Its hard to get away from news about the economy, especially in the building industries. Unemployment rate at 11% for construction workers, several major Atlanta design firms instituting layoffs, the Architectural Billings Index at an all time low. These changes are expected to last into 2010 and to not directly follow the traditional V-shaped economic graph.
The reason the economists are having so much trouble predicting the length of the current downturn has to do with human behavior. Tax cuts, job development, infrastructure investment, and bank bail outs can all cause very different reactions amongst various segments of the population. Fascinating to me is that urban designers deal with this same uncertainty. Human activities, and their collective choices, are the basis for most design decisions in the urban realm. And in declining economic situations, people’s behavior changes.
- Where are the people going? As unemployment rises, fewer people have long commutes. And their destinations change.
- How do people get there? As incomes decrease, people look for ways to pinch pennies by taking public transportation, car pooling and combining trips.
- Is the destination setting conducive to people feeling positive? Urban designers have a stake in assuring that the workplace fits comfortably into its surroundings. As global and local economic structures change, our basic assumptions of the office typology might change as well.
‘For urban designers and community people, location and connectivity factors of how individuals make a living, along with the economic context and its trends are of great importance, from the regional or macro scale to the individual work place”
This quote is from my professor’s upcoming book, Urban Design and People. I was struck by its relevance not only for the current economic climate, but for the future of the urban design professional as well. This economic crisis is doing more than making it difficult to gain an initial job out of college, it’s changing very base patterns that my field follows.
Office environments are more flexible. Social and business networking increasingly takes place online. The need for centralized working locations is still important, but the demand for smaller public spaces where many people can work online, on a variety of different tasks for different companies in different industries, while still being around people, is growing. People look more towards part time and freelance opportunities while unemployment. These people need to network outside a traditional one company, one office environment.
Octane Coffee Bar
Working from home doesn’t hold much appeal to a social, energetic professional who was recently laid off. They want to get out, meet people, set up opportunities for casual networking while updating their resume, writing an article for a trade magazine, or engaging others for industry updates. Can urban design help them?
Something that Julie Eizenburg said that happen to stick in my mind was that parking lots are important places of informal social interaction in today’s apartment complexes. That most everyone has a car, and therefore uses their parking space on a daily basis. Its a much more informal environment for meeting your neighbors than say, an exterior courtyard. Primarily because the parking lot is programmed to encourage action (looking for parking space, parking, unloading groceries, etc) rather than the mere interaction that is implicit in a more formal courtyard.
