News from the front desk: Welcome back! The year is still too fresh and unsteady on its feet for us to predict how it will bend and what shape it will grow into. So, let’s take full advantage and slap down some blueprints right up front. See if we can seize the agenda and channel the trajectory.
As a publication focused on ways to create a more sustainable built environment, we were thrilled to receive this deeply thoughtful contribution from Michael Spencer from Monash University. He’s connected some critically important dots that should make us all sit up and take notice as we grapple for ways to tackle the housing crisis.
Spencer has identified a fundamental way to improve our world – better public spaces. And ta da! Asking the people what they think, what they want, through a renewed view of the commons.
He cites several clever thinkers, including Flemish architectural historian Tom Avermaete, who says the architecture of the city can be a “collaborative process between professions and ‘lay people who hold important knowledge about the city’.”
What’s emerging instead is increasing atomisation, what Spencer cites as “the anti-social century, where growing parts of our world are “transformed into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude”.
We heard about the scourge of growing loneliness at one of our events last year and know that it’s not just our phones keeping us isolated, but the shape of our urban lives.
We know young people breathe a sigh of relief when social events are cancelled; they’d rather binge watch their favourite shows.
The tech bros also know how to manipulate our limited supply of dopamine to get us addicted to our devices rather than the thrill of a great night of laughter with the crowd. And the content is provided free of charge by the people who also get a hit from watching their followers grow.
The design of our urban fabric enhances this disintegration of communal/social life.
Gated communities, for instance, encourage us to replace human policing forces with privatised technology, or “security capitalism”. Bundled with our entertainment and social media addiction, where our every thought is tracked, you could call it surveillance capitalism.
Giant shopping centres offer extended shopping hours, not just to ensure we can drive to them after work and on weekends, but to capture more of our time to get around them.
Gone is the small corner store or high street grocer you can duck into on the way home.
Hand in glove with this “freedom” to shop whenever we want is to work whatever hours we want. So organised sporting events are harder to organise, and so too community events that are sidelined in favour of personal convenience.
Some people use this freedom to move to regional areas, a trend discussed by Rob Burgess in this edition. The attraction is cheaper houses, enabled by the ability to work online, but the cost is a stronger connection with workmates and the rewards of collective work. With any luck, these workers can reactivate the notion of village life that country towns promise, and they may well reinvent the art of bumping into neighbours.
Not much in the way of cherry thoughts to kick off the new year, but Michael Spencer has solutions.
We need to “rethink density and get away from the idea that the private sector will solve the problem,” he says.
“It will be important. But the government will need to rethink how density should develop and be prepared to address the affordability gap more directly. This needs to be a collaborative venture with communities – not combat. A starting point may be the commons – what we share – rather than private space.”