LAST METER® & SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION
This a summary of the Last Meter® services integration platform and design system, and all the work on sustainable consumpiton by John Manoochehri, Resource Vision, BASE2, and Futureperfect contributing to it.
This a summary of the Last Meter® services integration platform and design system, and all the work on sustainable consumption by John Manoochehri, Resource Vision, BASE2, and Futureperfect contributing to it.
It summarizes:
- development of the concept analytically and in design terms
- what went wrong with it in operational practice, and
- thoughts on what could happen.
A IDEA BACKGROUND
The main evolution here is from general policy on consumption, including an emphasis on service/sharing systems, to how these things are best understood and measured, and on to how to design them.
1 Policy
1.1 Consumption Opportunities
I wrote the United Nations Environment Program book, 'Consumption Opportunities', on sustainable consumption straight out of university. This was a major analysis and policy project that required basically breaking down consumption of transformation elements that were digestible:
- Efficient Consumption - more efficient production
- Different Consumption - changed consumption systems
- Conscious Consumption - green purchasing
- Appropriate Consumption - downshifting and sufficiency
The Different Consumption piece is the hard bit because it's about changed ¨consumption systems' which, I learn when I wrote this, is very poorly framed in economics or any other discipline.
UNEP Consumption Opportunities
I always thought this was good and beyond the literature, and thankfully, 20 years later, a review article of all sustainable consumption policy in the previous 30 years references it more than any other book or paper.
Sustainable Consumption Review Article
Notes:
- it is agreed that sustainable resource consumption, in terms of both resource consumption and consumerism, is one of the biggest priorities in climate/sustainability, but very little progress has been made in policy or market terms since this debate started
- is agreed that consumption drives all economic activity, and yet consumption is very poorly defined in economics - eating an apple, building a bridge, streaming on spotify are all, somehoww 'consumption'
- in particular, the problem of defining consumption is somehow flowing from a physical description of consumption (using and downgrading resources and energy to make things of value) to a sociopsychological description of consumption (having and using things to get welfare).
- the most obvious bits of 'consumption systems' that were growing at that time, before mobile internet, were 'product-service systems (PSS)' (more technical) ie renting things rather than owning them, and 'sharing systems' (more social) ie owning in common not privately. These principles are now sort of hidden underneath online consumption, but are still there and growing.
2. Analysis/Research
2.1 PhD/Use Efficiency
I started my PhD to explore the science of 'consumption systems' and in particular PSS/sharing, with Tim Jackson at Surrey, thinking I could just studying some PSS/sharing systems and back into better theory.
The sharing system I chose to study was the Guthi system of Nepal, where clan communities hold, use and develop land, resources, and equipment in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guthi.
It became clear as I did this work that there isn't a good measure of why or how sharing works at all, at least for more efficient use of resources, and I ended up formalizing this - a kind of efficiency in use, which I call Use Efficiency - as part of formalizing the overall role of consumption as an extension of the economic production function - instead of finishing my PhD.
2.2 Resource Transformation Analysis - Conference Paper
I started developing a formalism for how resources are transformed in value in general, called Resource Transformation Analysis (RTA), around this Use Efficiency parameter, as it seemed like this was required to actually fit consumption into a sophisticated model of economics - basically creating a Consumption Function to exist in parallel with the Production Function.
In fact, this RTA approach seems like a good way to blend into one model the different ends of consumption - the physical and the sociopyschologcal.This is a conference paper, the interesting stuff is the images at the end:
2.3 Resource Transformation Analysis - Chalmers Paper
This is an even more abstract presentation that I gave as a presentation to the whole department of Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers.
This paper takes the whole problem to an even deeper level, of how matter and value relate in general.
2.4 KKH Arkitektur - Ö Project
Instead of my PhD, I did complete my post-professional architecture program at Kungliga Konst Högskolan, in which I set up a research project on Sandhamn - Ö Project - to understand existing sharing systems in rural communities, and opportunities for new systems of service-based consumption.
This is a summary of the degree project, interest stuff. Lots of details in here not otherwise developed or expressed:
KKH Arkitektur Diploma - Ö Project
2.5 Resource Vision - Lifestyle Design Handbook
I produced as a side-output from the diploma work, a kind of handbook trying to summarize the practical implications of the Resource Transformation Analysis approach, as 'lifestyle design'. This was published in outline by the sustainable architecture consulting company I started at that time, Resource Vision:
RV - Lifestyle Design Handbook
2.6 Eye Platform Outline
I designed an actual lifestyle/consumption system outline as part of this, called 'Eye'. This is the summary and user handbook:
3 Extra Analysis & Research
This stuff is out of the chronological flow, it's an extension of the path though that didn't flow into design and Last Meter®
3.1 Consumption Theory Book - Resources, Consumption, Space
I agreed with MIT Press to write a book on consumption theory for MIT Press which will summarize all this, but this is out of sequence with the Last Meter® stuff - and is stalled anyway. The essence here is that there are problems and clarifications that can be made in the categories of
- Resources: how does matter 'get' value, ie how does it become a 'resource' - this is surprisingly not at all obvious (ie it's neither 'just low entropy', nor is it 'just preferences')
- Consumption: how to refine consumption into a manageable concept and practice, when historically it means anything from depleting low entropy by burning wood or eating an apple, to building bridge, to streaming a movie.
- Space: how to does space determine optimal or pesimal consumption (see below under spatial allocation science).
See this outline of the book content.
MIT Press Book - Resources, Consumption, Space
3.2 Spatial Allocation Science - Spatial Engine for Use Efficient Design
As part of the BASE2 design system and data model, I designed and developed the basics of a 'spatial engine' which determines how all space and all shareable/servicisable products are integrated into a building, and attaching speculative theory around the potentials and trade-offs of various scenarios.
There's a bunch of theory underlying this which I invented and seems necessary but hasn't been researched by anyone and so needs development and data including
- time-offset, space-offset, quality-offset, social framing limits to replacing products with services: ie how long would people wait, how far would they go, what quality difference, what 'social framing' difference would be critical to whether people would use products in a service/sharing context willingly and repeatedly, or whether they would want an owned product.
- physical vs psychological 'allocation to use': this it the crucial difference between whether something is actually used all the time, vs whether someone wants it to be available only to them even when not used. Eg a bed is physically allocated for use c.30% of the time but 'psychologically allocated for use 100% of the time' ie not available for others' use. Where was powerdrills are allocated for actual use for a small fraction of the time, and their psychological allocation to use likely stops (for non-professionals) when they aren't being physically used.
This spreadsheet includes some of these concepts - hard to interpret without instructions.
3.3 Futureperfect - Urban Futures Forum
The Futureperfect project was at that time an event project and we developed a high-level Urban Futures Forum concept event, which started in Copenhagen with the Danish Environment Ministry/Minister, at the Bjarke Ingels Group office.
The Urban Futures Forum - Copenhagen covered a lot of ground in reviewing complex issues relating to urban form and infrastructure, including as they relate to consumption issues, raising the larger question of how design, policy, infrastructure influence and interact to influence consumption.
Service-based consumption, and how it is promoted and developed in and through urban form and architecture is one of the explicit themes of discussion.
Urban Future Forum - Copenhagen
B PRACTICE DEVELOPMENT
The main evolution here is from general design ideas for sharing/service-based consumption, to increasingly concrete actual designs and projects for them, to the insight that the best way to support this is to design the infrastructure for service-based consumption into buildings, and indeed into the infrastructural relationship between buildings and delivery-based retail and services, ie the last meter.
4 Resource Vision - Eye Platform Proposals
4.1 Sandhamn Eye
The diploma project didn't just come up with a theory (Lifestyle Design Handbook) and framework for lifestyle system and spatial design (Eye), it mocked it up for the research location, Sandhamn
The Sandhamn Eye concept handbook and user-card are these (the spatial design is currently lost):
Eye Membership PackEye Member Card
4.2 Resource Vision - Hornstull Eye
This is a proposal for the Eye system to a applied to a part of town in Stockholm in partnership with a community development organization.
5 Resource Vision - Biografen App and Lifestyle System
For Oscar Properties, I made an app design and prototype for a whole personal lifestyle app called, Biografi, to be integrated into their property Biografen22.
These are the screens:
6 Resource Vision - Kliva App and Lifestyle System
As part of the Bjarke Ingels Group design team for Kiruna city move project, I developed a range of sustainability proposals, including a comprehensive lifestyle system called KLIVA, where I designed an app concept and spatial integrations for the system on the site.
This is the app concept:
C LAST METER®
7 Cumulative thinking and skills development about consumption change, real estate, space, platforms
Once I had developed and tried the lifestyle design concepts and projects above, and was in parallel continuing to work on the underlying analysis about consumption - what it really is, why services seem like the future, how efficiency in consumption might works, how preferences and sharing and human tradeoffs work in consumption, how space affects of all of this, the role of digital and mobile technology - it became clear that I would have to, and could, focus more intensely on both the intersection of all these things, and their productization.
I was deeply unsatisfied with the state of the debate in consumption that had materialized, and felt that taking spatial design and infrastructure, and emerging technology, into consideration was a necessary reality, and a great opportunity.
Advanced consumption research had got to the point of involving design, essentially of lifestyle to the extent of consumption systems - as evidenced in the very extensive conference report and papers in 2008 - Changing the Change, edited by Carla Cipolla and Pier Paolo Peruccio: but it didn't include
- actual spatial design, as in architecture and urban morphology, let alone any more explicitly quantitative spatial factors at any scale
- any technically sophisticated thinking about, let alone mocking up or actual development of, digital and mobile technology
- any advance in theory that was compatible with economics: the only advances in theory were gestures to 'system theory' - which isn't a unified theoretical realm - and to the social, psychological and political science dimensions of consumption.
A lot of the innovation opportunity, it seemed to be was at the very point where we needed consumption to have better formalization - what is it we are trying to 'improve'? how would this work? what factors are entailed?
My own knowledge and skills of the built environment dimensions and digital technology-driven potentials helped my synthesize further work in the space.
One principle that evolved gradually was an understanding of the concepts of platforms and infrastructure.
One level below the concept of 'use efficiency' wherein sharing and services combine, to seek shared use of an underlying resources, is the concept of the platform: where, actually very naturally, the concepts of sharing and services interplay well, and actually are becoming well-defined in a way that is not generally captured in economics or business literature.
And, at one level below this, is the concept of infrastructure - a poorly-studied premise in both business, economics and indeed - which, surprisingly - again blends elements of sharing and services: a hospital provides a service, and the beds and infrastructure is shared; a road provides a service, and the surface and signs are shared; street lamps provide a service, and the infrastructure is shared.
On an operational level: I also realized that unless you are driving your own innovation into commercial practice, or at least some kind of reality, it's very hard to test it. The speed of change in the world around consumption had, and still has, massively outstripped the capacity of researchers to understand and model it, let alone prototype options, it seems to be, so real-world tests seem to be essential, at least if we want to contribute to meaningful change.
8 First iteration of BASE2 (Last Meter®) - Aggregation Focus
The primary insight of BASE2 (as the company was originally called, but from here called by it's product name Last Meter®) was that the shift to service-based consumption (homeservices for short) was a matter of aggregation opportunities lost or recaptured.
The nature of the high street (main street), as in the original, physical 'market' for consumption, as an aggregation system for price, leading to 'natural prices through competition', is well understood.
Less-well understood is the physical and non-price information aggregation properties of the physical high-street, and still less the implications for consumption by the aggregation power of both digital technology and physical real-estate as consumption trends towards delivery to the home instead of fixing around retail locations.
Last Meter® original incarnation was called 'Homeservices Aggregation' proposing two kinds of opportunity:
- data aggregation - the aggregation of data related to multiple homeservices in one exchange system between real-estate, consumers and retailers/delivery companies
- services brokerage - the aggregation of service consumption itself as an 'infrastructural feature' of the building, akin to the 'infrastructuralization' of water and electricity into buildings over time. The insight being that to 'integrate services' into the business and physical infrastructure of the building was
This would rely on consumers, retailers, delivery companies and multi-family real estate companies having engaging with a single system, in order to facilitate homeservices. The incentives are in principle clear:
- consumers have efficient transmission of data, and choice-making, about services in a single app
- logistics actors have efficiency gains in last meter interactions - better information, more space, and explicit permissions from the real estate owner
- retailers have sales efficiency of a sort that matches and outstrips the value of prime retail locations (since consumers are 'aggregated at home' more at home than 'aggregated in city centres').
- real estate owners/managers have improved experiences for their residential users, better and safer experiences inside buildings, and potentially significant revenue share from sales partnership with retailers.
In addition to the data and sales aggregation, the Last Meter® outlined but didn't make explicit actual design integration - how last meter infrastructure might work, scale, support optimized logistics and more.
This is the first stable deck outline:
9 Successive Iterations of Last Meter®
In 2017 BASE2 raised some money from Fastighetsägarna Service, the service wing of the Swedish Real Estate Federation (Fastighetsägarna) which represents more than 50% of Swedish property owners. The proposition in all iterations included in Last Meter® in all cases included:
- data exchange:
- real estate owners supply data to service supply companies and logistics for parking, entry, storage (dedicated space), security (locked space)
- service companies supply aggregate activity data per building to real estate owners and managers
- service companies supply user-specific activity data to user apps, to simplify their notification and management experience homeservices
- service brokerage:
- real estate owners could choose service partnerships with service operators who would offer discounts and other benefits in return for real estate selling service packages and optimized logistics options to the service providers.
Gradually Last Meter® included
- design integration:
- development of patentable last meter® integration system comprised of architectural and interior design modules - spatial solutions - to integrate service experiences into buildings efficiently at the 'last meter' beyond the last mile
- architectural design service to analyze and design in 'last meter® integration' to new-build real estate
- 'spatial engine' to compute requirements of last meter® services, in other words, a way to go from a set of preferred services and experience in the building - as packaged experienced offered by owners/managers, similar to water, power, internet - to a set of spatial requirements at different levels of resolution and function - parking, temporary storage, permanent storage, access, and more
These decks show the iterations of the model:
The core products in demo form are visible below. Some of the interfaces need editing or correcting since the software environments/platforms haven't been updated recently.
9.1 Real Estate
Multi-property, multi-user (flerbostadshus, multi-family or kontorshus, commercial real estate)
A dashboard product for multi-property real estate owners to:
- review status of homeservices integration to real estate
- add and manage data exchange with homeservices providers
- choose service packages and add-ons
- set up and manage spatial integrations into their property holdings
dashboards.lastmeter.info/re-dash-v3-1
9.2 Homeservices + Logistics
Retailers offering delivery, service, and/or return products and services and their logistics partners
A dashboard product for homeservices and their logistics providers real estate owners to:
- review status of homeservices offerings to real estate partners
- receive and transmit via API: activity they are performing at the building, data and building usage rules specific to their partnership status and use-case from the building owner, requests for new data.
- set up and offer service packages
- request and manage engagement with spatial integrations
dashboards.lastmeter.info/hs-dash-v3-2
9.3 End-users
Real estate users consuming homeservices at that property, residential or community
A web app for mobile phone offering homeservices users:
- Information on available last meter® integrations in the building
- Opportunity to add information and requests about these
- Information and ordering capability for bundled homservices, and opportunity to buy more bundled homeservices
- Preferences and information regarding their user status.
This is similar to, but is a live coded, version of the KLIVA app.
9.4 Spatial Design
Last Meter® spatial design integrations
The spatial solutions are summarized in 3D and annotated here, sometimes
base2works.webflow.io/spatialsolutions
9.5 Spatial Data
Last Meter® was always focussed on data aggregation:
- helping retail/logistics optimize sales and performance by giving them permissioned data on the status of homservices consumption and spatial affordance at the 'last meter'
- helping consumers and real estate operators understand in what ways their building was being used by homeservices actors.
The Last Meter® data index was a product to help visualize the availability of data of this sort on a map, and stimulate interest in it on both sides of the brokerage model.
This has now been subsumed into the Treasury Spatial Tech Index. In principle, the performance of a building in terms of its Last Meter® capabilities - how much data is available, what kinds of consumers and consumption, what kinds of spatial affordances and specific Last Meter® integrations - can be indicated with this kind of tool, and data supplied and requested via it.
10 Alma Last Meter® Services
All of the above were demonstration tools that had some technical application and capacity, and were in limited testing with partners, and clients - as in, commercial partners willing to use these in principle.
Below is the most actively advanced development of Last Meter® in practice, a fully-launched service operation for the premium office location in Stockholm, thisisalma.com, integrated with their billing and management system.
This interface is the user app, which works on web and mobile, to order and user services in bundles supplied by and optimized by the real estate owner/operator, including live support system:
And this is the app for the real estate owner/operator to manage the experience:
11 Cambric
Cambric is a rebranding of the Last Meter app for premium users, as a kind of member experience.
In this evolution, developed with Frederic Carlström and anotherstructure.com, Cambric is a experience that exists across multiple property owners, capturing the value as a brand, and not giving it all back to real estate owners.
The insight here is that a 'lifestyle app' may be a better, more commercially viable, scaleable, operationally implementable, and protectable version of the Last Meter® experience, than one that is essentially run directly by real estate operators.
12 Design Projects
BASE2 was hired for a number of design projects to develop Last Meter® spatial integrations (called 'space engine') into new build, starting with develop a service bundling solution for real estate developers - picking bundled services on behalf of their future users - which then cascaded down to spatial and technical requirements at the last meter.
One of these projects by Mecon Bosta is summarized here:
base2works.webflow.io/station1901
13 Last Meter Overview
The Last Meter proposition has been stabilized in outline here:
This includes an overview of how the parts listed above fit together:
as well as a summary of the analysis and content generated around Last Meter®.and a review of how, at various levels of integration, last meter can be designed into buildings and cities:
D WHAT WENT WRONG
A simple summary of how BASE2 failed to implement Last Meter® effectively includes:
- Action on multiple levels of the model all at once:
- More effective than working on data aggregation, service-sales aggregation, and design integration all at once would have been focussing on one of these at a time
- Fragmented core incentives
- With many parts of the model under development at once, any one core motivating incentive - users' quality of experience, logistics efficiency, retailer sales scale and cost-savings, real estate revenue and risk reduction - were not clarified, or sequenced, sufficiently
- These incentives are complex and interlocking, and to have them all mobilize together, even if logically inevitable, is a very complex narrative, technical and timing task
- Small team
- Team was way too small
- Technical skills were insufficient for any aspect of a scaleable (vs demo or single-client) product, perhaps except architectural design
- Not enough money raised
- Tiny amount of money raised
- Evolving concepts
- The core concepts were evolving all the time, leading to a shifting narrative and technical framework
- Prototyping not facilitated
- The correct way to progress would have been more aggressive prototyping and development, rather than rush to finished product and value proposition
- Not enough development partners and cheerleaders
- The Last Meter® framework and incentive structure has many actors, such as cities, who benefit from its adoption, but who weren't recruited early or sufficiently enough
- Idea and product accounting
- Not enough accounting for ideas and practices and product features, leading to uncertainty about stage of development, and thus inability of interested parties to join in and contribute to elements.
- Wildly underdeveloped capacities and incentives in real estate
- Naturally the way to implement Last Meter® is in user apps and real estate dashboards that already exist and are sufficiently modular to simply absorb new features - these didn't and don't really exist yet
- Real estate operations needs to have far more technically astute low and mid-level operators people, who can for example collect data and photos; and more structurally ambitions, technical business leaders who can manage technical transformation processes.
- Real estate not sufficiently pressured to make services pay for their use of the building
- Real esate not strategically ready to think of itself as a platform proposition - with service layers monetizing the physical asset in various ways.
- Sustainability imperative not strong enough
- Imperative to drive resource efficiency at any level has been insufficient to lead to a need for fully circular operations in resource flows, that would likely lead to a renewed focus on
- Too much capital required
- Many relevant models rely on huge capital expenditure to simply take on the operations in all parts of a complex system: such as Uber, Reef (ParkJockey).
E WHAT TO DO NEXT
Without a full review of Last Meter® content and opportunity, the following are some ideas about how it could be linked what is incoming in urban and consumer trends:
- Circular cities to integrated services - The rise of narrative about Circular Cities will naturally lead to how circularity is achieved in any way that includes consumers. Likely this will lead to tracking resource flows where they end up - which is residential and commercial buildings, and so, even if only for waste management, let alone deliveries, parking, returns, a Last Meter® approach, involving data flow, resource flows, revenue flows and spatial optimization, seems relevant.
- Consumer experiences to integrated services - Whether from the real estate operators' perspective, or from consumer expectations, from the consumer perspective, or from the (at least premium) retailer perspective, the quality of modern consumer experiences will seek to improve, which will likely lead to aggregation and integration of consumer experiences into the buildings in which they take place.
Narrative and strategic position of the Last Meter® concepts and demos, as this all unfolds, may be worthwhile.
The natural starting points for Last Meter® development other than narrative and strategic position, might be:
- Last Meter® data service - focus on data + rules based facilitation of services with real estate at large scale
- Last Meter® design integration - focus on designing Last Meter® into buildings using model, automated design tools
- Last Meter® packaging system - enabling a last mile modular packaging system, based on the data and design integrations potential of any improvement in this space.
In any case, consolidating the value of the key ideas and product features, even while assessing what and where concrete contributions might arise would seem to be a reasonable idea.
F IDEA FLOW
The following is a summary of the concepts and practices developed and proposed in the flow of this work:
- Consumption Meaning & Phenomenology - defining consumption better than economics, and integrating the physical (entropic) and economic (psychosocial) aspects of it on some conceptual axis of material value creation and extraction
- Consumption Function and Resource Transformation Analysis - Providing a consumption function, and broader Resource Transformation Analysis model, to formalize the above axis (from matter to value)
- Defining Use Efficiency - Specifying the technical basis on which services and sharing offer the potential for resource-efficient consumption, and are versions of the same social-material phenomenon
- Efficiency as Consumption Change Vector - enhancing the role of efficiency in consumption discourse, and as a vector of changing consumption patterns, on the basis of the Resource Transformation Analysis model, in distinction to either conventional economic incentives (price) or morality (information).
- Spatial Aggregation Theory of Market - Understanding how space enables market aggregation: including how historically the physical market (and now high street/main street), is an aggregator of 1 price signals, 2 inventory discovery and 3 inventory fulfilment; and how these are no longer necessary or attractive in urban centres given internet and mobile information; but how real estate (where people inherently are, even with internet) becomes the new re-aggregation points for these data and market phenomena.
- Real Estate as a Platform - Treating real estate as a platform, in which services are 'layered' and where third parties can operationalize some or all of the service layers, but with the control and monetization of the spatial asset owner.
- Infrastructure as Convergence Point - Convergence point of spatial aggregation theory, digital platform models, and service/sharing efficiency models, leading to 'infrastructuralization of consumption'.
- [Lots of product ideas] - A lot of ideas instantiated as product features and platform architecture, and as design system and spatial model.
G WHAT TO THINK NEXT
I think the two most important principles that emerge from this Last Meter®/sustainable consumption work are:
'Infrastructuralization of Consumption'
If we link up the key ideas:
- Consumption as a 'function' that can be optimized without relying on morals or information.
- The optimization function involves treating physical goods as 'functional surface' carriers, which, in a given regime of consumption can be better or worse allocated.
- The allocation of functional surface unites the concepts of sharing and services.
- Once functional surface of goods is deployed in consumption systems to facilitate sharing and services - meaning, in practice, that whether through sharing systems (more social) or services systems (more commercial), available goods are used in ways that maximises their allocation to use and extraction of value, without constraining expected experiences - it becomes clear that goods are in practice part of the 'infrastructure' of consumers.
- This can be formalized by anchoring them to the physical buildings in which they work and live, and optimizing through with the broader infrastructures of logistics, energy, waste, internet - ie the actual infrastructures of their lives.
- We note, in fact, that quite separately from any innovation in consumption of goods, actual infrastructure is itself exactly, already, in this analytical space at the boundary between services and sharing, and oriented towards maximizing use of functional surface.
- So, by:
- treating goods (and thus the services from goods) as 'infrastructures' of consumption, and by
- attaching these infrastructures to the classical infrastructures of the built environment - we may say this is the 'infrastructuralization of consumption'.
What this invites and enables is a family of different ways of thinking about consumption, sustainable consumption, optimal consumption and material provisioning in society including these overarching ones:
- why and when would consumption ever naturally be 'deinfrastructuralized' - ie made entirely private?
- what physical infrastructures are optimal for hosting infrastructuralized consumption - at building, block, city and intra-city scales?
- what adaptations in consumer practices and goods and services provision can be imagined with fully or partly infrastructuralized consumption?
- is there any way to conceive of the 'circular economy' in operational practice without evolution in infrastructuralized consumption?
'Morphologization of economics'
At a higher level of analysis, a broader principle holds that flows from the infrastructuralization of consumption.
This the reframing of economics generally in terms of spatial and in particular morphological (ie the physical and dimensional characteristics of built environments) characteristics.
If it is true, for example, that to infrastructuralize consumption is to consider eg
- the amount of storage space required to effectively manage the delivery and returns of a high proportion of the durable goods consumers in a given building use regularly
- the types of goods that can be supplied by third-party services, vs offered as shared goods in a given building, vs goods held and managed in private ownership (with or without a service relationship on top)
- the data exchange and usage rules, and economic incentives and exchange, between different actors interacting with a given building around physical goods, including real estate owners, managers, consumers, logistics and retail
- etc
then it is also, and equally, true that similar principles will hold at a broader level of abstraction and large scale and complexity of morphological analysis.
For example, what is the best way to design a building, block, neighbourhood, city or region such that:
- money spent on energy can be saved by regional planning for district heating (which relies on spatial/physical relationship between production plant and consumption locations ie space heating in buildings)
- building orientation is considered in energy saving practices (wherein south-facing building facades/windows in the northern hemisphere capture more sunlight, and north-facing windows emit more radiative heat)
- park design optimized to enable inclusion of nature and biodiversity to mitigate macroclimate and facilitate microclimate effects
- block design to enable safe play for children and in-community living for elders
- block morphology including road grid, parking, and access regimes to facilitate transit and cycle oriented transport, to enable higher density habitation and lower overall transport impact costs
- city-scale morphology to enable agglomeration and other spatial effects of specific industries, including agriculture and market gardening, light industry, entertainment, retail, culture, sport.
What is notable about these morphologically-induced economic outcomes is that
- they cannot be achieved by seeking 'more efficient' market performance: these outcomes are not about, for example, better competition, or more complete information, for market participants (classic means of driving market efficiency); instead, these are about how the market is, literally, framed
- their absence doesn't, per se, lead to externalities: poor morphological contexts for economic outcomes is just a less performant economy, not one that per se has unenforced, uncosted economic penalties spilling out onto specific actors
- in general, they demonstrate the poor applicability of economics to certain kinds of decision making: essentially, where markets just don't exist in the conventional sense of liquid, open, information-dense decision systems; infrastructure is, essentially, never decided upon in conventional market terms, because even if there is wide range of offers and bids for delivery, the buy-side is essentially a monopsony, the state or local government, and with very different purchase criteria than any given consumer anyway.
Post-Material Consumption, or Post-Consumption
Parallel with the injection of spatial themes into the world of material consumption is the evolution of the concepts and practice-set of consumption in the first place.
The work above evolves the concept of consumption well beyond the activities of individual economic consumers to the infrastructural and ultimately morphological contexts and structures which enable the provision of utility from material goods.
Here arises an opportunity arises to explore more deeply the foundational relationship of utility and material goods in the first place.
Consumption as a concept and practice is poorly defined in the first place - for example, services and goods are not even formally distinguished in conventional economics (if you rent a car are you using a good or a service? if you lend your own car, are you offering a good or a service - or something else?) - and underlying it is are unexamined and untested premises about the relationship between material goods and utility or experiential value.
Yes, food is needed for nutrition and satisfaction, but human bodies can only eat so much food. At some point, attention in food consumption shifts from quantity to some kind of quality - whether ingredients, cultural features, social contexs, cooking skills or some other feature. In no society, at any level of development, has there ever been no focus on qualitative characteristics of food, even despite extremely low levels of absolute and relative quantities of available food.
This is an example of a disjunct between the linear correlation of material consumption and experiential value, and investigating these disjuncts is the first step towards consumption that goes beyond materialization - where the non-material aspect of consumption is not the most important, still less growth of the the material aspect.
Some examples of consumption that have a disjunct relationship with materials:
- yoga and exercise - where use and experience of one's body is improving without an increase in material use in terms of direct consumption (one is not consuming more materials as one progress). After a year, or years, of yoga, one may feel markedly better during and after any one yoga experience, and interests and aspirations to continue may be increassing, but the amount of material consumption that has taken place is negligible.
- cultural production - such as music and art, where producing cultural content, in particular music, in a way that increases wellbeing for producers and consumers, without increasing material consumption. Again, after years of music production and consumption, it's possible that almost no addition material consumption has taken place.
Other examples include:
- cultural appreciation (listening, viewing art), experiencing nature, relating, caring, sport, learning.
Promoting these for moral reasons, perhaps as higher forms of consumption, is not the same as observing that the mechanisms whereby experiential value is conferred appears to be different from much else in consumption.
The invitation instead, while exploring advanced consumption studies and spatial and lifestyle design, is to investigate in which context these consumption modes are advanced and preferred.
