The Design of Scarcity; 2015; Strelka Press
INTRODUCTION
Scarcity: a word that hangs over early twenty-first century society as both threat and reality. Scarcity: a condition that is shaping many of our environmental, economic and political futures. Scarcity: something we take for granted and therefore feel helpless in the face of. But what if scarcity is not inevitable? How then could we deal with it, how then could we design with it?
There have been previous attempts to address scarcity. Forty years ago, the Club of Rome think-tank published The Limits to Growth. This report took a series of variables – food, non-renewable resources, population, pollution and so on – and mapped how they interacted over time. The authors predicted that if the global economy continued to grow as it had in the past, the world would reach its limits at a certain point. This conclusion was fiercely contested, but recent studies have shown its predictions to have been impressively accurate. Notwithstanding its pessimistic tone, The Limits to Growth attempted to account for many aspects of the modern economy and ecology. It had at its heart the most basic economic concept – scarcity – and for the first time prompted an interpretation of the complex nature of scarcity in relation to other systems.
Forty years on and the issue of scarcity appears ever more relevant. The contemporary politics of austerity raise scarcity as a spectre, while rising inequalities draw attention to its realities. Environmental politics invoke the idea of planetary limits as a call to action. Assumptions about perpetual economic growth are being questioned as we confront the diminishing of resources and the degradation of the environment.
Scarcity runs through all these debates; as a basic economic concept and as a practical reality, it touches us all one way or another. For designers, it affects the production of our environment and hence cuts to the core of contemporary practices in design and architecture. It is essential therefore to understand the historical and contemporary constitutions of scarcity in order to know how to work with it. It is equally important to find new readings of scarcity, readings that escape the dominant structures and processes that limit contemporary economic and social life. Scarcity is not going away, so we had better understand how it is created and what it means.
In the most general terms, scarcity is understood as an insufficiency of supply: a lack. This essay takes “lack” as the working definition for scarcity, but challenges its neutral, uncontested status. Scarcity as simple, inevitable lack appears to shut down opportunities for design and life. But what if other readings of scarcity could offer productive opportunities, moving away from a negative and limiting conception? To find these other readings we have to understand that, far from being neutral, scarcity is designed. In turn architecture and design have to deal with these constructions of scarcity in order to know better how to design within the context of scarcity. Only then can the full implications and potential of design be explored.
To be so apparently affirmative about a term that has such bleak connotations probably appears counter-intuitive, even foolhardy. But a fresh understanding of scarcity allows one to imagine new possibilities, and with them new social formations.
DESIGN
Working within externally defined constraints is a fundamental part of the design process; scarcity is thus always a context for design. Design here is seen not as a noun, a set of objects, but as a verb, a set of processes that necessarily deal with surrounding systems and contexts, including scarcity. This engagement with the limits thrown up by scarcity can be productive. In the early 20th century one finds fascinating attempts not just to design in the context of financial and material shortages, but more to construct architectural and design values out of that very engagement, and so produce a collective language out of our societies’ confrontation with scarcity. Thus urbanists worked with the politics of distribution, architects explored collective languages of minimal dwelling and designers explored a new functional objectivity in their designs.
Perhaps the most sophisticated attempt to construct an architectural value out of a sublimated engagement with scarcity is Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum “Less is More”. However, it also shows how complicated design's engagement with scarcity could become in a capitalist society. Mies’s catchphrase for engaging design in a relationship of means and ends found itself turned into an economic imperative. It is a self-imposed aesthetic programme expanded into a general principle, employing the architect and designer as a servant of modern capitalism. The credo of reduction merged with the logic of efficiency: make more with less. Creativity has always been absorbed by capital: the creative professional was never outside accumulation, but an essential part of it. He and she were capital’s strongest workers, adapting to ever-new constraints, expanding the logics of the creation of value to ever-new margins: the creative designer became the epitome of the entrepreneurial self.
Mies’s dictum has been revived, dressed in a new coat. Following the excesses of the early 2000s, design, and in particular architecture, has become the agent of contemporary austerity, wrapping the exigencies of pared budgets in a thin veneer of reduced aesthetics, and meanwhile letting the market determine spatial conditions. Once again, design has shown what it is capable of: making more out of less, so creating surplus value. It might be easy therefore to just reject “less is more”. But our argument is that it is necessary to fully engage with it, to consider design as a practice of means and ends, aware of its relation to the wider contexts of production. While it would not be appropriate or sufficient today just to return to the architectural and design experiments of the last century, there are real lessons to be learned from the modernist attempt to construct design values and cultural meaning out of our relationship to scarcity.
Beyond the complex dimensions of aesthetic experience, design is often considered to be a process of solving problems in the most efficient manner. Design in this guise can easily be reduced to a measurable practice: for example, designing to reduce a building's carbon emissions. Design, particularly when linked to technology, holds out the promise that the effects of scarcity can be perpetually held at bay on the back of innovative and ever-more efficient systems. The solving of problems and the pursuit of efficiency are often used to legitimate the designer’s role in society beyond simply the production of an experience. Designers present themselves as part of an overall societal effort to overcome scarcity, or at least to mitigate it through the optimal use of resources.
However, this problem-solving paradigm of design can leave the underlying conditions unconsidered, leading to the paradox that design, far from “solving” the problem of scarcity, may actually exacerbate it. This happens in a number of ways. The first, and most obvious, is the way that obsolescence is actually designed into objects, from buildings to consumer products. At a large design scale, commercially developed housing too often precludes future adaptation, shutting down the opportunity for change, thereby making people move rather than adapt, and so keeping the market in a state of permanent demand. At a smaller scale, today’s mobile phone has an average life span of 18 months, with software updates causing slowdowns in older devices. Domestic appliances use proprietary parts that cannot be replaced, and frequently the cost of repairs makes buying new goods more attractive than fixing old ones.
Without this intentional obsolescence, products would last longer, demand would be reduced and the market stifled. Designed obsolescence is a symptom of the market’s need to constantly produce more scarcities as an engine for more consumption. Contemporary industrial production arose out of conditions of scarcity, and cannot exist outside of them. It projects an image of an abundant society, which can afford to create endless consumables. However, this apparently abundant production of stuff masks the underlying production of scarcity. Scarcities are thus designed into the system of consumption: they haven't arisen by chance; they are the inevitable and predictable consequence of decisions and actions. In our current social and economic models scarcity must be maintained so that production can be maintained.
Design can also produce scarcity in the way that it changes its own context; the solving of one problem may lead to multiple others. Responding to specific scarcities by design and innovation therefore often causes new scarcities to arise. To give but one example, the invention of the kidney dialysis machine saved lives, but also created an immediate scarcity in dialysis machines. Under scarce conditions, the young physicist Willem Johann Kolff built the first prototype of an artificial kidney for dialysis from sausage casings, wooden drums and juice cans in 1938 at the University of Groningen. By 1945, his dialyser had its first success in saving the life of a patient suffering from kidney failure, which before would have caused death. Once the invention was refined and implemented in the post-war period, demand for it exceeded supply, and still does. The overcoming of one problem through design led to the emergence of a new form of demand, and a new form of scarcity. The same is the case in what are termed disruptive technologies, inventions such as mobile phones that transform the field into which they arrive, creating at the same time a context for new scarcities.
Finally, design also contributes to the production of scarcity in the way that it is part of the desire-making machinery on which markets depend. Design increases the fetish nature of commodity and with it the associated desire. The stimulation of desire and the production of want through design thus becomes a key driver of the market, as consumers are led to follow their desires. One almost certainly does not need a new smartphone every year, but their ever-evolving aesthetic and technical design lead us to believe we do, while their proprietary software upgrades create real functional scarcities. The result is an increase in resource scarcity as rare materials, often extracted at huge social and ecological cost, are depleted to maintain the production of the new.
The problems that design frequently solves are primarily those set for the benefit of corporations and investors, rather than the user. The fresh surfaces and endless creation of newness presented by design obscure the social relations that constitute things. The Dutch critic Roemer van Toorn uses the term “Fresh Conservatism” to describe designers who are constantly creating images of freshness in a way that disguises the highly conservative nature of the constitutive processes and values.
The design of the new thus frequently generates scarcities without any social or ecological oversight. This is particularly the case with the built environment, where design is operated on the grandest scale. Prior to the financial crash of 2008, architects were caught up in, and complicit with, the general frenzy of growth and production. Empowered by new computer tools, they presented ever-fresher and shinier images of their clients' buildings, which in the presentation of a world of abundance allowed us to forget the scarcity-producing nature of these developments. As velvet gloves for the iron fist of the real estate market, buildings became desire-creating commodities at an extreme scale.
One problem is that the instruments of design do not allow us to engage with the underlying social and political conditions within which design is conducted. Design is practised through a series of technologies, primarily drawing and its derivatives, which have formed an elite, expert discourse. Drawings tend to foreground questions of appearance, and in doing so mask specific social, political and ecological questions. The designer becomes obsessed with form and technique, as these are the areas of production and technology that the designer has most control over. Ultimately, these technologies of design silence the user, freeze the object and depoliticize design as such.
Design must understand its Janus-faced character, caught between addressing need and producing desire. Acknowledging this ambiguity reinforces the demand for the politicisation of design, embedding it in the social discourses from which it cannot flee. As we shall see, scarcity asks us to re-evaluate what “need” and “desire” might actually mean, and so provides new contexts for design to operate in. The expansion of design beyond problem solving displaces the discipline from the field of the provable and quantifiable – of science, technology and engineering – into the realm of the qualitative – of value and the aesthetic. This is still within the realm of desire production, but also of the political, the contestable. In this development, design shifts from matters of fact to matters of concern, as the sociologist and historian of science Bruno Latour puts it. Matters of fact appear hard, measurable and certain, whereas matters of concern are socially contingent and negotiable.
Design in this mode of concern shifts its attention from shaping objects alone to an engagement with the life of objects – to their constitution, their consequences and their relationship with the human and non-human worlds. With scarcity enmeshed in these relationships, a better understanding of how design works under conditions of scarcity is needed. We cannot simply demand that design should somehow solve scarcity, or overcome scarcity. Design should start by accepting scarcity as a condition and constraint, consider how its work relates to scarcity, and find ways of constructing new collective values out of scarcity. This is not easy, as design frequently obscures its own conditions of production, and the social and economic forces that determine its space of operation. We therefore need to shed light on these underlying forces, and like our 20th-century forebears, understand more about the economic constructions of our conceptions of scarcity.
ECONOMICS
The notion that something in the world might be restricted in quantity is easy enough to grasp, and the roots of our everyday use of the word “scarce”, as well as a host of related concepts (shortage, dearth, lack), can be traced back millennia. Importantly, scarcity has been bound to economy as part of society’s means of regulating and managing resources. Contemporary capitalism uses scarcity as a central feature of its raison d’être. In a seminal note on the objective of economics, the British economist Lionel Robbins describes the discipline as “concerned with that aspect of behaviour which arises from the scarcity of means to achieve given ends. It follows that Economics is entirely neutral between ends.” Scarcity here becomes an essential precondition for any and all economic behaviour. For Robbins, economics is the “science” of choice under conditions of scarcity, and its purported neutrality removes any political or ideological stains. In this light, the assumption that we live in an age of scarcity needs to be challenged. In fact we live in an age of scarcity as defined by capitalist economics.
It is through an unravelling of these economic structures that one might reach new understandings of scarcity, shifting our conception of it from one that is simply defined by lack, in terms of neutral quantity, to an unravelling of the way that lack is created.
The use and meaning of scarcity in relation to economics has changed over time. In feudal society, the management of scarcity frequently took the form of a series of mutual obligations and prohibitions regarding the distribution of food between the aristocracy and peasantry. In later mercantile society, a particular set of systems was developed to deal with the threat of scarcity. Grain production and supply were regulated by the state through price controls, prohibition of hoarding, constraints on export and limits to the amount of land to be cultivated. These measures were designed to both limit excessive abundance, and with it the collapse of prices, and also prevent scarcity in order to protect the wealth of a nation and to suppress revolt and political unrest that might arise out of a lack of food. However, for all their regulatory sophistication, these mercantile measures could not outwit scourges such as crop failure and drought. This ever-present spectre of an impending, unswayable, scarcity was used to legitimate attempts to overcome scarcity, something that persists today as threats of future shortages – say of food – are invoked to sanction market operations – for instance land-grabs in Africa.
The mercantile anti-scarcity system, with its regulations and inherent failures, later came under pressure from the laissez-faire model, in which the free market is left to control supply. This is a system, self-regulated by an “invisible hand”, that claims to level out any sort of scarcity much better than any adjusting state power could do, and which releases scarcity from market prohibition. Soon, however, rising new scarcities derived from growing social differences and inequalities made it necessary for the state to intervene again, forming the model of the welfare state, which rebalances the market’s unevenly distributed scarcities.
The threat of scarcity to the entire population that existed under the mercantile system is replaced by the structural necessity for an anonymous some-of-the-population to endure scarcity, sometimes. One can see exactly this is in the way that contemporary localised scarcity, for instance in the form of hunger or deprivation, is permitted to develop in order to prevent scarcity operating at the level of the whole population. The global economy evolves unevenly, developing an uneven geography of scarcity that affects the lives of different sections of society in unequal ways. Cultural and political ideologies explain away these structural pockets of scarcity as being the fault of their inhabitants, attributing poverty and unemployment to fecklessness and antisocial attitudes, rather than as the inevitable product of an undemocratically managed system of production, distribution and exchange.
The laissez-faire assertion that an ideally free market will safely regulate itself is still the preset of today’s dominant neoliberal capitalism. However, something changed significantly in the early 1970s, accelerating the free-wheeling dynamic of global economy in an unprecedented way. By unleashing the dollar from the value of gold – an act that led to the end of the Bretton Woods system of global exchange controls – and from material production in general, scarcity became truly phantasmic, abstracted from material reality and now more firmly than ever is associated with immaterial speculation. Since the 19th century, capitalism has been plagued by crises of overproduction, by falling rates of profit and by the fact that it becomes ever more difficult to extract surplus from production. Recent acts of financialisation are simply the latest means for capital to invest in something, anything, even if it is a house of cards built on Ponzi principles: an unsustainable pyramid where one person’s return is dependent on the debt of others. Contemporary financialisation thus creates speculative asset bubbles and virtual scarcities, as manifested in futures markets in food prices and real estate speculation.
Within neoclassical economics, scarcity arises with the perceived endlessness of human desire, which can never be satisfied. The paradox of scarcity within economic thinking is that it both fuels the market (by regulation of resources and the production of demand) and also presents a threat to the unfettered market (by suggesting that the growth upon which capitalism is dependent has limits). Economics thus oscillates between the regulation of supply and the ongoing attempt to overcome the limits to growth. The former, regulatory, model has led to uneven distribution and with it inequalities. The latter, growth, has created new scarcities: increasing social inequality and unsustainable material and biological extraction.
All of the episodes in the economic history of scarcity challenge the neutral sense of the term as presented in neoclassical economics. The allocation and distribution of resources does not happen in an even-handed or logical manner: supplies are manipulated and controlled by vested interests. Far from being natural or inevitable, scarcity is designed. Food, for example, is not scarce in terms of quantity. There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, but food distribution systems, the politics of food subsidies, the machinations of global food corporations, international land grabs and more combine to construct scarcities of food in particular places. The food is too often in the wrong places, and owned and managed by the wrong people. The meaning of food scarcity is very real – high food prices, hunger and malnutrition – but the underlying condition is constructed. However, the presentation of scarcity, of food or anything else, as naturalised and inevitable masks these constructions, creating a false consciousness that disguises the underlying conditions and the dynamics of inequality.
This sense of constructed scarcity based on neo-liberal economic imperatives reaches into all spheres of human operation, including the production of the built environment. To some extent there is nothing new about this. The renaissance architect Alberti advises that a “private building must be so treated that it will not seem possible to remove anything, because everything has been put together with great dignity.” Alberti valorises an underlying conception of the sensible use of scarce materials, framing the aesthetics of architecture within economic terms of reference. But in the contemporary condition, the impact of economic-scarcity thinking on building is perverted from diligent stewardship as a means into a dominant end on its own. The Italian political theorist Mario Tronti talked about the “Social Factory”, an indication of the way that the post-Fordist production paradigm has spilled out from the factory to infuse all aspects of social production, including our cities and selves. Architecture shifts from being the sensible deployment of scarce resources, in the Albertian model, to being a pure instrument of surplus production without any other qualities and values.
An example of the dominance of economic-scarcity thinking within the production of the built environment is the UK’s notorious Housing Renewal “Pathfinder” scheme, introduced by the Labour government in the 2000s. This initiative made the market value of housing the central instrument of urban regeneration. The argument was that rising house values would in turn lead to inward investment. The means to encourage the housing market were extraordinarily brutal. The swathes of half-empty, low-grade, tired old houses that were a feature of the northern cities were seen to be devaluing regional house prices. They therefore had to be demolished, and people relocated, in order to stimulate the market. Most of the replacement new housing was beyond the reach of the displaced families, priced as it was to create a more desirable market for gentrifying occupants. These acts of demolition – repeated in recent years in Detroit, where federal regeneration grants are spent on area clearance – were a direct way of constructing scarcity in order to manipulate the housing market, and if it resulted in (using the British critic Owen Hatherley’s words) “slum clearance without socialism”, then so be it. Exactly the same logic is applied in the clearance of slum dwellers from cities in India and elsewhere in the global south, all done in the name of urban renewal based on the tenets of progress and growth.
Spatial development is too often determined by scarcity thinking – a surplus is eliminated to increase the value of a commodity. As part of this process of the economisation of the built environment, the whole way that we talk about architecture has shifted, being redefined through value engineering. The passive act of observing and measuring quantities is replaced by the active aggression of value engineering, substituting cheaper materials and working to drive down overheads. Of course that value is the value defined by the market, thereby eliminating other value systems – of well-being, of longevity, of appropriateness, of ecological fitness or of use. As long as scarcity is dominated by the logic of neoliberal economics and the market’s attachment to exchange value, it remains impossible to relate it to these other forms of value. The argument that the logic of economics, founded on scarcity, can be extended into any area of human activity is found wanting, because it is clear that there are social fields that are beyond that logic.
Our call therefore is to extend our conception of scarcity beyond the limits of economic knowledge. One way forward may be found in the origins of the word economy in the Greek term, oikos, a household, an etymology that it shares with ecology. Both economy and ecology are thus founded in the vernacular knowledge of running a household – managing resources not in a linear model of extraction, but in a cyclical system of relations to seasons, storage, distribution and redistribution. The vernacular understanding of economy as an everyday field of human activity has become hopelessly entangled with economics as the expert, scientific, study of that field of activity. The exploration of the world by the economist’s gaze does not equate with the handling of the polis and its ecologies by the means of economy. Scarcity, universalised and naturalised in the field of economics, takes on a very different guise within oikos – as economy and as ecology. A collective re-imagining of scarcity must necessarily entail a transformative re-imagining of economics (as economy) and ecology. We return to this in the second half of the essay, but first need to see the specific ways in which the manipulation of scarcity leads to inequality.
INEQUALITY
From 1750 onwards, the British Parliament enacted a series of measures that brought about the enclosure of land. The pastures, acres, forests, rivers and meadows, which had been held, harvested and farmed according to ancient systems of common law, and which provided a livelihood for many common people, were literally enclosed, fenced and walled off. Forests that had provided wood and food for generations were now out of bounds. Fields for which peasants had farming rights fell under the ownership and management of large estates, and with this land shifted its meaning from “use” to a traded commodity. The first modern agricultural revolution sprang from this now-enclosed land, guaranteed by laws that prioritised new property ownership rights. The land could be exploited much more thoroughly, making use of the new, scientific farming techniques being developed at the time. This new food production system did indeed dramatically increase yields and broke one ancient cycle of scarcity, that of periodic food shortages. But at the same time, a total scarcity was enforced upon the peasantry by the acts of enclosure. Deprived of its common rights, this class was forced to migrate to the growing cities in search of food and work, and form the basis of the urban proletariat at the dawn of industrialisation.
The underpinning rationale for the enclosure acts was that of “improvement”: the industrialisation of farming techniques to increase efficiency and yield in order to feed an increasingly large population. Enclosure was legitimated on the basis of the spectre of food scarcities, a potential crisis that overshadowed the very real conditions of inequality that resulted. This is but one example of how scarcity has consistently been used to legitimise unequal distribution, be it of land, water or money. Because there is not enough, the argument goes, decisions need to be made about who gets what. In doing so, it does not matter whether scarcity is an actual fact or a mere projection; what is clear is that it is not a natural condition.
This logic of scarcity is all too apparent in the regimes of austerity that govern the western world in the early 2010s. Presented as a scarcity of liquid capital and state revenues, austerity is promulgated as a necessity in order to re-establish economic equilibrium. Suffer now in order to find growth in the future, we are told (which of course conveniently sidesteps any questioning of the efficacy of growth in the first place). However, that suffering is unevenly distributed, with the poor, the unemployed, the dispossessed bearing the brunt of the cuts. Austerity is far from an inevitable and necessary part of economic logic, riding on the back of the fear of real scarcity; rather it is a deeply ideological programme which ramps up social inequality while at the same time protecting the vested interests of the market. The truth is that there is no shortage of liquid capital, in fact quite the opposite, but there is a shortage of profitable investment opportunities for the exponentially growing quantities of money-capital in the global economy. Austerity is the mechanism by which swathes of currently non-commodified or semi-commodified economy (such as publicly-owned health, housing and education, or indeed entire countries such as Greece) are opened up to processes of commodification. Austerity is nothing less than a mechanism for new processes of enclosure, or primitive accumulation by expropriation.
The connection between scarcity and inequality works beyond just the western world and its current obsessions with austerity. Enclosure has not ceased – it is being tragically played out at a global level through neo-colonial land grabs in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazonian rainforests and Indonesia. Forthcoming scarcities – of food and of traditional sources of energy globally – are being used to legitimate wholesale land appropriation, which in turn creates inequalities for the indigenous and local populations who are displaced from their livelihood. Accumulation by dispossession has also returned to Europe, notably today in Greece and Romania, where the IMF in the case of Greece or corrupt local politicians in Romania, have facilitated the transfer of ownership of resources to international corporations, often with the suspension of national and European environmental and social legislation.
The production of biofuels is one of the most direct manifestations of these transnational processes of creating inequalities. As a renewable resource operating in a closed loop, biofuels are seen by some as one solution to the perfect storm of climate disruption combined with diminishing carbon-based energy resources. Under influence from large corporations, EU guidance promoted the advancement of bioenergy, programmes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, as a means of stabilising prices in the face of uncertain fossil-fuel supply, addressing political insecurity in oil-producing states, and opening up new markets. In ways that are very reminiscent of the Dutch and British East India Companies of the 17th and 18th centuries, which acted as privately owned corporations but were supported by the state, multiple global companies already hold 317,000 hectares of agricultural land in Ethiopia, a country that is the world’s leading recipient of food aid, and whose famines have come to epitomise one form of scarcity. Shifting tenure from an established system of smallholdings to centralised control, the Ethiopian government is making a further 4 million hectares available for exploitation. Thus, scarcity of energy resources in one part of the world leads to the production of a different form of scarcity in another part of the world, as subsistence farmers are displaced from perfectly good food-producing land, and so come to rely on food aid from the countries that manipulated this scarcity in the first place.
There have been a number of attempts to mitigate against forms of constructed inequalities, among them the welfare state of western societies. Based on the ideal of a common good, and on the philosophical principles of universal norms, the welfare state presumes to manage the distribution of resources in as fair a manner as possible. In many ways the welfare state is a precious thing, especially so as we see it being dismantled under the regimes of austerity, but in its logic of standard yardsticks, it universalises scarcity, making it the same for everyone. Against these norms, the next chapter introduces the idea that any understanding and effect of scarcity is dependent on the human and political context within which it is perceived.
CONTEXT
The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins makes an argument in his book Stone Age Economics that throws into the air our standard assumptions about scarcity. He contends that the first hunter-gatherers, normally designated as “primitive”, were in fact the “original affluent society”, fully capable of satisfying their material needs. Sahlins shifted the normal reading of hunter-gatherer societies as primitive to seeing them as practising a refined mode of existence. In contrast to the affluence of the hunters, he describes the present human condition as one defined through scarcity, a tragedy “of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means.” Sahlins reverses our received versions of the terms abundance and scarcity. Following this argument, it becomes impossible to state unequivocally that man’s needs are unlimited or that means are necessarily scarce. Abundance can be found outside the schemes of economic growth and material accumulation on which we have become dependent. Most importantly, Sahlins’s example shows how context is vitally important to any understanding of scarcity.
In a famous example Karl Marx speaks of a modest house. As long as it is surrounded by other equally small houses it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. Yet if a palace is built alongside the same, then Marx argues that the house shrinks to a little hut and the occupant of the dwelling “will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.” Marx’s story illustrates how the processes of capitalism fuel want. But in addition to this, Marx indicates the relational sense of scarcity: with nothing beyond to compare to, wants are fulfilled and scarcity remains unperceived. It is only when the context alters and kindles new wants that scarcity arises. This relational sense of scarcity does not abolish it completely – there will always be limits to stuff – but it does suggest that there are other ways of understanding those limits.
The supply of oil, for example, is limited. We are reaching, or have reached, peak oil, the moment when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached. But it is not this limit that makes oil scarce, or implies increasing scarcities in the future. There is no shortage of $500 barrels of oil. What makes oil scarce is the way that we use it and our reliance on it. If we didn’t use oil, it would not be scarce. For subsistence farmers whose economy exists outside the oil supply chain, the notion of peak oil might have little meaning. Knowledge about our environment and its resources is never natural but always relative to our social practices and expectations. To consider that something is in short supply already implies a particular way of thinking about the world and our relationship to it. But this does not mean scarcity is a mere illusion. Many important resources that Western industrial economies are dependent on are indeed stressed or running out, and the effects of designed scarcities are very real. Nor does the contingency of scarcity mean that it should be treated in a relativist way, as if anything goes. Rather, the impacts of scarcities demand that we deal with the way that they are constructed.
This is what is meant by a relational sense of scarcity: scarcity is not an absolute but always has to be understood in relation to its context and the way it is produced. This is well illustrated by the apocryphal story of a field officer from the World Bank on a visit to a developing country. He encounters a local man lying on the beach and interprets this as the root cause of why development is not taking off at the speed the World Bank would like. Addressing the man lying on the beach he demands: “You should get up, work hard, make money, invest that money so that it makes more money for you.” Somewhat perplexed, the man lying on the beach asks, “What would I do then?” To which the World Bank officer replies without flinching, “Go and lie on the beach.” In this story the two “world views” privilege different scarcities. The World Bank officer perceives lack of wealth as the fundamental condition to be overcome, very much like hunger and thirst, and thus the option of resting before “this scarcity” has been overcome is not an option. The local sees the context differently.
A contextual understanding of scarcity requires different ways of dealing with it than does an absolute reading of it. The absolute suggests an inevitability in which limits can only be addressed through control and reduction. This mirrors the argument of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, a lecturer at the East India Company at the end of the 18th century and the first professional political economist. His argument is deceptively straightforward: population grows at a geometric rate over time, food supply at an arithmetic rate; at a certain moment, demand for food will exceed supply; population growth must therefore be restricted in the face of predicted scarcity.
Malthus was wrong in many respects. Population does not necessarily grow geometrically, and food and other resources may grow or reduce unevenly. However, Malthus’s supposedly objective view appealed to ruling elites in that it singled out the poor as inferior and responsible for disproportionate population growth. Malthusianism thus prepared the ground for Social Darwinism, eugenics and other deeply ideological population control programmes masquerading as science. Malthus’s conception of scarcity as a “natural law”, an absolute, has served as a dominant reference in debates on famine and population ever since, as has his conclusion that we can only deal with this limit through control and reduction.
This discussion between an absolute and a contextual understanding of scarcity has parallels with similar discussions about space, especially those led by political geographers such as Neil Smith and David Harvey. For them, a reading of space as an absolute means that we perceive it as fixed. We can only measure it and move things around within that space. A relational view of both space and scarcity reveals a very different dynamic. For Harvey, “the relational view of space holds there is no such thing as space outside of the processes that define it.” The implication, for both space and scarcity, is that the designer intervenes in those defining processes, and in the ways that scarcity is constructed.
Such an intervention can be seen in a recent initiative in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. This is a typical post-industrial city, in which a combination of suburban flight together with the collapse of industry and retail had led to a deserted city centre. There was an abundance of empty space, but access to it was restricted in a number of ways. The building owners treated the empty space according to the norms of the conventional market and its leasing structures. Nobody could afford the set value or terms of rentals, and so the space remained empty, locked into leases and pricing mechanisms that were based on market mechanisms, but in a context where there was no commercial market. This lack of access was reinforced by regulatory and zoning frameworks that prescribed particular use patterns, and so did not allow alternative uses. The result was a paradoxical impasse: the city had an abundance of space but a lack of means of accessing it.
A not-for-profit agency, Renew Newcastle, finally unlocked this impasse, releasing the abundance by renegotiating zoning regulations and inventing creative leasing arrangements in which owners license the buildings to Renew Newcastle, which in turn finds short- and medium-term uses for the spaces. In the space of two years the city centre was revitalised with a mixture of creative enterprises, artists and social entrepreneurs who had previously been denied access to the absolute market system. A scarcity – in this case a lack of access to abundant space – was addressed by understanding the underlying processes and creatively intervening in them. A spatial problem, Marcus Westbury argues, was addressed not by working with the hardware of the city – its physical buildings – but rather with its software, "the rules and restraints that are imposed and enforced by governments.” “You need,” Westbury writes, “to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves.”
Westbury shifts the understanding of the city from how it “is”, a fixed set of objects, of nouns, to how it “behaves”. In this he develops the previous hint as to how to approach scarcity as a designer. With absolute scarcity, the designer is only able to operate in terms of limit and control: use less, make sure the building consumes less, and so on. But when scarcity is understood as constructed and contextual, new areas open up for the designer to deal with. Scarcity may indeed become an opportunity and not a threat. To find these opportunities we need to move away from the outmoded conceptions of progress and growth around which the constructions of scarcity have circled.
INTERLUDE: PROGRESS AND GROWTH
Hanging over everything that has come before in this essay are the twin concepts of progress and growth. The two terms are used almost interchangeably: when one speaks of progress one assumes growth, and growth is the signal of progress, particularly in the norms of economic measure. The term growth suggests a certain naturalness (flowers grow, children grow), which then somehow makes “natural” the economic logic linking progress to growth. Of course, the economists forget to mention that biological growth is just one part of a cycle: children stop growing, plants die at the end of summer.
Nonetheless, graphs are drawn, time along the bottom, growth upwards, and we only feel comforted if the line is pointing upwards and to the right because that signals progress. In the idealised version the line is diagonal and straight, representing time’s arrow as a linear march of progress away from the dark ages of history, and reassuring us of our control over time. The vertical axis can stand for many things, from GDP to food consumption to the size of apartments, but in all cases the expectation is of the upward pull of the line. In today’s Vienna the graph shows new-build apartments providing four times as much space per person as they did in the 1920s, but the graph demands that this ratio increases still more. In the course of the 20th century: progress means bigger apartments, holding out the promise that one day we will all be living in more space, one day there will be enough apartments for all of us. Although linear developments of history and of growth have been criticised again and again, our form of thinking still has not changed; society holds to these graphs, these representations.
In the last fifty years, the line on the graph has become an exponential curve upwards: time has been compressed as growth (of population, of debt, of CO2 emissions) went skywards. Alongside the twins of progress and growth lies scarcity. On the one hand it is their catalyst, on the other their nemesis. Progress and growth are driven by scarcity, economic theorists makes us believe, promising that one day in the future abundance will be found for all and scarcity will be overcome, equality achieved. The forces of modernity – technology, innovation and newness – are harnessed in this mission to banish scarcity. And yet this flight from scarcity at the same time exacerbates it. We are caught in a double bind: the modern model of growth can only be achieved through the extraction of surplus, and this intensifies the experience of scarcity as lack. The exponential curve of the graph grows towards infinity and approaches a singularity. In its move towards infinite growth, it actually suggests a slowing down and then stopping of time. From the perspective of growth, this can be read as the end of history. Against such a reading, with all its inherent problems of an ultimate end, our critique of scarcity provides us with a means not only to understand the actual effects implied in the graph but also raises the possibility of re-drawing it.
CONSTRAINT
Faced with the exponential shape of the growth graph, the obvious solution is to apply limits. The graph projects a future of scarcity, which in turn demands limits in the present. Scarcity is announced simply as things running out, and the causal response is to limit that reduction by using less. The line of the graph is pulled downwards and the fateful moment of things running out is delayed.
The idea of limits is played out very clearly in the current debates around sustainability. The very word establishes the principle of sustaining existing patterns, including those of growth and development. The only way this sustaining can be achieved while at the same meeting the Brundtland definition of sustainable development (“…that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”) is through systems of control. Thus the various systems of measure and control of sustainability in the built environment, including BREEAM in the UK and LEED in North America, focus on reduction of water, waste, carbon and embodied energy. All of these would seemingly address the issues of scarcity head-on by reducing the potential for future lack. Sustainable design may result in a lessening of extraction from the biosphere, and thus does align with imperatives that arise from the increasing scarcity of resources. However, these measurement systems reduce the built environment to a collection of objects, the making and use of which can be subjected to limiting measures. Under such conditions of sustainability, scarcity is accepted an inevitable and the only way to deal with it is through control and limit.
Architecture is all too easily subject to this urge to limit. Understood, as it often is, as the production of buildings as objects, architecture is described as a collection of things: walls, thresholds, floors, roofs. Under conditions of scarcity one simply uses less of these things and strips them of any material or aesthetic excess. But architecture is about much more than these simple measures of matter: architecture is also about constraints. The core of architectural knowledge is the manipulation and production of space, and with it power. This is done through making material and physical constraints, in the form of walls, doors, windows and roofs, which in turn produce social organisations and values. In his seminal essay “Figures, Doors and Passages”, Robin Evans traced the emergence of the corridor as a spatial invention that set up new social relations of flow and constraint. Prior to the 17th century, movement through the houses of the English and European aristocracy tended to be by passing through a series of interconnected chambers producing specific constraints but also facilitating certain social relations. The introduction of the corridor in the 19th century initiated different constraints and with it different social relations in the household. Access to rooms was organised and controlled; it was made scarce. This was not scarcity in the sense of running out or having less of something, but the deliberate restriction of the use of space.
Architecture in particular and design in general already have a self-conscious relationship to constraint. There are several examples in contemporary design practice of engagement with the wider issues of scarcity. These include a careful focus on construction materials: specifying from responsible supply chains, reducing waste in construction and manufacture, and designing to minimise material use. More sophisticated designers are also considering the whole life of materials and components, and are designing not just for manufacture and use, but also for demolition and recycling. Then there are design practices that explore efficient forms of structure as a vehicle for constructing architectural value: one thinks of the minimal surfaces of Frei Otto, or more recently digitally engineered structures that follow the logic of parametric algorithms. At a grassroots level, from Walter Segal to Drop City, we find an entire ad-hoc vocabulary for re-use, often adapting unconventional, non-architectural materials, such as car tyres or plastic bottles. All these practices create real new design and architectural values. However, these practices tend to manifest themselves as management procedures for the production of objects rather than for the construction of social and design values, or else they tend to valorise reduction as a sole principle.
Another area of design research has returned to themes first explored in the 1960s, raising questions of use and the operations associated with any building, city or product. The Italian designer and theorist Ezio Manzini, for example, shows how designers – experts and ordinary people alike – need to redesign the systems through which users engage with complex networks. This is shown most clearly in his design for social innovation, which holds up co-housing and car-pooling as results of successful design processes. Again one sees the shift from the object as the focus of design, to a new focus on the processes and relations that come before and after objects. In the building-as-object all one can do is adjust the technical systems in order to address scarcity, but when one treats the building as a set of human and non-human forces and constraints, there are other ways of dealing with lack. An example is the “Cool Biz” initiative in Japan, which encouraged workers to wear looser and cooler clothes to work on hot summer days, a simple way of doing things differently that has resulted in significant energy savings as buildings need less cooling. A social constraint (the expectation to dress formally to work) is renegotiated in order to address a resource constraint (the need to reduce energy consumption).
Under conditions of scarcity, architecture and design can be defined as practices within a field of constraints. “Constraints” here have different connotations to limits or barriers. A limit might be definitive and a barrier might be overcome, but a constraint stresses scarcity’s elasticity: a constraint is variable and can be engaged with productively. In Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’s construction, “constraint does not only limit possible elements, it is also opportunity.” Constraints must be satisfied, but the way that they are satisfied remains open. Constraints are real (and so cannot be avoided) but not so fixed that they determine only one way of responding. “[Constraint] does not simply impose itself from the outer environment onto pre-existing reality,” they say, “but participates in the construction of an integrated structure and determines for the occasion a whole spectrum of intelligible new consequences.”
A good example of how a creative engagement with constraint can act as a catalyst for change is the Narkomfin building in Moscow, built in 1928 according to designs by Moisei Ginzburg, Ignaty Milinis and engineer Sergei Prokhorov from the constructivist OSA group. They negotiated a number of scarcities and constraints, and from within these new forms of living arose. Because of the housing shortage in Moscow at that time, there was a tendency for any multi-room apartment to be subdivided for multiple families. The Narkomfin apartments were designed to be too small to easily subdivide, and each unit was organised across two levels in order to further preclude subdivision. In addition the apartments were equipped only with kitchenettes. Communal kitchens and other collective spaces were provided to make up for this, in an attempt to promote the emergence of a new kind of sociability. The negotiation of scarcities and constraints was thus given direct architectural form and value. Scarcity was given the role of a constraint to be actively engaged with, realising a collective form of living.
Constraint is not submitted to but engaged with, interpreted and given meaning. Architecture and design then becomes a process of negotiation amidst a mixed set of social, political and material forces and constraints: human and non-human, needs and availabilities, technologies, knowledge and matter. Clues as to how one might engage with these complex networks might be found in the field of ecology.
ECOLOGY
As we pointed out earlier, economy and ecology share the root oikos, a term that encompasses the material life of the household. Economy as oikos, the management of scarce resources, is very different from the contemporary understanding of economics as a purportedly rational and “natural” science of organising flows of money and resources. The argument in the section on economics is that our conception of scarcity needs to escape the shadow of contemporary economics if we are to understand its full complexity. To do this an ecological understanding of scarcity is essential.
The concept and discipline of ecology emerged as a way of thinking about the interactions between organisms and the emergent behaviour of living systems. The term has since become perhaps the paradigmatic word for describing complex relational systems in time and space; ecological thinking has had an enormous influence upon environmental and spatial political movements. The first professional ecologists worked (as the economist Malthus did) for the East India companies, managing large productive landscapes for imperial capital. Ecological models of thought are abstractions based upon our perception of natural systems. Ecological sciences measure and diagram the flows of matter and energy through ecosystems, using many quantitative and statistical tools borrowed from economics, and ecology has been described as an economics of nature.
Ecology maps neatly onto the readings of scarcity that we have already encountered. Ecological thinking takes us beyond simplistic dualisms such as that between society and nature – oppositions on which simple theories of scarcity rely in their narrative of the human exploitation of nature as an inevitable consequence of progress and growth. Taking an “ecological view” reveals that capital has always operated ecologically, drawing no distinction between human and nature but rather turning everything into a “standing reserve” of resources, both human and material, to be expropriated. The idea that we are running out of resources only makes sense within this context of an inert, passive reserve of resources, which in its abstraction alienates us from a creative and sensuous relationship with matter, nature and life.
Ecological thinking challenges these ideas of fixed systems, and so upsets any rigid conceptions of what is considered “nature”, “artifice” and “matter”. Where these terms are often thought of as describing separate realms, in ecology they are seen as continuously interacting. Through observation and interpretation of these dynamic interactions, ecology leads us to relational, historical and contingent readings of the world. Matter, when viewed ecologically, is much more than fixed lumps fixed of stuff; it is “vibrant”, and the world is encountered as bodies mutually affecting each other. Such ecological readings are consistent with the contextual and relational understanding of scarcity that we described earlier. In an ecological understanding, dealing with scarcity is more than just stopping resources running out; rather it represents a renewed engagement with some of the processes through which scarcity arises.
A good example of how scarcity is deeply entangled with process and matter is the use of concrete in the built environment. Concrete is the most widely used building material on the planet: each year we produce over 10 billion tonnes of the stuff, more than a tonne for everyone on the planet. Three primary resource flows feed into concrete production: cement, water, and aggregate. All of these are apparently abundant resources, but the production of concrete creates in its wake a trail of accompanying scarcities. First, cement, the production of which accounts for nearly 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Thus an apparently benign material such as concrete is deeply implicated in the scarcities associated with global warming. In addition, we quarry around 5 billion tonnes of limestone each year for cement production. Second, water: each year around 1 billion cubic meters of water is used in concrete production. These numbers are so huge that they begin to affect local water tables, and this is indeed happening in China, resulting in water scarcities.
Finally, aggregate, of which sand is the main component. It may appear that sand is everywhere, a truly abundant material. However, for the purposes of concrete only certain types of alluvial sand are appropriate, resulting in the paradox of Dubai, set on the edge of a desert of sand, having to import sand from Australia. This is because the desert sands tend to contain more salt, clay and sulphur, and due to its exposure to winds have a rounder geometry, weakening the strength in construction.
Sand has become an economically contested resource, deeply affecting the environment. Moving aggregate does not imply that it can just be taken without causing damage; it is needed for the functioning of local ecosystems. In Europe, large bodies of mainland sand have already been exhausted – with the majority transformed into concrete. In the UK the majority of aggregate is therefore now dredged up from the English Channel and North Sea. There are significant environmental impacts associated with dredging, most obviously in relation to marine biodiversity, especially in fisheries that are already threatened by over-fishing.
As a resource that is apparently endlessly available, sand as raw material has little or no value. The cost of sand rests in labour, technology and transport needed to extract and move it. Any underlying or accompanying scarcities are ignored by both the public and in the language of money because it is not considered an economic, that is to say scarce, resource. The apparent abundance of aggregates and cement means there is little interest for looking for alternatives. They are only rarely substituted by aggregate extracted from recycled concrete or (in the case of cement) by fly ash from power stations. The production of concrete is one of pure linear extraction (with accompanying scarcities) whereas the use of recycled materials and fly ash would tie it into a more complex series of cyclical relations.
Concrete is not just some undifferentiated matter that we give form to, but a complex multi-scalar and multi-temporal system involving enormous resource flows, which restructure the deep material time of the planet. Concrete thus embodies in a particularly dramatic way many of the contradictions that we face when trying to think about scarcity. Concrete internalises a series of very local and wholly global relations. It can only be properly grasped as an ecological network that extends from the laboratory to the dredge boat, from the kiln to the computer. It affects the water supply of entire regions and economies, and global carbon dioxide production, but also can be understood as a series of flows at a molecular scale. Concrete might appear as mere inert matter, but it is in fact matter that encompasses process and thought; matter revealed as a relational process.
To reiterate, an ecological reading of scarcity shows how the consumption of resources and the creation of lack fit into a complex system of material and social flows, many of which operate at a global scale, but have effects on very specific contexts. Scarcity is often created at a macro-economic and geopolitical scale, but revealed at the micro-scale. Equally the accumulation of small scarcities that operate at a local scale can create large-scale disruption (for example the effects of local structural poverty on regional economic development). This systemic character of scarcity reinforces the previous argument that designers have to move away from a purely linear, problem-solving manner. “Solving” the problem of scarcity is only very partial: it often doesn’t address the underlying reasons as to how that scarcity has been designed in the first instance.
Instead of attempting to solve scarcity, it is better to redefine it not as a problem but as a constraint to make sense of. Is it necessary to build that building in the first instance? Are the parameters by which the project defined the most appropriate ones? Can one measure things in other ways? What contextual forces have brought forth the respective scarcity? All of these questions require one to challenge scarcity as an historic a priori truth. A relational approach based around ecology also demands that the designer is always aware of the fact that addressing scarcity in one context might lead to another form of scarcity in a different part of the ecological and social system. This suggests a set of actions that the designer might deploy under conditions of scarcity – not to suggest that scarcity will somehow disappear or no longer be a problem, but to propose thinking and operations that allow designers to engage productively with scarcity.
REDESIGN
Today we speak of design not only in the sense of designing buildings, landscapes, graphics or vacuum cleaners, but also in the context of genetically modified maize or money flows. All of these are enmeshed in current economic models, again showing design’s ambivalent character, caught between addressing real need and producing want. However, there are emerging models of design that address the design of scarcity, and so contribute to transforming the way we live in profound ways.
The disciplines of design have in recent years been taken on as paradigms in policy and management theory in general. The term “design thinking” for example has been coined to describe a practice of open ended, semi-rational, semi-intuitive trans-disciplinary inquiry. Among other concepts it has been offered as a paradigm for a new design practice that is closely related to business, offering a methodology for what have been termed “wicked problems”. The danger is that in its uncritical mode, approaches like design thinking may be sucked into, and so exploited by, the very processes that we are arguing it should redefine.
The expanded sense of design is thus not enough on its own. Design under conditions of scarcity has to act with an awareness of the constitution of those constraints, and then project outwards from them. This is where the politicised practice of design comes into play, engaging with economy in general and the designs of scarcity in particular. In the built environment a broad range of designers, architects and activists, loosely grouped as “spatial agents”, have explicitly attempted to politicise questions of such design agency, primarily through attempts to address the design of organisations, systems, processes and material life cycles. The designer here operates as collaborator, escaping from any mythology of the designer as an individual genius solving the problems of the world. These new design-based actions have sought to operate as a form of resistance to the economic status quo, leading to new social conditions that allow people to share resources and live more collaboratively – for example the Brazilian architectural group MOM works with favela dwellers to empower them to construct better and safer dwellings outside of the market economy.
Another area where design has successfully opened itself up in a more critical manner with respect to scarcity is in providing platforms for sharing resources. Open source systems do away with limitations on knowledge – that is to say, open source opposes the maintenance of a scarcity of information – and give access to the public in a manner that encourages redistribution. Design thinking, spatial agency and open source platforms begin to allow us to see new ways by which we might be able to conduct design. Specifically we can see a number of design tactics emerging that can inform a future practice of redesign. Optimisation, restarting, adaptation and redistribution all deal in broad terms specifically with the contextual and designed nature of scarcity, and start from the point of view of a networked and interrelated world.
Optimisation has become a catchword for corporate progress. By making “efficiency gains”, the argument of the corporate world is that waste (human and non-human) will be reduced, and with it scarcity mitigated. Corporations optimise one aspect of their operation but this is often at the expense of another: a supermarket may “optimise” its supply chains and in so doing kill off others. Food production is concentrated within a supply chain of industrialised agriculture, with attendant restrictive labour structures, that decimates small-scale and diverse forms of production. This form of corporate optimisation based around the notions of efficiency is too often short-term and shortsighted; based as they are on linear models of extraction, all they can do is pare down at each stage of the process.
William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle-to-Cradle model, for example, aims to challenge this kind of reductive approach. They explicitly argue for a more relational and ecological design method, conceiving of a new manufacturing paradigm based upon metabolic loops of material flows. In this they radically re-imagine efficiency and notions of optimisation. They argue that ecological design is not about efficiency or reducing the use of resources but rather demands an expanded ecological conception of the entire life-cycle and metabolism of matter. They remind us that fruit trees, from an economic perspective, are incredibly inefficient and wasteful. Only a tiny fraction of their fruit produces new trees. But some will. The huge quantities of waste they produce are not signs of inefficiency and failure at the end of a linear production process, but rather become food for other organisms in more circular ecological metabolic loops, and thus inseparable from more “valuable” resources. However, McDonough and Braungart’s model is full of contradictions. They frequently imagine more socialised manufacturing systems as the necessary infrastructure for such processes, but then fetter this imagery by trying to make it work on the basis of existing capitalist property relations. Design for optimisation in the context of scarcity needs to take its cues from outside existing economic models: from ecology, from cybernetics or other approaches that include a relational sense, and which understand interdependency as a core feature of design.
The most poignant symbol of the linear model of production is obsolescence, in which design objects are deemed to have reached the end of their life. As we argued before, obsolescence is too often intentionally designed into systems in order to keep the market in a permanent state of demand. Against this inherently wasteful, and scarcity-producing, strategy, restarting brings back to life stuff that is working but no longer in demand or with its demise planned in. While obsolescence accelerates scarcity, a restart, including reprogramming buildings and spaces so as to initiate a new life, mitigates scarcity. Restarting is more active than the rather defeatist commonplace “make-do and mend”. Thus the environmental designers, The Restart Project, in their campaign against planned obsolescence, have taken on the “kill-chip”, which is programmed by printer manufacturers to stop the printer working after it has delivered a certain number of copies. By employing a Russian software hack that disables the kill-chip, apparently useless equipment is brought back to life.
Closely related is adaptation, which refers to both reconfiguring existing conditions, but also designing with a view to future adaptation. Architecture can offer the opportunity to transgress the single use classifications that inhibit free appropriation by the user to meet individual needs. The single-purpose commodity is favoured by markets because they proliferate. Read any in-flight magazine and you’ll find things that you never knew you wanted, and almost certainly don’t need. But these classifications are also constructions of scarcity. First, by fixing use they limit use. In most western cities there is a scarcity of one form of use (typically housing) and abundance of others (typically industrial and commercial), but cultural and regulatory codes keep the two realms separate. Scarcity is thus solidified. Secondly, multiple classifications of objects proliferate redundancy and accelerate extraction. Scarcity is thus exaggerated. Design thus needs to adapt the existing, so one category becomes another, an office a house. A second approach is to design for future adaptation and against the single category, so the objects and spaces can assume multiple and hybrid uses, thereby avoiding future redundancy.
Finally, redistribution as a design tactic. It is already with us through the growing number of peer-to-peer exchange networks in which space (Airbnb, Couchsurfing), resources (Freecycle, Streetbank) and transport (Liftshare, Zipcar) are shared around in an apparently new economy. These networks have the capacity to disrupt the old economy and their power structures, and so it is no surprise that Airbnb has attracted massive venture capital investment, including from a hotel chain that saw its extraordinary success as a threat to their own operation. It has also swept up many of its local competitors through acquisition. In many instances, far from being models of a new sustainable society, these networked initiatives have become the leading edge of neoliberal expansion by using the concept of redistribution in order to merely optimise and capture increasingly fragmented labour resources – for example, small-scale labour outsourcing systems such as Taskrabbit. However, the networks that operate outside the market economy, particularly those concerned with social innovation, show the potential transformative power of redistribution.
It is thus possible for designers to use redistributive tactics as part of a wider collective project. What if, instead of adding more stuff to the world (which is the normal end of design), the focus of design shifts to the redistribution of what is already there? In a post-growth world, redistribution becomes not so much a nicety as a necessity.
All these tactics – optimisation, restarting, adaptation and redistribution – deploy design intelligence in a manner that redefines the ends of design. Designers generally define themselves by exercising their creativity through creation – of freshness, of innovation as expressed through new objects. Optimising, restarting, adapting and redistributing do not produce these images of progress on which design has drawn on as default. They do not threaten the practice of design, but just ask that it be exercised in a different manner – moving from refinement of the new to the reinvention of what is there already.
These concepts call for a serious re-imagining of our contemporary scarcity relations: rather than simply optimising, adapting, restarting or redistributing what exists (i.e. the current models), an alternative approach requires an enormous rebuilding and retooling exercise; re-distribution in its true sense. It requires a wholly new project, a redrawing. Design in its original meaning of disegno relates to the idea of drawing forth. To design is to project into the future, to plan for future conditions. Design imagines future scenarios that differ from the present conditions, not unlike the most progressive aspects of the project of modernity. The fact is that the redrawing required is in many respects currently unimaginable. We should not be put off by pessimism, expressed for example in Frederic Jameson’s famous remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The whole point of the genuinely new is of course that it is unimaginable until it appears. We must discover an affirmative design practice that desires a different now and future.
DESIRE: REDRAWING THE GRAPH
The historical understanding of scarcity has been constrained by its definition as lack. Scarcity as lack brings with it limiting connotations. However, as this essay has shown, it is possible to redefine scarcity, and with it find more productive possibilities. Scarcity is in most cases far from a natural or inevitable condition. Instead, scarcity is bound to its context, “planned and organized in and through social production” as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pointed out. The endless reproduction of scarcity within our world is mostly designed, and so the obverse is also true, namely that design can engage with conditions of scarcity.
The Design of Scarcity is both a statement of fact and a call to action.
It is a call to action that asks us to reject the inevitability of scarcity, because accepting scarcity as a persistent natural law justifies inequity in advance. There might be various forms of intervening in the structures of scarcity so as to reform and redistribute goods and flows of money, but the law of scarcity, as an independent eternal truth remains: with scarcity situated at a primordial level, inequity apparently does not exist, because this is how nature is. To escape this sense of the inescapability of inequality, it is essential to underline the design of scarcity and lack, and to act on it.
It is also a call to action that asks us to reconsider the relation of lack and desire. The pervasive logic of scarcity blanks out reconsidering its sibling, desire. However much one wants to release scarcity from its economic hold, it still retains repressive and dominant connotations, and ones that obliterate a productive reading of desire. Scarcity relations necessarily involve desire; a desire that, in the neoclassical conception, is conceptualized as infinite. The creation of lack becomes an art of capitalist society, restricting access to commodities in order to create endless want. Desire is thus artificially manipulated by the market: it is reduced to the lack of commodity, extinguishing the multiple facets of what desire can mean to life, denying desire as a motive and vehicle for change. Why should the scarcity postulate – “that human needs are unlimited but the means to achieve them are scarce” – be allowed to go unchallenged? We need to reject the idea that human desire is tied simply to unlimited needs, and instead use desire as an active force for change.
Finally, The Design of Scarcity asks us to join desire with design. Desire projects a site of possibility – a site where different social relations are possible. The design of scarcity is a productive agency, something that all of us designers, expert and non-expert alike, can and should engage with. Design becomes an act of true desire, as the act of imagining new futures.
Earlier in this essay, we referred to Malthus’s law of scarcity and described it as a graph, with a coordinate system: the x-axis indicating time and the y-axis indicating increment. Malthus spoke of two lines: the first one was food or resource and its increment was linear. The other one was population growth; its increment was an exponential curve. At one point, as he depicted, the line meets the curve. This is the Malthusian point of crisis and it will cause dearth and hunger.
Then there was a second graph: the same coordinate system again with time on the horizontal axis, and gain on the vertical axis. We expected the line to head towards the top right corner: better, faster and, above all, more. Finally, there was a third graph. It showed a curve that indicated growth: that of greenhouse gas emissions, debt and other irrepressible conditions of the early 21st century. It skyrocketed, leaving a trail of scarcities in its wake.
Those graphs limit our imagination and possibilities, depressing us with images of rocketing debt, shaking us with depictions of environmental collapse. They govern our lives, hurtling us towards a future of accelerated scarcity. They leave little room for manoeuvre apart from tweaking the coordinates to slow things down. However, a different reading of scarcity, moving from pure scarcity to multiple desires, demands us to redraw the graph of time and increment. Only then can we find new spaces of potential.
With various timelines brought together all at once, we had too many coordinates. Moreover, as they took on board complex interrelations, they had lost their linear characteristics. We abandoned the x-y coordinate system immediately. We do not know quite how the graph looks now, but we like it much more than what we had before. It loops and bends. It has gaps in it, and multiple ways around it. It intermits and reinserts. It is dots and strange curves. Scrawly and spidery, like a drawing by Paul Klee.