Economic Science Fictions

by Davies, William;

  The Personal

  If the industrial age meant production, a person was a worker who produced.

  If the marketing age meant consumption, a person was a consumer who bought.

  If the internet age meant interactivity, a person was a user who experienced.

  Capitalism – the You-You

  The role of the individual person dominates more and more through the ages, laden with extra responsibility in the name of personal autonomy.

  Choose clothes that reflect you!

  Personalised services tailored to you and your preferences!

  You are empowered to manage your energy bill!

  Earn money by renting out your spare room!

  Even social media services used by billions of people the world over are ‘tailored’ or ‘curated’ for you.

  You are the architect of your environment and you are responsible for you.

  With worlds personalised by you, around you, for you, there is no shared experience; only you experience you, which others drop in on.

  Life individuated.

  Absorbism – the We-Saw

  Absorbism counters this. People are tweaking their roles and jobs so that, by design, they include others in decision-making, in creating, in living.

  If Absorbism means withstanding shock, a person is a member who forms relationships.

  We spoke to Jillie, an infrastructural ombudsman from North-West, whose job is dedicated to building relationships between her region and others. This takes place in matters of trade, transport and leisure. Jillie considers herself both as part of North-West and as part of the URE in equal measure, and sees her role as one that helps others to feel that way too. Jillie is a strong encapsulation of a new mindset that we’ve seen in the URE: open, collaborative and fearless in seeking out new adventures to protect against exposure.

  My job is to be friendly to people so people see a good side of North-West region, and we make more friends and relationships. I’ve recently been working on a Party with Scotland for next spring. This will be important next year, when we need to rebuild the roads between North-West and Scotland.

  Jillie, 29, infrastructural ombudsman. Born in Devon. Grew up in Scotland. Eldest of five siblings.

  We also spoke to Pheylan, a software landscaper and one of the Arbiter network co-creators. His role involves less contact with people from different regions, but is still completely interwoven with a new cooperative regionalism. Pheylan is part of a cross-regional team who design and adapt Sub-Arbiters, a digital service encapsulated in a totemic physical shell that governs the distribution of resources throughout given areas in the URE

  On a day-to-day level, this means greater fluidity. Despite working on a project of obvious infrastructural importance, as a public worker Pheylan will spend two months of the year working in another region, in other roles. Discovery of, experimentation with and empathy for other regions are the drivers for this activity.

  An Arbiter is nothing more than a physical symbol for the collectively owned algorithm that governs our resources. However, we take huge care to place them in prominent but not imposing positions throughout the public spaces of the URE, and even more care to ensure that they feel like they belong where they are situated, in form, size and cultural relevance. An Arbiter in South-East looks different from those in West, even though they perform the same function.

  Pheylan, 53, software landscaper, West. Younger brother to COO of Silicon Valley firm Decacorn. Former research teacher in Manchester.

  If the economic model is about creating a we-ness rather than a what-ness, this is also reflected on a more personal level – in how people see themselves – and represents an evolution from our existing idea of the individual autonomous agent. Rather than see themselves as kings of their own world, interacting to their own specifications and preferences, citizens of the URE self-identify as members of many worlds, with a desire to play parts in and learn about other worlds.

  Age Role of person Defined by

  Industrial Worker Producing

  Marketing Consumer Buying

  Internet User Interacting

  Absorbism Member Bonding

  For all my life, I’ve been scared of the city and scared of exploring. To look outside was to expose yourself to the demands and ways of the city, and I didn’t know what that was. But I always trusted the youngsters to do something good.

  Today, I look outside and I don’t feel exposed. For the first time in my life, I can explore and be excited by it. There’s nobody else’s ways to stick to, nobody knows the rules, and it’s nice to go for a walk with someone and not know where it’ll lead.

  Ann, 76, terrace champion (part-time), East. Occasionally sculpts. Married without children. Learning to code.

  Return from the URE

  Sounds pretty New Age – right? That’s what we thought too.

  And yet it seems to be a good thing.

  A bit of unpicking and you can see why.

  Whereas the London model becomes ever harder to grow as the opportunities for value extraction and optimisation become more and more pinched, the untrammelled permutations for enterprise, enquiry and experience that are shared with another community or region present countless possibilities… We suppose that’s why the Parties are so important: they become the site of possibility overdrive – where the possibility valve is released.

  We called London a fatberg because it just fitted. Everything was pushed, compressed into feeding this kind of amazing, kind of disgusting, thing that just took up space and spilt into everything. We’d had enough of feeding it – we wanted to do our own thing.

  David, 42, regional councillor, North. Former semi-professional left back. Family lived in same street for three generations.

  London URE

  Aim Outcome Aim Outcome

  1 Create Reproduction 1 Make bonds Enlisted members

  2 Compete Victory 2 Explore together Connected members

  3 Optimise Extraction 3 Learn from each other Shared discovery

  4 Grow Stagnation 4 Dance Stronger bonds

  5 Repeat Shock 5 Repeat Shocks absorbed

  Against our expectations, we see in the URE signs that a pressure has been eased, and a weight lifted. It’s poorer and messier, but less angry and, unexpectedly, more inquisitive. In the strange, uncanny world of a London-less country, rebuilding itself to absorb shock and make friends, we see early indications that new resources and innovations might emerge. We should keep an eye on them; there may be opportunities for growth that we can take advantage of.

  www.postrational.net/fatsink

  1We would recommend a further study based on quantitative behavioural data and conjoint analysis to provide a more robust segmentation to incorporate ‘real people’ and ‘rich human stories’ and map their holistic experience.

  III

  Design for a Different Future

  The economy is an artefact, a man-made, politically invented and planned set of institutions geared around production, exchange, surplus extraction and distribution. Under neoliberal capitalism, the manufactured nature of economic institutions is too easily forgotten, as they come to appear autonomous or natural. Yet the question of economic science fictions is also a question of how design might be actively channelled towards a different form of economic life, through invention and planning. It is in design that the utopian impulse of science fiction meets actual economic policy. The political-economic potential of urban design is explored in Owen Hatherley’s chapter, which studies a suburb of Moscow built in 1958 using prefabricated materials, with the intention of being reproduced en masse. This would take the industrial properties of cheap mass production, and turn them towards the provision of good social housing.

  Mark R. Johnson turns to a fictional portrayal of the built environment, through an unusual type of fiction: the mega-structures as represented in computer games. The fact that these can be actively explored by the player of the game offers a different form of utopiani
sm or dystopianism, which is interactive and open to manipulation. Yet, being produced by technology, these environments are as much ‘scientific’ as they are ‘fictional’. The final two pieces in this section, both written by design practitioners, explore the possible uses of design methods for thinking critically and imaginatively about the economy. Bastien Kerspern explores how methods of ‘design fiction’ can nurture critical enquiry into alternative economic paradigms. Then Tobias Revell, Justin Pickard and Georgina Voss examine critical and speculative design, as tools for a reimagining of economic life and the realisation of utopian plans.

  10

  Prefabricating Communism: Mass Production and the Soviet City

  Owen Hatherley

  The public square just off 60th Anniversary of October Street in the 9th District of the Moscow suburb of Novye Cheryomushki (‘New Cherry Town’) is a very ordinary, although unusually placid, place. Trees, playgrounds, benches, mothers pushing prams and the odd middle-aged boozer circle around a small statue of Lenin. The four-storey flats are a little worn, and the owners of apartments have built extensions or glazed in their balconies; housing was privatised en masse after 1991. The sense of quiet torpor here is fitting given that Russians call the suburbs ‘sleeping districts’, not much more than cubicles to come home to at the end of a day’s work. If so, this is definitely one of the more attractive places to sleep, with low-rise buildings, lots of social facilities and a Metro station nearby. But this one is different. Novye Cheryomushki is the common ancestor of every mikrorayon (‘micro-district’), as they’re officially known; the parent of thousands of prefabricated districts, the forefather of nearly every suburb in Moscow. This square was the site of a competition between seven blocks of flats. The winner, supposedly, would be built everywhere.

  Each of these seven blocks, built in 1958 at record speed, used a different prefabricated construction system, usually of concrete panels, slotted into place like toy building blocks. Each was assessed on expense and speed of construction, and then one lucky block of flats, codenamed ‘K7’, was chosen as the winner (see Figure 10.1). It was then constructed in thousands of copies – though structural problems with it have meant that many of these have in turn been demolished. Nonetheless, this site was where began the largest experiment in industrialised housing in history, where homes would become mass-produced commodities like cars, fridges, TVs. In one respect, this was a fulfilment of a long-held modernist ideal. When he was the director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius declared his intention of becoming ‘the Ford of housing’. Houses, he insisted, must become machine-made, serial products, as efficient, clean, cheap and essentially disposable as cars. Like so many twentieth-century dreams, this would eventually be realised in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and with notoriously mixed results. For every Model T, there might be an Edsel, and bad things happen to disposable products when they’re not replaced.

  Figure 10.1 ‘K7’, Novye Cheryomushki

  The Elimination of Excess

  In the contemporary context, however, there is something quixotic and heroic about this effort. Those of us born since the late 1970s, in Britain especially, but to varying degrees in the west and east (and south) of Europe, have seen staggering levels of inflation in the price of housing, and a seemingly corresponding sharp decline in the price of consumer goods, from cars to food. It’s almost a reversal of the Soviet situation, in which, by the 1980s, the need for cheap and decent shelter (and full employment, and a functioning, if rickety welfare state) was widely met. Currently, we have a society in which housing is a constant source of worry, anxiety and cost for much of the population, but the goods the Soviet Union had such trouble manufacturing – particularly the consumer durables most subject to fashion – are both abundant and extremely cheap. Because of this, if nothing else, it is worthwhile to examine this experiment, the ideas behind it and how it proceeded. In doing this, we will focus on a particular area of Moscow: three large suburban districts that emerged in the hinterland of Moscow State University between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s. There is Novye Cheryomushki, the country’s first, built in the 1950s and 1960s; Belyayevo, an apparently generic example from the 1960s; and the more ambitious late 1970s Severnoye Chertanovo, which tried to break from standardisation. Each offered stable, free or near-free housing to workers, both white-collar and blue-collar, until mass privatisation in the early 1990s reintroduced profit and insecurity, as more desirable locations were snapped up by investors. Each has also been infilled with new prefabricated housing in the 2000s and 2010s.

  As well as their possible lessons for means of solving the housing crisis seemingly endemic to neoliberalism, these housing projects reveal the way in which the USSR in this era attempted to return to the ‘utopian’, technocratic vision of full communism that was common in the 1920s, and fell into abeyance in the Stalinist era. It saw a re-engagement with the idea of revolutionising everyday life, an embrace of futurology and specific prediction, and also something new: an extensive discourse over automation. Unlike in the Stalinist era, the Khrushchev ‘Thaw’ saw a return of science fiction, and very blurred lines between that and actual policy. Two books of policy prediction written near the end of the 1950s, both of which were later translated into English, show this particularly well. M. Vassiliev and S. Gouchev’s 1959 Life in the Twenty-First Century is a compendium of predictions by planners, scientists and economists, presented for a popular readership. The chapter on the ‘Moscow of the Twenty-First Century’ focuses on the territory around Novye Cheryomushki.

  Nearly a third of the New Moscow was covered with green and blue patches representing the parks and hydro-electric reservoirs, arteries radiating from the centre. Yevstratov took out a metal stick and pointed out many of the details of the new town planning. ‘In the next five years Moscow will expand to the south-west behind the University…’

  The planner also pointed, however, to ‘another characteristic of the Moscow of the future: each zone will be completely different from the next and differently organised’. That is, the New Moscow, which will be dominated by greenery, electric cars, an extensive metro and garden suburbs, will be ‘beautiful’ as well as functional.

  Most beautiful of all will be the facades of the four and five storey houses partly hidden by trees and shrubs. Let us enter one of these houses and ask permission to visit an apartment. Brightly lit, air-conditioned rooms with huge windows. Radiators have been replaced with heating in the walls and ceilings… If we go out onto the flat roof we will see a curious winged machine. It is an air taxi.1

  The air taxi, and, depending on taste, the ‘beauty’, may not have been realised, but much of the rest was, and a long time before the twenty-first century at that. Largely, this was because of the extremely fast pace of construction enabled by building with concrete panel systems.

  These were not new in themselves; the most influential system was the French Camus panel construction system, which formed the basis of Soviet practice from the mid-1950s on. Some efforts had been made to combine industrialised construction and Stalinist luxury in the 1940s. Nonetheless, the story begins with Nikita Khrushchev’s decree ‘On the Elimination of Excess in Design and Construction’, in 1954. In a speech to architects and engineers the same year, the General Secretary made the following statement: ‘[W]‌e must select a smaller number of standard designs – and conduct our mass building programme using only these designs over the course of, say, five years…and if no better designs turn up, then continue in the same way for the next five years. What’s wrong with this approach, comrades?’2 The vast territory of the USSR was divided into three climate zones and three soil types, and an often dysfunctional system of numbering and classification emerged, giving a (sometimes deceptive) impression of rationality. Room sizes, block heights and lengths were decided on the basis of mathematical calculation, not landscape or context. The system didn’t remain the same from 1955 to 1991, however, but had three distinct moments, which Philipp Meu
ser and Dimitrij Zadorin divide into three games: ‘chessboards’ in the 1950s and early 1960s; somewhat more spaced-out ‘dominoes’ in the 1960s; and the final complexities of the ‘Tetris’ arrangements found in the 1970s and 1980s.3 Standard blocks, which were identical in layout, height and flat size in a multinational federation several times the size the European Union might be, were, if you were lucky, leavened with decorative mosaic panels on revolutionary, scientific, heroic and historical themes; and often, in the southern republics of the USSR, the need for shading led to some more sculptural, op art effects with loggias. Variations don’t go much further.

  Figure 10.2 Aerial view of south-west Moscow, around Moscow State University

  Automating the Ideal Communist City

  Mostly, this is a story of mind-boggling homogeneity: areas the size of small towns made up of the exact same prefabricated module (see Figure 10.2). The intention appears to have been automation of both design and construction, and aesthetics was a matter of optional applied facades. These were arranged in coherent districts, which at best attempted to combine social facilities and open space. Kuba Snopek, historian of the Belyayevo district, describes them thus:

  The building block of Soviet society was the Microrayon (or ‘micro-district’), a standardised housing unit that has been replicated all over Moscow since the 1950s. Simple prefab residential buildings, free plan, schools and kindergartens are an integral part of both the programme and its composition. In the heart of each neighbourhood is a public building, most often a cinema or a club. At first glance, a Microrayon is a typical modernist neighbourhood, commonplace in the West. Yet there are things that differentiate the Microrayon from its French or Dutch counterparts: the degree of uniformity, the repetitiveness of the structures and the enormous scale.4