Fast-Moving or Cheap?
Make sure you know what you’re planning for
Once, I was visiting a WWI fortress at the French-German border (Fort de Mutzig, Feste Kaiser Wilheml II, highly recommended). An interesting side-note was the mentality when it came to putting up the border signs:
The Germans used cast-iron signs with intricate ornaments and weather-resistant paint. For them, it symbolized the strength and finality of German culture and ownership. The French, on the other hand, used flimsy, quick-to-build wooden signs. For the French, shifting borders were just temporary, and they would conquer more land anyways. So why waste all the effort for a sign? Make it cheap and quick to build.
Recently, I visited Toronto and we had an Airbnb in a neighboring city, called Brampton. The area was nice and clean, peaceful. And I was truly surprised to see so many nice stone-houses!
Except they aren’t. They are wooden.
Coming from Europe, my knee-jerk reaction was disappointment. A stone house in Europe is most likely actually made of stone and possibly hundreds of years old. In North America: It’s a fake. An imitation of the beauty of old historical buildings from back in Europe, or maybe of the rich people’s mansions from the early times of American colonization.
But then, I had a second feeling slowly emerging — a feeling of freedom. A stone house is build to last. A wooden house does not ask for your allegiance. It does not expect you to care for it so that it lasts 500 years. You can just come in, live, and leave. You can change it easily. And maybe, one day, rebuild it entirely. No attachments.
Our current technological development progresses in a rapid pace. Think of social-media coming and going, every year a new generation of smartphones is released — what is new today, will be old tomorrow. Buy (subscribe), use, throw away. Rinse, repeat. Nothing (almost) we use or buy today, is meant to last. We even expect things to need replacements/updates within a few years at most. And there is also a lot of uncertainty, if, what we buy today, actually still exists tomorrow.
Is this good? I don’t know. Given our ecological food-print, we should try to reduce the waste of resources. That means, planning long term, stable, with minimal dependencies. But it does make me thing differently about many cultural differences between Europe and America.
I was just recently at a light-installation “theme park” in Montreal. It was a collection of plastic figures with LED-lights in and on them, speakers playing music, and in one place also some animatronics. Even though the tickets were not cheap, the place was used as an advertisement platform — that’s capitalism I guess. But the whole place, oozed the same “temporary” feeling that I feel here so often. Don’t commit to a quality product, just setup a quick and cheap thingy where maximum profit can be extracted from.
Here it goes again: Was it good to have the installation at all? Lots of people came and enjoyed it. Honestly, I had a good time, too. Or is it yet another throw-away insta-satisfaction?
Coming back to the ecological footprint, I think we all should think very carefully what we use our resources for. And for both strategies discussed, we should focus the following:
Short-term: Use as little resources as possible. And if you have to, make sure everything is either reusable or recyclable. After that, make it cheap and easily movable, changeable. These objects can be a fun distraction, prototypes and temporary installments. They’re not meant to stay, and so you should treat them. Decide on a finite life-time for short-term objects and communicate it.
Long-term: Build it to last as long as possible. Use materials that are proven to withstand weather (not like 60s concrete that is starting to fall apart). For parts that need replacement, use recyclable, sustainable materials and make them easy to exchange. Use your time to build. Pay attention to the details — once built, no-one is going to fix mistakes. Plan ahead for continuous, long-term maintenance. Don’t over-complicate and over-abstract things.
PS: I hope you like what you read. If you want to read more of my stories, feel free to follow me here on Medium! Cheers, Felix
