Mall of Africa - A new Sense of "Placelessness" for All?

If you do not live close to Gauteng you might not have heard the brouhaha surrounding the opening of the new Mall of Africa. South Africa’s biggest shopping mall the media proclaimed … or is it the biggest in Africa? In a fit of Mall Envy, a Cape Town centre as well as Eastgate claimed it was actually the largest. Who cares? This new mall encloses 130 000sqm of new shopping centre space filled with yet more Woolworths, Truworths, Dis-Chem and McDonalds outlets. Luckily there are a few new marketable international stores too. The cherry on the top … we now have two Starbucks outlets in South Africa. One template begets another - from concrete mall, to shop layout to coffee. Yippee.

The Mall of Africa represents the evolution of 100 years of Modernism in urban design thinking. This paradigm leads to a template view of mankind and communities where structure, style and layout is transferable from one culture to another regardless of context. The operating mantra is that of urban efficiency wrapped up in massive concrete scale and ribboned with tar. 

The prevailing modernist metaphor is that of the machine. Predictable, impersonal, functional, without personality. Yes, early Modernist thinking viewed society as a machine and they sought to maximise its efficiency. Modernism as a theory emerged at the end of the 19th century and was influenced by the industrialisation wave that swept Europe at that period. Early proponents of Modernism saw roads as the major functional arterial passages that propagated economic activity. Modernists set about driving nuisance value pedestrians off ever widening roads, adorned on either side by new templated featureless buildings. This is consistent with the spirit of pure function over nuanced form and characterful texture. The result is urban sprawl and the destruction of habitat - both natural and communal.

But something is amiss. 

While we measure the value of investment funds in the Mall of Africa in terms of pension fund growth, we ignore the real costs. These real costs include the real people prevented from participating at the meagre peripheral of the economic landscape. A shopping centre is an extension of a “gated community” both in practice and insinuation. While I know you will cry out “but we have a high crime rate and shopping centres are safe”, to what extent can we follow exclusionary land use principles that may well contribute to the problem of inclusion, participation and powerlessness? Does exclusive land use ameliorate or exacerbate what we seek to avoid? 

A community comprises many people. Many you might not even see. Where I live there are people that pick through the rubbish to extract anything of value. They live by agreement behind a petrol station. Sometimes I talk to them. They have families and are paid 85c for each kilogram of scrap metal that they can recover. There are others that sell items at intersections, and still others that claim to clean up these places. Yet more try to sell goods door to door. These people, largely unseen, are participants at close quarters. They try, best as they can, to engage in the economic fabric of our communities. But shopping centres, as we know them, simply smother this vibrant component of real people and with it the problems we hope to avoid are magnified elsewhere. 

New Urbanism is a response to, and a critique of Modernism. Human complexity and nuance informs its approach where urban design facilitates walkable, sustainable, mixed use community environments. New Urbanism is an approach that builds inclusion and participation around the community. In so doing it creates natural buffers against crime and squalor. 

There are many places in South Africa that reflect the spirit of New Urbanism. Many of these places are indeed quite old but the spirit is present. Can we build on this? Newer places such as Melrose Arch in Johannesburg have tried to capture the essence of New Urban thinking but have also failed to authentically reflect the local community. 

And so we have the Mall of Africa and probably many more to come - milestones in our national pursuit of at least 1 square metre of shopping centre floor space for every citizen and an epoch in “placelessness”. Is this really the best we can do? 

Andrew Barnes 
Partner at Noted Thinking
May 2016 

Sensationalising Racism in the News - Does it Help?

Again there’s another headline in the news – “Racist Tweet” or similar. Again there’s a lot of noise and hyper reaction. Do we face our societal reflection and deeply interrogate our innermost flaws? Or do we implicitly revisit old racial stereotypes, …. stereotypes we explicitly know are damaging?

Is the motivation behind the “news report” of any use? Does it move us forward or does it re-inforce the status quo and hold us back?

Headlines and news reports such as this are sensationalist. They unashamedly seek to provoke public interest. Via cavalier scrounging of social media verbiage “reporters” seek literally anyone that provides suitably controversial outbursts that fit the current agenda. In this case the news, more so than racism itself, is a “less than 140 character” Tweet outburst or something slightly longer on Facebook by an estate agent. Sure, this has curiously morbid value on social media, but in paid-for, curated and considered media, treatment of such news should offer society far more than scandalous “copy and paste” reporting. Note that “sensational” news is often conveyed at the expense of accuracy.

Is the sensationalised racist report seriously offered in the guise of helping us as a society move forward? And if so, does it succeed?

To understand fully we need to turn to Social Identity theory and how it relates to racism. Racism is a form of “extreme” prejudice rooted in stereotypes and arising from our need to boost our social identity. We do this by adopting favourable perceptions of our own group (the in-group) and often unfavourable views of out-groups. This dynamic changes as we implicitly and explicitly view out-groups, either as superior or inferior to our own group. We do this, it is said, to boost self-esteem.

Here’s an extract from an essay on the recent killings of black individuals by USA police: “Implicit bias - an unintentional action rooted in prejudicial cognitive bias - causes more trouble than it should. It's the root part of your brain that assesses everything you absorb from the world around you - smells, tastes, people, feelings - and categorizes them into experiences - good, bad, scary, happy - for easy recall. For example, if you smell something yummy, see a chocolate chip cookie, eat the cookie, taste it, realize it's delicious, your brain shortcuts remembering all of those stimuli by saving the whole experience as "cookie = yummy." That ingrained memory becomes a preference helping you make future decisions much more quickly. Implicit bias is your brains autopilot for decision making”.* 

Stereotypes and implicit biases work hand-in hand and are the same in some instances. These aggregations of accumulated experience help us simplify complexity and promote the emergence of a “mindset”. A mindset is a psychological screen filtering external data that bombards us. The most important characteristic of the mindset is that it only admits data which agrees with our current view of the world. Put another way, it self-selects data that re-affirms our stereotypes. Ultimately our mindset defines who we are. We cannot wish it away – it is fundamental and integral to our identity.

The interesting point arising from this, and there are many, is that implicit biases and stereotypes are re-inforced in the media, which in turn we generally select on the basis that it affirms our own in-group perceptions. You may choose to disagree, but the media choices we make (what we want to see and hear) already reflect our biases and stereotyping of others. Here’s the rub - we engage with media that favours our in-group because our mindset drives us to do this.

When our chosen media reports on “racism” it does so using stereotypical narratives that validate our in-group bias. In essence the “news report” itself assumes a racist mantle under the guise of seeking magnanimous ubuntu. It does this through the replay of stereotypes impacting us primarily at an implicit (subconscious) but also at an explicit level.

In other words, at a deeply subconscious level the sensationalised news report reiterating an un-curated social media outburst, serves merely to confirm the very unfortunate racial profiling we seek to correct. This happens because it confirms our most recessive racial stereotypes even in the face of our conscious repudiation.

The racist “news” report does not directly challenge social constructs such as language, behaviour, culture, ethics and morality which is needed to move society forward. It fails to offer guidance. It is thus unhelpful, even damaging, as it endorses the status quo using tired racial stereotypes and idiosyncratic isolated events as major news happenings.

The only way that a prevailing mindset can be changed is through authentic encounter and real life experience that is strong enough to offer a compelling alternative to the mindset predisposed towards prejudice. Of course this is possible - but not through the prevailing “140 character” Tweet mechanism. The media, especially “long story” journalism, can present an alternative narrative, but it must move beyond under-curated social media “cut and paste” ersatz journalism. 

Take your own Racial Implicit Association Test here and find out your score (this is built for USA society but will provide some use in other environments): Implicit Association Test Race. I tried it and in all honesty it is remarkably difficult, tiresome and frustrating!

Andrew Barnes 

Partner at NOTED Thinking 
www.noted.co.za

Sources:

• Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory by Peter J. Burke Jan E. Stets Washington State University.
• Social Identity Theory by Sabine Trepte Universitat Hamburg.
• A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo by John T. Jost Department of Psychology, New York University and Mahzarin R. Banaji Department of Psychology and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University and Brian A. Nosek Department of Psychology, University of Virginia

       * The Science Behind Why Cops Kill Black Men - And How to Fix it by LAURIE VAZQUEZ 

Work and Advertising - Did Marx foresee this?

Karl Marx’s theories are back in fashion. Many talk about the failure of capitalism and more recently the failure of markets. If you don’t see the problem inherent in the fact that 62 people have the same wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population you deserve the social turmoil that will surely result from this in time. But that is not my point. While seeking a new road ahead that guards against the weaknesses of capitalism - an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people – the theories of Karl Marx have come back into fashion.

Marx was not right about everything, but he may have been right about some things. He was one of the first to study the nature of work writing at length about it. Importantly he argued that work creates meaning. Work provides links to family and community and these links add meaning to our existence. The modern idea that real meaning is found through pop psychology, laughter therapy, drugs, yoga, consumerism, or free sex is a fallacy. It’s a deception. These pursuits, as well as the modern fascination with trying to connect with one’s inner self and blossom as an artist, is indicative of the extent to which our work fails to provide meaning and “agency”.

Yes, that is the point made by Marx. He argued that capitalist industrialisation distances people from their productive output. Through this loss of “agency”, Marx claimed workers are alienated not only from themselves and their workplace but from their communities and society too. Work therefore provides the basis for relevance and meaning. It creates the context in which we relate to people and the world around us.

Later, Christopher Lasch took Marx’s thinking further exploring how a loss of worker agency impacts at a societal level. He saw two contrasting dynamics emerging amongst individuals: 1) a narcissistic personality crippled by a fragile sense of self seeking solace in consumerist identifiers (wearing the right brands, etc.) and 2) an alienated mind-set seeking therapeutic self-help and pop psychology.

The post WWII global industrial boom has driven a loss of worker agency and an alienation from means of production. Corporate growth, globalisation, financialisation and cosmopolitanism have spearheaded this trend of task granulation. And the growing nation-state interventionist bureaucracy only aggravates matters. You can’t do anything without explaining it, accounting for it, apologising for it, and paying for it, either to a corporation (often domiciled outside SA) or the government. It is against this back-drop that we have seen the burgeoning self-help industry. Alpha courses, motivational speakers, centering, confidence building, how to win friends, positive thinking, and a raft of other commoditised self-deifying diversions, are products of our time and reflect our alienation from work and self.

But nothing happens in a straight line. The computer revolution, starting in the eighties and really gaining traction after 2000 is changing the world for the better in ways we least expect. Notably, computers are enabling some of us to recover agency over our work. Computers and digital communications are fracturing the traditional workplace. Increasingly work is neither location nor work-hour dependent. Many people have greater control over their output and can produce far more, both at a task and volume level. In many instances computer technology allows a reclaim of labour pricing. Cost of production is falling and networks are adding exponential value. A knowledge economy is emerging and it lies outside of the walls of traditional business. At its heart is worker agency.

Marx neither predicted the technology revolution nor a networked economy, yet some of its benefits speak directly to his critique of capitalism.

In support of an emerging new “agency” over work a few interesting facts from Forbes are:

• ·         Millennials will force companies to be transparent. Transparency is one of the top four qualities that millennials look for in leaders. They don’t trust CEOs and politicians because they don’t feel like they are honest, especially how they are portrayed in the media.
• ·     Millennials will choose corporate culture and meaningful work above everything else.  30% of millennials say that meaningful work is important versus only 12% of managers. Furthermore, only 28% of millennials feel that high pay is important versus 50% of managers.
• ·         Millennials want to build a collaborative organization. Millennials like to work in teams, on projects to accomplish goals. They are used to using wiki’s, social networks and other technologies to share ideas and innovate.
• ·         Millennials will make working from home the norm. In the next 9 years, 41% of the workforce will be working from home and currently over 13.4 million people work from home in America alone.
• ·         Millennials will encourage generosity and community support. While millennials are often stereotyped as being selfish and narcissistic, the story that goes untold is their involved in supporting their communities. 60% of college students aren’t considering a career in business. They view corporations as being greedy, having no equality (especially at the CEO level where only 5% of CEOs are women), and at fault for causing the financial crisis. Deloitte found that 92% of millennials believe that business should be measured by more than just profit and should focus on a societal purpose and 83% of millennials gave to charities in 2012 (up from 75% in 2011).

It’s not only the youth that are impacted by the current techno revolution. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation says: Seniorpreneurship is a growing trend in many countries including the UK, Australia and the USA where nearly a quarter of new ventures in 2013 were started by those aged 55-64.

The facts above are all predicated on modern computer technology.

If one agrees that there has been a long term decline in worker agency post WWII then it’s not hard to see the link with rampant growth in modern narcissism and the elevation of “self” to the level of cultural keystone. These manifest in the obsessive seeking of instant gratification, the need to support a failing self-image, the absence of personal social relevance, and the need for material markers and debt-based lifestyle funding.

And a lot of advertising is contingent to this … all in the spirit of rampant capitalism and the seeking of a great fortune. The ad messages of old corroborate the spirit: the brand is the hero, be cool, seek joy and endless nirvana, reward extravagance, stop for nothing. Money is the enabler and consumption is the resolve.

Will this change? With a new youth culture emerging on the back of new technology maybe worker agency is strengthened prompting a renewed sense of authentic self-worth. Will ad messages and brand values change too? Will we talk about the world in terms of preservation, talk about self in terms of purpose, and talk about society in terms of cause and caring? Will we find hero’s outside of the ego and away from brands?

That, I think, is the challenge.

Andrew Barnes 
Partner at NOTED Thinking
April  2016