Peter Jackson employed an intricate approach to the stage design of Lord of the Rings. The people who inhabited Middle Earth for hundreds of generations slowly left cultural traces, alterations, artefacts and remnants of their human existence on the environment.
For example, the cinematographic stage set for Rivendell gives the viewer the impression of use and legacy over generations. Stage designers aged artefacts and applied, erased and reapplied cultural marks and insignia to “make” Rivendell the special and legendary place that author J.R.R. Tolkien had intended.
Designing Middle Earth: behind the scenes of The Lord of the Rings.
Placemaking
Urban space turns into place in a similar way. People are natural placemakers.
When they live in cities, they create “livehoods”, build, modify, decorate, expand and renovate. In doing so, they slowly leave their mark on the city.
In the 1960s, progressive urban planners and designers like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte argued that catering for slow pedestrians rather than fast cars results in better city design.
Placemaking can make places “sticky,” so people dwell longer, customers spend more in retail shops, and students stay on campus.
Trying to accommodate sustained high levels of growth, coupled with the need to contain urban sprawl, has led to the rapid gentrification of inner-city suburbs. As construction companies are trying to keep up with the mandate to grow Australian cities, they won’t slow down easily.
Placemaking is being used to quickly breathe life into new urban developments. Speedy placemaking is of the essence when generic turnkey residential stock is sold as “vibrant communities”, “liveable neighbourhoods” and “distinctive precincts”.
Cookie-cutter cities
Accelerated placemaking poses several risks.
Places come with history and heritage to be conserved and protected. Digital storytelling has been used as a form of digital placemaking that not only enables the study of a place’s history, but also ways of embedding and commemorating historic evidence and artefacts in place.
To avoid making places that suit the placemakers and their funders more than the current or future occupants, inclusive practices of placemaking are needed. Marginalised and economically threatened communities should be enabled to engage with their neighbourhood on their own terms and create their own urban imaginaries. This requires transdisciplinary, participatory and action research approaches to placemaking.
Placemaking can fuel further gentrification with its well-known set of associated issues and consequences. Activating places often aims at making nearby retail and residential properties more profitable. Yet genuine and slow placemaking can add further value by unlocking a city’s diversity advantage.
Contemporary placemaking relies more and more on stereotypes. An example is the iconic architectures of kerbside coffee shops. Christian Norberg-Schulz speaks of the genius loci as a fundamental element of placemaking: the essence of a place that makes it unique.
This approach seems currently ignored in favour of a cookie-cutter approach. Copying success stories – Venice in Vegas, for example – is a constant in architecture and urban design. But the trends of tactical urbanism, pop-up interventions and gentrification actually risk impoverishing our urban landscape and our urban ecologies.
James Howard Kunstler: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs. TED 2004.
Slow cities
In addition to a set of ongoing challenges, there are exciting opportunities on the horizon for slowing down placemaking and for placemaking to slow down cities.
Our fast-paced world of automation and smart cities prioritises speed and efficiency. Yet the health and wellbeing of city residents can be improved by slowing down.
This is about not only a slower pace of pedestrian flow, traffic and life in public spaces. It also relates to appreciating artisan crafts, food provenance, seasonal changes, local customs, and even boredom and getting lost. In Australia, the cities of Goolwa (South Australia), Katoomba (New South Wales) and Yea (Victoria) have joined Cittaslow – “the international network of cities where living is good.”
Le Dîner en Blanc, Brisbane, September 1, 2012.brisbrad/flickr
This “slow cities” movement promotes the use of technology. Yet this is different to how technology is portrayed in many smart city visions, which liken cities to corporations that are about growth, efficiency and productivity. However, a city is neither a business nor a computer.
Making cities collaboratively
Revisiting Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” we understand placemaking as a strategy to bring about much-needed social change and urban renewal through grassroots democratisation.
Cities often invite people as participants in urban planning decision-making. Yet why limit people to just providing feedback to city governments as part of conventional community consultation processes? Genuine placemaking regards them as co-creators in collaborative citymaking.
The exposure to diverse ideas, places and communities is crucial for innovation and the functioning of democracy. We believe placemaking can help develop a better dialogue between citizens, communities, government, businesses, civic groups and non-profits.
Placemaking is meant to provide a close connection between people and their locale. Placemaking has to be specific and unique to urban space, taking into account its community, environment, culture, food and social practices.
Finally, cities certainly need to face up to the challenges of climate change. Placemaking provides opportunities for more sustainable ways of life not only by creating accessible, healthy, democratic and slow cities, but also by imagining the post-anthropocentric city.
Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
What is the importance of digital commons?
What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crisis?
What are briefly the differences between commons and markets?
Further reading
What are the commons?
Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system - any
resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a
commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is
motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with
the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work.
Is there a clear example of a commons-based business?
The internet provider Guifi.net in Catalonia shows how commons can
create a new paradigm of organizing and producing. This bottom-up,
citizen-driven project has created a free, open, and neutral
telecommunications network based on a commons model. This is how it
works: People put Wi-Fi nodes on their rooftops, which is extended and
strengthened each time a new user adds a node to the network.
Currently,
Guifi.net's broadband network has more than 30,000 active nodes and
provides internet access to more than 50,000 people. The project started
in 2004 when residents of a rural area weren't able to get broadband
internet access due to a lack of private operators. The network grew
quickly over the whole region, while the Guifi.net Foundation developed
governance rules that define the terms and conditions for all users of
the network.
Installation of a "supernode" of Guifi.net's network in the neighbourhood of Sant Pere i Sant Pau in Tarragona. Photo by Lluis tgn via Wikimedia Commons
The example shows that in creating any commons, it is critical that
the community decides that it wants to engage in the social practices of
managing a resource for everyone's benefit. In this sense "there is no
commons without commoning." This underscores that commons is not only
about shared resources - it is mostly about the social practices and
values that we devise to manage them.
In what areas are commons active?
Examples of commons can be found today in different areas:
1. Local food sovereignty
2. City commons
3. Alternative currencies
4. Web-hosting infrastructure for commons
5. Creative Commons license
6. Open-source software
7. Open-source design/cosmo-local production
8. Academic research/open education resources
It is interesting to consider the improbable types of common-pool
resources that can be governed as commons. Surfers in Hawaii, catching
the big waves at Pipeline Beach have organized themselves in a
collective to manage how people use a scarce resource: the massive
waves. In this sense, they can be considered a commons: they have
developed a shared understanding about the allocation of scarce use of
rights.
Wolfpak of Oahu manages access to the biggest waves in the world. Photo via onthecommons.org
Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
From a historical perspective, commons were an essential part of the
economical and social system of rural societies before modernization
took place. People in rural areas depended upon open access to the
commons (forests, fields, meadows), using economic principles of
reciprocity and redistribution.
When common grounds were enclosed and
privatized, many migrated to cities, becoming employees in factories and
individual consumers, and lost the common identity and ability of
self-governance. The modern liberal state separated production
(companies) from governance (politics), while in the commons system
these were an inseparable entity. In industrial capitalist societies,
the market with its price mechanism became the new central organizing
principle of society.
How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
Nowadays massive land grabs are going on in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. Investors and national governments are snapping up land that
people have used for generations. All over the world, all aspects of
life are being monetized with the expansion of private property rights:
water, seeds, biodiversity, the human genome, public infrastructures,
public spaces in cities, culture, and knowledge.
What is the importance of digital commons?
The internet has been an arena for experimentation and innovation,
precisely because there is no legacy of conventional institutions to
displace. Entire new modes of creative production have arisen on the
internet that are neither market-based nor state-controlled. Open-source
software, Wikipedia, and Creative Commons licenses have emerged as a
new way of production that is non-proprietary and based on the
collaboration of widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who
cooperate with each other.
Prior to the rise of the web, commons were usually regarded as little
more than a curiosity of medieval history or a backwater of social
science research. Now that so many people have tasted freedom,
innovation, and accountability of open networks and digital commons,
there is no going back to the command-and-control business model of the
20th century. The full disruptive potential of this profound global
cultural revolution is still ahead.
What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crises?
The commons offers a powerful way to re-conceptualize governments,
economics, and global policies at a time when the existing order is
incapable of reforming itself. The most urgent task is to expand the
conversation about the commons and to ground it in actual practice.
The
more that people have personal, lived experiences with commoning of any
sort, the greater the public understanding will be. In a quiet and
evident way, the commons can disclose more and more spaces in our
everyday life in which we can create, shape, and negotiate our lives.
What are the differences between commons and markets?
Commons: Rely on people's altruism and cooperation Markets: Believe humans are selfish individuals whose wants are unlimited Commons: Stewardship of resources Markets: Ownership of resources Commons: Individuals and collectives mutually reinforce each other Markets: Separation of individual and collectives Commons: Shared, long-term, non-market interests Markets: individual consumers, short-term market relationships
Further Reading:
Benkler, Yochai, The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation Over Self-Interest (Crown Business, 2010).
Bollier, David, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2014).
Bollier, David & Silke Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012).
Capra, Fritjof & Mattei, Ugo, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal
System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
2015).
Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonio, Commonwealth (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Sennett, Richard, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press, 2012).
This piece was written by Bart Grugeon Plana, a journalist and contributor of the New Economy and Social Innovation Forum (NESI Forum). It is based on the book "Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons," by David Bollier.
Shareable is media partner of the NESI Forum, a nonprofit
initiative that will bring together change-makers and thought leaders to
conceptualize, discuss, and lay the foundations of a new economy, in
Malaga, Spain, from April 19-22, 2017.
Header photo of Ballard Sunday Farmers' Market in Seattle, Washington, by Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons.
Many years ago, while researching the history of the U.S. decision to
use atomic weapons on the people of Japan, I came to understand
something: there was something deep at work in the American political
and economic system driving it toward relentless expansion and a
dangerous, informal imperialism.
I began thinking about how to
fundamentally change America out of concern with what America was
doing - and is still doing - to the rest of the world.
Many experiences since - especially working in the U.S. House, Senate,
and at upper levels of the State Department trying to resist the war in
Vietnam; and thereafter with activists in the antiwar and civil rights
movements - taught me something important: it wasn’t enough to stand in
opposition to the injustices America inflicted on the world and its own
people. It was equally important for these movements to operate with an
idea of what they want instead.
Could we imagine a system that undercuts the logic responsible for so much suffering at home and abroad?
It was reflections like these that brought me to first sketch the
idea of a “pluralist commonwealth” - an economic and political system
different from both corporate capitalism and state socialism grounded in
democratic ownership, decentralization, and community that could
fulfill two key functions.
On one hand, it offered a general map of
where we might want to go - a design for a next system in which a
plurality of overlapping institutions reinforce each other to
democratize our common wealth. On the other hand (and unlike other more
utopian blueprints), I’ve always believed that the Pluralist
Commonwealth, grounded in everyday American reality - like the deep
cooperative tradition of the Wisconsin where I grew up - was also an
effective guide to how we might actually get there.
While progress is never strictly linear, I believe that we are
beginning to see an accelerating development of the foundations for a
system that looks a lot like the Pluralist Commonwealth, and a growing
recognition of how they begin to fit together.
So how do we maintain and deepen the momentum? Here are six areas
where it’s particularly strategic to be organizing and building
institutional power in the current moment.
1. Public banking: take it to the cities
Public banking, which invests capital for the common good rather than
Wall Street’s bottom line, has existed at the state level for nearly
100 years in North Dakota.
Now, activists are taking this model to cities and uncovering exciting possibilities. In
Santa Fe, for instance, organizers have worked with Mayor Javier
Gonzales to begin serious consideration of a municipal-level public
bank. As an official city study
released earlier this year showed, instead of the city’s $200 million
in cash deposits sitting in large, non-local financial institutions, a
municipal public bank could leverage those deposits to reduce borrowing
costs for the city - saving millions of dollars of taxpayer money every
year that would otherwise go toward costly bond offerings.
Similar efforts in Philadelphia
and other cities are also picking up steam as more and more people
discover just how much money is wasted on Wall Street to finance the
growth and development of city infrastructure. Why make a bond trader
rich when you could build better schools and lower taxes instead?
The publicly owned Bank of North Dakota
has long strengthened the state economy, expanded access to affordable
credit, and contributed its revenues to supporting vital services like
education. But the institution is also the product of a unique history,
in which progressive populism was able to use the state Legislature to
create this innovation. Today, in the face of relatively unresponsive
state legislatures, progressives are proving that cities are promising
spaces to channel energies for creative action.
By demonstrating the power of finance as a public utility, the public
banking movement is building momentum for and giving shape to a
democratic system of investment that is much larger. Public banks,
credit unions, and community development financial institutions can all
grow over time to displace the financialized, profit-seeking banking
sector, helping turn the tables to put the public’s money to work for
the benefit of everyone.
2. Worker ownership: build the ecosystem for economic democracy
There’s been an explosion of interest in worker cooperatives
as a simple solution to begin democratizing ownership of the economy.
An ecosystem is emerging that allows people all across the country to
accelerate these cooperatives’ development by engaging local governments
for support, converting existing businesses, or even investing personal
savings into their expansion.
Worker cooperatives, by directly shifting ownership and control of
the workplace to workers themselves, are some of the most intuitive and
immediately appealing institutions of the Pluralist Commonwealth.
Studies show that worker-owned companies don’t just democratize wealth,
they can also operate more efficiently and are more likely to stay in business than “normal” firms.
Yet while there are more than 10 million Americans working in
companies in which they also own a share, the number of worker
cooperatives - where these shares are equal for all workers, and come with
an equal vote in the future of the business - is far smaller.
But this isn’t because of some intrinsic problem with worker co-ops.
Traditional businesses, in which workers labor for someone else’s
profit, have an entire ecosystem of support - from the business schools
that train their managers to the banks and public subsidies that finance
their creation and expansion.
Worker-cooperative advocates are building a parallel ecosystem of
this kind all across the country. Cooperative development projects like
the Wellspring Collaborative in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the CERO
cooperative in Boston are creating exciting new crowdfunding mechanisms
to help communities launch democratic enterprises. Organizations
like The Working World and the Shared Capital Cooperative are building
national networks to channel financial resources into the cooperative
economy, creating diversified opportunities in which both institutions
and individuals can invest.
In cities like New York, Madison,
Wisconsin, and Rochester, New York, municipal funding is now being used
to support the work of cooperative developers focusing on creating
worker-owned businesses in low-income communities. There
is no reason why every city and town’s existing infrastructure for
helping small businesses cannot be turned toward democratic
alternatives, and the more this happens, the easier it becomes to make
the case to community stakeholders and policymakers.
A key opportunity here is conversions of existing businesses. As the
boomer generation retires, the future for hundreds of thousands of
small- and medium-sized businesses is unclear. Without a succession
plan, many of these businesses may get absorbed by financialized private
equity or simply cease to exist. If we organize to take advantage of
this historical moment, we can convert many of these to worker-owned
businesses instead.
3. Procurement politics: “buy local” at a bigger scale
Solid local organizing is shifting the purchasing behavior of
place-based nonprofit institutions - or “anchor” institutions - toward
sustainability and economic inclusion. This means big steps toward the
Pluralist Commonwealth can be achieved with relatively small amounts of
activist resources.
Consider the Real Food Challenge: In less than a decade, this network
of student activists has secured pledges to shift more than $60 million
of food purchases at 73 colleges and universities across the country
into more sustainable and just options.
Opportunities exist in every aspect of anchor institution operations.
A student-led study at the University of Michigan found that just a 5
percent shift in procurement to local suppliers would increase local
economic activity by more than $13 million and create more than 450
jobs.
Non-profit hospitals may be particularly open to such demands with new
rules under the Affordable Care Act mandating “community health need
assessments” - reports that can illuminate the role that poverty plays in
poor public-health outcomes and make clear the responsibility of health
care institutions to use their resources to address economic inequality.
And campaigns to alter purchasing can strategically link up with
campaigns to shift investment dollars in the same institutions. For
instance, the Reinvest in Our Power
campaign is mobilizing students to demand not just divestment from
carbon in their schools’ endowment portfolios, but active reinvestment
in community-controlled financial institutions.
“Buying local” may make us feel better about the consequences of our
consumer choices, but when we change the way our public and large
nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals spend their
money, we’re shifting hundreds of billions, if not upwards of a
trillion, dollars into local economies - and creating a kind of
decentralized planning system in the process.
This is the concept behind the Evergreen Cooperatives, which channel
the purchasing power of Cleveland’s biggest anchors into a network of
green worker cooperatives, creating opportunities for ownership in some
of the city’s hardest-hit communities and communities of color.
As we work to shift the dollars spent by public and nonprofit
institutions into patterns that support and stabilize thriving local
economies, it’s important to remember that we must defend our right to
do so politically. Right-wing state legislatures and large-scale
international trade agreements like TTIP and the TPP aim to remove
barriers to the global movement of capital and undermine local
procurement initiatives.
4. Participatory governance: organize for renewed democracy
At the heart of the Pluralist Commonwealth is the idea of renewed
democracy. We all know that American democracy is severely broken - but
just “getting the money out” of our political system is insufficient.
A compelling alternative is suggested by participatory budgeting,
which allows residents of a community to vote directly on how a portion
of public money is spent. The mechanism, developed initially in Latin
America, has been making substantial progress in the U.S. in recent
years and can be built upon, shifting our political culture away from
spectacles of personality and toward real engagement with the project of
self-government.
Following the lead of city officials in places like Chicago and New
York who embraced participatory budgeting to manage discretionary funds,
smaller cities like Vallejo, California, and Greensboro,
North Carolina, have embarked on citywide participatory budgeting
processes. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is pioneering a participatory budgeting
process tied to a fund for renewable energy investments.
While the amounts of money in each project to date remain small,
participatory budgeting at once normalizes the demand for direct
community control over the allocation of resources and provides a site
in which the muscles of community self-government can be strengthened
and scaled up. In short, it is an organizing process as much as it is
budgeting process. And it’s only through such organizing and development
that we can build toward higher-order processes of truly participatory
planning.
Boston’s trailblazing participatory budgeting process, for instance,
recognizes the key role it can play in developing long-term community
leadership by prioritizing the city’s youth. Boston has placed $1
million of public money under binding, directly democratic control of
Boston residents between the ages of 12 and 25.
And even in cities where municipal officials aren’t ready to embrace
direct participation in budgeting, there are plenty of opportunities for
creative grassroots organizing to expand participatory budgeting. The
Department of Housing and Urban Development has officially endorsed it
as a way to implement required community oversight of money allocated
locally through Community Development Block Grants. In Toronto, for the
past 13 years public housing residents have had direct, binding control
over millions of dollars of annual capital improvement funding.
As we seek to reinvent, reinvigorate, and revitalize American
democracy, we can begin by empowering the communities far too commonly
denied the right to meaningfully participate.
5. Energy democracy: plan it by region
Building democratic ownership at the community level opens up the
possibility for planning. In Boulder, Colorado, citizens felt that their
city’s power supplier - corporate giant Xcel Energy - was not taking the
threat of climate change seriously. Rather than trying to force the
company to comply with regulations, the residents of Boulder decided to
take their utility back. When this municipalization (currently in progress
despite multiple political and legal roadblocks thrown up by the
corporate incumbent) is complete, the city will be able to
democratically manage its own energy sources.
Boulder proves that planning is by no means necessarily undemocratic
or centralized - in fact, one of the reasons I believe changing the
underlying ownership patterns of the economy is so important is that it
begins to unlock possibilities not just for a more equal distribution of
wealth, but for the kinds of decentralized planning we need.
Ultimately, we need to be scaling up beyond the city level to the
regional level if we really want to plan effectively for a new energy
system. Those most affected by the old energy system already realize
this - and in many cases are at the forefront of efforts to imagine what a
just transition looks like at a regional level.
A particularly exciting effort is the one being led in parts of
Appalachia by groups like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Mountain
Association for Community Economic Development. Faced with a
recalcitrant state government opposed to implementation of the federal
Clean Power Plan, local activists have been engaging stakeholders on the
ground to develop a clean power plan of their own, from below, with a
particular focus on rebuilding economic opportunity for the workers and
communities that have traditionally depended on the coal industry as one
of the few sources of jobs in the region.
Even without the ability to directly translate this popular planning
process into public policy, such activism, oriented around large-scale
alternative visions, can be a powerful organizing tool as we work toward
a post-carbon future.
6. Stop imperialism, tame growth
I have worked nearly my entire life in
the United States, inside what has been the most powerful capitalist
state in the world. And while bottom-up, grassroots experiments at
increasingly larger levels of scale are key, it is important to remember
why they matter.
Simply put, without dismantling the
engine of growth at the heart of the American economy, we don’t stand a
chance of making the world a sustainable and equitable place for the
human species to thrive. This ultimately means transforming some very
large corporations into public utilities,
preferably at the regional level. Such entities would not be subject
to the Wall Street maxim of grow or die, nor would they drag the U.S.
into support of right-wing dictators willing to allow American
corporations to control a good deal of their development.
Building the Pluralist Commonwealth in
America is, to my mind, an act of anti-imperialism. But recognizing this
deep connection between building a more local and sustainable economy
at home and the well-being of the rest of the world does not absolve us
of responsibility to oppose the government’s efforts to reassert
America’s grasp on global hegemony.
The same good conscience that leads
us to reconstruct the American economic system over decades should also
lead us to oppose the rattling of sabers, the support for the overthrow of inconvenient foreign democracies, and the destruction wrought by American military action overseas.
Gar Alperovitz wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Gar is the former Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. His most recent publication is What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution (2013).
The majestic swell of the Southern ocean provides an endless spectacle.
This seemingly simple succession of crests and troughs is perhaps one
of the most striking memories I keep of my life at sea.
Over the years,
in my mind, it ended up symbolising the subtle combination of constant
change and continuity that characterises most living systems.
Just as
Heraclitus famously said that “One cannot step into the same stream
twice”, one cannot witness two identical waves building up and receding.
Each one is unique, so similar yet so different, a perpetually evolving
landscape, a perfect illustration of feedback-induced unpredictability.
The first age of machines, brought
about by the Industrial Revolution, rationalised many informal processes
and created a new worldview underpinned by the idea of control: we
could predict what would come out of the man-made system, provided we
guaranteed consistency of feedstock.
Put in simple terms, if you pressed
the same button you would always get the same result - the big
machine’s levers did away with uncertainty, and paved the way for mass
standardisation. It worked very well, and the unprecedented level of
economic development experienced by western countries since the middle
of the 19th century is a testament to that efficiency.
In order to refine the system, to
make it better and faster, specialisation was a key tool and experts
soon became the emblematic figures of progress…yet one could argue that
along the way was lost a sense of interconnectedness: the notion of
being part of the ‘bigger picture’ somewhat faded away.
A rather strange
thing, considering that the industrial “take, make, dispose” linear
model is based on the ability to extract finite resources in order to
produce the goods that get sold to consumers, thus powering the growth
engine. A system very much relying on the environment within which it
operates, but which somehow has to make a conscious effort to take a
step back and consider its dependencies and level of resilience.
There are many voices currently
calling out for a more transverse, less silo-like worldview, and to a
large extent information technologies enabling global knowledge sharing
contribute to advancing that agenda. What the Earth Timelapse tool
allows us to see is the change happening to our system as a whole, and
to understand the cascade of transformation that unfolds: it provides a
pattern to think big picture, to use a “macroscope” as Joel de Rosnay
would put it.
Why would it
matter? Because on the way towards a circular restorative and
regenerative economic model, making sense of stocks and flows is
essential in order to foster effective use of resources, identify areas
of brittleness, and rebuild capital where necessary.
Furthermore, living systems’
metabolisms are anything but linear and only a bird’s eye view - with
the right timescale - can reveal that characteristic in a plain manner. A
quarter of a century might seem a lot at the level of an individual,
yet it is but a blip on the scale of time, a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’
type of moment. Isn’t it then staggering to think, looking at these
animations, that so much can happen in so little time? Shouldn’t we be
inspired to believe that large scale change is possible within our
lifetime, when we look at the Earth Timelapse?
As Janine Benyus’s biomimicry taught
us, living systems work by building things (that includes organisms) up
and breaking them down, never creating any component or substance that
does not have a place or a use in the bigger system … now that we have a
better view of it, we should adapt our economic models so they too
actually fit that system, in order to achieve long-term prosperity and
resilience.
The fact that co-ops are democratically owned and operated is widely
understood, but that model brings with it a wealth of empowering
benefits, such as:
Co-ops' jobs and revenues, by nature, stay within their local communities.
Co-ops are more resilient during economic downturns.
Co-ops generally bake social and environmental needs and solutions into their missions.
Further still, cooperatives don't exist in some
foreign socialist utopia of the future (or past). They are organizations
that operate in neighborhoods all over the world right now run by
over 800 million members. Support one, join one, or start one today!
Sweden, which already
stands out among nations for its generous paid maternity leave and model
prison system, is giving everyone another reason to applaud.A number of companies and local municipalities in the
Scandinavian nation have increasingly been experimenting with a six-hour
workday.
Filimundus, an app development company, is one of several
leading the way. "I think the eight-hour workday is not as effective as
one would think," Filimundus CEO Linus Feldt told Fast Company. It's "hard to manage our private life outside of work."
Feldt told the website his company had switched to a
six-hour day last year and saw no reduction in productivity from
workers.
In exchange, the company asked employees to keep social media
to a minimum and phased out a number of previously required meetings.
Another Swedish tech company, Brath, followed suit around three years ago and saw similar results. The company wrote on their website:
We want to hire the right people and we want them to stay
with us. While our competitors write that they have an inspiring
workplace, play rooms or free sodas (or whatever it is that they write)
we don't even have to write ads. We're well known in the industry (and
in the rest of the country), partly due to our working hours.
Work-hour shift changes have also seen benefits in Sweden beyond the world of niche tech startups, like at a retirement home in Gothenburg.
The private sector changes build on previous examples set by the public sphere. In 2014, the Local.Sereported
government workers of Gothenburg would participate in an experiment
measuring efficacy of the six-hour workday. In fact, according to the Guardian, Sweden has been experimenting in one form or another with six-hour workdays since 1989.
It's not just Sweden where people appreciate shorter hours. In Secaucus, New Jersey, Royce Leather
learned the value of giving workers shorter hours long ago. Royce,
whose assembly line employees once worked nine to 10 hours a day now put
in six to eight.
"I can say unequivocally that there's an overall more
optimistic upbeat mood in the company culture and a strong desire to
want to work for a company where there are more employee perks, where
employees are treated as fellow humans and not just sources of output."
William Bauer, Royce's managing director, told Mic. "Being a historically family business, we place great importance on happiness and well-being of employees."
Since implementing the new policy in 2012, the company has
never looked back. Bauer estimated that over the last three years,
overall company productivity had increased 10% to 15%. Today, with
average American workweek creeping up, not down, the Swedish model may be more timely than ever.
Jon Levine is a staff writer at Mic,
covering politics and people. He is based in New York and can be reached
at JLevine@mic.com.
Speculative property developers, criticised for building dog boxes and the slums of tomorrow, are generally hated by urban planners and the public alike.
But the doors of state governments are seemingly always open to developers and their lobbyists.
Politicians find it hard to say no to the demands of the development industry for concessions because of the contribution housing construction makes to the economic bottom line and because there is a need for well located housing. New supply is also seen as a solution to declining housing affordability.
Classical economic theory however is too simplistic for housing supply. Instead, an offshoot of Game Theory - Market Design - not only offers greater insight into apartment supply but also can simultaneously address price, design and quality issues.
New research reveals the most significant risk in residential development is settlement risk - when buyers fail to proceed with their purchase despite there being a pre-sale contract. At the point of settlement, the developer has expended all the project funds only to see forecast revenue evaporate.
While new buyers may be found, this process is likely to strip the profitability out of the project. As the global financial crisis exposed, buyers are inclined to walk if property values slide.
This settlement problem reflects a poor legal mechanism (the pre-sale contract), and a lack of incentive for truthfulness. A second problem is the search costs of finding buyers. At around 10% of project costs, pre-sales are more expensive to developers than finance. This is where Market Design comes in.
Matching buyers and sellers
Market Design argues individuals will cooperate where there is an advantage in doing so. This is the premise of the “sharing economy”. Much of the innovation in the sharing economy also reflects another insight of Market Design; that markets can be constructed in different ways to serve different purposes.
Our interest here is in two-sided matching markets, which is a common design for e-commerce. Buyers are aggregated on one side of the market and sellers on the other with a market manager. Think Airbnb or Uber. Aggregating potential buyers of apartments would resolve the issue of searching for presales: taking the process from looking for needles in the haystack to shooting fish in a barrel.
Both buyers and developers would need to be registered participants, and the market manager would be responsible for recruiting participants and matching development opportunities to buyers. Pre-identification of buyers would avoid much of the cost of pre-sales and search time.
In addition there could be real-time communication and customer segmentation that permitted developers to take account of the actual expressed preferences of the buyers. An expanded apartment product range and cost reduction should make apartments more attractive to owner-occupiers, reducing settlement risk. The same can be said of having more owner-occupiers and fewer investors.
Pre-sales are one of the most expensive and riskiest elements of property development.Dean Lewins/AAP
Keeping developers honest
However, as one financier (who agreed to be interviewed but not identified) rightly noted, developers can be expected to pocket the savings. Residential development is oligopolistic so there needs to be a source of competition to put pressure on prices, and who better than consumers themselves?
DIY apartment developers, what we call “deliberative” developers, now comprise 10% of all new housing in Berlin, and it has taken off in Europe. Deliberative developers make cost savings in the order or 25-30% and get the type and high quality product they want.
Financing constraints have meant deliberative development in Australia has been the preserve of the well heeled, but support from impact investors for example, would enable ordinary households access to such self-help schemes.
One further change however is required. Planning schemes need to impose density restrictions (in the form of height limits, floor space ratios or bedroom quotas) in urban localities where housing demand and land values are high in order to dampen speculation and de-risk development by creating certainty.
Building a model that encourages owner-occupiers
The existing development model relies on capturing uplift in site value, and suits investors (incentivised by tax concessions) seeking rental yields in the short term and capital gains in the longer term. The price of land in the vicinity of redevelopment sites is then pushed up as landholders' expectation of future yield is raised.
It is a vicious circle in which developers seek to compensate for these higher prices through increased dwelling yields, smaller apartments and reduced amenity, further alienating would be owner-occupiers from the market.
However restrictions on over-development of larger infill sites needs to be offset by permitting intensification of “greyfield” suburbs. Aggregating existing housing lots to enable precinct regeneration, and moderate height and density increases would permit better use of airspace, delivering housing designs that can optimise land use while retaining amenity.
Redesigning the market and supporting deliberative development are the keys to achieving good, affordable apartments.
