Future Here Now, June 6
Just a little bit of whiplash, I promise....
Welcome back to Future Here Now, where we discover the unexpected ways that the world around us is changing, how that’s affecting our communities, and what we can do right now to help the places we care about thrive, now and into the future.
In this edition, we slingshot between new ways to keep the memory of horrible suffering, and a minor fit-throwing at architect hubris. Usually, I try to maintain some consistency of tone between articles. This time you get a bite of sweet and a bite of extra salty. You’ve been warned.
Coming Soon: Shoah Remembered via VR
One of the great anxieties surrounding the re-emergence of right wing extremist is that so few survivors of the mid-20th century’s atrocities remain alive to testify to them. They risk becoming ancient history, seemingly irrelevant. But new technology may give us a way to keep the hard lessons of the past from going stale.
Local Learning: BIG IS NOT BETTER, ARCHITECTS! FIGURE IT OUT!!
No one can proclaim quite so much arrogance toward the Great Unwashed Rabble as self-important architects. Proclaiming that public engagement around development is a “problem” is about as egotistical as you can get. But here we are again.
How many years have I been yelling about this? COME ONNN!
Do Now: Yes, you might have headline stress disorder. Whatever that is.
I probably contributed to this with those last two articles. Now to figure out how to deal with it.
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Coming Soon: creating a memorial that lives on.
One of the great challenges of learning from history is the way history recedes from the collective memory - as frail as the frailty of the human lives that lived it. Even though the effects of traumatic historical events last for generations, we tend to consign an event to ancient history if it happened before our lifetime. World War I feels to many of us like a time disconnected from our own, even though bombs still turn up in French cities. World War II, and the Holocaust, are approaching that horizon now, and the resurgence of extremist right-wing behavior in the US and abroad makes losing the awareness of those events — awareness that many of us gained from grandparents and elders — all the more painful.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum has found a way to give us all that experience - and even moreso, using VR to not only let you see a person and hear their story, but simultaneously walk through the places and see the faces that they’re talking about:
Both films, which are designed to be viewed through HTC Vive Pro VR headsets in scheduled screenings beginning January 27 at the Skokie museum, take viewers to train stations, concentration camps, and other sites involved in the horrors experienced by the two survivors and others imprisoned by the Nazi regime. The movies allow viewers to turn their heads to explore the various locations as the survivors narrate, getting a sense of the shape and scope of the sites in a way that would be difficult to convey with traditional video.
“Pretty much across the board, viewing audiences have been moved by this in ways that they couldn’t have expected,” says museum CEO Susan Abrams. “They feel like they are standing there having this intimate one-on-one experience with this incredible human being.”
Capturing and sharing important stories from people, and then creating a “real” experience with the additional layers of information that VR can include, might be one of the most effective ways that we can build empathy with others whose lives we will never cross. Not only is the person who holds the story protected from insult or abuse, but the enhanced experience makes it harder for the viewer who doesn’t want to believe it to deny what they are seeing.
The one challenge that I can anticipate here (caveat: I have not seen the exhibit myself, although I hope to soon), is that such an experience might have to be designed intentionally to not only tell the story, but to show how its impacts have rippled through time. I’m thinking particularly now about how this new communication method might be used to change minds about structural racism. If I experience the story of a Jim Crow community via VR, I may have a whole new understanding of how damaging that environment was to the people who lived it. But if it’s left at that, I might just have a fancier way to learn history. The power of these emerging communication tools needs to be used to connect the past to the present — not just by building empathy for those who experienced atrocities in the past, but for those who are affected by the echoes of those atrocities today.
Local Learnings: Architect Arrogance Rides Again
Close to 10 years ago now, I wrote my first piece that got something akin to “viral” attention (it was a lot easier then). That article focused on the arrogance of a statement from Andreas Duany about how having to deal with the public got in the way of the grand beauty and unparalleled wisdom of his plans (you should read that with a heavy glop of sarcasm, of course). I compared his arrogance to a hubris-laden egoist of a previous era, whose domineering led to the destructions of downtowns all over the American midwest — destruction that he regretted, or at least rejected, in the closing years of his life.
I had this sort of fantasy at the time that Duany might see that article and recognized the error of his ways (ha.) More importantly, I thought the profession had grown up since then, developed some empathy, some nuance, some… something less than unmitigated arrogance.
Silly me.
Here’s what esteemed senior star-chitect Moshe Safde wrote earlier this year in an opinion piece for Bloomburg’s CityLab, of all places:
I have been involved in the design and implementation of projects on a large scale in Asia and North America. The impressive achievements overseas — universal internet service in South Korea, bullet trains in China, the water system in Israel — are not simply the result of better funding or dictatorial fiat. They have been enabled by capabilities that the U.S. does not have.
This convoluted process, which varies from place to place, is a major roadblock. The U.S. once implemented projects on a major scale. Today, localized squabbling can stop initiatives of great urgency….
Similarly, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, together with relevant ministries, has the power to see megaprojects through. Our Marina Bay Sands project in Singapore is situated on landfill that transformed Singapore’s harbor into an enclosed bay. Within five years, the bay was dammed and converted into a freshwater reservoir, addressing the water crisis. Simultaneously, subway lines and freeways were built ahead of demand to allow for the expansion of the central business district…
Safde has to acknowledge that many of his showpiece examples were built in highly centralized (and in at least two cases flat-out dictatorial) countries. But he brushes off that inconvenient fact in favor of praising the higher “efficiency” of construction in these places. And he makes a nod to needing to find a balance between “Jane Jacobs and Robery Moses,” but his arguments would make sense to only one side of that dichotomy.
His focus is on getting the thing built, like his monument to himself in Singapore. Something gets in the way, someone perceives that your project represents a threat to their life or livelihood? What an annoyance. An inconvenience. Get that out of the way. And he gives no sense (of course) of the opportunity costs these Big Deals placed on people, the environment, or anything else. More is always, always better, right?
Moshde’s stance is just a more completely articulated version of the arrogance I called out 10 years ago. He’s right that we have big things in the US. that we need to repair and rebuild — including things that architects of his generation and previous built that probably should have never come off the drawings.
But the resistance to development, the messiness and the fragmentation that he protests came about because people like him and other 20th century Masters of the Universe ran over so many little people that the rest of us insisted on being heard.
I’m the first to say that governments and developers do a spectacularly crappy job of giving people, especially people who don’t have deep pockets, a meaningful place in that process. Which is why, as I’ve said many times, we have to do better, more engaging, more equitable public engagement, not the nodding, box-checking, ignored-Santa-Claus-list crap that we usually claim is “public engagement.” The public is on to that, and they’re sick of it.
But the solution is NOT to push people away and hand the golden shovel to the Masters of the Universe, who’ve pretty clearly demonstrated that they don’t give a damn about the real people who make a place alive. The real solution to Safde’s frustration is to engage that public, meaningfully and constructively. To work with them to find solutions that don’t make other problems worse We can do that — we have no shortage of capability and techniques to do that. What we have lacked is the willpower to make that happen.
Development, whether a road or an airport or a mega-hotel with a giant swimming pool on top that most of the world can’t afford to enter, should not happen in the United States the way it does in Singapore. We have a responsibility to be the place that does not shove people aside in the pursuit of some Big Thing. That’s the vision, the unrealized and failed and staggering and massively incomplete vision, that defines what the United States is. We place a central value on being heard, on the community as a democratic endeavor. The fact that U.S people are pushing back so hard on Big Projects, that development proposals engender so much conflict, should tell us that the way we’re doing public involvement needs an overhaul, not that we should double down on Master of the Unverse thinking in order to Get It Done.
Safde identifies himself as a planner, in addition to an architect and a bunch of other stuff. I don’t think he should. Planners, even design-oriented planners, have a responsibility to look out for the best interests of the whole community, especially those who historically get overlooked. That’s actually in the American Institute of Certified Planner’s Statement of Ethics. People who have an AICP, like I do, have to agree to this statement every three years in order to renew our certifications.
Safde’s approach, like many of the predecessors who made the messes we have to clean up today, says something else. It says, Trust me. I have magic knowledge. I don’t need to know what any regular people think. I am the Master of the Universe.
Safde and architects who ascribe to his stance have more in common with oligarchs, with wannabe dictators, than with the purpose of planning.
Safde is not a young man, and chances are he won’t be around when we have to clean up the messes his Big Projects left. So why should he let a bunch of mundane details, like the needs of the people the Big Projects displace, matter to him?
Safde closes the article with an indirect quote from Thomas Jefferson:
‘Design activity and political thought are indivisible.’ Our future record on infrastructure will be a verdict on ourselves.
Our future record on infrastructure and how we treat people will be the verdict on ourselves, Moshde. For myself, I have no interest in living in your Master of the Universe Dictatorship. No matter how cool the airports look.
Do Now: Your headline overwhelm is real. Go do something about it.
This article’s message is basically, “Yes, you can get overwhelmed by the headlines. Making Grandpa’s lasagna won’t really help. We’re not sure what will.”
OK, guys, thanks.
I’ve been dealing with my own sense of overwhelm at everything going on in the world, as I am sure you have been, too. It’s way too easy to doomscroll and slide into hopelessness, I know. And like the respondents who found NPR’s response tone deaf, I don’t think “self-care” is gonna fully cut it. It’s good to reset and get your nervous system to settle down, of course. But for me, at least, that doesn’t address the sense of helplessness. A lot of what I’m working on focuses on building a better future, but sometimes that seems like a far-off future. Maybe more far off than I want to admit.
One thing that I’m finding helpful, for what it’s worth, is to put some energy into a specific, short-term thing that’s concrete. Doable. It will be finished at some point, it has an end in sight, and when that end is in sight Something Good will have happened. Maybe not enough good, but Something.
I’ve criticized nonprofits before for setting their sights too small — the quote I use from Johann Wong is that there’s lots of people doing good things, they’re just not scaling fast enough. And I stand by that: doing a nice thing in our little corner isn’t enough to budge the national and international needles that we have got to get moving.
At the same time, it’s worth re-recognizing, I suppose, the intrinsic award in pulling off one step on the way to that More Just Union. And for myself, at least, I don’t think I accept those intrinsic rewards often enough.
I’m also finding it useful to do my concrete short-term thing in a space that isn’t where I put the majority of my effort. Right now I spend a lot of my days working on racial equity via Trep House, but I’m also working on a workshop about understanding transgender and nonbinary issues through my church. Maybe because that’s not the space that’s getting the lion’s share of my do-gooder action, I don’t feel quite the pressure to solve Everything Right Now.
So perhaps that’s how we deal with headline overwhelm, especially in a news cycle that seems more outrageous and regressive every time I look. We can make progress — we ARE making progress — but perhaps our minds need an occasional little moment of progress that we can see and touch and get our heads around, while we work on the longer term.
Thanks. Go get ‘em, however it makes sense for you to do it today.
Della