I haven’t been officially soothsaying for a decade or three so I thought I would limber up my skills by indulging in some summer musings about the relatively near future. That’s always a little dangerous because reality usually bounces quite a bit around the epidemic curve trend lines. Given that this is an election year in many parts of the globe, the bounce might be more than I expect.
So hold on and try your own versions of these three that assume nothing changes quickly. Keep in mind that climate change is the elephant in the corner.
In December 2020 I wrote a blog about redesigning city centers. This time around I consider redesigning the rest of the cityscape. One of my main themes for the past almost five decades was that telework would allow us to work and live in a neighborhood while still being connected to the rest of the world. The simultaneous advantages of small town and big city living. Most things available without getting in a car.
Before
That concept was in the core of our original telecommuting project in 1973. Workers were allowed to work in satellite offices located in their residential neighborhoods, dropping the commute in favor of telecommuting. Working near home instead of in the big downtown headquarters of their employer. The Los Angeles long range plan then was to have 18 regional centers as hubs for local activities. Our idea was to set up projects in those regional centers. Living at human-scale within a booming metropolis. Fast forward 48 years and an article by Peter Yeung appears on the BBC website with the same idea: the 15-minute city.
In May 2020 I wrote a blog about the potential impacts of the coronavirus and telework on urban downtowns. At that time the idea was tentative that telework might force major redesign of city centers. Now comes another article from Matthew Haag of The New York Times about city center conditions to date. Titled “Midtown is Reeling. Should Its Offices Become Apartments?” Haag essentially verifies my conjectures. City centers need a redesign, even in the past-covid era.
Here are some of the events that have occurred in Manhattan since May.
In my last blog I wrote about possible impacts of the coronavirus and teleworking on cities, particularly downtowns. Specifically, I wrote about patterns of evolution of the urban structure; what will we do with all those downtown office buildings when they are mostly empty? Recently Matthew Haag in The New York Times wrote about some possibilities in his article Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. Here are some thoughts about how this may work.
The art of forecasting the future is often fun. But it is fraught with peril. Perils of forecasting that I have often encountered are: disbelief and anger. Here is an example.
It was in the mid- to late-1980s. Selma Holo, the director of the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California, asked me to give a talk. The subject was possible future trends in art galleries. The occasion was an art museum curators’ conference held at the Fisher. That sounds innocuous doesn’t it?
Today I had an iMessage exchange with my astute grand-niece about climate change, ending up with thoughts about change dynamics. This was triggered by her comment that she was confined to the house because of the miserable air quality in Seattle. Now Seattle is not one of the places that frequently comes up in discussions of air quality. Yet, for the second time this week, Seattle’s air quality was comparable to Beijing’s (112 vs. 151 today; a few days ago Seattle was more polluted than Beijing).
The reason for this? Forest fires in British Columbia and smoke therefrom drifting down to Seattle. Advice to all, but especially to women of childbearing age: Stay indoors!! This is what was annoying my grand-niece. It is also what is annoying many women around the world as global warming aids in the ignition of forest fires. The west coast of North America has had a disastrous fire season so far this year, attributable to climate change.
Telework/telecommuting has always been based on the concept of location independence: the idea that some jobs/tasks are independent of where they are performed. Our mantra has been to move the work to the worker instead of moving the worker to work.
Some history
The telecommuting portion of telework concentrates on local situations; usually urban-oriented, replacing some or all of the daily commute between home and workplace. In fact, this was the brainstorm I had one day around 1970 while stuck in near-zero miles per hour traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. To make it worse an overhead traffic control sign urged: “Maintain Your Speed”. Inner thoughts: “My job generally involves thinking, computing, writing and otherwise doing solo stuff. Why can’t I just do it at home? Why am I wasting hours sitting here inhaling carbon monoxide and stressing?”
Sustainability apparently means different things to different people. Fundamentally, sustainability refers to the ability of the human race to survive into the indefinite future. The crux of the sustainability dilemma is the tension between what we want to do and what Mother Nature allows us to do while remaining on Earth. I would like to summarize and expand upon an article that appeared recently in Nature Sustainability. The article’s title is “A good life for all within planetary boundaries”. It was produced by a team from the Sustainability Research Institute of the University of Leeds, UK and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, Germany.
The fundamental constraint on sustainability derives from the fact that we’re stuck here on Mother Earth, therefore we must take pretty good care of her if we are to be around very long. What Mother provides us is breathable air, potable water, arable soil, sources of energy and a variety of raw materials that we can make into useful products. The fundamental constraint on “the good life” is our ability to realize at least a minimum level of health and other human needs. The researchers for the paper quoted above described this as the ability of humanity to stay within a doughnut; the inner boundary of the doughnut comprises the human needs requirements while the outer boundary comprises the constraints imposed by nature.
Telework versus transportation: for the past four decades much of my work on telework and its telecommuting subset has been on demonstrating the relative advantages and disadvantages of those two. It all started in the early 1970s when I got fed up with wasting my time sitting in traffic twice, or more, daily. The commute to and from work was a drag.
Then came the proverbial lightbulb! If what I’m doing at work simply requires a phone (remember, this was in the dark ages of computing) and a desk, why do I have to fight traffic for more than an hour every day to do it? Why not do it from home (Starbucks hadn’t been invented yet either)?
Since then a growing number of people and organizations have come to the same conclusion, fortified by the evidence that telework and telecommuting are good for business. There are now tens of millions of teleworkers worldwide and the number continues to grow.
Well, it has been an interesting year, in the sense of the old Chinese curse: You shall live in interesting times. Here are some year end thoughts regarding telework’s future.
First, this year has demonstrated that many carefully thought out plans have gone awry. Seriously! Brexit, Trumpism, Syria, China’s economy, Russian autocracy to name a few. The global master plan seems to be chaos. Now, all of the aforesaid are geopolitical in their nature. What do they have to do with telework?
