EXTRACT: DEVELOPMENT
But consider this: the average US citizen emits as much CO2 in one day as someone in China does over a week, or a Tanzanian in seven months. Or this: a tourist from a rich country can uses as much water in 24 hours as a villager who lives there uses in 100 days. The word “development” does not make perfect sense.
Big D development tends to view human, cultural and territorial assets - the people and ways of life that are already there - as impediments to progress and modernisation. A huge development industry measures progress in terms of economic growth, and increased consumption, and assumes without question that urbanisation and transport intensity are signs of progress. Development tends to devalue human agency and replace people with technology automation and “self service.”
These ways of looking at the South from the North are the result of a wrongly-developed model from the perspective of sustainability. This wrong model is making many designers rich. Around the,world, from Dubai to Pakistan, the worst excesses of development are fuelled by design “visions”. One Dubai property developer has teamed up with Giorgio Armani to build thirty hotels and resorts around the world. One of these design destinations will feature in a US$43 billion luxury development on two islands - Bhudal and Bhuddo - off Karachi. Government officials describe the islands as being ‘deserted’ - but the the livelihoods of about 500,000 fishermen - indigenous people who have been living on the islands for centuries - will be severely affected.
Ten million people a year suffer forced displacement from their homes and livlihoods to make way for the development of dams, transportation systems and waterfront developments of one in pakistan described above. These big infrastructure projects are often promoted on the basis that they will reduce poverty, but poverty is more often a pretext for developments that are primarily designed to improve incomes and lifestyles for the rich. The result, in the words of one disillusioned obsserver, is that “millions of people are expelled to the margins of frutful existence in the name of someone else’s progress.
When development based on dams ushers in a world of luxury resorts and service industry jobs, most local people less less secure than they were before. A third of the world’s populaton - two billion people - live outside the economy of secure jobs, mortrgages, and pensions. When the possibility off living off the land and sea is removed, only a tiny minority attain formal employment. In much of South Asia, Africa and poorer Latin American countres half the Brazilain economy is ‘informal’ - and that proportion is growing. When the next wave of development comes along, the informal economy is either ignored by planners or, if they they get in the way, they are routinely swept away along with ways of doing things that have served people well for generations.
Many property developers don’t even pretend to care about poor people. But in the North, a lot of people are keen to do good. Advanced Micro Devices and Architecture for Humanity, for example, ran a $250,000 competition for the design of technology centers in the developing world. The company boasted of its ambition to connect 50 percent of the world’s population to the Internet by 2015. They seemed to be unaware that there is one cellphone for every two humans on Earth now. As it happens I write these words in India where six million mobile phone accounts are being opened each month without the participation of a single “technology centre”. It’s resonable to predict that we’ll reach four our of five people by by 2010.
Technology experts in Sunnvale, California, simply don’t get it that smart poor people are ahead of the game in their access to connectivity, devices and infrastructures. AMD dreamed about the design of a “sustainable technology facility and community center which incorporates a centralized building equipped with internet connectivity solutions designed to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the Internet”. With two uses of the word “centre” in a single sentence. the words “old” “western” and “paradigm” spring to mind. Another North-to-South project that missed the point was the $100 laptop.Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Laboratory at MIT, launched his project at the World Economic Forum in Davos. To the delegates in Davos, $100 probably sounded cheap; many were paying $100 an hour to be there. But in Mali, where 90 percent of the population lives on $2 a day, Negroponte’s laptop would cost people two or three months’ earnings.Intel did more homework before launching its “ruggedized” PC for rural communities in India. Its Community PC was equipped to operate in a village setting in kiosks called Jaagruti (Awakening) that would be operated by local entrepreneurs and provide access to services such as e-Government forms and commodity prices. Well-meaning donors from the North know nothing about the lives they are trying to change with technology.“The trick is to think and act rural” advises Ashok Jhunjhunwaller, a promoter of electronic kiosks that are transforming connectivity in rural India. ITC, one of India’s large trading conglomerates, connects rural farmers, information, products and services, through its eChaupal system. A chaupal, traditionally, is where farmers meet to share news and information. Farmers access latest local and global information on weather, scientific farming practices as well as market prices at the village itself, through this web portal which is in Hindi and other local languages. In every cluster of villages, a lead farmer acts as the interface between computer terminal and other local farmers. ITC claims that the system enhances farm productivity, improves farm-gate price realisation, cuts transaction costs, facilitates supply of high quality farm inputs and the purchase of commodities.Donating information technology for development is not, of itself, virtuous. Connectivity is more about the design of clever business models than about the mass distribution of devices. Delegates to Doors of Percetion conference back in 1994 were mesmerised by learning this from the extraordinary Sam Pitroda. Pitroda enabled hundreds of millons of people in India to gain access to telephony by designing the Public Call Office (PCO) concept - a low-tech, high-smarts system based on the clever sharing of devices and infrastructure. PCOs exemplify the kind of design skills that we need to learn from India and adapt to our own situations. Well-meaning top-down-ness also afflicts the architecture profession. Many architects offer to help whever a natural disaster, such as a tsunami hits poor countries far away. But itinerant design professionals often lack in-depth knowldege of local ways of building and living, and propose solutions that cannot be readily adapted to local conditions. I once chaired an Aspen Design Summit whose aim was to launch “a design revolution to put an end to poverty in developing countries by conceiving new extreme-affordability products”.The trouble on that occasion was a skills mismatch. Eighty percent of professional designers are in the representation business - but designing a poster about an issue, or launching a media campaign about it, is not the same as helping real people, in real places, change everyday material reality.Bottom line: development is not primarily about products. An entrepreneur who understands this, Paul Polak helps people in developing countries improve water extraction and distribution systems. Polak reckons the design and technology of a device, such as a pump, is not much more than ten percent of the complete solution. The other ninety percent involves distribution, training, maintenance and service arrangements, partnership and business models. These, too, have to be co-designed. We are all emerging economies now
New approaches to development are all about exchange and distribution. William Gibson’s take on the subject has become a classic aphorism: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” Among the elements of a sustainable world that already exist, many are social practices - some of them very old ones - learned by other societies and in other times. From this insight flows the idea of designers as global hunter-gatherers of models, processes, and ways of living that already exist. Or used to. As scavenger-innovators, our first response should be to ask: who has cracked a similar question in the past? How might we learn from, or piggyback on, their success?The South can teach the North all manner of useful techniques for the the re-localisation of production and exchange. The South also knows a lot about service intensity: Those two billion people who live outside the formal economy have innovated a thousand-and-one ways to keep body and soul alive. The North, despite being wrongly developed in so many ways, still has plenty to offer. Northern designers are good for casting fresh eyes on a region’s assets, for example, that are not appreciated by local people. Delhi street food. The North also has useful tools and skills to offer; these range from service design to technologes of co-operation and systems for resource allocation - ranging from people, to water - than can be re-purposed for ultra-local use. The most exciting opportunity for innovation lies in combining the knowledge systems, tools, and social and territorial assets of South and North. In a light and sustainable economy, we will share resources such as time, skill, software, or food using a socially embedded systems, enabled by networked communications, that are bound to be a hybrid of assets from North and South. Solidarity economy Sustainability it is not an ingredient that you add - as if to the fuel tank of a car. It is a property of the system as a whole. The export of ready-made solutions - whether North to South, South to North, or a hybrid - is less important than a tranfsormation of the economy.The term “solidarity economy” describes grassroots forms of cooperative economics that are emerging all around the world. They are a bottom-up alternative the profit-over-all-else economy. Solidarity economics re-values practices of cooperation, mutual aid, reciprocity, and generosity - everything from shared meals and Community Supported Agriculture, to Carpooling and Seed Exchange - that already exist in our midst if we only choose to look for them.Rules of engagement Rather than swan around the world capturing information about peoples lives, the design challenge here is to create systems foirm the exchange of tacit knowledge. If we are to exchange value - rather than just take it, or act like cultural tourists - what do we have to offer? During one of several debates on this topic at Doors events in India, Alok Nandi made the point that ethnographers – and for that matter documentary film makers - have been wrestling with this issue for decades. Nandi was critical of the “dive bombing” method in which people land in places cold, and start filming things that they see, but have no way of understanding. A British professor, Jonathan Gosling, refers to this as “The Mir Experience” – dropping in on another galaxy from within one’s own spaceship. Our provisional conclusions, following discussions over several years, are the following Rules of Engagement for designers and lifestyle researchers operating away from home:Rule one: when in doubt, development begins at home. Look near as well as far. It’s easier to enhance the human resources, culture, heritage, traditions, know-how and skills of a local culture than that of a distant one.Rule two: Work for actual people, not for categories. Be on your guard whenever you read the words “the poor” (or “the elderly” or “the blind” or “the disabled”). These casual and widespread habits of language disembody and dehumanise people. If you don’t believe me, ask a blind person.Rule three: Respect what’s already there. Most designers are trained to to change things first and ask questions afterwards. A better us of a designer’s fresh eyes is to reveal hidden value and thus mobilise hidden local resources. Rule four: Empower local people. Any design action that rearranges places and relationships is an exercise of power. A good test for the sensitivity of a design proposal is whether it enable peoples to increase control over their own territory and resources.Rule five: Commit long-term. It takes time to understand a situation, time to listen to local people and gain their trust, time for appropriate solutions to emerge. When Sergio Palleroni offered the support of design students to communities in New Orleans, he commited to a minimum of three years engagement. Rule six: Think small. Small design actions can have big consequences, many of them positive ones. If someone builds a bus stop in an urban slum, a vibrant community can sprout and grow around it. Such is the power of small interventions into complex urban situations. Read Small Change, by Nabeel Hamdi for more inspiring examples of the power of thinking small.Rule seven: Think whole systems. The design of a device such as a pump, or sprinkler system, is not much more than ten percent of the complete solution. The other ninety percent involves distribution, training, maintenance and service arrangements, partnership and business models. Informações sobre o livro:
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