The Need for Research | Nov 8th at 8:07am
In an op-ed on Monday, New York Times columnist David Brooks predicted an Obama win and he speculated on the biggest challenge for his administration and our country: scarcity.
“In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future. We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.”
The last thing anyone wants to hear right now is an idea about how to spend more federal dollars. It’s probably the fastest way to end a conversation with your elected official. But somehow we need to bridge the divide between the mounting problems and the need for solutions. We need a plan and that plan must include research.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Barry Katz of IDEO talk about new product design. IDEO is a rare example of a company embracing an inclusive and smart approach to research. “It is an integrated approach,” Katz said. “It’s not just engineering [a product], it’s anthropology, history, design.” IDEO brings different disciplines together to circle around a problem and to find a research-driven solution. Katz himself is an historian, a title you don’t often find in a design firm.
Having a research-driven answer is something that the built environment sorely lacks. We rate buildings before they are up and running, we award designs before they are constructed, we have no effective way to measure building efficiencies after they are built. We cannot accurately frame the answers in many cases because we cannot honestly analyze and assess the problems.
An idea that has been circulating is the creation of a National Academy of the Built Environment, similar to the National Academy of Sciences, to do the kind of research and development that can make real inroads. The trick, of course, is getting the kind of political will needed to invest in research during a serious recession. How can you make the ROI argument? How can you convince others that an investment in the built environment and in cities is the smartest way to resolve our coming global crises?
The new Obama administration is going to come calling. They are going to look to urban designers for solutions about infrastructure and energy needs. If there is not a clear and articulate response, the window of opportunity will pass. Start to form your response now.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture and design for publications like The New York Times Magazine, Architect, and Metropolis. In addition to her own blog, Urban Palimpsest, Dickinson is a regular contributor to the Metropolis blog, P/O/V.
KLaus Philipsen in Baltimore on Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 10:27pm
Scarcity of course make inventive, so does research, so these go well together. Affluence has been the biggest enemy to progress in the US. Too much land promotes sprawl, too much oil promotes waste and so on. Scarciity forces us to rethink how we go about things. Smart Growth, for example saves money, so does better health care and better education. Green buildings and sutainable cities save money.
At this particular juncture we have to see to it that the remaining available resources (are there any left?) will be used strategically as real investments with future return. General tax cuts and increased consumption do not fall into this category. The post petroleum city will be a real city again because the petrol and car oriented places aren’t really cities at all.
John Reinhardt in Washington, DC on Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 7:30am
We need the metrics to prove that upfront investment now will pay dividends in the future. Unfortunately, our the way our markets are structured, there is pressure to show profits and results immediately.
Harvard has an interesting model in the Green Campus Loan Fund (http://www.greencampus.harvard.edu/gclf/benefits.php). Large institutions such as this who have the luxury to invest in research and make upfront capital investments for longer term results - because they aren’t going anywhere any time soon - may prove the best model, and we should start paying attention now.
Elizabeth Dickinson on Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 11:15am
John,
Thanks for that link. This is so important—we must be able to articulate the financial story in real and tangible ways (not just speculate on energy savings years from now).
John Reinhardt in Washington, DC on Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 12:41pm
Exactly. Two undergraduate researchers at Wharton (Alicia Fowler and Julie Pearne) developed a proposal for a similar fund at Penn - in their proposal, an initial outlay of $1-5 million (a drop in the bucket for Penn’s 5 billion dollar annual budget) would produce enough cost savings within five years to pay for the initial projects AND turn a budget - which they propose revolves into both new projects, and for furthering Penn’s research on sustainable initiatives.
It’s think kind of longer-term, sustainable finance that we need to solve the problems. There is so many opportunities to profit on inefficiency, it just takes a little bit of vision and some start up capital. I believe large institutions will be the ones to put forth this model, which then may be adopted by cities themselves.