Diplomatic World nummer 54

Yona Friedman, La jeune fille qui voyageait avec les gazelles, from the series « Films d’animation », 1961
B/W animated film, sound, 21’, Ed. 1/5 + AP, Courtesy of the artist, Cneai & Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris
3. In the short term future, main employment opportunities
and growth are related to person-to-person services. Even
in traditional labour environments, people working in
garage workshops — after sales services and maintenance
— are creating a higher number of jobs than in traditional
car factories. What we will never be able to computerise
or robotize completely is personal care and service.
We should invest and create a maximum in this type of
employment opportunities. From repair jobs to babysitter
to healthcare to personal care. This alternating type
of employment doesn’t need to coincide with the high
density and flux to cities. It can be organized anywhere.
People could benefit form a better service also in rural
or smaller suburban areas, because often in larger cities
supply and demand are disproportionate.
To conclude I would like to propose urban dispersion
instead of urban growth.
On first sight it might add to the complexity but being an
architect, when I have created my vision and manifest on
mobile architecture, I also meant that architecture should
be completely customised and not planned and that the
individual person or family could transform his housing and
living premises and that it was not the primordial task of the
architect. It used to be the praxis of older times but also of
my daily life.
It is a strategy in architecture that people can push their
own space and borders. Imagine in this kind of urban
dispersion program farming and agriculture become a city
trade, which is a logical step. Small vegetables and fruits are
grown in your garden, individualised. In this case garden
service becomes also a personal service, another type of
employment created.
In general I am not speaking about rich or poor countries
or cities because the relative proportions are often similar
— of course absolute amounts show huge differences. In
the poorest countries you are poor recalculated towards
international currencies and standards, but locally the
situation is not the same. For example in India a peasant
would have a servant, and still today in poor countries
agriculture and farming are still important industries,
creating value.
After all these images and impressions on a revised urban
strategy I would like to anticipate and comment on the
obstacles. Surprisingly or not I say these obstacles are
related to our basic ideas of banking in which real estate
plays a very important part in the structures of the financial
system. If we propose a change in the real estate situation,
we must also anticipate and be clever enough to follow an
alternative pattern in our banking procedures towards real
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