...it is the architects, with their modernist dreams of making the world anew according to implacably abstract principles, who have created the wasteland [in which one of the protagonists finds himself] in the first place. Ballard captures the socially isolating nature of modern architecture—and the modern way of life associated with it—with great symbolic force.The architects, yes ... and the town planners too. As in so many other social and environmental aspects, government and big business have brought about a monoculture; a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach that might very well optimize some abstract economic indicators, but which leaves does very little for our psychological wellbeing. Subsidies to the energy and construction sectors play their part, as does an infrastructure that relentlessly favours the large and global at the expense of the small and local. The impact of the top-down approach to policy isn't always negative - sometimes it's desirable, sometimes necessary. The point is that, manifestly in architecture and town planning, the outcomes it mainly serves are of little interest to ordinary people - as against the large corporates and government agencies for whom administrative tidiness and consistency are ends in themselves.
We need instead a system that is responsive to genuine outcomes; not the academic economic figures that so bewitch our policymakers. A system that, because it subordinates activity to meaningful outcomes, will not stifle diverse approaches to reaching those outcomes. Social Policy Bonds are one way in which we can bring an end to the dreary, dangerous monoculture that threatens our physical and social wellbeing just as surely as it has stripped our agricultural land of wildlife and cloned our cities.
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