Future Here Now: Roof signals?
Signals
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OK. Now for the good stuff.
Boundaries hurt more than they help: a lesson from St. Louis
In his incredible book Nobody, Marc Lamont Hill unpacks the train of events that led to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in 20214 — a train of events that starts with the founding of Missouri and leads through the Pruitt-Igoe development and directly to the street in Ferguson where a teenager died. It’s an astonishing story whose sweep shows exactly how insidious and pervasive racism becomes. And it demonstrates how the lives of people who have few options intersect with places that were designed with imaginary gates to keep them pristine — often to disastrous results.
This article outlines a regional initiative to untangle at least a bit of that Gorgon’s knot by establishing a basis for collaborative effort using more constructive methods of law enforcement. This article is clearly something of a promotional piece, but it’s an effort that I haven’t seen covered elsewhere. And it’s one that starts to take apart the arbitrary boundaries that make it impossible to solve regional issues at a local level. As a colleague of mine used to say, we live at the scale of the region. Trying to address regional issues, particularly the kinds of deep rooted and visceral issues that Hill unpacks so well, takes a concerted regional effort.
Unblock thyself with the AI
I am following the (too often breathless) coverage of new AI tools and tricks like everyone else, but even for all of my talk about shifting mindset and seeing new perspectives, this one caught me off guard. Can AI help us get past our own mental blind spots?
There are many ways we can be our own worst enemy, but awareness is half the battle. Even top executives who have mastered all the right executive skills struggle to link their aspirations with the actual performance of their organizations. But McKinsey’s Dana Maor, Kurt Strovink, Ramesh Srinivasan, and senior partner emeritus Hans-Werner Kaas argue that to make a lasting impact, leaders must look inward first: “What’s holding them back as they push themselves and their organizations ahead is their own psychological conditioning, which is rooted in the very habits and behaviors that got them where they are.”
The article appears among several links on research and observations that show high-powered people using various techniques, including AI tools, to see from a different perspective. That’s an absolutely crucial Future Ready skill that is also incredbly difficult to put into action, when so many of us live in highly segregated social groups.
I’ll take all the hacks for seeing from new perspectives that I can get.
Roof wars?
When I enrolled in my Masters in Community Planning program back a million years ago, my intent was to pursue a Masters of Geography, concentrating on cultural geography, at the same time. For a variety of reasons, including this little thing called pregnancy, I dropped the geography degree pretty quickly after I got to Cincinnati.
The reason why I wanted to do that was because geography can be another kind of a Signal — in many cases, a signal of the past, like in this article, but those past signals can also help us spot current signals more effectively, as well.
The moment in history that this place captures so clearly - and so subtly - is just wild:
Flat roof advocates argued in the 1920s that they were less expensive to build and maintain, in addition to fitting in with Modernist ideas about minimalism and functionality, like using roofs as terraces. But the pitched roof partisans—including many nationalists—argued something entirely different: that flat roofs were a blight on traditional German architecture, or, as the critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg wrote, “immediately recognizable as the child of other skies and other blood…”
The two sides met on Am Fischtal, which today survives as a literal and figurative monument to the Weimar Republic’s increasing political divide. The flat roof residences came first, part of a housing development built by a leftist housing cooperative between 1926 and 1932 known as Onkel Toms Hütte, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an unlikely moniker borrowed from a nearby tavern which was named after the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel. Across the street, GAGFAH, a housing cooperative supported by conservative white collar unions, built their response in 1928: a community called Fischtalgrund, which consists of 30 buildings with 120 housing units. The roofs, of course, were pitched.
When you drive through that neighborhood on your way home, or stop by the grocery store in the strip mall, it might be interesting to see what that architecture is telling you. In a lot of cases, it might be much more than you were expecting.
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