Katarzyna Jagodzinska talks to Zuzanna Skalska about the directions of change in the world.
Zuzanna Skalska researches and analyzes signals of change for business. Her career began in 1998 at Philips Design, where she worked for many years in the group responsible forSensorial Trends Analysis in the visionary projects of the future emerging there. She was then responsible for researching and analyzing industry trends at a leading design studio in the Netherlands for almost fifteen years. In 2014, she founded 360Inspiration, a company that works with clients from a variety of industries. Among them are many global giants and market leaders. She specializes in areas such as radicalinnovation (Up-front innovation) and strategic thinking about the future(Future(s) Thinking®).
Zuzanna Skalska
Katarzyna Jagodzinska: Even before the pandemic, you predicted that among the directions of change in the world would be Scandinavianization, a shift from "I" to "we," a shift from empires to strongholds. You said that city centers were becoming small villages, as infrastructure, along with residents, was moving to the suburbs, and that city presidents were now in big trouble because tax revenues were shrinking and there was not enough money to maintain cities. Today, with the pandemic spreading, is this direction still relevant?
Zuzanna Skalska: First of all, I don't want to use the word "trend," because it is for me at the moment a leprosy of modern capitalism, a sales slogan. We are talking about directions. I deal with signals of change - researching and analyzing signals of change for business. These analyses consist of a constant study of various industries and issues related to technology, politics, economics, the development of society or the environment. I visit the most prominent trade shows in eight different industries around the world, attend many opinionated conferences, read, talk, listen. I look for sparks that can ignite change. I am interested in the process of combining diverse, often non-obvious information.
Almost five years ago I talked about Scandinavianization, it is indeed ongoing. Everyone is now looking at Sweden, if only because it is the only major country that has not done a lockdown. This has to do with population density - Sweden has one large urban agglomeration with nine hundred thousand inhabitants, and all the rest are small settlements where people live a few kilometers apart. They don't have the problem we have - in Europe and Asia - in our very dense cities. Therefore, the transition from "I" to "we" was a very natural way for them to develop their social consciousness from the very beginning. That's where the first popular cell phone - Nokia, with the company's slogan "Connecting people" - or the Bluetooth system of the Swedish company Ericsson also came from, that is from the north, because here I'll add Finland.
Most important is the way of life adopted in the Northern states. Before and after the war, the Scandinavian countries were very poor. They came out of this crisis thanks to industriousness, industrial development or natural deposits, this is the case of Norway. In all rankings, these very societies are among the happiest in the world. Every private factory - after all, how many Danish, Swedish or Finnish brands are there, from fashion to cars to all things for the home - brings together an entire community in a given town, is a mainstay and a guarantee of existence. The factory also invests in the urban structure, identifies with its city. It's a thinking: what you can do for the city, not what the city can do for you; without the belief that since they pay taxes, they deserve it. It's also the philosophy that you should slow down and skillfully find Scandinavian hygge, that moment of bliss when you can feel good and need almost nothing to do so, that is a state of mind.
Dominika Krzych and Kasia Basiewicz of Inspekty.pl plant vegetables in the boxes of the community garden at the Vistula Station Park in Cracow (2018)
Photo: Katarzyna Zolich
This is what we in our Eastern Europe can't quite understand, because it involves intangible things. For us, everything had to be material: I practice mindfulness, but for this I need a T-shirt for three hundred zlotys, leggings for five hundred and fifty, of course a special brand, because in another brand I won't achieve this mindfulness. For yoga I also need a special mat, because on something else, after all, I can't show off. It was all artificial, for show. We tried to attach to ourselves the values that those societies achieved without having so many material possessions, but having the most important value, which is community. The name "Scandinavianization" is not so much about the Scandinavians themselves, but about their way of thinking, their mentality. Scandinavization defined the transition from "I have" to "we have" economics.
In the case of cities - indeed, powerful urban agglomerations have already begun to go beyond naming. The city as such does not have its own definition, or rather, there is no single definition - each country has its own, as it has its own history and its own laws, according to which the city is built. It turns out that each city is an individual organism. Growing at a great pace, Asian cities are real colossi, "metropolis" is an insufficient word. There are many cities of more than tens of millions in Asia that we don't even know, meanwhile their population exceeds that of most countries. I remember that when I was on a business mission with the Dutch government to Istanbul, the Dutch prime minister greeted the mayor of Istanbul and the words were said that they manage the same number of people - seventeen million inhabitants each. Over dinner there was an interesting conversation about what is a state and what is a city.
When you look at a map of Europe (to the Urals), you have London, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul and Moscow. These are the largest agglomerations. If we were to redefine the word "city" right now, only they in Europe would be cities. And since all the rest are not cities, they are simply villages. It's a take you can already read about in many books. My latest read on the subject is Swedish author Per Stenholm's book "City Village of To-Morrow." In it, he argues that the best solution for today's cities is to "villageize" them, that is, to look at them from the perspective of not one big organization managed from above, like the state, but neighborhoods that are a kind of united villages under the umbrella of one city. We know that together we are stronger, together we are able to create a better economy. Economic livelihood is one of the determinants of a city, and at this point the set of small villages that make up these cities provides better preparation for the future than the molochs.
Dominika Krzych, co-founder of Inspekt.pl, tells us: "The garden was created to be closer to nature and so that our children could have what we had as children: a garden full of plants. We wanted the children to know where vegetables come from and to understand that they don't grow in a vegetable store or a market. The idea came from a trip to Vienna, where Kasia saw such crates full of vegetables and we decided to make one at our place. We hadn't gardened before, but when I was a child, my parents grew vegetables for their own consumption (they still do). Kasia's parents have a garden with raised beds and a greenhouse. We learned the rest in practice, in our backyard."
photo: inspect.co.uk archive
Why? Even when we look at today's situation, lockdown, people who live in massive multi-family houses, commonly called blocks of flats (a legacy of communist times), and have only tiny balconies, and sometimes still behind bars, they face a big problem - how to find a quiet corner to work. This is the case in large metropolitan areas. Where cities were built to fit a person, each house has a garden, a large balcony and a completely different space to enjoy. I'm not talking about the suburban agglomeration, because this area does not belong to the city and does not enrich the urban economy, only its own small municipalities. This is a problem for the city.
These strategies were adopted in the development. Berlin has set its sights on garden agglomeration from the very beginning, and so have many Dutch or Danish cities - they are aiming for rurality - reducing cars, increasing greenery, creating cities for the human being, cities that you can embrace with one glance and understand them.
I stick to the same issues all the time, I could just change the nomenclature at this point.
Katherine: You gave examples of cities where these changes started a while back. Do you think the pandemic and the ensuing closures and suspensions will make managers of other cities open their eyes and want to move in that direction too?
Susanna: This is a generalization, I always try to be cautious. You can't say that all of us will have our eyes opened. If they are opened by the three managers, it will still be a lot. These are the problems of today's city managers - how to feed their city, how to make it possible to survive? Certainly at the moment in the countryside there is a better chance of survival, because you can have your chickens, and behind the house crops, if you have close to the river, you can fish, if you have a forest, you can pick berries in the summer and mushrooms in the fall. Somehow we have gathering as a tradition, it's just that we have started to be very ashamed of it. Making jams, making something ourselves, was a shame at some point. We preferred to go to a restaurant for dinner with friends. It was in good taste, especially in large metropolitan areas. One didn't invite people to one's home, unless it was a house like from a jurnal, which had to be shown, but then most often housewives didn't cook themselves, but ordered catering.
Now we have the opposite situation. A few years ago, the fashion for baking cakes and pies began in the UK. The program "The Great British Bake Off" on the state-owned BBC channel broke viewing records. The same program came to the Netherlands ["De heel Holland bakt"] and suddenly it became clear that the biggest show off was baking your own cake. Yesterday I was watching a TV journal, they were showing a queue in a small village in the north of Holland for a big mill, of course with people standing every meter and a half apart. It turned out that people were baking during the lockdown. My friends, Dutch and Polish, one after another uploaded to social media pictures of breads and cakes baked with their children. We are able to do things ourselves, only we haven't done them until now, going with the wave of social compulsion to show up with a tag.
Green Block is a neighborhood garden in the courtyard of a Krakow block of flats, brought to life in 2017 by one of the residents, Lukasz Szydlak (pictured). Mostly ornamental plants grow here, but there is also no shortage of herbs or vegetables. The garden is grown naturally, without the use of chemicals, water is provided by collected rainwater, the garden infrastructure is completed by a composter.
Photo: Matthew M. Klagisz
Catherine: This also shows how borderless the trend is. Europe is baking. The scarce product in Poland is precisely yeast, small bakeries sourcing from mills also have problems with flour.
Susanna: In a moment of crisis, we suddenly become resourceful. I was ten years old when martial law was imposed, and I remember very well how people coped then. When there was nothing in the stores, after all, we ate normally. In such a situation, we have a lot of initiative, we are resourceful, we help, we share, we are good. And when we are well off, we start to get lazy, jealous, the worst qualities come out of a person.
Catherine: You talk about grassroots activities. And what can be done to ensure that the opportunity presented by the pandemic - to reset and change the rules of the game - is not missed?
Susanna: It takes informed and wise city managers. If there are no such ones, all will be lost. There are a few of them in Poland, they have been managing cities for some tenure - the mayor of Krakow, the mayor of Gdynia or Sopot, and so was the mayor of Gdansk. People trust them and give them an electoral mandate. But let's not forget who really owns the city. The government? The city government? Well, precisely no - the owner of the city is the one who pays taxes in the city. All city residents are co-owners of the city, and the city hall has only a service function. We hire the city hall to run the administrative affairs of our city. Every few years we elect a person to manage all this property.
However, the city government often forgets that it is solely because we - the city owners - pay taxes, and they are for us, not we for them. Every city official is at the service of urban residents, not the other way around. Misunderstanding this role is upsetting. Thinking only about winning the next election and doing only term things, such as opening a museum, nothing else, is no feat. The city doesn't need to open a museum, let the Ministry of Culture open it in cooperation with local initiatives and business (PPP system, Public Private Partnership). Residents need better-designed bus stops, better-designed public transportation, more bridges (if our city has a river), better-lit streets, level pavement so that we don't constantly run into potholes, efficient offices. Good mayors understand this.
A backyard chicken coop and pigeon house in Krakow's Bronowice (7 km from the Main Square), enclosed by new housing estates
photo: Katarzyna Jagodzinska
Katarzyna: It seems to me that the realization of the basic needs you mention and cultural needs need not be at all disconnected, and good administrators should satisfy them all. The museum, even though it will serve all the residents, certainly stems from the needs of the cultural community. Besides, there are also museums whose creation is sought, for example, by neighborhood residents. This was the case in Krakow with the Museum of Podgórze, which, after ten years of effort, was established as a branch of the Krakow Museum to tell the story of the Podgórze district and become a keystone for residents.
Susanna: Such a city initiative is praised as much as possible. The worst thing is when such an idea is imposed and implemented from above, by force.
Katarzyna: Today, during the lockdown, public spaces ceased to function - parks and recreational spaces were closed, people were not allowed to walk or gather. Will these spaces have to be redefined now?
Zuzanna: It certainly is. There are messages coming from everywhere that we will definitely have a "one and a half meter economy" until we have a cure and a vaccine, which is probably until 2022. This will apply to all spaces - parks, buses, banks, airplanes, cinemas, theaters, restaurants, schools or museums. Everything will have to be designed with the new reality in mind. We need to start getting used to it. Our behavior - the English word behavior reflects it better, because it includes not only behavior, but also mentality and culture - will involve a completely different space. Restaurant interiors will have to be redecorated or remodeled. In parks, benches will have to be secured or looked at differently. The mayor of Vienna before the Easter holidays created a new street space in the center of the city, which is shared by cars, cyclists and pedestrians. The speed limit is twenty kilometers per hour.
Catherine: Conditions are different. In Scandinavia, there is more dispersion. Moloch cities are densely populated, have a lot of skyscrapers, apartments are small. Will everyone, regardless of geography, have to follow the economy of one and a half meters?
Susanna: It's already known that northern Italy, New York or parts of Spain won't open soon. In a way it's a shot in the knee, they are closed to those who enter with money - we're talking about hotels, restaurants, museums, that is, tourism. Almost everywhere we have health care killed. This is the third world war, the main armed force this time is not the military, but the medical service. Except that we medical service never prepared for such a situation. It never earned as much as the military and was not a strategic branch of the state. We have mental burnout of people who work in hospitals, we have trauma. It will take time to rebuild. These are similar observations to those after 9/11. We started watching people with backpacks then, we became sensitive to people and situations. Someone left their luggage and a bomb disposal team would show up. Now we have to get used to similar consequences in public spaces. People will avoid each other by a wide margin.
Catherine: This is the first such global epidemic, but it's certainly not the first to have made wide circles. There was SARS before, there's ebola all the time. Have lessons been learned from these experiences?
Susanna: Many countries look not so much to ebola as to the Spanish flu [1918-1920]. In Poland, Spanish flu didn't have such tragic consequences, but in Western Europe it did. Soldiers brought the disease back from the front lines of the First World War. All of Western Europe, the United States and many more countries were going through a very severe epidemic. People then learned social distancing, masks, hand washing. It was a huge lesson, including that health care is an important institution. But, well, we quickly forgot about it. The health service in general was supposed to be a thing of the past, as we came to believe in the sacred technology that was supposed to test and cure us. Lessons were certainly learned in the countries that dealt with this epidemic. But rather, everyone was preparing for a completely different virus - a digital one. We are lucky in all this misfortune, because we have electricity, water, a banking system, telephony. All of that works. If the digital virus came, we wouldn't have all that.
Catherine: Unfortunately, one does not exclude the other.
Susanna: Exactly, it could be even worse, so let's be happy with what we have. It sounds absurd, but it could claim even more victims. Epidemiologists are now saying that the crown flu will return every year, and we'll just get immune to it. We'll have to get used to it. The coronavirus is a result of globalization. Other theories say that with the melting of glaciers or the fires that have occurred in Australia, the viruses are looking for new carriers.
Motyka and Sun community garden in Warsaw's Finnish house estate (Otwarty Jazdów); established in 2015, it brings together people connected with ecology and urban gardening facebook.com/motykaislonce
photo: Maciej Lepkowski
Catherine: Now that we can't move and sit in confinement, it has turned out that thanks to technology it is possible to get a lot of things done and that many of us can still work. Is this likely to continue once the pandemic passes?
Susanna: There will definitely be a review of the way we work. Some employers will see that a lot of things can happen online. The big airlines are analyzing the market and guess that there will probably be a review of costs and a reduction in the number of flights. Lufthansa has just decided to close its subordinate airline Germanwings. Whether or not we work from home will depend on the employer. If the employer is like a farmer on the farm, he will consider that the Lord's eye is fattening the horse. If he is modern, aware and enlightened, he will go to the people. What will be important to him will be the happiness, well-being and free time that people have while they are at home, because they can arrange this time for themselves - they don't have to rush off to work, but can have breakfast in peace and quiet with their children, take the children to kindergarten, and then go with them let's say to the dentist, and still get their work done. There are smart company managers who are well aware of this. They prefer to have mentally healthy, rested and loyal people who will be open to many different things for that company. They will be its ambassadors and contribute to the growth of that company. How you treat your customer or your employee during a coronavirus, is how that customer or employee will treat you after. This is a moment of truth. However, this does not apply to manufacturing companies, i.e. positions in production.
Catherine: We've been living during the pandemic for a long time, in Europe it's been over a month. This time has allowed different scenarios of a post-coronavirus world to be floated. Everyone is discussing. What place do designers - designers and architects - have in these discussions? Are they an important party to this discussion?
Susanna: Very important. The designer has an interesting role: he is that person who transfers ideas and thoughts into reality. The role of the designer is changing as reality and needs change.
Catherine: So you can risk saying that to some extent designers are responsible for the kind of world we live in?
Susanna: In a huge way. If you're standing at a bus stop that doesn't protect you from the sun when it's hot, when it's raining, and when it's blizzarding in the winter, you're standing under a dummy, not at a bus stop. When you have a ticketing system and someone new comes to town and doesn't know where or how to buy tickets, it means the service was poorly designed. For me, the best design is one that is invisible. You don't see it because it works. You can see where the bus stop is, thanks to the information graphics you know how the buses and streetcars run. You don't need to know the language, you can see and understand. The power of design is enormous. If you don't have to read an instruction manual and you immediately know how something works, it's a brilliantly designed thing, service or reality. Products and services shape reality, and it shapes our consciousness and culture.
Catherine: Now many industries are counting losses. Various projects and developments have been put on hold. Will the design profession experience a renaissance after the coronavirus, as many things will have to be redesigned?
Susanna: That's a good question, except that we have a great many unaware companies that won't even pronounce the word "designer." It will be more like "advertising agency" that will do what needs to be done quickly and preferably cheaply. For me, the important thing here is the English acronym ROI - return on investment. The most important thing is that last word - "investment". Many Polish entrepreneurs have a problem with it, because it means an expense. When you invest, you don't expect an immediate return. Companies often expect an immediate increase in turnover. There is no return on the expense, there is only a return on the investment. Now it remains to be seen how many companies have been able to invest in such a way as to survive the crisis. There are probably more companies that spent money on the fly to show how brilliant they are, and this was dressed up in pretty words by marketing tubes. Individual companies have decided to invest in such a way as to become a flexible and organic company that can handle any situation.
But, most importantly, you don't need to have all the answers now. What you need for this moment is: be curious and open-minded enough to keep learning.
