This is a crisis too good to be wasted. Isn’t that how the saying goes? For a long time, I lived in the belief that it was an eloquent American (no, not the President, but someone else) who coined that expression and I even contemplated taking the time to look up the source. But a recent lecture by Paul Bennett, creative wizard and design guru at Ideo, taught me that all of this talk about how to “never waste a crisis” is a figure of speech. There you have it. But that is not why you listen to Paul Bennett. You do it to pick up some tips about how creativity and design can help us out of crises, although the latter is something the guru would rather not talk about. As Bennett puts it, “talking about the crisis is so 2008.”
Which, in 2009, quite obviously is the perfect thing to say if you want to be applauded in Reykjavík, where he held his speech. In fact, I am in a hotel room with a view over Austurvöllur* as I write this editorial.
The solution to the world’s economic problems, it seems, is creativity. Individuals, not natural resources, create growth. Today, if we are to believe thinkers like Paul Bennett and Richard Florida, then it is more about fostering good ideas than manufacturing things. At least this is what Richard Florida argues in a recent article in The Atlantic. Florida looks into his crystal ball and predicts that New York, in spite of the Lehman collapse and financial crisis, will recover, brush off the dust and go on with business as usual. At some point.
What surprises me about the article is not the solution to the crisis but what Richard Florida maintains is the cause.
In the other America, away from New York and other creative centres, all those who own their own homes will stay put. Chained to the house that can’t be sold and burdened by a mortgage that is becoming harder and harder to pay.
These people are victims, claims Florida, and it is their ownership that has made them that way. At the same time as the economy is becoming more mobile, the share of American families who own their homes has grown to almost 70 percent. This doesn’t just mean that people aren’t able to relocate to where the jobs are. No, economic policies have encouraged people to invest in flashy homes rather than in technology and alternative energy sources.
There you go! And here we have been going around thinking that modernism is to blame when actually the fault lies with ownership. Talk about a paradigm shift!
This issue of Forum is different and it isn’t just the design that is new. Only a few months ago, we called ourselves Forum AID. Now we’ve changed our name to Forum, just like when the magazine was started in 1976. This issue has the feeling of a new beginning, and we decided the best way to restart was look at our past. Back to 1976.
This has proven to be a fruitful exercise. Not just because the magazine’s start coincides approximately with the death of modernism. But it is interesting to discover that, if we look beyond the traditional image of modernism (Pruitt-Igoe, back-lit pistons, omniscient architects in bow ties), it is precisely modernism’s major tenets – a faith in the future and a belief in technology – that we have put our faith in to get us out of the current crisis. It is creativity that will mend the economy, and technology and progress that will save the planet.
It was different in 1976. Then, just like now, the economy was in turbulence and energy supply and ecology were the words on everyone’s lips. But the definitive difference between now and then is that the mid-1970s were not a particularly progressive time. No, in the 1970s the solution was to grow a beard, pack up your belongings in a rough-and-tumble Volkswagen van, move out to the countryside and grow your own carrots. The folk movement was called counter urbanisation – and wasn’t always particularly green. Today, urban centres are generally considered to be the environmentally-friendly alternative. The larger and denser, the better.
In this issue, we open the door slightly to take a peek at the future. Järvafältet, just outside Stockholm, is an area that represents a belief in the future that today seems almost crazy. But it is precisely there where the opportunity exists to show what technology and innovation can create in the form of an organic and concentrated urban centre for the 21st century.
Daniel Golling, Editor-in-Chief
daniel.golling@forumaid.com
