Future Thinking by Adam Greenfield
Adma Greenfield is a well know author with an interest in housing.
“I would urge organisations to be more sceptical about the rhetoric of "placemaking"
Ahead of his session “The Future is….” at this year’s Housing Scotland Annual Conference in June, Adam Greenfield author of Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life gives his thoughts on what neighbourhood and communities should be like in the future.
How do you visualise neighbourhoods and communities in 2040 - in Scotland and globally?
“Ha! Given the utter insanity of contemporary politics, I'm not really comfortable making any prognostications about 2020, let alone 2040. About all I do feel comfortable saying is that we will either rediscover the organic capacities for self-care, solidarity and mutual aid which have so badly eroded over the past four or five decades, or we will find ourselves facing a very unpleasant set of circumstances indeed.
Nobody's riding to the rescue. We're it now. We're the adults in the room, and we will have to relearn how to take care of ourselves and one another. The good news is that this is what communities under pressure have always done, in Scotland as on everywhere on Earth, and that however deeply buried they may be, we still do have those instincts and memories to call on.
It will have pretty major implications for the way we dwell together, and in particular I don't imagine housing provision will look much like it does at the moment. As to whether it winds up looking more like community land trusts, municipalized ownership or something else, I honestly don't have the foggiest. But my sense is that something's gotta give.”
What do you see as the most important changes which housing providers need to respond to?
“The ones that took place around the end of the 1950s? I mean, I still see waaaaaay too many new-build developments plopped down in straight-up 1960s superblock style, with utterly sterile, afterthought public realm, no local services to speak of, and at-best indifferent public transit connectivity. It would be nice to see developers assimilate the fundamental insights of the Jane Jacobs era before trying to address the challenges of the DeepMind era.
That said, I think anything built now that dedicates any significant area at all to parking ought to be considered an act of malpractice.”
What advice do you have for organisations working to design great places and deliver great services to customer and communities?
“I would urge them to be more sceptical about the rhetoric of "placemaking." We were piloting a friend's narrowboat up the Regent's Canal here in London the other day, and as we passed the steps at Granary Square, King's Cross — which is generally called out in the urbanist community as one of contemporary London's greatest triumphs of placemaking practice — she pointed out that while there were indeed a great many people hanging out there on a gorgeous Bank Holiday weekend, the overwhelming majority of them seemed to be interacting primarily with their phones. They were there physically, but elsewhere psychically. I'll consider a place to be "made" when it's compelling for its own qualities, not simply because it's a neutral, more-or-less pleasant platform for activities you could in principle be doing anywhere.
Beyond that, my soul groans a little bit every time I encounter something like Coal Drops Yard in King's Cross. It's the kind of thing I associate with Dubai, where someone's thrown significant amounts of money at a patch of land on Earth and wound up with kind of a heavily curated, brand-centred experience that says nothing, does nothing, asks nothing and ultimately is nothing. Compared to that, even the humblest parklet real people have made for themselves shines. I think of Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin, or el Campo de Cebada in Madrid, or Les Grands Voisins in Paris, or even your local allotment. Give people space and the (conceptual and literal) tools to transform their environment, and what they come up with will all but invariably be more fit for purpose, more sustainable and more pleasing than anything the brand engineers can deliver.”
Finally, what are you most looking forward to about the conference?
“Spending more time in Scotland, which I'm rapidly coming to love both aesthetically and politically, and doing my best to make sure the wonderful vibe of last year's Housing Europe event in Tallinn is sustained.”