What is the City Appeal?

Now that our scope has been narrowed from 2012-2062 to 2020-2030 i need to reassess what our future scenarios mean to this specific decade and Brisbane city site.

Firstly, to predict how our city will change in the future i need to understand what the current appeal of the city is...

• An appeal for individual expression within a collective environment (is this part of what drives consumerist behaviour)?
• If consumerist behaviour changes as our previous scenario predicted what will still appeal to individual expression?

I came across a lot of theories and TED talks that discuss the idea that its never really the product you want, you just want what it does - this reveals a potential increase in rental markets... rental clothing, rental tools, rental cars etc. Particularly when we extrapolate the changing notion of sharing (facebook, piratebay etc). Sharing has been completely redefined and ownership is becoming far less important.

I started looking at the idea of branding - something that i think will last whether you rent something or own it and what the social meaning of brands might mean to the future scenario.

I looked at the concepts of 'Lovemarks' - emotional attachment to a company.. loyalty beyond reason

I also looked at Bruce Philp's idea of 'Consumer Republic':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GZtYPLkhDY 

Key concepts:

• Brands hold a lot of power, but it is the consumers who give power by 'approving' the products.
• Political soul of consumerism - genisis in enlightenment
• Consumerism broke down the class system as you no longer had to be born into wealth to have nice things
• Capitalism has a habit of outsourcing conscience
• How do we give consumerism a conscience? 
• Buy less, buy better, be heard - understand the power the consumer has. 

So what happens to the CBD if consumerism changes to buy less, buy better (Philp's prediction)?

• If a company needed to convince you that its product was the best (assuming people bought less but spent more) the customer service & experience aspects of shopping would be far more important - rendering superstores, department stores etc disadvantaged... a customer would need to feel valued... lovemarks.
• Perhaps an advertising prohibition as an attempt to curb consumerism (no billboards etc).. how would retail shops adapt to survive.

Individual Project One Statement

I believe our group project was successful in imagining a logical evolution of society and graphically representing the complex ideas and circumstances of this future scenario. 

Representing the scenario with the analogy of evolution helped to categorise the range of different changes we had imagined. It was not as simple as ‘people and lifestyles’, ‘future scenarios’, ‘architectural opportunities’ and ‘sustainable futures’ because these all have cause and effect on each other. If we imagined future changes in policies for example, this would affect all four categories, and those affects would have a reciprocal flow on affect and so on.

So instead we recognized the major pressure points that would initiate these changes and called them our ‘ages’ (Jurassic Age etc). From here we separated our ideas into ‘species’ – Politics, Culture, Education, Transport, Agriculture, Built Environment and Technology. We looked at how these would evolve differently throughout the different ‘ages’ – where we decided they would evolve more rapidly was represented with greater splitting of branches. The semi-circular form of the diagram allowed us to cross reference easily between ‘species’ for example when there was a change in cultural attitudes we could easily place the flow on effects of that within the evolution of other species for example new policy implementation, implications of policy implementation etc.

The changes we predicted were graphically represented with pictograms to allow a more visually appealing and diagrammatic exploration. Some of the pictograms represent quite complex ideas however, were able to be explained within the timeline above.

The future scenario of cultural change, the shift towards individualism and the potential of new social order will play a huge role in guiding my individual project. The resource crisis, and its affect on all the ‘species’, in particular its evolutionary affects to the exploration of retrofitting and parasitic architecture will also be a main focus for my architectural proposal.

As a group we worked well together, however, we had to work around one of our group members experiencing a personal tragedy in the week before the due date. We were able to manage the workload and complete the desired outcome regardless. 

Architecture as a Dissident Practice

This reading was short and sweet - i liked it.
The reminder that most ideas don't come out of space but from a discourse is useful in critiquing design decisions. Sometimes the most difficult aspect of imagining future scenarios is the absolute unrestricted possibility of everything - it is too broad. When we can focus from a discourse and to some extent narrow the view to our future scenario, it allows us to target more specific ideas for change. If we start with a political discourse, as we essentially did with our group assignment, it becomes a driver for a much stronger idea. It naturally becomes intertwined with other discourses but there is always a constant thread throughout to which you can tie all design ideas and decisions. I will certainly work with this in mind on the next stage of the project.

The way in which they speak about space in temporal terms is also very interesting. Though it is not a particularly unique idea i think they eloquently sum up how this influences their design process and decisions. I believe it is particularly topical when considering the future of architecture - the contrast of this with traditional ideas of permanence and monumentality. I believe with densities increasing, resource crisis' and sustainable design practices, that ephemeral notions of architecture - 'architecture of atmosphere' offer a more indeterminate typology of architecture (and is far more sustainable). This thought combined with the ideas from the 'Shearing Layers' reading begin to setup groundwork for a design methodology where the blending of virtual and reality, growth and decay, bio and mechanical offer dynamic and sustainable design opportunities for the future (virtual infrastructure, retrofitting, parasitic architecture).

Politics and the Situationist International

This reading reiterated concepts fresh in my mind from last semester - existentialism, phenomenology and Heidegger. It is this school of thought that has potentially caused me to struggle so much with the idea of entirely virtual future scenarios. This reading however, allowed me to bridge the gap a little between existentialism, the phenomenological approach and imagining future scenarios. It is the 'politicization' of existentialism from this reading that i found particularly helpful.
The collective act, the act in solidarity, permitted groups to act in accordance with collective choices in the face of repression by powers exerted by those whose authority is to be resisted (p. 95).
This idea of Sartre's, when re-imagined in the current context of social media begins to suggest that a dramatic shift in power is a plausible future scenario. It was interesting to see the overlap of this reading and what we had discussed as a group - we had been considering an increase in individualism and this combined with Debord's interesting prediction that media would become a future driving force of capitalist economy (after railroads and motor cars prior), led me to think that the potential for social media platforms to have major power in our future is quite high. I would assume that what we know as social media today will continue to evolve and become increasingly sophisticated before it reaches a rivaled level of driving force (to the media, motorcar & railroad). It also leads the imagination to consider how powerful this may be when considering it in relation to the huge percentage of world population in developing countries having access to social media, increasing their ability to 'act in solidarity'. The change could be immense.
I think i will enjoy finding out more about the 'Situationist International'.

Week 05: Architectural Evolution

After discussing the implications of politics in regards to its affects on the growth of society, we became interested in what the evolution of architecture would look like - what pressure points/'atmospheric change' has caused a splitting in the gene pool - evolution. The requested topics for this assessment piece are so intertwined and dependent on each other it is difficult to separate them - nothing in evolution happens in isolation. You cannot separate people, lifestyles, sustainability, architectural opportunities & future scenarios, they are all completely dependent on each other.

Week 04: Character Charrette

Creating a personal scenario within our future imagined scenario allowed us to expand our thought in regards to the 'real' affects of the issues we had discussed. It revealed a shared agreement that looking at potential policies created in response to the crisis' would help to imagine design opportunities that may emerge. When looking into history the evolution of policy reveals a great deal on all other aspects of life at the time - it is a deeply embedded structure which responds and dictates human evolution. 

Key policies we proposed included:

-No cars in CBD (in response to climate change, carbon tax, increased population)

-Sustainable business rebates (climate change, resource crisis, shift in retail norms)

-No new buildings in CBD  (resource shortage, economy, social agenda for sustainable practice)

- Global agreement on immigration (compassion, acceptant of global responsibility, population balance with local carrying capacities)

We then went on further to analyse the benefits, consequences and architectural opportunities of these new policies. 

Hugh Barton: What about population growth?

Barton’s theories offered little in addition to what should now be considered common knowledge amongst designers of the built environment. The most frustrating component of his writing is that it seems to completely ignore the impacts of inevitable population growth. The focus is entirely on transport in terms of emissions and its impact on climate change. Sure, this is important to consider but its highly plausible that a clean alternative fuel source is not so far away on the timeline of technological development. If a clean fuel source is available then limiting people’s transportation is obviously not as necessary in terms of environmental protection. What will be a much more pressing issue is the strain an over-inflated population will have on congestion of transport networks and access to resources (food, water, housing). Finding a solution to clean energy already fits into existing principles of human psych, for example, high values placed on human development, economic stimulus etc. Where as solving population growth is likely to require a solution that contradicts most existing social norms. For example, population distribution (to adjust to more localised carrying capacities) would challenge nationalism, immigration policies, territorial instincts etc. and population capping would potentially challenge values on family choices, healthcare (its effect on life expectancy), and essentially the value of a single human life.

I believe when considering future scenarios we should place some faith in those people who are currently developing technologies that will provide a renewable and clean source of energy. How this might affect our grid systems, infrastructure, transport and building services (will everything be completely ‘wireless’?), is far more important to consider than whether or not clean energy technology we require is actually possible. When it comes to transport systems and urban design, I believe it is much more important to consider the unit of space a car consumes than the fuel it consumes. As population and density inevitably increases, transportation will need to adapt to suit high volumes of people with an expectation of relatively personalized transport modes – an expectation of choice in locations to be picked up/dropped off. Will this mean cities will no longer require the same transport veins that roads have, for centuries, enforced upon them? Will our mode of navigation through cities entirely change? In terms of gps technology in phones etc, roads and street names certainly don’t have the same necessity as previous generations experience in our navigation of a city.