The first thing to say is – in general – how contemporary the play seems to be. It premiered in 1949, but could describe our post-crash world. Willy Loman is, we discover, working only on commission, although he’s been with the firm for most of his working life years, as his undistinguished sales record gets worse; Linda, his wife, has an exact handle on the household debts at all times, barely staying one step ahead of the payments; and the boys, now in their thirties, are stuck in dead-end jobs. A recent New York Times article which mentioned a new production of the play which opens on Broadway later this year put it this way (spoiler alert!):

Willy Loman may emerge as even more a man of our time than he seemed to be of his when the play first opened in 1949. … Willy, after all, remains the American drama’s most poignant example of a man driven to despair when he loses his job and is made — to use a word more in fashion now than then — redundant.

Handling tools

One of the themes in the play is the contrast between Willy’s work as a salesman and more traditional American skills, involving working with your hands (Willy has built much of the house himself, and despises his neighbour Charlie – despite his success in business – because he can’t “handle tools”), or working on the land, which Biff has been doing in the West, despite the poor pay and prospects.

A couple of days after I read the play, I came across this passage in Matthew Crawford’s  The Case for Working With Your Hands (US title, Shop Class as Soulcraft):

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” would impart to students, as though by magic. (His emphasis).

The limits of consumer society

With hindsight, Death of a Salesman can be seen as one of a number of works which addressed the rise of consumer society (The Visit, The Affluent Society, The Critique of Everyday Life, and A Bout de Souffle also come to mind). And part of that story is about the rise of extrinsic value in which the external world is needed as a source of validation (at its extreme this manifests itself as celebrity culture) at the expense of intrinsic value.

I know that there’s a longer and larger story here; the origins of this split can be traced back to Adam Smith and the division of labour, the development of the factory system, and its acceleration during the 20th century through the invention of the assembly line. But this is changing. We are, according to research by Hardin Tibbs (opens pdf) moving quite quickly to a world in which those who hold post-materialist values are in a majority. We already know that one of the values expressed by the millennial generation is that they are less likely than previous generations to see who they work for or what they do as a source of personal esteem (although the work, and its purpose, may contribute to their esteem). With hindsight, looking back from a coming world of scarcity, the separation of work from ourselves may come to appear as a long blip and a strange aberration.

The picture of WillyLoman comes from the blog Voices Carry, and is used with thanks.

Before getting to the principles, it’s worth noting that the reason that we were able to re-publish the report without legal or copyright difficulties is because the British Government has moved to a surprisingly liberal copyright regime for government-funded documents, as a result, or so the story goes, of a conversation between the last Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and Tim Berners-Lee. The Open Government Licence incorporates most of the most liberal aspects of a Creative Commons licence; we can, in effect, use all or some of a report, we can combine it with other reports, we can do this for either commercial or non-commercial purposes, and so on.

I’m not going to rehearse the argument of the Understanding Best Practice report here, except to say that it stresses:

• the importance of engagement, both before and during the work, and both inside and outside the organisation
• the importance of rehearsing the future
• the culture and positioning of the futures group within the organisation – both connected to the centre but also sufficiently arms-length to maintain its independence of thought
• thinking about how the output will be understood and used before you start the work – which may affect the tools and methods you decide to use.

Dancing around the edges

Re-reading the report, one diagram I was particularly pleased to see again, which we adapted from the work of Max Boisot, who sadly died in 2011, was about the difference between intended and emergent strategy. The diagram is largely self-explanatory, but it suggests that good futures work can help organisations adapt when their intended strategy runs into turbulence and it becomes clear that persisting with it is likely to be damaging. As the report says,

Strategic futures thinking allows the organisation to regroup in a new place, and thereby develop new strategic insight from new places. This is, however, an iterative process; for turbulence can develop quickly and from unexpected quarters. Continuous futures thinking improves an organisation’s agility, enabling it to dance around the edge of difficulties. In other words strategic futures work enables organisations to see beyond the ‘noise’ generated by turbulence, and thus respond more quickly to changed circumstances.

The ten point summary

It concludes with a ten point summary, which I’ve summarised further here:

1. Start early: Don’t wait until the organisation starts to feel pain from turbulent conditions, because by then it will probably be too late to act on the findings.
2.  Strategic futures work is about rehearsal rather than knowledge: It’s not about predicting the future but preparing for it, understanding possible futures and the opportunities or threats they represent.
3. Ensure clarity about the objectives and intended uses of the work: strategic futures work needs a clear strategic remit. And this can take time at the start of the process.
4. Be patient about the process‘ The work is more likely to have an impact if it is approached as a continuous process of learning rather than a quick one-off exercise.
5. Ensure senior management involvement:  They need to understand the benefits, be seen to support the process, and are exposed to the work: “thinking about the future can’t be entirely delegated”.
6. Ensure the involvement of other key stakeholders: Create involvement amongst those who are likely to be affected by the work or be charged with taking it forwards. And ensure that learning about strategic futures thinking is distributed through the organisation as quickly as possible.
7. Choose the right people for the job and give them a licence to be different: Select individuals who have an aptitude for engaging with the future and the will and ability to question existing assumptions. Grant them a licence to challenge existing management thinking – and accept that the process may cause some organisational discomfort.
8. Use an appropriate balance of internal and external inputs: Don’t underestimate the value of the knowledge within the organisation, while also including a wide range of external views.
9. Align the methodology with the purpose of the work and the culture of the organisation: Avoid a ‘one size fits all’ approach. The key requirement is to ensure that there is a fit between the approach used, the ultimate objectives of the work and the culture of the organisation.
10. Develop feedback mechanisms to create a virtuous circle of learning: Always ask the questions: How has the work been useful to us? How could the process be improved next time? Tracking metrics help

A copy of the report can also be downloaded – as a pdf – from my ‘Selected Articles‘ page.

Mature sector, accelerating social impact

Digital networked technology is already a mature sector. Penetration of platforms and devices is high everywhere outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the technologies which are transforming our everyday lives are already familiar. For the moment at least, the price/performance ratio of the devices continues to double every two years or so, but the significant acceleration we are seeing is in the social impact of the digital technologies as they make connections with each other, become a social and economic platform, and become increasingly embedded into everyday life. In this, information and communication technologies have followed the same pattern as other ‘technology systems’ going back to the Industrial Revolution. The technology and economic historian Carlota Perez has identified five such systems or platforms (opens pdf) since 1771: cotton, iron and canals; rail and steam power; steel and electricity; cars, oil, and mass production; and our current phase, computers and telecommunications.

Each follows a similar pattern, over a period of around 50-60 years: an ‘installation‘ phase, when infrastructure is put in place, largely funded by investment capital; a crash, as the returns on infrastructure fail to materialise as quickly as expected; and a deployment phase, when production and service businesses put the newly developed infrastructure to use. In terms of the ICT platform, we have passed the crash (the dot.com bust of 2001-02) and have moved into the deployment phase.

Platforms become the dominant idea of their time

There are several points worth noting here:

• A platform, or a technology system, is more than a particular technology; instead, it is greater than the sum of specific technologies which make it up. A platform becomes the dominant idea of its time, an organising principle for society which permeates language and thought.
• When a new platform emerges, the seeds have been in place for some time. The auto platform started with the establishment of Henry Ford’s assembly line plant at Highland Park in 1908, but by then it was already quarter of a century since Daimler’s first vehicles. Computers had been evolving for around 30 years before the invention of the microprocessor, which Perez identifies as the start of the ICT (information and communications technologies) platform. And even after a new platform begins to emerge, the previous platform continues to develop for a period, before starting to adapt to the new platform (think of the way in which cars are increasingly computers on wheels).
• Third, at the point of the crash, the elements are in place, but the social impact is modest. (At the time of the dotcom crash, household internet connections had reached the low teens in the US and the UK). Even afterwards there is a gap between the penetration of the technology and its social impact. Before the crash, as the saying goes, a new technology is used to do old things in new ways (classic installation behaviour); it is only afterwards that we see people start to use it to do new things in new ways (classic deployment behaviour). The social and economic effects don’t become clear until later. Parking meters and edge of town retail and business parks are, for example, relatively late manifestations of the auto technology system.
• Related to this, one of the features of the deployment phase is that the technology gets buried in the application – a trend predicted by Donald Norman in his 1998 book The Invisible Computer. To use an analogy that was made at the time of the launch of the iPad, this was technology’s ‘Chevrolet moment’, the point at which an owner no longer needed to know what was happening ‘under the hood’ to use the machine effectively.
• The companies which do well in the installation phase do less well in a deployment phase. The skills required are different; the first involves a technical, engineering focus, the second a customer and service focus. So far in the technology space, only Apple has credibly jumped the gap, but this is because it was so unsuccessful as an installation company that it was facing bankruptcy just before the dotcom crash. Looking back at the car industry, the transition from one to the other was often painful and internally disruptive.

One of the interesting things about Perez’ model is how tidily it maps on to diagrams which show how consumer needs and expectations evolve as a technology develops. The designer Donald Norman outlined this model in his book The Invisible Computer. The early technology market (which we align with Perez’ installation period) is characterized by high growth, high margins, and low volume, while in the consumer-driven market place of the deployment period, “profits come from devices, consumables, services, and content”.

New business models emerge late on

Looking at these two diagrams together, one of the striking features of Carlota Perez’ technology surges model is that new forms of business organisation and new business models tend to emerge clearly only in the second half of the surge, and later rather than earlier, although some pioneers are seen before this. Codification of these emerging ideas as management practices isn’t seen until the final decades of the surge. Looking back, for example, Alfred Sloan pioneered some of the main features of the 20th century assembly line business at General Motors in the 1930s, after the crash, but the theory that supported his practices wasn’t developed until the 1960s by writers and academics such as Alfred Chandler and Peter Drucker. In other words, we are only now beginning to see the development of the innovative business models which will characterise the digital technology age.

One of the important aspects of any new technology platform is that the shape of businesses adapt to the shape of the technology, and not the other way around. The steam engine emphasised the concentration of production, and the assembly line the importance of throughput. The successful businesses of those times absorbed these structural lessons, and adapted themselves to fit.

A radical challenge to the idea of the organisation

The core ideas at the heart of the next phase of digital technology are about:

• Pervasiveness
• Unbundling
• Inter-connection
• Reconfigurability

These four characteristics will define the shape of business over the next decade and beyond. Different businesses, and different sectors, will respond differently to these factors, depending, for example, on their value networks, the present mix of data and tangible output, and their wider external constraints. Strategy is always distinctive; every organisation has to find its own route through to a strategic future which is right for it, which matches its capabilities against a landscape shaped by changing social values, by evolving technologies, and by infrastructure, systems, and regulation.

Nonetheless, in all sectors, these characteristics represent a radical challenge to the idea of the organisation, which is at heart defined by boundaries (if it has no boundaries, it ceases to be an organisation). The big question for any organisation, commercial, public, or non-profit, is how it maintains its edges in a world where technology renders so much fluid; relations with customers, suppliers, stakeholders, and employees all start to melt into bytes. Indeed, the distinctions between the organisation and its customers and its suppliers start to blur. These are big strategic shifts which represent a deep challenge to prevailing business structures.

The image at the top of this post is from the DHD Multimedia Gallery and is used with thanks.

His book has been in my mind because I’ve been watching, close-up, the machinations of Hammersmith and Fulham Council as it appears to collude with developers in rebuilding large chunks of the borough as highrise while trampling on the requirements for affordable housing laid out in the Borough’s core strategy (opens pdf), “that 40% of all additional dwellings built between 2011-21 should be affordable”.

And while, of itself, this is only the subject of local grief, there are some wider lessons.

Hammersmith and Fulham Council has become something of a byword for egregiously ambitious development since the present Conservative administration was elected in 2006. It isn’t clear why: the borough has enough office space (though some could do with refurbishing), and while – like the rest of London – it could do with quite a lot more affordable housing, this has largely been absent in the developments which the Council has promoted.

Unaffordable housing

I’m going to look at two recent development proposals in the Borough to try to explain how this development game works.

The first is the Fulham Reach development, overlooking the river downstream of Hammersmith Bridge. The plan, which was pushed through the council’s planning committee two months ago ago, is for eight residential blocks, of up to nine storeys.  This one’s a bit complicated, so I’ll go slowly. The Conservative administration had previously approved a six-storey office block on the same site, but when the commercial property market went south after the financial crash, developers came back with this new proposal. There are 740 units in the development, but only 25% are classified as ‘affordable’ – below the 40% figure in the Core Strategy. We’ll come to the reasons for this in a moment. The affordable units were so small (‘Manhattan’ studio flats, in developer and estate agent language) that one member of the Planning Committee said that anyone who bought one would have problems re-selling it.

Bait and switch

Now, the developers said they couldn’t provide more affordable housing because the development wouldn’t be viable if they did. But although the planning officers have seen these sums, the public isn’t allowed to: they are commercially confidential. In other words, the developer is allowed to ignore public planning guidelines, but the public isn’t allowed to make a informed judgment on whether it is reasonable for them to do so. (Hammersmith Council has even tried to prevent Opposition councillors from seeing the sums.)

The other aspect of the Fulham Reach development that’s worth noticing is the role of the previously approved office block as a stalking horse for the more profitable residential development. First, planning officers judged that because there was already permission for a six storey office building, it was reasonable to give permission for residential blocks of up to ninw storeys (apparently different criteria apply). Likewise, one of the grounds for objecting to developments is on the grounds of traffic impact. To my untrained ears, the traffic densities quoted at the Planning Committee meeting seemed excessive. But because planning approval had already been given for the office block, with similar traffic densities, it was not possible to object on these grounds. In other words, it worked in a similar way to the classic sales bait and switch. But the ‘mark’, in this case was the public and the public interest.

An unashamed land grab

The second development proposal went to the Council’s planning committee this week. It is a plan – promoted by the Council for the past five years -  to demolish part of Hammersmith Town Hall (the ugly bit) and adjacent blocks and build some huge residential blocks. The plans have been fiercely contested by well-informed local groups and by London and national heritage organisations, including English Heritage: in the planning papers there are 30 pages just listing the names of objectors.

But there’s one striking thing about this proposal: it is an unashamed land grab, on behalf of the rich, at the expense of community assets. First, consider the development itself, quite apart from its lack of design features: 290 luxury apartments, with no affordable housing. Plus a new supermarket, in an area already well-endowed with supermarkets. And, lest I forget, large and shiny new Council offices (so no conflict of interest there, obviously).

And now consider what will be removed to make way for it: some long-established affordable housing, including some sheltered accommodation for the blind; a (profitable) cinema – unlike supermarkets, the nearest cinemas are some way away – and worst of all, a large area of the riverside public park Furnival Gardens, apparently required as a landing area for a bridge from the development over the A4, the bridge itself a stipulation by the developer to help sell the flats. (There is already a decent foot and bike tunnel under the road just metres from the proposed buildings.) It’s said that one of the reasons the blocks need to be so tall is to let the 0.1% who will be able to afford to buy them piss better on the rest of us.

The planning committee meeting convened to discuss the planning application was moved to a nearby school hall for reasons which were unclear; 40 or more people were shut out because the hall wasn’t large enough. The speaker system wasn’t good enough to enable people at the back to hear what was being said.

Looking like Croydon

Most councillors I’ve met, regardless of party, are in it at least in part out of a sense of civic virtue. It’s unglamorous work, mostly, the hours are long, the financial rewards modest. So it’s difficult to see what’s motivating Hammersmith’s councillors. They claim the Town Hall  development (like many of the other proposals which have been shunted through) is necessary for the regeneration of the Borough, though most of the proposals are too far away from the economic centres of the borough to have this effect. And you probably don’t want to be remembered in your obituaries as the person who made Hammersmith look like Croydon.

Perhaps we’ll find out the real story when someone finally manages to follow the money. Or perhaps – as has been suggested – what’s going on is a form of social cleansing, to remove the non-Conservative voting poor and replace them with richer Conservative voters. This may backfire: successive planning meetings have been attended by increasingly large numbers of objectors, a good proportion of whom would likely have voted for the Conservatives last time around. As to the vote on the Town Hall development, dear reader, don’t hold your breath. Despite a devastating critique by a local Conservative councillor of the planning officers’ case for the development, the Conservative bloc on the planning committee shunted the thing through, pausing only to add some minor conditions for window-dressing. [Update, 17th December: It appears that the Mayor of London has blocked the plan, at least for the moment.]

It was worth attending the planning committee meeting, however, to learn that the developers’ “expected rate of return” on a development was 20%. To put that in context, the rate of return businesses can expect in competitive markets, when the economy is healthy, is 10% or less. But note that 20% figure. It plays a critical role in how the council plays the development game. For the Core Strategy also states (Box H2) that “financial viability” is a criteria in making decisions on affordable housing, and a planning officer made it clear during the hearing the finance criteria trumped the policy on affordable housing. But when the rate of return is set so high, in an area where land prices are high, affordable housing will always be squeezed out.

Ownership or stewardship

Theo Crosby got more radical as he got older, more frustrated by the lack of democratic participation in the planning system. Right now, the government plans to make it even less democratic, citing largely spurious arguments about economic growth. Actually, at a national level, the proposed changes in the planning system are just a version of what’s already happening in Hammersmith: they are a way to transfer public and community assets to corporations which can make money from them. And one of the striking things about the rapacious way in which Hammersmith and Fulham has set about selling off public and community assets is how little protection such assets have. And when it asked residents what they throught about such sales, residents were strongly against (opens pdf). But a political administration – essentially temporary – is treated under law as if it owns public assets which should actually be held in trust or stewardship.

When it is no longer possible to make money legitimately, you have to find ways of abstracting it. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has even made this process more straightforward by instructing councils to publish lists of their assets.  Some rob you with a gun, and some with a fountain pen.

Picnicking at More London (Blueprint)

In my earlier post a few days ago, I wrote about the background to the widespread privatisation of public space. In this second part I look at some of the activist and political responses.

The idea of public space is at the heart of the idea and the life of the city, as Paul Kingsnorth wrote, in his book Real England:

It is the essence of public freedom: a place to rally, to protest, to sit and contemplate, to smoke or talk or watch the stars. No matter what happens in the shops and cafes, the offices and houses, the existence of public space means there is always somewhere to go to express yourself or simply to escape. … From parks to pedestrian streets, squares to market places, public spaces are being bought up and closed down.

A couple of years ago Blueprint magazine, working with the progressive libertarians of the Manifesto Club, chose to go to places which we think of as identifiably public space in London, such as Trafalgar Square and the riverside area in front of the City Hall. They went back on different days to picnic, sometimes with drink, wearing different clothes (hoodies always went down well with security personnel). There’s only a summary online, but it was an interesting experiment. In More London (privately owned and managed, seen above), they were moved on, by security staff citing ‘health and safety’ reasons, which may sound familiar this morning. The rules in Trafalgar Square – publicly owned but tightly restricted under social order legislation – are different in the north half from the south half, below the steps. Deck chairs were not permitted above the steps: below the steps, although drinking is not permitted, the police were happy provided they put bottles out of sight and drank the alcohol from teacups. But then the police have more leeway than security guards, who are poorly paid, and also heavily monitored (by CCTV) themselves.

Dolan Cummings, who wrote the Blueprint article, argues:

Instead of the ambiguity that comes from different groups of people sharing the same space and using it for different purposes, there is a conformism … Anyone doing something a bit different stands out all the more and is increasingly likely to be seen either as a threat or a source of embarrassment.

No fun

'Welcome to London Bridge City. You are now entering private property'

Space Hijackers, who also spoke at the Occupy LSX event I mentioned in my first post, subvert these newly private spaces in ways which make more explicit the way the space is controlled. They add posters which set out the rules (‘NO FUN’, ‘NO OLD PEOPLE’, ‘ENJOY YOUR STAY’), they intervene to prevent passers-by from doing things like holding hands or otherwise enjoying themselves. They tend to stay until they have attracted the attention of the security guards – which they always do because of the pervasive CCTV – but leave before the police arrive. More extreme interventions include night-time cricket games, in full whites, in private spaces such as Paternoster Square.

Part of the Space Hijackers’ critique of this privatisation process is that it diminishes the social aspects of the street so that it can emphasise consumption. “They say, ‘You’re welcome here as long as you spend your money’. It turns us into isolated little bubbles”.

Diane Coyle touched on this from a different angle recently when she wrote of the way in which public life is designed out of the city:

The enclosure of open space in private malls, the design of street furniture to make sitting down (never mind sleeping) a challenge, the bearing down on demonstrations and gatherings and even photography on the grounds of law and order or security, have all contributed to discouraging public gatherings.

Paradoxes of public space

Taking a historical perspective, the opportunity to reconstruct urban space so radically, observed Anna Minton when she spoke at Occupy LSX, was created by the de-industrialisation of the city, and the closure of the factories, works, warehouses and docks which used to dot the urban landscape (as one look at any 1970s street map reveals). What we’re seeing as a result is a fairly rapid reversal of the long trend through the 19th century of roads and highways being ‘adopted’ by the public authority. Minton pointed out the irony of the City of London Corporation trying to use the Highways Act (about maintaining public access) to remove the Occupy protesters outside St Paul’s after being so aggressive in privatising land elsewhere in the City of London.

There are a couple of interesting paradoxes here, which mean that such approaches to managing public space are self-defeating. The mantra of a manager of such privately-controlled spaces is ‘clean and safe’, but they also want to see some energy, which is good for business. What we know about safety in public is that it comes mostly from social interaction, not from the paraphernalia of security management: by banning so many activities, social interaction is reduced, not enhanced. The second paradox is that the management companies believe that ‘clean and safe’ is merely the bottom level of a Maslovian hierarchy, and that once that is established,the site moves up to energy and excitement. Not so; by killing off the messiness, you also kill off the diversity and difference that bring cities to life. You can’t make yogurts or urban environments without some live culture. (The picture shows the feeble attempt by one privately owned space to inject some untidiness. No, they really don’t get it.)

Perhaps improbably, one of the people who realises the costs of this privatisation is the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who issued  ‘A Manifesto for Public Space‘ (opens pdf) in 2009. It turns out that developers do not need to be bribed with gifts of public land, as they were so notoriously in the building of Liverpool One. The Manifesto is explicit about the need to maintain city space as public space.

There is a growing trend towards the private management of publicly accessible space where this type of ‘corporatisation’ occurs, especially in the larger commercial developments, Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city. This need not be the case. At Kings Cross it was agreed that the London Borough of Camden will adopt the streets and public areas. Elsewhere unrestricted 24-hour access to the area has been agreed. This has established an important principle which should be negotiated in all similar schemes.

Despite the title, this is a policy document with the status of legislation. It’s early days: property development is a slow process, especially during a downturn. And so far the Greater London Assembly seems to have disregarded it. But there’s a simple, important principle within it: as Johnson writes, “I want to ensure that access to public space is as unrestricted and unambiguous as possible.” For Londoners at least, it provides a space in which planning and property become visible again, the proper subject of politics.

The photograph at the top of this post is from Blueprint, and is used with thanks. The others were taken by Andrew Curry, and are published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

So it seems appropriate that Occupy LSX has made so visible the private nature of Paternoster Square (as seen in the picture above) and that one of the ‘teach-outs’ it has organised through its Tent City University was about the private control of public space. By privatised public space, I mean that space which appears to be a public space (a square or a lane, for example) is in fact owned and controlled by a private landowner (or sometimes managed privately for a public owner.) Either way, different rules apply. It’s a trend which has been driven along by private sector regeneration schemes, and reinforced by a plethora of increasingly contentious public order legislation. But it is all but invisible.

From public interest to economic interest

Broadly speaking, in the UK, the current wave of land privatisation started in the 1980s, with the development of Canary Wharf and the City’s Broadgate building, and has grown from there. According to Anna Minton, a speaker at the Occupy LSX event, and the author of Ground Control, the best single book on this subject, New Labour gave the process a boost in 2004 when it changed the legal basis by which Compulsory Purchase Orders were assessed. Previously they had to show they were in the “public interest”; now they need only to demonstrate “economic interest”. (New Labour was never very good at consequences, but one consequence was to create a platform for the Coalition to propose trashing the entire planning system in the same way).

What started with office spaces quickly moved on to city centre retail developments such as Cabot Circus in Bristol and Liverpool One, where the developer has a 250-year lease on the 42-acre site. Local authorities were keen because, at a time when regeneration was thought to be about new buildings, it seemed to be an affordable way of re-shaping the city. You don’t get something for nothing, of course, and in many places local authorities were far too willing to give away public space in their dealings with developers.

And then there are the Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), which are managed by a company on behalf of the local authority, and funded by local business subscriptions.

Rules and security guards

One of the things that comes with private management is, almost always, a lot of rules and a set of security guards to police them: no music. no busking, no picnics, no drinking (at least of alcohol), no photography, no street theatre, no ball games, no skateboarding, no roller-blading, no cycling. And certainly no protests. (And as an aside, the fact that London’s seat of government, City Hall, sits on such land seems, to say the least, an affront to civic democracy). Surveillance is widespread, usually via CCTV. “The streets”, said Minton, have been privatised without anyone noticing.”

And indeed, you can tell when you’re on a privately controlled site because of the notices. I’ve included a couple of pictures of these, from Hays Galleria on the south side of the Thames near London Bridge.

Obviously shopping malls and retail areas have long followed this pattern, because they were typically closed off spaces under a roof. Here there is a similar blurring; there’s a telltale sign on the Thames’ riverside walk, as it passes by London’s Hays Galleria, that it is a ‘no-smoking area’ – a sign that the land is under private control even though it appears to be public space. Guardian journalist John Harris made this point about Bristol’s Cabot Circus – which is partly covered, partly open:

Cabot Circus bleeds out into the city, and surrounding streets they are busy redeveloping. The fact that their turf includes open areas points up one of the more unsettling aspects of the development: what seem to be ordinary streets are actually privately owned. “It’s an interesting one, this,” says [Centre director Richard] Belt. “These places are quite a new breed. We’ve applied all the usual rules that shopping centres do, but because it’s a streetscape, it’s getting customers scratching their heads a bit.” Cycling is forbidden. Unless you have a visual impairment, should you turn up with a dog, you’ll be told to leave it at home next time. Security staff in regulation black blazers keep a constant watch on what’s going on, including smoking.

This British model was – according to Ground Control - imported almost wholesale from the United States, but with an important difference. In the US, the changes to property and planning laws became a focus for widespread protest, with extensive media coverage, and eventually George W. Bush had to intervene. In Britain, there was almost no political response, but this was partly because of our opaque legislative processes and the technicalities of our planning processes. As Anna Minton writes, “While the legislation may not look very significant when it passes through parliament, by the time it becomes law, the addition of utterly obscure guidance and statutory instruments … ensures it is rather different.”

The second part of this post will appear in a few days.

The photographs in this post were taken by Andrew Curry and are published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

It’s worth mentioning here because one of the benefits of being virtual is that it’s not expensive to put on (this is partly down to some valuable technical support from the University of Houston, which is providing access to its e-learning platform for the event), the cost of attending is low, and it is open to non-members.

I’ve added a link to the current programme below, but in summary, there are four themes and an impressive array of speakers. The themes are:

• Futures/Foresight Methods
• Insights from Art/Design/Architecture
• Crazy Futures
• Building a Futures Career

Some highlights from the programme for me: in the European session, Sohail Inayatullah is contributing (from Taipei, as it happens), on the topic of ‘Does Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast’, the French futurist Emile Hooge is talking (in English) about the use of Lego in urban design, and Wendy Schultz, who’s been championing the Crazy Futures strand, is challenging the notion of the ‘plausible future’.  During the US session, Cindy Frewen is talking – in the Design strand – about ‘Mega Hacks’ and there are presentations from both Peter Bishop (on scenarios) and Andy Hines (on values). In the Australian window, Richard Slaughter is talking about Integral Futures (I expect this to be provocative) and Marcus Barber presents on the links between futures and spiral dynamics. A bit earlier, during the European session, I’m co-presenting on using postcards as visualisation tools.

Having been involved in a little of the planning, we’re not sure how this will work, but in a downturn it seemed to be a sensible and sustainable alternative to the big face-to-face conferences that futurists traditionally use. There may be someone out there who speeds their way through the full 18 hours, but for those who can’t manage that, there will be recordings of the talks and sessions that you miss. We’ve programmed some virtual water coller sessions, since apparently the software can support this, so we’re hoping that there will also be some promising virtual conversations as well.

Anyway, the conference fee is $25 for APF members and $45 for non-members; registration information can be found here.

Vgathering Agenda and Speakers

But even three years after the financial crash, we’re still seeing that ethos and that economy on our streets and in our public realm.

Citigroup explained its ‘plutonomy’ concept this way:

Our thesis is that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand in many economies around the world (the US, UK, Canada and Australia). These economies have seen the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth and spending in these countries. Asset booms, a rising profit share and favourable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries.

Another way of describing it is as the rule of the top 0.1%, by the top 0.1%, for the top 0.1%.

Then the financial crisis came, and banks were saved from bankruptcy by money provided from  taxes paid by the other 99.9%, and Citigroup had an attack of conscience, or perhaps public relations, and the newsletters in which they talked about plutonomy were removed from the website. We know about them only because a public interest group salvaged them and returned them to the internet.

But we are living in that plutonomy world, and I was reminded of this last month when trying to find a shop I used to visit sometimes in Bloomsbury. Playin’ Games was once one of the best games shops in London, over two cramped floors, stuffed floor to ceiling with a huge range of games. Something for all pockets, too; a child would be able to find something at pocket money prices. It usually seemed busy, as well.

Selling status

But no more; as I looked for it last month, I found that it had vanished, to be replaced by Mokspace (see the picture at the top). It’s not clear to the passer-by what Mokspace is actually selling – although the website reveals it to be a gallery with East Asian connections. But at the same time, we know exactly what it’s selling; it’s selling status, it’s selling those objects which the plutonomic classes surround themselves with to demonstrate their membership of the plutonomic classes to other members – and non-members.

So it’s perhaps worth unravelling this a little, lest this post is misunderstood as cheap point scoring.

Mokspace may well turn over as much revenue from the occasional sale of expensive artworks as Playin’ Games did; its margins may well be higher. In terms of the overall economy, there is probably little change.

Negative social outcomes

But unlike Playin’ Games, which was selling positive social outcomes (playing games is a deep and long-standing human habit), Mokspace is selling negative social outcomes. As we know from the work of Michael Marmot and others, chasing status is a fairly destructive social activity.

Of course, one of the reasons why a shop such as Mokspace  chooses to locate itself in this part of London is because of its proximity to the British Museum (similar galleries have gathered around the edges of the Tate Modern). There’s a sharp irony here, since the British Museum was established on a strong principle of social inclusiveness, with free access to its collections, a principle which continues today. Indeed, historically, the Museum was a vast source of self-education in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Hans Sloane, the Museum’s benefactor, would have been dismayed by this sort of elitist cultural retail.

When planning laws have nothing to say

Now, ministers are currently telling us that our current planning laws cost the economy millions, albeit on the basis of discreditable data. But in the case of Mokspace and Playin’ Games, our planning laws are all but silent. It is probably a shop for a shop, so no change of use is involved. Similarly, if a £6 a plate cafe is replaced by a £60 a head restaurant, planning laws have nothing to say. It is not possible to challenge a change of ownership (and the planning use categories are very broad) on the grounds of social impact. We can see the result in every high street; a vanishingly small range of shops, owned by an increasingly narrow range of owners, which works fine only if you want to buy skinny decaf latte, or a new cover for a mobile phone, or place a bet.

This is, I suppose, a version of the Tragedy of the Commons, in which the narrow short-term interests of one class of local actors, in this case landlords, reduce the social wellbeing for the community as a whole. (we know about the reduction in wellbeing from the excellent work done by nef on ‘clone towns‘).

One-sided contracts

Put like that, of course, it is exactly the sort of problem which law, regulation, and institutional governance are designed to manage. But in practice, planning rules are completely toothless in the face of this sort of social erosion by landlords.I don’t know why Playin’ Games closed (though it was probably a casualty of the recession, previously squeezed thinner by online competition, reckons Graham Linehan), and their landlords may have had little to do with it. But one of the ways in which shops get squeezed out of their premises is through the application of upward-only rent reviews at the end of each rental period, regardless of market or economic conditions. I’ve always wondered why these are permitted: they are clearly a distortion of the market and they seem to have poor social and public outcomes. They transfer unearned income to landlords at the expense of more productive parts of society. I can’t think of any other sector where such a one-sided contract would be permitted, and have never heard a credible rationale for the practice. They have just been banned in Ireland, it seems. About time for the Competition Competition to take a look.

The pictures in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. They are published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Mishra’s essay is based around a number of the books which have been written about 9/11. Being Indian means that he has read more eclectically than his Anglo-American counterparts, and perhaps also helps to give him perspective, enabling him to be more reflective and as sceptical about outcomes for both Islamic radicals and American radicals.

The Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf sums up the powerful illusions spawned in the decade before 9/11 in his new book Disordered World: “we believed that democracy would now gradually spread until it encompassed the whole planet; the barriers between countries would fall; the movement of people, goods, images and ideas would develop unimpeded, ushering in an era of progress and prosperity.” … Of this millenarian fantasy of the flattened earth, which informed war-making by western heads of state and innumerable columns by international affairs pundits as well as the average issue of the Economist, you can now only wonder: what was that all about?

If the West’s decision-making was based on fantasy, so were the expectations of al-Qaida’s animators.The combination of the two was flammable, certainly to the notion of the liberal state:

The damage to the west in the last decade has been overwhelmingly self-inflicted. Some of the domestic toll is visible in the draconian restrictions on civil liberties, the vast bureaucracy of “security” and the increased surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and other infringements of individual privacy and dignity that now seem routine and irrevocable. “War,” Randolph Bourne famously warned in the early 20th century, “is the health of the state.” It is now also the health of companies such as Halliburton, Blackwater (now Xe Services) and Lockheed Martin that are embedded with the state.

And yet, and yet: as David Cole points out in the New York Review of Books, many of the authoritarian excesses of the Bush Administration’s response to 9/11 have been rolled back, through a combination of the judiciary and civil society, from which he draws three conclusions:

First, the values of the rule of law are more tenacious than many cynics and “realists” thought, certainly than many in the Bush administration imagined. The most powerful nation in the world was forced to retreat substantially on each of its lawless ventures.

Second, there is no evidence that the country is less safe now that the lawless measures have been rescinded. Bush administration defenders often assert that its initial responses were driven by necessity, but the fact that we remain reasonably secure under a more law-bounded regime refutes that claim. Indeed, even some of Bush’s own security experts now recognize that our success rests on resisting overreaction. …

Third, the choice to jettison legal constraints has inflicted long-lasting costs. … [T]he decision to deny those at Guantánamo any of the most basic rights owed enemy detainees turned the prison there into a symbol of injustice and oppression, exactly the propaganda al-Qaeda needed to foster anti-Americanism and inspire new recruits and affiliates.

In a similar vein, Andy Oram argued on O’Reilly Radar that the changes we have seen over the last ten years have been driven by deeper structural change:

The world has certainly changed in the past ten years, but not in response to the attacks. Analysts do say that investments by the U.S. government in Egyptian democratic groups provided some foundation for the Tahrir Square protests, but much more of a foundation was supplied by long-standing activists such as labor unions. The Arab Spring, the most significant political change of the decade, sprang for the most part from internal ferment. The natural evolution of the computer field, benefitting much less from military investment than in previous decades, created many social changes. Investments in green technologies have been driven not by concerns over terrorism … but by worries over climate change in Europe and the exhaustion of traditional energy sources in China.

And as Pankaj Mishra observes, all of this can be read as an expression of some of the consequences of our long globalising boom, in which differences are sharpened, and where specificity matters:

The world changed on 9/11: so goes the insistent, melodramatic cliché, which stops short of telling us just how, in what ways, and primarily for whom … Globalisation, it turns out, does not lead to a flat world marked by increasing cosmopolitan openness. Rather, it sharpens old antipathies and incites new ones, while unleashing a cacophony of opposed interests and claims.

And the problem with the cacophony is that it drowned out the noise of a lot of other issues which we might otherwise have paid more attention to, especially in Europe and America. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to construct a version of the history of the last decade which has the war of terror as a form of sleight of hand to distract from the more immediate economic and political conflicts closer to home, where the protagonists are not strange, distant, and “othered” but are instead rather too familiar. As the saying goes, you should judge a system by what it does rather than what it says it does.

Inequality and unemployment grow as highly mobile corporations continually move around the world in search of cheap labour, low-tax regimes and high profits, draining much-needed investment in welfare systems for ageing populations. Economic crises, bleak employment prospects and a sense of political impotence stoke a great rage and paranoia, often directed at non-white immigrants, particularly Muslims, or channelled into random criminality.

A final note. The ’9/11′ attacks are often used as an example of a ‘black swan‘ – the utterly unexpected, low probability, high impact event, which transforms our world. Actually, as Sohail Inayatullah and others have observed, the possibility of an asymmetric attack on New York (and specifically on the World Trade Center) had already been identified – and, of course, even attempted. Just because something surprises you doesn’t mean that it should have been unexpected.

The picture at the top was taken by Andrew Curry, and is available to use on a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved. 

And perhaps it’s not surprising that it has taken a little longer to emerge. The older generation, who are generally more blind to this issue (what? us? inter-generational beneficiaries?) include the politicians and media commentators who have more privileged access to the media and were therefore able to construct their preferred narratives more quickly.

I was interested in this because in several of the scenarios we’ve done since the crisis, the pattern of inter-generational conflict has emerged strongly. Let’s start with the economist David Blanchflower, who’s been more right than most on both the crisis and the downturn, in the New Statesman:

It is quite clear that the coalition decided very early on to protect the old at the expense of the young, presumably because this was politically expedient. It cut spending on youth workers and youth centres, abolished the Future Jobs Fund and Education Maintenance Allowance for children from disadvantaged families and slashed funding for charities at a time when demand was rising. An explosion in the inner cities was almost inevitable. What the heck did they expect?

On Open Democracy, politics lecturer Andrew Mycock made a similar point, but drew it more widely, albeit in a somewhat moralising post:

There has been a gradual abrogation of the responsibilities of the state towards young people which is rarely acknowledged by politicians. This curtailment of the role of the state has been viewed as politically expedient. Many of the young people most affected are not old enough to vote whilst those who can have become increasingly disengaged from a political system which increasingly focuses on older voters.

The great disconnect

The most entertaining exchange, though, came on the pages of Prospect‘s blog. Prospect’s editor, David Goodhart, had spent time on the blog developing a more literate version of David Starkey’s argument on Newsnight, connecting the riots to hip-hop and Britain’s Anglo-Jamaican experience. The headline caught the tone: “The riots, the rappers and the Anglo-Jamaican tragedy”.

Shiv Malik, the co-author of Jilted Generation, responded sharply, and entertainingly a few days later.

What Davids Goodhart, Starkey and Cameron seem not to understand is that young people, especially those in Britain, live completely different economic lives to their elders. This is the great disconnect. To fail to understand that this massive generational difference in economic plight would not translate into anger is a remarkable failure—or just willful blindness—on behalf of our political and cultural leaders.

Malik points to employment and housing as significant issues. The unemployment rate for young people is five times that for over-50s; one-third of under-30s live with their parents; those who live in rented accommodation (unable to afford to buy) have seen rent increases far outstrip inflation. And the cuts – as Blanchflower observes above – have fallen disproportionately on the young.

The message is plain: if you’re young, you’ll have to pay your own way because this country can’t afford you—even though we will depend on you to pay for the older generation’s pensions and health care in the coming decade.

If you’re not from here

One of the more entertaining parts of the exchange between Goodhart and Malik is watching two writers engaging in textual analysis of Lethal Bizzle’s rap song, “You’ll Get Wrapped” (yes, I was new to it as well). There’s a line in it which goes, “You don’t come ’round here. You don’t know”. The older Goodhart hears this as saying, if you’re not from here, if you’re not one of us, you don’t have a right to speak. The younger Malik: “Geography matters, and if anything, I’d read Lethal Bizzle’s statement as an invitation to come and witness his reality.”

If you’re not from here, if you’re not one of us… You can turn that on its head, of course. One way of looking at this – which is underlined by the severity of the post-riot sentences – is that we’re seeing a “moral panic”, a term popularised in the early ’70s in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics by Stanley Cohen which described how “[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Folk devils, meanwhile, are those people who supposedly threaten the social order, and in a moral panic they’re are labelled and ‘othered’. Cohen identifies groups which are repeatedly on the end of moral panics; the first is ‘young working class violent males’.

Labelling the young

Abby Day talks about the way young people have been labelled in a post called “Riots, Respect and Research“:

Mindless, crass, materialistic, and, probably most unforgiveable by those on the left, apolitical. Those are the common descriptors of, principally, the young people involved in last week’s riots. Unsurprisingly, they are the words most commonly employed to describe young people even in the absence of rioting.

Similar stories, in similar tones, she says, are told in Australia and the US, as well as the UK. This is because they are myths, not insight.

And as it happened, I stumbled this week on The Insecure Offenders, a book published in 1961 and written by T.R.Fyvel, a left-wing journalist and sometimes collaborator of Orwell’s. His subject was “rebellious youth in the welfare state”, and he was much taken with the difference between the Teddy Boys of the early ’60s and another group of young people which he called “Thrusters and Drifters”.

Hidden fears

In the early ’60s, the Teddy Boys – like their close cousins, the mods and the rockers – were a puzzle. Fyvel suggests that this was because they were the first generation of working class kids to have money to burn. In contrast, his notes on the ‘Thrusters and Drifters’ could come from this month’s riot discourse: “An idea of being excluded or unfairly treated, which can set off their floating resentment like a spark of fire, often motivates cases of vandalism”.

One of the reasons for moral panics, it’s argued, is that the underlying phenomenon is too difficult to discuss directly. In the early 1960s, the notion of an affluent working class, which might not behave the same way as the existing middle classes, represented such an underlying social fear. In the end. that cohort was the bedrock of Thatcher’s electoral success. Now that 30 years of neoliberalism has once more stripped that brief moment of affluence from the working class – at least in relative terms – the spectre of the young urban poor, and the hidden fear of the return of the English mob, is certainly enough to cause a moral panic. The other question that has emerged in our post-crisis scenarios is, where does the anger go? At least we have one answer to that now.

The painting at the top of the post is ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’, by William Frederick Yeames, which is in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It is used with thanks.