cityofsound

Journal: 'In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change' book, and Helsinki Design Lab

In short: Our team, the Strategic Design Unit at Sitra, has just published a new book, In Studio: Recipes for Strategic Design, written by my three colleagues. More here, context below. But now ...

“There arrived an invitation to the North Pole – at least, that was how he described it to himself and everyone else. In fact, the destination was well below the eightieth parallel, and he would be staying on a ‘well-appointed, toastily-heated vessel of richly-carpeted oak-panelled corridors with tasselled wall lamps’, so a brochure promised, on a ship that would be placidly frozen into a semi-remote fjord, a long snowmobile ride north of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. The three hardships would be the size of his cabin, limited email opportunities, and a wine list confined to a North African vin de pays. The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change, and conveniently, just ten miles away, was a dramatically retreating glacier whose sheer blue cliffs regularly calved mansion-sized blocks of ice onto the shore of the fjord. An Italian chef of ‘international renown’ would be in attendance, and predatory polar bears would be shot if necessary by a guide with a high-calibre rifle.”—Solar, Ian McEwan (2010)

Last year, I too was invited to a place near(ish) the North Pole, to a gathering comprising of illustrious people plucked from all over the world, in which we were given a week to devise a pathway towards carbon neutrality for the host country. Yet the event I participated in could not have been more different to that being offered to Ian McEwan’s odious anti-hero Michael Beard.

Instead, the setting was Helsinki, and the week-long event hovered around the idea of strategic design and its ability to unlock the particularly interlocking problems around climate change and carbon, with Finland as the pivot. The patron in my case was Sitra, the Finnish Innovation fund, and in particular its Strategic Design Unit, which I would later join. The food was good, since you ask, but we saw neither Italian chefs nor polar bears.

And the week, under the Helsinki Design Lab programme, was fascinating, instructive and, it would later become clear, a transformative experience personally. More importantly, it was genuinely productive. Sitra’s unique position—self-funded and independent, though under the auspices of parliament, and so both arm’s length from government and embedded at the same time—means that initiatives it creates can actually begin to get traction right away. This is in stark contrast to most workshop-led consultancy, which often pitches ideas in from outside, despite the presence of 'inside' in the workshop. These subsequently bounce off the host organisation’s shields of indifference or institutional inertia as, beyond a certain scale, an organisation’s first instinct is often to protect itself against transformative ideas. (fig.1 below)

In particular, much strategic work for government clients in particular suffers from a major flaw—the lack of a ‘hinge’ connecting the work to a clear pathway to projects, or further work. If the workshop is free, as it often is in new, challenging, transformational areas where there is no clear understanding of value from previous efforts, it's particularly difficult, Here, the client is barely a client at all in one of the moremeaningful senses i.e. they haven’t paid for it, they don’t have ‘skin in the game’.

Equally, studios can usefully bring together multiple stakeholders. Yet with complex interdependent problems requiring holistic thinking and action—e.g. climate change, health, urbanisation, education—this can lead to no one body taking responsibility, and so potential solutions fall through the cracks between organisations or within one organisation's architecture (fig.2 below) i.e. education is no longer the sole responsibility of the Department of Educaiton; it's more complex, hybrid, layered, networked than that (add your descriptor of choice).

Finally, workshops or studios lend themselves to a particular kind of focus, based on conversation and collaboration—yet they rarely provide the depth of analysis to tightly define an issue such that it can be developed into action. This often requires subsequent work, by which time the potential client has left the building and achieved escape velocity, easily side-stepping momentum generated in the workshop. The workshop model, which is often the foot-in-the-door for consultancies in this field, is intrinsically flawed.

'Nairn's London' by Ian Nairn (1966)

(A half-written entry on Ian Nairn's book 'Nairn's London' had been lying dormant for almost a year. However, a conversation on Twitter last night between myself, Kieran Long (of the Evening Standard), Justin McGuirk (of The Guardian), Charles Holland (of FAT), and Owen Hatherley (of Owen Hatherley and more besides) prompted me to finish off the sentences and hit 'publish'.)

The Economist’s Christmas special (2009) had a typically fascinating article about being an outsider, an emigrant, a foreigner, and the role and practice of writing in terms of understanding the nature of a place. The article described the effect on perception that 'being a foreigner' may have:

"Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”." ['The Others', The Economist, December 17th 2009]

Unrelated to this, Owen Hatherley and I had a very brief email correspondence a while ago about whether one could capture the essence of a city - or perhaps an essence of the city - in a brief visit, as with his research-fuelled excursions for Building Design (which are turning into a kind of retrofitted Pevsner for the 21stC) or my own scribbles garnered from a mere 24 hours in Geneva or Seoul, or 48 hours in Seattle or Turin or Milan, or a few days in Boston/Cambridge, or several intermittent weekends in Barcelona, and so on. Can you detect and describe an essence of place from a brief visit? I’ll leave it to you to decide, though I think that—with practice, and research—you can indeed quickly conjure an essence of a city, which may even be a decent facsimile of how many people perceive the place. (Somewhat like The Dishonourable Kirstie Allsopp’s 11 seconds rule on Location Location Location, though not really.)

Ian Nairn's book Nairn's London is quite the opposite—a rich book derived from a life spent amidst the city, a city which he clearly worshipped even as it was changing around him. It's the ultimate inside job. And although written from the point-of-view of the insider, I'd argue it manages to transform the "banality of the everyday" into a "super-real, evocative, true biography" of a city, too.

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Carsten Nicolai / Alva Noto

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day three. Written at the time, last October.)

As noted, I’ve followed Carsten Nicolai’s work for years, so it was a pleasure to see — and hear — him in the flesh. Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, is one of the stalwarts of the avant-garde electronica/noise/sound scene, but also works as a visual artist, as we’ll see.

For some time before the scheduled start, there are clearly set up issues with Herr Nicolai’s equipment. There is lots of quiet, concentrated discussion around the projector and sound set up. The projector resolution doesn't seem sharp at all, and worried-looking young organisers are all talking into headsets, making agitated waves up to the AV booth at the back of the auditorium. Throughout, Nicolai is calm and considered but insistent. With little else to look at, I note that he’s an elegant dresser - loose, dark wool flared trousers, grey top, deep burgundy scarf, impeccable white Adidas.

Finally, everything is good enough. The projector still isn’t as sharp as it needs to be, but Nicolai starts with a short video ... It’s a crisp glitch piece, with patterns of dots on screen. Then the fizz and static and rumble of a distant roar, until visual and aural static takes over. It’s the kind of start I’d expected, and a good one.

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Day One

As is often the case, I wrote the following notes at the time, just after the event - in this case, the ICOGRADA World Design Congress in Beijing, October 2009 - and have polished a little since, but then neglected to post until now. However, inspired by a recent trip to Shanghai, here are a set of earlier posts on the conference, Beijing, and China.

I was in Beijing for the first time, for the World Design Congress conference - where I was a speaker on Tuesday and a panellist on Wednesday - and to launch the aforementioned ‘Designing Creative Clusters’ project. It’s my first visit of any significance to China and as usual I’m fascinated by a new city, a new map, but this is something else, as if I’d been waiting for years to experience this first hand (in truth, I had.) The flurry of thoughts and observations is proving almost impossible to pin down - and new reflections keep emerging, weeks later - so as usual please excuse the impressionistic jottings. This one is organised in broadly chronological order.

I’m also conscious of a note at the beginning of Thomas J. Campanella’s book The Concrete Dragon, regarding visiting academics “discovering” China.

“Upon his first visit, the scholar is ready to write a book; after visiting a second time, he decides to settle for an article. By the third visit, our erstwhile academic realizes he knows next to nothing about China, and had better keep his mouth shut.”

This is probably the first visit of three for this research project alone, and unfortunately I have new publishing platforms such as this at my disposal, so here goes. (NB. Re-reading this, months later, and a visit to Hong Kong and Shanghai later, I think Campanella's anecdote is right, in that I already wouldn't write in the same way about China. But this is the nature of first impressions, after all.)

Method designing

Over the years I’ve realised that, like many designers, I have to immerse myself in the cultural context of my work in order to get results. I’ve come to think of this as ‘method designing’, after method acting; a way of ‘getting into character’ that consciously and subconsciously informs the design process. 

This approach might come from the fact that, as a designer, I’ve actually spent a lot of time writing, curating, and doing strategic work. All these activities require the ability to process vast amounts of data (often media) fairly rapidly and synthesise into some new form—as does designing, or at least the kind of designing done by designers like me. I find it difficult to have a discussion around form and function without trying to get at the ineffable, intangible aspects of a project’s context, for which I’m yet to discover a good word. Raymond Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’ partly does it, and mise-en-scène does to a limited extent, but ‘context’ isn’t quite enough, and doesn’t get at the lived experience and cultural aspects as well as the socio-economic and form-based.

A few years back, I noticed I’d been practicing method designing since the 1990s, when I worked for about five years as a web designer to the music industry — mainly artist websites for Virgin and EMI — and we often ensured that the music of the artists in question was on constant rotation while we were working. This was often gruelling, given the artists in question not only included Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, David Sylvian and Bryan Ferry but also the Spice Girls, 911, Billie Piper, Genesis and many others that I appear to have astutely excised from the memory banks. Still, enduring that lot through a form of immersion did at least partly ensure that the texture of the work that emerged from our studio was generally felt to be on-the-money.

I’ve taken this approach with me as my work moved away from more obviously cultural artefacts towards cities and architecture, where there are rich pickings to be had, of course.

Specifically, as I’ve been doing work on projects in Helsinki over the last few months, often at a (very large) distance, I’ve been actively exploring a few cultural artefacts, as part of a ‘method design’ approach underpinning work on Low2No and Helsinki Design Lab.

Matti Joensuu’s book The Priest of Evil was recommended to me after I asked Twitter for some contemporary Finnish fiction recommendations. And, despite the dodgy title, it’s great (thank you Lewis Martin). It's a crime novel, featuring a modus operandi of murder feared by most urban dwellers, committed by a occultish serial killer who is being tracked-down by a world-weary detective with a complex personal life. There are actually numerous patterns of Finnish culture—and specifically Helsinki culture—discernible within the prose. It was also a chance to delve into the exact opposite of the Helsinki I know. I’ve always visited the city in spring, high summer or autumn, and found it a place full of crisp light and sparkling water - clean, highly civilised, creative and inspirational. The Finns I know are funny, bright, talented, often garrulous, and highly engaging. Not without their moments of introspection, but cultures without introspection are dull and problematic.

But The Priest of Evil portrayed the opposite of that Helsinki, which is a useful counter-balance if nothing else. As I’ve noted many times before, cities are often experienced through the lens of  layered cultural artefacts assembled prior to visiting in person. This is most obvious in places places like Los Angeles, yet here, Priest of Evil’s explosive finale at Hakaniemi was certainly in my mind as I was walking through the old square a few months later, on a sunny spring day where almost every aspect of the ‘soft infrastructure’ was entirely different to Joensuu’s story. I am entirely aware that the Finnish winter is very long, but have no particular feel for it, having never experienced it. Friends talk of November being the hardest month, as it is without even the reflective qualities of snow. 

Joensuu’s book is Permanently November.

But beyond that, having read the book beforehand, I actually heard echoes in several insights into Finnish culture that locals contributed during Helsinki Design Lab. For example, the backdrop of domestic violence in Finnish culture, which is not a theme I’d have listened-out for otherwise. I find that cultural artefacts like this can often by more illuminating and thought-provoking—due to their philosophical contingency, subjectivity, and relatively impressionistic form—than straightforward, apparently objective articles on such matters.

In terms of music, a few years running sites for non-mainstream music meant I was familiar with Finnish artists like Pan Sonic, Jimi Tenor, Kimmo Pohjonen, Edward Vesala, Raoul Björkenheim, and subsequently the great Paavoharju and others.

Yet it was clearly time to dive into Sibelius a little more deeply, and I’ve been listening to fair amounts of Symphonies 1 and 3 and his earlier work Finlandia (in particular, the recording by CBSO conducted by Sakari Oramo.) Here, the allusions are more formal and more abstract, yet also affecting and inspiring. (Sound can also provide a supportive backdrop to work, of course, in a way that other artefacts cannot.) Reading around the music—particularly with classical music—can help massively, and the fluid national identities swirling around Finland when Sibelius was composing these works easily emerge from these vibrant recordings.

How these particular themes will emerge in subsequent design work is often not obvious, although the prompts in Joensuu’s characters make one look more carefully at the sparse characteristic of public squares, for instance, or the importance of subterranean spaces (I mean underground shopping centres and the metro, rather than the bad guy’s lair), just as the stirring, colourful dynamism and belle epoque qualities of Symphony No. 1, say, echo a golden era in Helsinki’s architecture, which one could choose to either draw into design strategies or react against. But really, there is a certain amount of ‘magic’, to borrow fellow HDL-er Alejandro Aravena’s description, going on in the synthesis here, which defies easy description of process. (I should also add that this was accompanied by more traditional research, such as reading Helsinki: Daughter of the Baltic, or the copious, largely-technical briefing notes on Finland's carbon profile supplied by Sitra for HDL.)

Method designing may not be so much about psychological motives or personal identification, as it is with method acting—although the idea of inhabiting elements of the collective psychology around a culture is increasingly interesting, if complex, territory. It’s more to do with creating a series of sensory impressions that inform the design work in less tangible fashion.

Perhaps the allusion to method acting will reveal some new vocabulary or ways of thinking? Anyone familiar with Lee Strasberg, and various methods and systems, is welcome to post comments below.

This, of course, is not rocket science. Or even rocket design. It could be seen as just listening to a bunch of mp3s while your cursor is hovering in Adobe-space. Which it is, partly. But I’ve always found it useful, since beginning to think of it as ‘method designing’ a few years ago, and am sharing it here in the hope it generates some further discussion or richer thinking.

'49 Cities', by Work AC

A while ago I was asked to help write a short piece on 'future cities', no more specific than that. The context was Australia, but fairly free. I suggested we start it with the following passage:

— Fade in —

The city of the future is established initially with north-south and east-west axial streets, and the city is laid out as a grid. Each block is envisaged as a programmable slot and is mixed-use, containing apartments, houses, shops and workshops, creating a dense city core. Between the urbanised zone and the city boundaries is a buffer zone, and beyond lies agricultural lands. Urban amenities such as plumbing, reservoirs, drainage and sewers, pedestrian sidewalks and traffic calming measures are employed throughout the city, along with public amenities like markets, public baths and toilets, theatres and religious and governmental buildings. 

Socially, the city's population is actively engaged in public life, through sport, food and drink, and an outdoors '24/7' culture, but also political discussion. Active transport ensures a strong, healthy populace, almost all waste is recycled, and food production is localised and distributed throughout, orchards, vines and herb gardens integrated into living spaces. Light industrial production is also distributed throughout the city, and connected globally through trade networks. Global communications are at the centre of the city's success.

Housing is based upon the courtyard house model, with an average of 3.5 people living in a space featuring two private courtyards, one of which collects rainwater that feeds subterranean water tanks. Cooling is achieved through passive design, and heating through the inherent thermal properties of ceramics.

Although dense, 69% of land use is green space, leaving 11% for infrastructure and 20% for built area. Of that built area, fully 52% is public space and 48% is housing. Of the green space, only 2% is devoted to parks as the other 98% is a productive landscape of urban agriculture, far more ubiquitous than the hemmed-in green spaces of the 20th century city. As citizens spend much of their time in this verdant space, dedicated parks feel less necessary.

The entire urban form is modular, flexible, and capable of being repeated across numerous contexts and locales. It has been tried and tested throughout much of the known world, each time iterated and refined through adaptation.

— Fade out —

In case you didn't already guess, the mention of "public baths" might be the give-away, for this is actually a description of the archetypal Roman city circa 500 BC—500 CE (drawn from the recent book '49 Cities'). Of course, the Roman city had more than a few flaws, particularly if you were a slave. And for even the healthiest, life expectancy was far lower than we'd accept today. Similarly, there are newer technologies that we should certainly take advantage of, such as renewable energy production, wireless connectivity, bicycles and of course the espresso machine. Yet it's surprising to consider how similar visions of contemporary urban planners - with their own versions of urban agriculture, active transport, walkable densification, courtyard housing with passive design, recycling, localised production, and so on - are to this Roman city from two millennia ago.

As stated, that introduction was adapted from the entry on the Roman city from the great collection 49 Cities, a compendium of utopian city projects linked to an exhibition at the Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York City, developed by local architects Work AC. 

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, by Alain de Botton

My flight from Brisbane to Sydney had been delayed en route, due to 60kph winds at Sydney leaving only one runway operational, and so the plane was directed into a holding pattern. Presumably we were stacked alongside other aircraft, though none were visible.

The Australian landscape had also disappeared surprisingly quickly into the gloom of evening outside the window, a gigantic land mass suddenly and easily secreted away. On take-off from Brisbane an hour earlier, ascending above the mangroves and oil refineries at the mouth of the Brisbane River, the lower stratosphere of South East Queensland had been suffuse with a yellowy haze from the dust storms apparently now firmly ensconced along the east coast. But now the view out of the thick starboard window was complex in composition and banal in content, a multi-layered montage of grime and moisture in the foreground, vast inhuman darkness pocked by the odd spot of light in the background, and my trousers reflected in the cabin reading light somewhere in-between.

The delay, which again reminds me of the brittle nature of the oft-inappropriately-named civil aviation (and the essentially unsustainable nature of domestic commercial aviation in the long run), does however give me enough time to both start and finish Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, his account of spending, well, a week at the airport, as writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, courtesy of BAA. 

To my mild surprise, I enjoyed it hugely.

Maps in the Writer and the City

As you might imagine I was, and am, very fond of the Writer and the City series from Bloomsbury. It's a collection of great writing and beautifully realised as books - crafted, collectable, carefully curated and with unique material from great writers.

I’ve drawn on the contents several times and will continue to do so I’m sure. Yet a particularly fine feature are the maps in the inside covers. They’re both a useful reference and an additional fiction, and although they also largely emerged before Google Maps, their hand-drawn, loose evocations form a kind of response to latter's ubiquity. Just as the physical books themselves represent a minor and inadvertent pre-emptive strike on the Kindle and whatever tablet Apple have up their sleeve. I'm not sure Bloomsbury are still them running as a series though I hope so.

Of course maps wrapped around stories have a long history, perhaps as long as written history itself. Michael Chabon wrote a beautiful article about childhood, maps and adventure recently, noting the relationship between story and topography:

"Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life. This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity." [New York Review of Books]

Chabon's article is worth a read on many counts (I fully endorse his eulogy for adventure in childhood) but I liked this casual aside about the relationship between maps, landscape and narrative.

So here, below, a set of the maps from a few of the Writer and the City series, covering Florence, Paris, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and New York. I’m particularly drawn to the New York map which adds a further layer of imagination to imaginary place-making. Take a closer look.

 

Housekeeping; and Cut 'n' Paste Cities

Firstly, apologies for the lack of activity here back here in May/June. We've moved house (hello Lilyfield; you'll soon see images of a new deck underneath books in my reviews) and I've been submerged in work. Unfortunately this site has to flex in response at such times, receding into a background hum of the occasional Delicious update and artlessly sporadic Twitter use.

Secondly, while discussing inactivity, there has actually been some activity on what we called the Best Urban Spaces project a 'while' ago. Russell Davies, James Goggin and I did the initial cut of images over a year ago; then production issues - by which we all mean other work - beset us. 

You may recall the project was an attempt to produce a pamphlet, or short book, which would be a compendium of user-submitted photographs of favourite urban places or spaces, ideally accompanied by a short description. The Flickr Group we are using quickly became a fascinating selection of contributions. It still is, and they keep coming. What we've failed to do is move quickly on the production side, for which we apologise. It's a 'slow project' in the R.M. Davies sense, but still. Not intended to be that slow.

However, Practise have done some sterling work on the design and layout and it's all coming to fruition. James and Russell are investigating the appropriate printing options (from London; add a note below if you want to suggest something; though we're not thinking Lulu or equivalent with this particular project). It's looking great, and we're really excited that it will be emerging soon. I think the project has quietly uncovered some interesting reflections on what people consider to be good or great urban space, and even what they think urban space is in the first place. Some sneak peeks in the crops below (some of you may recognise photos of yours; those that do will receive a free copy of the book, if you remember the deal):

We're renaming it Splendid Urban Places. This is partly as the opportunity for synchronisation with the Worst Urban Places project is long gone; partly as we don't want to, or simply couldn't, claim to be as authoritative as the word 'best' implies, and also because I was taken with the following passage by William H. Whyte in his Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which better captures the spirit of our project (and which eagle-eyed readers will recognise from a certain recent speech). And because despite its American provenance, it sounds rather English.:

"Some of the more felicitous spaces, furthermore, are leftovers, niches, odds and ends of space that by happy accident work very well for people. At 57th Street and Madison Avenue in New York there is a bank with two window ledges. They're low enough for sitting and are recessed enough to provide wind protection. There is sun all day, a parade of passersby, and a the corner a vendor squeezing fresh orange juice. It is a splendid urban place. There are other such places, most provided by inadvertence. Think what might be provided if someone planned it." [my emphasis; from The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces]

Practise have spent time designing a flexible layout (which was tricky, given the highly variable dimensions, aspect ratio and resolution of the images people submitted) which will serve the project well through subsequent editions.

By chance, a colleague of mine in Arup's Foresight+Innovation team, Duncan Wilson, has created a project with broadly similar aspirations and platform. I've been helping Duncan pull it together a bit, with our colleague Francesca Birks in New York, and it's also proving fascinating. Entitled Cut 'n' Paste Cities, the project is different to Splendid Urban ... in that it concerns a wider range of aspects of urban fabric and life - not simply spatial, though it can be - and also enables you to suggest things you'd like to see less of i.e. a cut from a city, as well as a paste into a city.

So we might imagine suggested pastes into an urban environment could be elements of urban infrastructure - trams, funiculars, recycling systems, local food delivery services, community gardens - as well as services - integrated ticketing systems a la Oyster or Octopus or Go Cards, say. Cuts could be unnecessarily large freeways, examples of dreadful architecture, potential development sites being sat upon, shoddily run services and so on. 

Or it could be the other way round - up to you. Again, we're using a Flickr group to co-ordinate, although you can also submit via email (instructions at the Cut 'n' Paste Cities website). This is heading towards a different series of outcomes, including potentially an exhibition, though you retain the rights to your images of course. You'll find contributions from Arup staffers like me in there too.

So, stay tuned for Splendid Urban Places and in the meantime why not visit Cut 'n' Paste cities; have a browse through both groups and ideally, join up and contribute.

Cut 'n' Paste Cities
Splendid Urban Places Flickr Group

In denial, on the beach, the road, the drowned world

For a lover of cities and an inveterate optimist, a curiously persistent thread over the years here has the destruction of cities. From an older entry on visions of deserted cities in films to later entries on drowned worlds in Brisbane, 'Apocalypse Sydney', and eliding the firestorms of Dresden and Tokyo with the bushfires/wildfires encircling Australian and Californian cities.

Continuing in this slightly morbid vein, and reading The Road recently not long after Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, I wondered if we could line up these books, along with JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, thus:

Each book depicts the aftermath planet suffering some kind of apocalyptic event in different ways, all post-nuclear interestingly (as far as we can tell with McCarthy’s), though all in different ways.

On the Beach (1957) describes a Melbourne as the last city on Earth, as a post-war cloud of radioactive fallout slowly enshrouds the globe. It’s a fascinating book, entirely redolent of its time, but in its depiction of denial entirely apposite now too. Climate change can stand in for this post-nuclear world, but appears more susceptible to denial due to its creeping diffuse nature.

In Shute’s novel, several of the characters struggle to deal with the impending death of human civilisation, from the American naval officer steadfastly believing his wife and child to be alive, even though he knows they cannot be, to the wife of the Australian naval office who plants vegetables she’ll never see come to fruition. (In the depiction of a car culture faced with dwindling oil reserves, we also see the kinds of autogeddon we can assume to be with us at some point this century.)

Clive Hamilton, in a brilliant essay in The Monthly on climate change denial, completes the Rumsfeldian square with his suggestion that climate change denial is about “unknown knowns, the facts we know but push from our consciousness.” On The Beach is more about this form of denial than reconciliation perhaps. It’s closer to ‘interpretative denial’ than ‘literal denial’ or ‘implicatory denial’, in Stanley Cohen’s model from his States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering.

This first form of denial is arguably where we are now with climate change. Although such change may take a different form, what echoes of 20th century behaviour will we see? WG Sebald’s On The Natural History of Destruction depicts a form of mass consensual denial after the complete obliteration of Hamburg during the Second World War:

“Instead, and with remarkable speed, social life, that other natural phenomenon, revived. People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. The population decided - out of sheer panic at first - to carry on as if nothing had happened.” (p.41, On The Natural History of Destruction, WG Sebald)

JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) concerns a form of attempted psychological adaptation, perhaps also as denial. Ballard’s vision depicts living organisms, including humans, regressing to a prehistoric consciousness, a form of long dormant lizard brain awaking and grappling for control of consciousness and subconscious, in parallel with the rampantly fertile flora of the Triassic era. This is hardly denial, consciously or subconsciously. Rather, a surely doomed attempt by the human mind to reboot itself into another mode more appropriate to the conditions, like DOS suddenly re-emerging from within Windows.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007) is shattering, and one of the finest novels I’ve read. Certainly one of the most emotionally affecting. The protagonists in The Road are further advanced along this destructive linear progression. Indeed, further on down the road. They're far removed from any possible form of denial. Their ash-cloaked dead world is one of grim realisation and numb despair.

Happy new year.

Alternative ending: this closing image from Sunshine, noted in the aforementioned 'Apocalypse Sydney'.

On the Beach, Nevil Shute
The Drowned World, JG Ballard
The Road, Cormac McCarthy