CAN I HAVE 9 MINUTES AND 54 SECONDS OF YOUR TIME?

Alexis Kalagas

Living Cities Forum 2021 – The Long View

On a yet-to-be designated day in 2024, the Onkalo nuclear depository, located deep in the bedrock beneath an evergreen pine forest on a sparsely populated island in western Finland, will begin receiving canisters of ‘high level’ radioactive waste. Approximately one hundred years later, when 6,500 tonnes of spent uranium from the Loviisa and Olkiluoto reactors fill a honeycomb of storage vaults fanning out 400 metres below the frozen tundra, capacity will be reached, the main access tunnel backfilled, and the complex’s single entrance sealed and abandoned. Onkalo, which means ‘hiding place’ in Finnish, is still under construction. When complete, it will be the world’s first deep geological disposal facility—a model of ‘robust storage’ intended to safely manage highly toxic waste that must be isolated from all life on earth for a period of at least 100,000 years.     

Within a bounded human frame of reference, this is an almost unfathomable sweep of time. Onkalo is the subject of Into Eternity, an otherworldly documentary by the Danish artist Michael Madsen. Through interviews with scientists, geologists, engineers, and policy-makers involved in the project, the film grapples with the immense technical, ecological, and moral implications that flow from the act of projecting beyond the edge of our imaginations to design in radiological time—what the cultural anthropologist Vincent Ialenti has characterised as a form of ‘deep time reckoning’[i]. During one conversation on camera, a blast technician observes that the subterranean tunnel at Onkalo is a place where time does not exist. But the facility forces us to question how we conceive of distant (including non-human) futures, and connect these unknowable time scales back to the pragmatic design processes of the present.  

What does it mean to take the long view? In part it resembles what historians call the longue durée, a widescreen perspective that aims to reveal patterns of societal change and continuity playing out over extended periods, between ‘the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly’[ii]. Unlike short-term, isolated events—‘brief, rapid, nervous oscillations’—these patterns can be imperceptible to those who experience them. At the same time, they are a potent tool for shaping alternative futures, by looking back to see forwards[iii]. It was the long durée thinking of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, for instance, whose understanding of historical change informed a radical political life in turn of the century Britain, which led to the ‘London Programme’, a plan for extending government’s mandate to design London’s housing, transport, and water—infrastructure now taken for granted in the modern city[iv].   

Physics reminds us that time is elastic, non-linear, even an illusion[v]. It is also an abstracted system of measurement that constructs the way we perceive and organise everyday life. Design historian Judy Attfield has described the highly personal way in which time is experienced through ‘duration, frequency, longevity, change and finitude… the relation of the body to the material world of things’[vi]. Just as they shape the material world, wider cultural and economic forces inevitably shape this kind of ‘existential time’ too. In ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, historian EP Thompson famously argued that mechanised factory work introduced en masse during the Industrial Revolution changed the relationship people had with synchronised ‘clock time’[vii]. As new technologies and systems of capital produced new labour practices, time itself—once distinguished through natural rhythms and periodic seasons—became precise, standardised, and commoditised.

The city as a drama in time

The city is a complex collage of these experiences and cycles of time operating all at once. Like the ‘cosmic view’ that inspired Ray and Charles Eames’ film Powers of Ten—which explores the interactions between atoms, bodies, societies, and the universe through a series of scale jumps—zooming back and forth between timescales, including those that exist beyond the limits of an anthropocentric perspective, helps situate the agency of design practice. Andrés Jaque has suggested that architecture’s main role is compositional, in that it mobilises and articulates assemblages of interests and objects that operate in different time and space configurations[viii]. In this ‘trans-scalar’ view, the city as a setting that enacts our shared realities is no longer defined and governed territorially. Confronting the challenges of the urban necessarily involves multiple overlapping dimensions: material, relational, spatial, and temporal.

As Timothy Morton has noted, we live in more timescales than we can grasp[ix]. Deep time is the most expansive of these scales, and as a result the least tangible. We now know that humans have become planetary agents on a deep temporal scale, binding together human history and billions of years of geological time in a ‘strange loop’. From global warming to biodiversity loss, nuclear radiation to plastic pollutants, the Anthropocene has emerged as a ‘profound moment of temporal dislocation’, which haunts the present while placing it in contact with distant times beyond the scope of human experience[x]. Human-built space is central to these dynamics. The exponential post-war growth of cities has been described as a potential ‘golden spike’ punctuating the future stratigraphic record, and urban demand—including the material economy of the construction industry—continues to fuel extractive resource flows that will reverberate far beyond the objectified now[xi].  

In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand introduced the concept of ‘shearing layers’ to explore how buildings comprise a set of elements and systems that involve different rates of change and obsolescence: the site (‘eternal’), the structure (30-300 years), the skin (20 years), services (7-15 years), the space plan (three months to 30 years), and ‘stuff’ (in constant flux)[xii]. If we zoom in to the temporal context of the built fabric that surrounds us, the reality is that most modern structures have a life expectancy of between twenty and fifty years[xiii]. Beyond material properties and engineering, this is shaped by how we price, fund, invest, and reinvest in the built environment—that is, how buildings are valued from construction to demolition, including accounting of risk. Even as urban development cycles accelerate, driven by economies of land use, the average building constructed today will likely last for two human generations.

Understanding the processes that shape the context within which a building comes to exist requires our temporal lens to contract again. Cities in Australia are layered jurisdictions, influenced by multiple tiers of government. Most operational and delivery responsibility—from planning and infrastructure policy to development approval—resides at the state and local level. In Victoria, members of parliament and local councillors are elected for fixed four-year terms, a compressed electoral cycle that produces a form of political ‘presentism’ focused on re-election, compounded by the ability of individual interests to influence discretionary planning and zoning decisions. Philosopher Roman Krznaric has argued that the bias towards short-term incentives intrinsic to the design of democratic systems treats the future as ‘empty time’—an unclaimed territory devoid of people and consequence[xiv]. In our current politics, accountability is ultimately time-bound.  

The economist William Nordhaus was the first to give this model of constrained ‘public intertemporal choice’ a name: the ‘political business cycle’[xv]. From twice-yearly earnings reports, to ‘just in time’ inventory management, to high-frequency trading, the actual business cycles and financial systems that function as the engines of contemporary urbanism move at a faster pace still. The CEO turnover rate at the world’s largest companies is now the highest on record. The average holding period for shares on the ASX is just 12-15 months. For property developers, time equals risk, with projects structured around the cost of debt financing. Debt itself, which influences both the unabated transformation of the built environment and our relationship to it, is a product of time. Indeed sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato has argued that the logic of the debt economy controls our ‘temporality of action’, neutralising uncertainty in the ‘living present’ and prescribing behaviour into the future[xvi].       

Real time and the 24/7 moment 

If deep time, building lifecycles, electoral terms, and financial flows represent layers of time operating in our peripheral vision—visible if we look hard, but otherwise intangible—real time is what shapes our everyday experience. Increasingly, it is an experience in flux. In 1856, stonemasons in Melbourne walked off the job to protest for reduced working hours, eventually winning the right to an eight-hour day. At the vanguard of an international ‘short time’ movement, their demands were couched in a simple demarcation of time: eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest. Jenny Odell has described the battle now playing out for our time through a ‘colonisation of the self by capitalist ideals of productivity and efficiency’—a 24/7 world where pervasive technology and perpetual access collapses the boundaries between labour and leisure, and an ‘off/on’ logic of rest is replaced by the inert readiness of ‘sleep mode’[xvii].           

Beyond an unprecedented incursion into our private sphere, we see this play out at an urban scale in the instantaneity of an on-demand economy defined by ‘fractals of time and pulsating cells of labour’[xviii]. The non-stop connectivity of the smartphone, allied to predictive data, outsourced navigation, and algorithmic management, allows companies like Uber and Deliveroo to subdivide time by choreographing a distributed infrastructure of seamless movement. We not only see this in the ‘logistification’ of urban food and mobility systems, but also in plug-and-play ‘space as a service’ housing models like co-living, and the time-based reprogramming of existing space through platforms like Airbnb. Dan Hill has extended Brand’s idea of fast and slow layers of change from the building scale to the city at large, expressed in a ‘fast and slow urbanism’ of rapid technological change overlaid upon analogue ‘updates’ of the built environment[xix].   

The seductiveness of the ‘smart city’ movement for public agencies has been built on the promise of harnessing real-time data harvested from ubiquitous sensor networks as part of a command and control model for city scale systems—the optimization and efficiency ideal applied to metropolitan governance. But the implications of today’s app-led ‘platform urbanism’ are both deeper and more diffuse. Proprietary ‘walled gardens’ are being produced and amplified through the network effects and monopolising tendencies of platform capitalism, reducing precarious ‘independent contractors’ to component pieces in an always on logistical infrastructure. Tom Avermaete has suggested that cities are increasingly being understood in the context of their temporal capacity to accommodate these logistical flows, with streets no longer represented according to their ‘name, offering, or atmosphere’, but instead as time sequences that platform actors can strictly monitor[xx].          

The experience of real time as a frictionless ‘hallucination of presence’ is reaffirming the value of free time[xxi]. While free time has commonly been understood as a byproduct of work time, the possibilities of a future free from work—promised by the progressive deployment of automation technologies—has led to a new free time movement focused on a shorter working week, the provision of a universal basic income, and the full commodification of labour. This last component aims to make visible what equates to a form of hidden time: the domestic labour of social reproduction. Feminist scholar Helen Hester has argued that activities like child rearing, housework, and elder care, traditionally performed by women for no wages or low wages, are forms of labour that need to be accounted for in a ‘post-work’ future, with new forms of domestic automation an ‘ally in the quest for temporal autonomy’[xxii].

Designing in time 

The crisis conditions of the past eighteen months have trapped us in a kind of extended liminal state, with our loss of temporal agency leading to a global occurrence of what the anthropologist Jane Guyer termed ‘enforced presentism’[xxiii]. During the pandemic time is both foregrounded and absent. We mark time by the number of hours of permitted exercise, the days of lockdown, the weeks that have elapsed since the last incidence of community transmission, or the months until we are eligible for vaccination. In the meantime, the future remains on pause. But while the shock of the early days and weeks of the pandemic was frequently framed as an enforced societal slowdown, Covid-19 has actually accelerated the collapse of the demarcation between labour and leisure, with the surge in use of virtual communications platforms like Zoom erasing our last spaces of autonomy.

Out in the shared physical territory of the city, initiatives focused on addressing the impacts of the pandemic have involved improvised forms of temporal design. From repurposed streets and parklets for outdoor dining, to dedicated supermarket shopping hours for the elderly and disabled, to staggered in-office work schedules to reduce peak period transport crowding, these strategies have treated time as a tool that can be called on to creatively rethink how our urban spaces and systems function for a diverse set of audiences. Despite the promise of extending this type of thinking into a post-pandemic future, the complexity of how time shapes our experience of the city in its fullest sense suggests that designers need to move beyond more literal projects of ‘temporal zoning’—reorganising a space through time—to engage with the deeper challenges of designing in time across multiple disciplines, dimensions, and scales.     

This essay has a total of 2,357 words. Based on the average adult reading rate of 238 words per minute, it should have taken you approximately nine minutes and fifty-four seconds to reach this point. How often do we make time to pause and do nothing, let alone make time to step outside of the relentless myopia of the current moment and consider the long view? In the introduction to her book How to Do Nothing, Odell claims that sustained attention leads to awareness, and ‘simple awareness is the seed of responsibility’[xxiv]. Long-term thinking carries with it this same seed of responsibility: to our future selves, to the non-human forms of life with which we coexist, and to future generations that will follow us. By dedicating the 2021 edition of the Living Cities Forum to exploring ‘The Long View’, its organisers are asking us to embrace that sense of responsibility, and see where the time may lead us.

[i] Vincent Ialenti, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now (2020).

[ii]  Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’ (1958) in Fernand Braudel, On History (translated by Sarah Matthews)(1982) 47.

[iii] Jo Guldi & David Armitage, The History Manifesto (2014) 14.

[iv] See John Broich, London: Water and the Making of the Modern City (2013).

[v] See Carlo Ravelli, The Order of Time (2018).

[vi] Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (2000) 213.

[vii] E P Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (1967).

[viii] Andrés Jaque, Superpowers of Scale (2020) 15.

[ix] Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016) 25.

[x] Franklin Ginn et al, ‘Introduction: Unexpected Encounters With Deep Time’, Environmental Humanities 10(1) (2018) 214.

[xi] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (2015) 124; Space Caviar (ed), Non-Extractive Architecture, Vol 1: On Designing Without Depletion (2021).

[xii] See Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1994).

[xiii] Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (2014) 110.

[xiv] See Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World (2020).

[xv] William Nordhaus, ‘The Political Business Cycle’, The Review of Economic Studies 42(2) (1975).

[xvi] Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2012) 71.

[xvii] Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) 14; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) 13.

[xviii] Franco Berardi, After the Future (2011) 26.

[xix] Dan Hill, ‘A Sketchbook for the City to Come: The Pop-Up as R&D’, Architectural Design 85(3) (2015).

[xx] Tom Avermaete, ‘The Places, Pulses, and People of Platform Urbanism’ in Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer (eds), Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents (2021).

[xxi] Crary (2013) 29.

[xxii] Helen Hester, ‘Family Matters: In the Bubble of the Nuclear Household’, Architectural Review 1479 (March 2021).

[xxiii] Jane Guyer, ‘Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time’, American Ethnologist 34(3) (2007) 410.

[xxiv] Odell (2013) xxii.