41. The Slowdown is something to fight for, not to wait for.
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Covid 19, Policy, Design, Racism, Climate Change

The balance of engaged and active care with culture that Infield suggests is important, for the final passage in all this cannot be a misunderstanding of what Slowdown might mean, an implication that it means giving up. You can occasionally catch that in the tone of Danny Dorling’s prose; perhaps in his reference to places like Ottawa or Helsinki, and the stability he describes as a “a little boring”. Though many of us would take a good long stretch of boring stability about now, the sensibility he evokes could be misinterpreted as an indifference to making change happen.

In other words, Dorling’s narrative could be interpreted as one of stasis. He does not mean this. However, the data could suggest that we are firmly heading in this direction, no matter what—short of some genuinely Handmaid’s Tale-scale retrenchment on womens’ rights—and so perhaps ‘we’ simply need to wait for people to attune themselves to this deeper reality? Perhaps it is simply a matter of waiting it out; of people realising they may have the time to take care of each other, as well as our ecosystems, with a simple click of the mind, as Meadows had it.

Sadly, that seems unlikely, given that we have not really clicked on any of the existing broad challenges requiring a similar ‘wake-up’—most obviously, the climate crisis. Dorling does not suggest this ‘waiting it out’ at all, to be clear, and our language has been so infected by mental models of growth at (almost) all costs that a message like ‘slow down’ does almost feel like a failure, like a depressive motivated only to give up and withdraw. This only makes it harder to address coherently and proactively.

To be clear, waiting it out will not deliver a just transition. Frankly, that kind of transition will be brutal. In fact, the virus may well be acting as part of such a transition, which indicates how rough it would be—unless we take our heads out of the sand and address the transition deliberately, carefully, with some broader goals in mind.

The alternative would take too long, and as is now clear, it will cut deepest along the faultlines deliberately carved into our society. Without a radical transition of the type Büschler and Fletcher (and many others) suggest, waiting for change is only likely to expose us to further climate crisis-induced pandemics like COVID-19, alongside wildfires and other extreme weather, while continuing to expose increasingly large numbers of people to crushing inequality of every kind. The Slowdown may be where we are headed after the Great Acceleration, but it’s the form that the transition takes that will define us as a species.

This means, for me, that while Helsinki, Stockholm, Ottawa and Kyoto may describe one form of Slowdown City, there are others that can equally point to the next futures. These are unlikely to be the ‘drawbridge cities’ of London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore et al—though clearly there are patches of those cities where conflict, struggle, and invention is happening on different terms to the growth narratives those cities have embodied. There are other cities that have to address the stage beyond over-development, who have already reached a point of saturation, or crisis, or slowdown—and in some cases decades ago.

In the over-developed world, these would include deindustrialised slow-growth cities like Detroit and Manchester and post-tourist cities like New Orleans and Venice. Suburban sprawlers like Los Angeles, Toronto, and Melbourne must genuinely embark on large-scale retrofit programmes. Equally, however, we might finally see a swing back towards many smaller towns and cities in deindustrialised, telecommuting, or restorative-agricultural regions. Amongst larger cities, Tokyo and Paris, and possibly Shanghai and Qingdao, will be interesting to observe, as previously mentioned, given their head-starts on 15- Minute Cities which move them beyond their other big city peers. The Nordic Model cities alluded to above could write their own tunes—somewhat hummable, productive ‘middle way’ variations—if they can reconcile themselves with the need to change (the same can apply to other mittel-European cities.)

These are all places where various 20th century models ‘went to die’, in conventional terms (whether economic or environmental, infrastructural or built). Yet all these cities are still there. Watching and working in these cities may be just as instructive as learning from the Ottawas and Helsinkis Dorling refers to, and in many cases, as the struggle will be greater, they may produce a more diverse range of outcomes to learn from.

And as has been well-established, though sadly often ignored by development agencies, cities of the so-called developing world, or the Global South, have a chance to avoid driving down all these well-understood cul-de-sacs. In this, there is perhaps the greatest promise. Perhaps that should be the greatest imperative behind their development, no matter how attractive the short term gains otherwise may look. In others words, the design brief for these places could simply be: how, at all costs, not to be like New York, London, Sydney, San Francisco…?

The city’s use-value over exchange-value

I mentioned Venice in the early ‘casebook’ paper, regarding COVID’s stiletto in the back of the tourism industry. I reproduced a passage from If Venice Dies by Salvatore Settis, a lovely small book on why the fight for Venice is important, and not only for Venice.

“Saving the historic city in Venice (and elsewhere) won’t happen simply by reviving memories of the city’s past or indulging in the pleasures of the present. Even protesting won’t be enough: the only effective move will be reenenergizing the active practice of citizenship and exercising the right to the city, to then come up with a plan to preserve its uniqueness and put firm rules into place that not only safeguard its framework and environment, but also prioritize the city’s use-value over its exchange-value, emphasizing the social function of property, the right of its citizens to gainful employment, and the right of its youngest to both a home and a future.” — Salvatore Settis, ‘If Venice Dies’ (2014)

In his book, Settis continues to explore what such a re-energising might involve. And there is much in the following paragraph that applies to cities well outside of Venice’s ambit, just as, in a perhaps unlikely repositioning, Venice can be seen as an extreme form of future city. Whilst not everything is applicable—and I certainly don’t agree with all of it, for what it’s worth—it describes the type of fundamental repositioning of the city required. This form of statement sets the scene for questions of everyday infrastructure, and for the participative design and political process that would begin to put flesh on these bones. Apologies for the lengthy quotation, but imagine it read out in one breath, as a broad sweep across the city’s conceptual landscape.

“In Venice’s case, this new pact will have to begin from a strong sense of commitment to spur politicians and public institutions to adopt a more creative outlook toward the city, to bring the history city back to life and gear it toward the future, the means to create a new kind of politics to stem the perverse logic causing the exodus of citizens, and to encourage the young to remain via strong incentives such as tax breaks. It would also mean curbing the rampant proliferation of second homes and the transformation of buildings into nothing more than hotels. It would mean encouraging manufacturing and private enterprise as well as generating opportunities for a wider range of creative jobs. It would mean reunifying the historic city, lagoon, and mainland by differentiating their functions, making more agricultural and available and investing in new fisheries, reutilising old, vacant buildings, incentivising research, launching new professional training schemes and apprenticeships and investing in universities, chiefly by making it affordable for students to actually live in the city. It would mean developing new models, analysing situations, evaluating options, and emphasising initiatives of a higher caliber (like the universities and the Biennale) and not just enslaving the city to ‘uncontrollable market forces’. It would mean enshrining the right to the city and the common good as our first priority.”

Again, not everything there is necessarily ‘a good idea’, or broadly applicable elsewhere. As you can imagine by now, I would personally place a greater emphasis on restorative impact on the environment, reorienting around care for humans and nonhumans—it’s there in Settis’s text, but barely—and try to get at what’s going on behind those statements like “higher caliber”, just as his earlier prioritising the city’s “use-value over its exchange-value” feels promising, yet it depends what we are talking about when we talk about value.

Yet statements like this begin to describe some of the more diverse agenda a resilient city needs. From here, we can imagine starting points, and then begin to build local teams to start the groundwork. However, if you know anything at all about Venice, you will understand how difficult that work would be.

For Slowdown will not mean a comfortable middle age. It will be a fight. The stories represented in this set of Papers are all about struggle, in their own way. Many have lost that struggle; others are still in the scrap.

De Monchaux’s absorptive green pockets did not happen, despite their ‘better’ solution. Most of Van Eyck’s 700+ Amsterdam playgrounds have disappeared, just as East Kolkata’s Wetlands are being rapidly lost to rampant property development.

Evelyn’s Fumifugium proposals of 1661 clearly didn’t happen; some centuries later the Great Stink was solved temporarily, yet London still had the worst air quality in the world at the start of the 21st century.

Ditzler describes trying to develop ecofeminist pixel farming in an agricultural robotics world “occupied almost entirely by men who mostly operate in the familiar comfortable of the patriarchal and monocultural paradigms”.

Delivering the Swedish street mission is already an almighty struggle in a country that was the most car-dense in Europe by 1955, and built a long-lasting culture and set of infrastructures accordingly.

Ron Finley’s gardens are, in his words, about “defiance” as well as tomatoes and strawberries. Even viewing Derek Jarman’s completely different form of garden through these lenses opens up wider vista. Jarman’s garden, as with his films, represents a defiant struggle for social justice just as much as Finley’s work in South Central. Even the garden itself, never mind what it stands for, is continually threatened by property development (it survived just this year due to a crowdfunding effort.) In the excellent climate crisis magazine It’s Freezing in LA!, Alexander Harris writes:

“In its heroic attempts to create conditions for life to flourish in a supposedly barren setting, (Jarman’s) garden unites rebellious social and political tendencies cultivated over a lifetime with an open-ended ecological position, under the banner of a deliberately ethical and aesthetic life.”

Yet if a garden in a desert next to a nuclear power station can produce this balance of open-ended ecology alongside ethics and aesthetics, so can other types of everyday infrastructure, such as streets, squares, and blocks. Doing so may require more of a gardener’s sensibility: aware of the need for ongoing care and adaptation, balancing multiple timeframes simultaneously, for open and porous structures, for valuing and embracing ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty over the damaging reductions of efficiency. Suffice to say, this is more advanced than the dull, static, sanitised approaches to public and private spaces that urban planning produces.

On the Streets mission here in Sweden, I asked Brian Eno to contribute some design principles. One of them is “Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings”, and “Unfinished = fertile”.

These are perennial themes of Eno’s, harking back to a talk at the Serpentine Pavilion in 2011, where he discussed ways of creating which recognise that what “one is doing is working in collaboration with the complex and unpredictable processes of nature”, and his ideas of a rebalancing of the roles of the composer, the architect, and the gardener, where for instance “the role of gardener as being equal in dignity to the role of architect.”

Few of the gardener’s instincts are about efficiency or non-resilient scaling or unsustainable extraction, yet a form of growth and reward, via care, engagement, and culture, is very much the point nonetheless.