in.

California is not the U.S., of course. But it's here, in New York City, and a few other places that the tensions between Democratic Socialism and the neoliberal left are particularly pronounced. The Democratic Party won on the Biden-Harris premise of centrism. If it revives the old neoliberal left elite, it will lose to some form of right populism in 2024. Its task is to integrate left populism and then sell it to the electorate. Its selling point is that the 99 percent can have better lives without the toxic baggage that comes along with right populism.

To get there, left populism has to be prepared to sacrifice some of its own sacred cows in the name of a more efficiently and effectively run public realm. It has to buck its own backers, admitting to what isn't working or is unsustainable and dealing with it. This alone will distinguish it from the neoliberal left that kicks every possible can down the road rather than tamper with the existing order. It has to do so in the name of the public realm that right populism wants to gut and the neoliberal left routinely shortchanges.

(What they share are political shell games.)

U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows how left populism can reconcile the local and the national by developing programs like the Green New Deal that focus federal, state, and local efforts on the public realm, seeing it as the fairest and most effective way to ensure that public investment goes to those who most depend on it. What appeals to me about that initiative is its effort to be comprehensive.

I try to think back to 1990. What's here in 2020 that might have been foretold back then? Office real estate was starting to crater. In 1992, Olympia & York went under and Canary Wharf went into receivership. The day before, I gave a talk at a forum in Tokyo, in the course of which I offhandedly said that this would happen. When it did, I was briefly an object of interest from others at the conference, but I'd been to Canary Wharf in 1991 and you could see it coming. My own career in architecture—I worked for SOM at the time, then moved to Gensler—saw episodic busts: the 1973 oil crisis, while I was still in graduate school; the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s; the commercial real estate crash of 1990 through 1993, the dotcom crash in 2000; and the near-death of finance in 2008. Now we have the pandemic, which is widespread, uneven in its impact and the timing and nature of the recovery. China is past it, it appears, and most everyone else is not.

In 1990, Japan was still on the radar screen and China was just opening up, undeveloped and hungry for outside investment. SOM San Francisco shifted in that direction. By 1995, it had a tiny office in Hong Kong and big projects in Beijing and Shanghai. But other markets were spottier—work in Manila, but not much in Jakarta or Surabaya. China persisted.

In 1990, Hewlett-Packard was big in Silicon Valley, competing head-to-head with Dell in Austin.

Apple was growing. Microsoft in Seattle was its rival.

That rivalry continued, then Microsoft faltered. HP broke apart, but still competes with Dell for scraps.

Email, run through dial-up modems, was coming into its own. I remember sending a proposal to Hong Kong as an attachment. It took a hour or so, but was worth every minute. Those proposals were tiny. No one was emailing drawings—the files were too big.

Somewhere along the way, privacy started dying out. In 2020, when mobile phones ensure that our movements can be tracked and our locations more or less established at any given moment, you may as well declare yourself openly, live transparently, but of course people developed new ways of hiding in plain sight, papering over their real views, states of marriage and employment, etc. Then Covid-19 put us indoors, except for the soon-sickened partygoers.

At my age, solitude was more or less mandatory, but the exceptions were out and about, and plentiful.

Much has been written about how things will look when the pandemic lifts—what will come back.

My guess is that the changes will be more apparent at a personal and organizational level, and less so as the scale increases. Not that we won't see new buildings and some evolution of the different places of human settlement, but their outward expression won't be as radically different as the way people experience the everyday—how they navigate it, communicate with others, find companions and entertainment, etc. It's likely to differ by cohort, with products finding mass appeal but how they're used differentiating based on age and many other factors. If the particularization of mass society, its division into ever-smaller identities, continues, entertainment will constantly look for an audience and audiences may look for each other to enlarge itself, monetize itself, and have more impact.

In 1990, we were coming out of the AIDS crisis.

Across the next 30 years, we saw epidemics come and go on a regional basis, isolated and contained.

Now they say that Covid-19 is a preview of what lies ahead. If that's true, it will alter mass tourism and business travel. Countries that can afford to will put up barriers to entry. Treaties that allow freedom of regional movement may fall apart for health reasons.

Behind this is a fear of climate-induced migration, of human movement at a scale that no region can resist.

By 2050, we'll either have something to show for our efforts to slow global warming or we won't. If we don't, we'll have a 30-year-clearer view of "worse."

Global warming, if it produces heat spikes and bitterly cold winters, will alter human settlement patterns accordingly. Worse weather will be another brake on travel and make it prohibitive to develop in a conventional manner in vulnerable places. Look for a revival of vernacular forms that dealt with these conditions. If it gets worse, you'll see more of them.

In 30 years, it seems unlikely we'll be at a point when worse turns into worst and people abandon land areas en masse because they're untenable. But instances of worst are likely. Hopefully, they'll spur action. But action on a concerted basis is unusual, as the response to Covid-19 demonstrates in spades.

Does this make China's point that its centrality and authority is preferable to competing regimes?

Yet there's New Zealand as a counter-example, and evidence that countries led by women did better with the pandemic than those led by men. My guess is that China will prove to be one more instance of a power overreaching, like us and our "New World Order."

By 2050, China may be like us in 2020. Xi will be gone. Some kind of loosening will have followed all of his tightening, his effort to effect command and control, not only within China but across whatever he thought China surveyed. Whether or not China takes Taiwan by force or browbeating, it will be the seed bank of what follows—more so, I think, than Hong Kong, despite the bravery of its patriots. Hong Kong and Singapore are the two city-states on which the British tried to graft a version of itself. In both cases, the resulting plant is a credit to its grafters, but also a distortion of them. Taiwan is more of a mongrel—Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese. Mongrels have an edge in scrappiness and street smarts. It's also a fusion, with a dose of postwar America and cowboy-entrepreneurial Silicon Valley. When the CCP's Mao excursion runs out of gas, Taiwan will be its model of democracy with Chinese characteristics.

India may by this point have shed Modi's Hindu nationalism, and parts of Africa may be ascendant.

It's not clear there will be a hegemon in 2050. China may dominate East and Southeast Asia, but its ability to extend that dominance runs into competition east and west. Even to its south, I foresee ASEAN being more organized as a counterweight, protective of Taiwan—Hong Kong may have suffered the fate of Lehman Brothers: too many of its rivals were content to see it eclipsed. Taiwan is a different story, despite the technicalities, "One China," etc. America will defend Taiwan, and if we're smart, we'll talk ASEAN into putting its regional skin in the game. A China that regularly overplays its hand will help this along.

A China that finally resumes opening up, accepting that the wider world is unimpressed by belligerence, will be more popular with its neighbors. Opening up could fuel another boom. Crack the Australian wine!

What I wrote above reveals my optimism. Is it warranted? For all its shortsightedness, humanity manages to come to its collective sense and make headway against specific challenges. It also evolves, and each significant evolution then takes decades to work through. An example is decolonization.

Despite backsliding by the former imperialists and its revival by new players, it happened fairly quickly— late 1940s through the 1990s, when the Soviet Union devolved into its various parts. It left a mess, often by design, but by 2050 more of that will be resolved.

Regional parity has its own challenges. It makes it harder to tackle a problem like global warming on a planetary basis, relying on international cooperation through existing international bodies. But this could also make regions more directly accountable for solving these problems, working through their trade blocs and mutual-aid organizations. In time, perhaps by the end of the century, it may be the regions that primarily interact with the UN, WHO, WTO, et al, taking on more responsibility but acknowledging that planetary problems—widely shared across the regions—demand coordination and cooperation.

By 2050, we should be on this road. Regions can sort their so-called internal problems, subject to broadly accepted norms—Geneva Convention-like rules and standards that define a social compact and the basis for interregional trade and movement. It may take 30 years to hammer this out. The BidenHarris Administration could take the lead with it. It points to fundamental reforms in the current order, which is badly frayed—as the Trump Administration revealed. The problems are existential enough that it's worth getting a different approach on the map.

Make haste slowly toward 2050. We suffer from our mass tendency not to think things out or apply what we know. Slowing the pace; rethinking how and why we travel, using digital means to sidestep such timewasters as commuting and most business trips; and questioning the current range of solutions for the public realm deficits that dog us—these are steps we can take immediately. Again, Biden-Harris could take the lead with it, defining regions within these United States to recognize that many problems are best dealt with at that level, subject to rules and standards that build in some flexibility. (That states currently compete with each other as tax havens is an example of a problem that needs to be fixed. Regions also offer a way to balance population and resource differences, put an end to inequities that tip things unjustifiably in one direction or another.)

If I come back to the US, it's because we have a pressing need to move forcefully beyond our recent past and embrace internal and external reforms in a concerted way that makes conversations operational rather than emotional and irrational, because they're focused on problems that while of different orders and magnitudes, are in front of us, clear as day.

Common Place | Text & images Š 2021 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com