What's next, America?

There are a great many people who would like to know what's next. Maybe  right now the future is less predictable than it has been in a long time. Especially immigrants are concerned what the future will hold. This article, although written from the perspective of an immigrant, isn't about the recent election but about the "brand" USA, how the world sees the country and how it sees itself and what should happen next to align the country with expectations and master the challenges with a special eye on cities. 

Each immigrant has a vision of the country of choice over the reality left behind. An idea of what the future homeland should be like that is fed from education, stories, news and folklore. America's brand has held its appeal over generations, even though the country has reinvented itself many times over.

Immigrant nation: what's next?

Each immigrant will find that the new found reality doesn't always conform to the imagined one. The worse the place of origin, the less such a discrepancy matters. For those like me who left a prosperous  and free country behind, idea and experience better be not too far apart. A bit of activism can help to reduce the difference. Each immigrant shifts the reality of their host country ever so slightly while the host country also transforms each immigrant. That is the idea of the "melting pot" even if the idea may have been overstated, there is the push and pull of attraction, identification and influence in which the country and its people shape each other like the spouses in a lasting marriage.

Cities are the microcosm where the cultures shaped the designated ports of entry Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York or Los Angeles through ethnic neighborhoods, music foods and customs.

Immigrants more than anybody curated various narratives and brands. They radioed their vision and their experiences to the world.  As a place of new frontiers, discovery and adventure. As a place that sheds restrictive conventions in favor of pragmatism and upward mobility. A place of innovation and progress. A place of democracy that was never interrupted from tyranny, a country of courage and opportunity that doesn't reward privilege and class but actual achievement. An exceptional country, God's own country. The narrative brought the next of kin, the stream never ceased and the country tried its best to live up to the expectations.

Reality never fully matched any of these images. One doesn't need to point to the slave trade to find people that did not set out for the better life oversees and still are here now. But more than any other country, America inspired dreams and motivated people to come by offering the glass that was half full.

The future of work: Fearsome technology

Capitalism and industrialism were seen as ugly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but held a shiny promise under Henry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. Wars were quagmires until America intervened and fought a good victory. But America also turned things the other way around: Mass production and consumption were powerful engines of prosperity until they became a blight on creation and turned cities into undesirable places. Automobility seemed the pinnacle of industrial production, consumption and freedom and until it turned into a curse that maimed and killed and took the life out of cities and towns.

But the next vision has always been right around the corner. The alternative hippy lifestyle was born in the USA in response to consumerism, the student movement the response to a frozen suburban utopia, the environmental movement to burning rivers, the computer revolution to fading manufacturing, the acceptance of the other followed the racial and sexual stigmatization. New Urbanism followed sprawl. Social media and virtual empires have conquered the world starting out in Silicon Valley. All those movements were born in the USA. That is not to say that some other country was eventually  better in actual implementation. 

The country reinvented itself, always a leader and an instigator. It invented the restrictive covenant and the civil rights, the pollution and the clean air act and the clean water act.  There was the discovery of space and the invention of GIS, the Internet and e-mail, social media and online shopping. The world speaks English, uses Microsoft or Apple devices and software and aspires to cities styled after the US. Film, entertainment and games, pesticides, genomics and medications, there is hardly a field that the US doesn't lead or dominate. Hardly a wave the country doesn't embrace with much more enthusiasm and much less trepidation than some others. Agriculture shrinking? No problem we have manufacturing. Manufacturing shrinking? No problem, we have the service industry. Services not affordable? Don't worry, we have the digital revolution. Dull and function separated metro areas? Even Houston and Fort Worth have now mixed-use downtowns and excellent public spaces.
Why then, is the mood so bad, the fear so great and the sense that the country lost its way so prevailing?

It looks as if the cycle of innovation has spun too fast and flung too many over the edge. Plus, the next vision for America is not visible right around the corner. Instead of optimism and creative energy there is half the country that not only wants to pull the plug but actually did it. The tycoons of Silicon Valley are rubbing their eyes.  They had it all mapped out, progress through technology, artificial intelligence, new frontiers, endless innovation. All "poof"? It feels as if the country has pulled over to sit motionless on the shoulder waiting for the scary tow truck driver while the rest of the world is confused. Is being towed back to the garage a solution or will others just pass us by? 

"Standing still is sliding back" has been the mantra of the innovators and they pointed to history which is littered with the debris of  empires which fell apart like a clay pot in frost because they failed to progress either technologically or socially.   What is America's place in history? What is the next problem to solve? 

I would suggest that the nut to crack is nothing less than the future of work. Work has been one of the greatest covenants and become an idol of a largely protestant country. A value in itself. A world without work can hardly be imagined. Which is why everybody talks about jobs.

Nearly 500 million new jobs will need to be created by 2020 to provide opportunities to those currently unemployed and to the young people who are projected to join the workforce over the next few years.
At the same time, many industries are facing difficulty hiring qualified staff. One 2015 survey found that, globally, 38% of all employers are reporting difficulty filling jobs, a two-percentage point rise from 2014. (World Economic Forum 2016)

It helps to review the history of work. The hard work that was needed in pre-industrial times for survival, food and shelter has been seen as a curse over most of history. In earlier societies the product of one's labor was a necessity. It was immediately useful to the individual, the family or  the tribe. There was just a tiny bit of division of labor with artisans making pots or shovels, jewelry or shoes, or others managing money.

Illustration in The Atlantic magazine (Adam Levey)

With industrialization, specialization and the infinite division of labor work changed to what we know now: Work as a means of earning a living. Large amounts of capital became necessary to produce anything, people moved to cities to become employees. The entire concept of work became abstracted into that complicated system where the benefit is split into a paycheck on the one side and profit on the other.

As hard as it may be to imagine, but this system won't be the last humankind will ever see. Another transition of work seems to be inevitable and it doesn't have to be seen as a crisis or a looming disaster. The US is the place where a nascent new definition of work can already be observed. As Josh Bersin puts it in Forbes:

The Future Of Work: It's Already Here -- And Not As Scary As You Think

The question is how work will transform in a time when thanks to technology less and less human labor is needed to make what humanity needs. The automation of the service industry with robots will repeat what automation has already done to manufacturing. How will people be enabled to get the resources they need to live if they can't earn a living through work? How will cities change when they are no longer the centers of production?
These questions are next to climate change the biggest challenge of our time and the answers won't come from China or India, countries that are still in the stage of industrialization, even though China has leapfrogged into massive use of robots. In spite of everything the false prophets say, the answer won't be more  jobs, at least not of the old kind. An attempted rewind to the past will simply mean that America won't meet the challenge. The answers have to come from the US for work and for climate change. The topics maybe more intertwined than it seems. Not because green technologies will produce hundreds of thousands of jobs but because a new order of work may have a much smaller footprint on the planet.

 America's narrative is one of optimism, why replace a can-do attitude with one of fear? The response to the work challenge requires everything that America ever stood for in its most positive narratives. Openness, collaboration, creativity, curiosity and ingenuity. As I have stated in many other articles, cities are the places where these characteristics can shine. In a post-work society even more.

How such a post-work society and its cities could look like will be the subject of another article about the the future of work. 

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

The History of work (slideshare)
The Atlantic: A World without Work