Shrink the Economy, Save the World?

"A rising tide and a bigger pie: Economic growth has long been considered such an obvious boon that it’s pursued by governments across the world as a matter of course. But in 2016, when a London professor warned an audience in Newcastle that Brexit would lead to a precipitous drop in Britain’s gross domestic product, that well-worn measure of economic activity, one woman’s heckling caught him by surprise. “That’s your bloody G.D.P.,” she shouted, “not ours!”

The eruption tapped into a suspicion supported by reality: Gains in economic growth have too often buoyed the fortunes of the richest instead of lifting all boats. Prosperity even in the most prosperous countries hasn’t been shared. But all the attention to inequality is just a crack in the edifice of economic orthodoxy. Now a much more radical proposition has emerged, looming like a wrecking ball: Is economic growth desirable at all?

Less than two decades ago, an economist like Herman Daly, who argued for a “steady-state economy,” was such an outlier that his fellow economist Benjamin Friedman could declare that “practically nobody opposes economic growth per se.” Yet today there is a burgeoning “post-growth” and “degrowth” movement doing exactly that — in journals, on podcasts, at conferences. Consider some of the books published in the last several years: Tim Jackson’s “Post-Growth: Life After Capitalism,” Kate Soper’s “Post-Growth Living,” Giorgos Kallis’s “In Defense of Degrowth,” Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson’s “Exploring Degrowth,” Jason Hickel’s “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.” The proliferation of the term is as good an indicator as any: The literature of degrowth is growing.

In 1972, the French theorist André Gorz coined the word décroissance to ask whether “no-growth — or even degrowth” in material production was necessary for “the earth’s balance,” even if it ran counter to “the survival of the capitalist system.”

 

Gorz was writing the same year that “The Limits to Growth” was published, a report by a group of scientists warning that surges in population and economic activity would eventually outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet. “The Limits to Growth” was initially met with skepticism and even ridicule. Critics pointed to humanity’s undeniably impressive record of technological innovation. As one representative economist put it, “Our predictions are firmly based on a study of the way these problems have been overcome in the past.”

And so degrowth remained on the fringes of the fringe for decades, until increasing awareness about global warming percolated into public debates in the early aughts. The realization that we hadn’t innovated our way out of our ecological predicament, along with inequalities laid bare by the 2008 financial crisis, fueled a more widespread distrust of the conventional capitalist wisdom. Maybe relentless economic growth was more poison than panacea.

An Ideology of ‘Growthism’

This doubt has taken varied forms, from cautious agnosticism to categorical doomsaying, with degrowth occupying the furthest end of the spectrum.

For advocates of degrowth, it’s a core tenet that in high-income countries the constant expansion demanded by capitalism isn’t required to improve people’s lives; instead, the ensuing inequality and environmental havoc have frequently undermined them.

Take Hickel, an anthropologist who teaches in London and Barcelona and is one of the movement’s most spirited exponents. Like other contemporary critics of unfettered growth, he emphasizes the climate crisis. His book begins with scenes of ecological devastation: dying earthworms, declining crop yields, collapsing fish stocks. He points to the connection between growing G.D.P. and energy use, identifying an ideology of “growthism” that he equates with “a kind of madness.” He says that he is not promoting a deliberate reduction in G.D.P. But if G.D.P. stagnates or declines because we conserve energy instead of consuming it, so be it.

In what could be a mission statement for the movement, Hickel writes: “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

This program amounts to an overhaul of the capitalist system, not just some reformist tinkering around the edges. Nor do its advocates place much hope in technological fixes. “‘Green growth’ is not a thing,” Hickel asserts, citing research he conducted with Kallis. “It has no empirical support.”

Of course, such a sweeping pronouncement is far from uncontested. Economists like Paul Krugman and data scientists like Hannah Ritchie have maintained that technological advances mean that economic prosperity doesn’t have to lead to ecological degradation. But for all the debates over carbon pricing and parts per million and degrees of warming, the distinctive argument that Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: “We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.”

In other words, we have plundered the planet instead of figuring out more egalitarian ways to live with one another. “The problem with growthism is that for decades it has distracted us from the difficult politics of redistribution,” Hickel writes. This initially looked like the opposite of a problem. Growth’s seemingly magical ability to allow us to sidestep the toughest moral disputes was, for generations of politicians, the very thing that commended it.

Yet this pattern of avoidance has compounded not only our ecological troubles but our moral ones, too. An illusory consensus held together by economic growth has dissolved. As the economist Daniel Susskind notes in his new book, “Growth: A History and a Reckoning,” big questions that were pushed to the margins — about clashing notions of freedom, equality and justice — have roared back with a vengeance. Still, he sees this as cause for ambivalence, not despair. After all, growth has also emancipated much of the world from “an unforgiving struggle for subsistence,” Susskind points out. “Growth has an irresistible promise and an unacceptable price; it is miraculous and devastating; we need a lot more and vastly less.”

Although he denounces the blithe optimism of the economic establishment, Susskind is also highly critical of degrowthers, who are too dismissive of capitalism for his liking. He recommends “adopting a weak degrowth mind-set” — one that holds “less regard for growth” while also preserving a “serious endorsement of growth’s merits.” Only a “more balanced position,” he says, would “recognize the reality of a difficult trade-off between growth and the climate.”

Abundance Without Growth?

Yet for the vocal proponents of degrowth, the timorousness of a “more balanced position” is what allowed capitalist growth to run roughshod over the earth in the first place. This is the resolute message promulgated by Kohei Saito, a 37-year-old Japanese Marxist philosopher who has emerged as the movement’s public face.

“Any attempt to blend degrowth with capitalism is doomed to fail,” he proclaims in “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” Capitalism doesn’t just tend toward growth, he says, but requires it. “To demand the cessation of all these things — to demand deceleration — is in fact to demand capitalism’s end.”

This idea might sound extreme, but it has found a considerable audience: “Slow Down,” which was released in the United States in January, has sold half a million copies since it was first published in Japan in 2020. In it, Saito quotes the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who denounced an older generation for only being “interested in solutions that would enable you to carry on like before.” Saito himself was born in 1987, and suggests that because he did not live through the Cold War, he was able to study Marxism without “reflexively” imposing the reality of the Soviet Union onto Marx’s work. By demanding “capitalism’s end,” Saito is just getting started; what he calls for is not just degrowth, but “degrowth communism.”

Mind you, Saito maintains that the communism he’s proposing isn’t the top-down, coercive, undemocratic statism of the Soviet Union, but something that looks a lot more like communitarianism, with an emphasis on more local measures like mutual aid, citizens’ assemblies and “face-to-face community building.” This redefinition, he says, isn’t a repudiation of Marx — who emphasized the necessity of state-led economic growth in “The Communist Manifesto” — but is based on “research notes Marx kept at the end of his life,” as he became increasingly willing to take the dangers of environmental degradation into account.

It’s certainly an unusual rhetorical strategy: insist on repurposing Marx and resuscitating a loaded (and arguably inaccurate) term like “communism” by trying to purge (or ignore) its historical baggage. But Saito’s book is written largely for a generation that has been saddled with the ecological consequences of economic growth and therefore has little reason to respect the likes and dislikes of its elders. He repeatedly derides the faintest hint of moderation with a dismissive “amounts to nothing more”; his uncompromising provocations are undoubtedly part of the appeal.

Eventually, though, Saito admits that there is “some truth” to the argument that capitalism produces material wealth, and so he champions degrowth communism only for rich countries, not for poor ones. “Those in the Global North enjoy rich lifestyles enabled by the sacrifices of those in the Global South,” he writes. Degrowth would halt this injustice and offer a form of “reparations”: Reducing the resources and energy used by the Global North would allow the Global South to pursue its own economic growth instead.

Just don’t call this a sacrifice on our part. Even Saito is forced to contend with our stubborn attraction to bounty, edging away from the austere vocabulary of degrowth by resorting to the language of plenitude. Like Hickel, he promises a new kind of “radical abundance,” in which a genuine commitment to “the commons” will allow us to savor “public wealth” instead of endlessly chasing stuff we don’t need.

‘A Poverty of Imagination’

Given how keenly the degrowth movement disavows coercion, how is this wholesale transformation supposed to happen? “Seeds of degrowth communism are sprouting all over the world,” Saito writes, pointing to experiments in local governance in cities like Barcelona, which has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050, and farming cooperatives in South Africa.

Even degrowth’s skeptics may find that Saito’s examples of grass-roots organizing sound agreeably democratic and improvisational. But the prospect of global apocalypse that degrowthers keep emphasizing also has the perverse effect of making local measures sound acutely inadequate. Still, Saito says that such experiments do offer something crucial: an enlarged sense of what’s possible. Degrowth’s critics, he writes, suffer from “a poverty of imagination that simply accepts the status quo as unchangeable.”

As it happens, Susskind says precisely the same thing but in the reverse: that it’s degrowth’s advocates who suffer from a “lack of imagination.” The mirrored accusations are striking. Maybe it isn’t a matter so much of imagination scarcity as of where that imagination is directed.

Techno-optimists place their faith in innovation; degrowthers place theirs in social movements.

Both sides lay claim to being the genuine realists. Each insists that we simply don’t have enough time to do what the other side wants.

The intransigence of such zero-sum disputes is a reminder of why win-win fantasies are so attractive in the first place. Whatever the profound differences between degrowth’s proponents and their critics, the scale of the climate crisis suggests one point of convergence: We need all the imaginative help we can get." [1]

Establishing 100% tariffs on Chinese electric cars, US President Biden rejected China's technological solution to the climate catastrophe. The West simply does not have the personnel, infrastructure and organizational ability to replicate what China is doing. This leads to an escalation of climate catastrophe, which leads to irreversible political processes that end, climate catastrophe producing, capitalism. Biden just signed the death warrant for capitalism.

It is time to end Social Darwinism. 

1. Shrink the Economy, Save the World?: Critic's Notebook. Szalai, Jennifer.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 8, 2024.

 

Kaip amerikietiška svajonė apie būstą tapo realybe Švedijoje

"Kaip architektas, I. Rupnikas mano, kad sprendimas dėl įperkamo būsto trūkumo Amerikoje yra akivaizdus: statykite daugiau namų. Pradėkite šiandien. Tačiau tai, kaip namai statomi Jungtinėse Amerikos Valstijose, greitis tampa neįmanomas.

 

 Prieš daugelį metų Rupniko kroatų močiutė, pati architektė, nurodė jam intriguojantį atsakymą į šią mįslę: modulinių būstų projektai, pastatyti Europoje šeštajame ir šeštajame dešimtmečiuose. Rupnikas buvo sužavėtas. Žinoma, surenkamieji kompleksai, o ypač sovietinio bloko būstai, gali būti negražūs ir pernelyg vienalyčiai, tačiau šis procesas žaibiškai sukūrė milijonus būstų.

 

 Užsikabinęs Rupnikas pradėjo tyrinėti modulinį korpusą savo daktaro disertacijai. Harvardo aukštosios mokyklos dizaino mokyklos archyvuose jis aptiko nuorodą sename žurnalo straipsnyje, kuris jį nustebino: pagal pramoninio būsto iniciatyva, pavadintą „Operation Breakthrough“, 1971–1973 m. JAV buvo pastatyta beveik 3000 butų. Kaip jis niekada apie tai negirdėjo?

 

 Paaiškėjo, kad mažai žmonių girdėjo. Neradęs daug daugiau informacijos, Rupnikas kreipėsi į Būsto ir urbanistikos departamentą (HUD), kuris ir sukūrė programą. 1969 m., kai buvo paskelbta operacija „Breakthrough“, HUD buvo mažiau, nei ketveri metai, o įperkamas būstas vis dar buvo abiejų partijų problema. Plano vizionierius, HUD sekretorius George'as Romney, buvęs respublikonų gubernatorius ir paskirtas Niksonas (ir, taip, Mitto tėvas), pavadino jį Ekonomika 101: Jei greitai padidinsite būsto pasiūlą, sumažinsite kainą visiems.

 

 Romney teigė, kad šaliai per 10 metų reikėjo pastatyti 26 milijonus namų, beveik tris kartus daugiau, nei buvo pastatyta per praėjusius 10 metų. Jis tvirtino, kad statybų pramonė yra vienintelis būdas, tai padaryti.

 

 Nors beveik visos kitos pramonės šakos nuo 1968 m. tapo produktyvesnės, namų statybos produktyvumas – iš esmės vieno darbuotojo darbo kiekis per valandą – sumažėjo per pusę. Šalis vos stato pakankamai, kad išlaikytų status quo, kurio, pasak Fredžio Maco, trūksta maždaug keturių milijonų vienetų. Ateinančiais metais, augant gyventojų skaičiui, keičiantis klimatui ir natūraliai nykstant būsto fondui, mums reikės tik daugiau.

 

 Būsto trūkumas buvo problema jau 1969 m. Romney suprato, kad įmonės neinvestuos į mašinas ir pridėtines išlaidas, reikalingas industrializacijai, nes dėl įvairių vietinių pastatų ir zonų kodų nebuvo įmanoma padidinti savo masto. Operacija „Breakthrough“ pasiūlė panaudoti didžiulę federalinės vyriausybės perkamąją galią, kad būtų užtikrinta didelė rinka, o proceso metu dokumentuoti ir pakeisti reguliavimo kliūtis industrializacijai.

 

 Operacija Breakthrough atrinko devynias vietas visoje šalyje. Tarp gamykloje pastatytų eksperimentų buvo būstas pagyvenusiems žmonėms Kalamazū, Mich. valstijoje, ir savininkų naudojami kooperatyvai prie ežero Makone, Ga. Pagal programą buvo sukurti viešieji būstai Memfyje ir 58 miesto namai Sietlo centre nuomininkams, turintiems būsto kuponus. . Tačiau 1976 m. Kongresas nusprendė, kad programa buvo per brangi ir HUD neturėtų vykdyti demonstracinių projektų. Praėjus mažiau, nei dešimtmečiui po to, kai buvo paskelbta, operacija „Breakthrough“ buvo mirusi.

 

 Tačiau kai Rupnikas tyrinėjo įrašą, jį nustebino tai, ką programa nuveikė. Dėl to buvo sukurtas nacionalinis kodeksas, kuris reguliavo ir labai išplėtė anksčiau neteisėtą priekabų namų sektorių, kuris dabar sudaro 10 procentų vienos šeimos namų. Rupnikui eksperimentas parodė kažką galingo: kai būtų įgyvendintas vienodas nacionalinis statybos kodeksas, pramonė reaguotų. Kitaip tariant, kliūtys greitai statyti būstą buvo ne technologinės, o institucinės.

 

 Nors operacija „Breakthrough“ neturėjo didelės įtakos JAV, ji radikaliai paveikė kitas šalis. Japonija išsiuntė delegaciją apžiūrėti „Operation Breakthrough“ statybvietes ir išstudijuoti jos ataskaitas: Beveik visos statybos Japonijoje dabar yra pramoninės ir 15 procentų namų yra surenkami iš plieno. Švedijoje 45 procentai statybų yra pramoninės. Ten statybininkai taip pat stato aukštas konstrukcijas iš medienos, kuri yra labiausiai mėgstama būsto medžiaga Jungtinėse Valstijose ir kuri yra labiausiai nekenksminga klimatui.

 

 Gavęs daktaro laipsnį, Rupnikas įkūrė firmą MOD X, kurios pagrindinis dėmesys skiriamas pramoninės statybos pažangai. Jis negalėjo atsikratyti absurdojausmo, kad Jungtinėse Valstijose, kur buvo išbandyta operacija „Breakthrough“, pramoniniai būstai užima vos 3 procentus rinkos. Taigi jis ir jo MOD X bendrai direktoriai gavo Būsto ir miestų plėtros departamento paramą, kad jie iš naujo įvertintų operaciją Breakthrough, siekiant išsiaiškinti, kaip sukurti efektyvų pramoninį būstą Jungtinėse Valstijose.

 

 2023 m. birželio mėn. prisijungiau prie vienos iš firmos tyrimų kelionių. Komanda norėjo sužinoti, koks galėtų būti būstas Jungtinėse Valstijose, jei Kongresas nebūtų atšaukęs operacijos „Breakthrough“. Išskridome į Švediją išsiaiškinti.

 

 Kaip pastatyti namą taip, kaip padaro automobilį Volvo

 

Operacijos „Breakthrough“ prielaida iš esmės buvo tokia: kas būtų, jei galėtume statyti namus taip pat, kaip automobilių pramonė gamina automobilius? Lindbäcks šeimai priklausanti statybų įmonė Švedijoje, arti poliarinio rato, šį klausimą suprato pažodžiui. Prieš atidarant būsto gamyklą 2017 m., jos vadovybė aplankė Toyota ir Volvo gamyklas bei netoliese esančias celiuliozės ir popieriaus gamyklas, pasiskolinę iš ten savo geriausių idėjų.

 

 Lindbäcks gamykla dabar apima 10 akrų plotą, tai yra orlaivių angaras, skirtas labiausiai įžemintoms konstrukcijoms. Miglotą birželio dieną Stefanas Lindbäckas, ketvirtos kartos įmonės vadovas, surengė ekskursiją mūsų delegacijai. Prieš išvedami į metalinį taką su vaizdu į didžiulę gamyklos aukštą, apsiauname apsauginius batus. Žmonės judėjo aplink mašinas, kaip žmonės muzikinės dėžutės takeliu.

 

 Gamykloje viskas buvo orientuota į vieną pagrindinę liniją – lėtai judančią konvejerio juostą, ant kurios baigti komponentai buvo surenkami į pilnai suformuotus modulius. Pagrindinė linija buvo stuburas. Daugiau laiko reikalaujantys mazgai – trumpesnės linijos su mašinomis, statančiomis grindis, sienas, lubas ir taip vadinamą logistiką, pavyzdžiui, stalviršiai ir spintelės – tiekiami į stuburą kaip briaunelės. Vienas dėžutės blokas buvo baigtas kas 30 minučių. Vienetus galima sujungti, kad būtų galima sukurti įvairaus dydžio ir išplanavimo butus.

 

 Ant vieno šonkaulio vidinė siena nukeliavo ant stovo, kur ji stovėjo vertikaliai dažymui. Šis triukas nustebino Mary Tingerthal, buvusią Minesotos būsto komisaro ir dabar specialią modulinės įmonės RISE patarėją, atrodydama beveik revoliucine. Mažai pramoninė statyba, kuri vyksta Jungtinėse Valstijose, paprastai tęsiasi viena surinkimo linija. Drėgna konstrukcija, pavyzdžiui, dažymas, paprastai vyksta uždaroje dėžutėje ir lėtina eigą. Šioje gamykloje ji stebėjosi: „Jis nuolat sklando ore!"

 

 Tačiau ryškiausias skirtumas tarp JAV ir Švedijos yra reglamentavimas. Statybos taisyklės JAV bando padaryti pastatus saugius, tiksliai nurodant, kokios medžiagos ir kaip turi būti naudojamos (rekomenduojantis kodas). Švedijoje vyriausybė tai daro, nustatydama tikslus, ir leisdama statybininkams sugalvoti būdą, kaip juos pasiekti (našumo kodas).

 

 Taigi, pavyzdžiui, JAV statybos kodeksai diktuoja gipso kartono storį, kuris turi būti naudojamas atsparumui ugniai užtikrinti, kiek sluoksnių reikia ir kiek vinių reikia jam pritvirtinti. Švedijoje pagal kodeksą reikalaujama, kad siena būtų atspari degimui dvi valandas, o tai leidžia inžinieriams ir gamintojams išsiaiškinti, kaip tai padaryti. Reguliatoriaus darbas yra patikrinti inžinieriaus darbą.

 

 Abiejų rezultatas – atsparumas ugniai ir konstrukcijų sauga, tačiau Jungtinėse Valstijose kiekvienam gyvenamajam pastatui reikia gauti leidimą. Statybos metu darbas dažnai sustoja, kai inspektoriai atlieka periodines vizualines patikras. Tai prisideda prie „sustabdymo“ tempo, kuris nuvilia beveik visus, išskyrus skolintojus, kurie gauna palūkanas už finansavimą. Švedijos kodeksai reikalauja daugiau darbo su priekine dalimi, kai statybininkai turi įrodyti, kad jų metodai yra pakankamai geri, tačiau gamyklos procesai, atitinkantys našumo kodą, gali būti sertifikuoti. Taip skatinami naujoviški sprendimai ir gaunama mažiau atliekų.

 

 Kokybiškų namų statyba, tiek vietoje, tiek už jos ribų, niekada nebus pigu. Nenorite taupyti medžiagoms ar darbo jėgai, o gamykloje pastatytų namų taupymas iš pradžių gali būti neaiškus, – sakė Lindbäck mūsų grupei. Įprastas statybininkas gali pasiūlyti mažesnę kainą nei Lindbäcks, bet tada tenka patirti statybos priežiūros vietoje išlaidas ir sumokėti už delsimą mokėti palūkanas. O įprasti statybininkai pelnosi iš vėlyvų pokyčių.

 

 Gamykloje pastatytuose namuose modifikacijos sumažinamos iki minimumo, nes klientai dažniausiai renkasi iš standartizuotų karkasų, o pakeitimai leidžiami tik iki tam tikro taško. Gamyklos statytojo pranašumas yra kokybės kontrolė ir greitis. Tikrasis pelnas, ilgalaikis pelnas, gaunamas, supaprastinant pastatų sistemą, kad būtų galima nuspėti rezultatus ir greitą pristatymą.

 

 "Tai ne apie pigiausią produktą", - sakė Lindbäck. „Norime pigiausio sprendimo“.

 

 Dizaino ir medžio alchemija

 

 Kai važiavome autobusu maždaug pusantros valandos į pietus nuo Lindbäcks gamyklos, pro plonus pušies ir eglės strypus už langų mirksėjo saulė. Tada borealinis miškas atsiskyrė į nedidelį miestą, kuriame vienas pastatas iškilo aukščiau kitų: kultūros centras „Sara Kulturhus“, kurio viršuje yra viešbutis, 20 aukštų masinis medinis pastatas, pastatytas iš gamykloje pagamintų agregatų. Viešbučio bokšte yra 205 vienodi kambariai, uždengti dvigubais langais, tarsi kubeliai, užklijuoti stiklu.

 

 Prieš 1995 m. Švedijai priėmus našumu pagrįstą kodeksą, mediniai pastatai buvo apriboti dviejų aukštų; beveik per naktį mediniai pastatai gali būti tokio aukščio, kokio saugumą inžinieriai galėtų įrodyti.

 

 Statybos išmeta 40 procentų pasaulinės anglies dvideginio emisijos, tačiau Švedijoje taip 20 procentų, nes tiek daug pastatyta iš šalies gausios medienos. Anglis sulaikoma nupjautuose medžiuose ir medžiuose, pasodintuose juos pakeisti. Nors mediena kainuoja daugiau, nei kai kurios kitos medžiagos, statybai su ja reikia mažiau energijos ir galima greičiau statyti. Tai reiškia, kad kūrėjai gali greičiau sumokėti paskolas statyboms ir išnuomoti vienetus.

 

 Medinė raktų kortelė paspaudė mane į eglės formos viešbučio kambarį su langu nuo grindų iki lubų. Dėžutiškumas labiau priklausė nuo minimalistinio skandinaviško dizaino, nei tūrinės modulinės konstrukcijos. Buvo jau gerokai po vidurnakčio, bet birželio pabaigoje saulė tik kelioms valandoms panirdavo žemiau horizonto ir skleisdavo blankų švytėjimą, tarsi lempa iš kambario už kampo. Dar labiau, nei šviesa šią stebuklingą, šliaužiančią, valandą, esminis kambario architektūros ir interjero dizaino alchemijos elementas buvo minkšta, raminanti, mediena.

 

 Oskaras Norelius, firmos „White Arkitekter“, kuri projektavo Sara Kulturhus ir viešbutį, partneris man pasakė, kad kokybiška mediena buvo brangi, todėl sutaupė, projektuodamas pramoninei gamybai. Tam puikiai tinka viešbučiai, bendrabučiai, biurai ir ligoninės. „Vienas modulis, – sakė jis, kalbėdamas apie patį viešbučio kambarį, – yra pakankamai didelis, kad jame būtų galima sutalpinti viską: vonios kambarį, visą apdailą, ir jį vis tiek bus gana lengva transportuoti.

 

 Tūriniai moduliniai mazgai buvo surinkti ir Derome gamykloje, kuri nepanaši į Lindbäcks. Tada jie buvo nuvaryti, 95 procentai sukomplektuoti, į vietą, kur buvo sukrauti kranu taip greitai, kaip po vieną 16 vienetų aukštą per savaitę, priklausomai nuo vėjo. Kai blokai buvo sujungti varžtais, tarpikliai aplink jų perimetrą išsiurbiami, sandarūs. Viešbučio modulius buvo galima surinkti ne vietoje, tuo pat metu, kai vietoje buvo statomas kultūros centras – viešbučio bazė. Ši lygiagreti statyba, anot rangovo, sutaupė metus.

 

 Norelius vedžiojo mus per kultūros centrą, kuriame yra viešoji biblioteka, dvi meno galerijos ir šeši teatrai. Kai per monumentalų vestibiulį patekome į atvirą galerijos erdvę, Rupnikas susijaudinęs atpažino standartizuotus medienos modulius, kurie buvo sukurti šiam projektui. Pagrindinis įėjimas atsidarė į laiptus su sėdimomis vietomis bendruomenės skaitymams ir renginiams. Viršuje kinetinis medinis sietynas atidarė ir uždarė medinius žiedlapius, kad atspindėtų, ar pastatas ir jo saulės kolektoriai prideda ar atima energiją iš tinklo.

 

 Rupnikui ir kitiems kelionės dalyviams modulinio būsto privalumai buvo akivaizdūs. Tačiau pastangos sukurti šį būdą JAV sunkiai klestėjo.

 

 Garsiausias JAV būstų gamintojas ne vietoje iš tikrųjų yra liūdnai pagarsėjęs: „Katerra“, įkurta 2015 m., buvo startuolis, kuris, kaip visi tikėjo, padarys šuolį. Ji turėjo begalę pinigų – „SoftBank“ investavo 2,4 milijardo dolerių – bet stengėsi viską, visur daryti, iš karto. „Jie įsigijo labai greitai“, – sakė Toddas Beyreutheris, buvęs „Katerra“ pažangių statybinių medžiagų vyresnysis direktorius, atvykęs į kelionę į Švediją. Praėjus metams nuo pandemijos, pasisėmusi pažangiausių gamyklų ir įsigijimų, įmonė žlugo ir iškėlė bankroto bylą.

 

 Tačiau Rupnik džiaugiasi kitomis iniciatyvomis visoje šalyje. Filadelfijos įmonė nusipirko Katerros gamyklą Tracy mieste, Kalifornijoje, ir sukomplektavo daugiau, nei 6000 modulių. Vallejo mieste, Kalifornijoje, „Factory OS“ sukūrė būstus tokiems klientams, kaip „Alphabet“, pagrindinė „Google“ įmonė ir Oklando kūrėjai. Mineapolyje Viešojo būsto administracija pavedė RISE Modular pastatyti 16 pastatų visame mieste.

 

 Tai, kas galiausiai gali priversti Jungtinėse Valstijose priimti pramoninius būstus, yra kvalifikuotos darbo jėgos trūkumas. Tai jau paveikė vieną namų statybos sritį: stogo santvaras, konstrukcinius medinius karkasus, laikančius stogą. Santvaroms reikalingi tikslūs pjovimo kampai, keletas darbuotojų turi įgūdžių, todėl dabar konstrukcijos dažniausiai gaminamos gamyklose.

 

 Darbuotojų trūkumas neabejotinai didės. Darbo statistikos biuro duomenimis, statybos darbuotojo amžiaus mediana yra 42 metai. Tradicinė konstrukcija reiškia darbą nenuspėjamomis valandomis nenuspėjamomis sąlygomis ir reikalauja fizinių jėgų lipti ir kelti medžiagas darbo vietoje. Gamykloje tie apribojimai nebūtinai galioja. Vienas duomenų taškas: moterys sudaro mažiau, nei 15 procentų JAV statybininkų; Lindbäcks daugiau, nei 30 procentų, dirbančiųjų yra moterys.

 

 Kontroliuojama aplinka naudinga ne tik darbuotojams; tai taip pat naudinga gaminiui. Rupnikas prisiminė, kad visą žiemą Bostone darbo vietoje stovėjo medienos krūva. Snigo, sniegas ištirpo į suodingą šlamą, o mediena kelias savaites mirko nešvarioje baloje, o tai pakenkė statybos kokybei.

 

 „Poreikis greičiui“.

 

 Panašu, kad niekas tiksliai nežino, kiek iš 3000 operacijos „Breakthrough“ sukurtų vienetų vis dar yra. Bryanto dvaras, 58 miesto namų kompleksas miesto centre Sietlas, etapais be fanfarų griaunamas. Jo vietoje iškils 250 butų pastatas, iš kurių 58 išliks įperkami.

 

 Neseniai sekmadienį užsukau. Priėjau prie vienos gyventojos Fatumos Hussein, kai ji išėjo iš komplekso. Dabar Vašingtono universiteto studentė užaugo Bryanto dvare. „Jis uždarytas, o vaikai gali žaisti lauke – vandens balionų kovos, futbolo ir visko, ką tik sugalvoji“, – sakė ji. „Senioliai ryte vaikšto žaliąja erdve. Pažįstu kiekvieną šeimą“.

 

 Ji paklausė, ar noriu ekskursijos, ir įvedė mane į vidų. Mažylė skruostus prispaudė prie lango su tešlos šypsena. Husseinai mostelėjus „labas“, prie stiklo pasisveikino dar du besišypsantys vaikai.

 

 Nusekiau paskui Husseiną į miesto namą, kur ji gyvena su mama ir dviem seserimis. Prieš įeidami nusiavėme batus. Husseinos kampinis vienetas buvo vienas iš mažesnių, tačiau jis buvo tinkamas šeimai.

 

 Husseinos motina Asha Mohamed, Somalio pabėgėlė, stovėjo virtuvės virtuvėje ir maišė skanų Etiopijos avienos troškinį – receptą, kurį sužinojo iš kaimynų bendruomenės centro renginyje. Ji gamino maistą buvusiai kaimynei, gyvenusiai viename iš nugriautų butų. Buvusi kaimynė buvo vieniša, nes laikinai persikėlė į kitą gyvenamąją vietą, o jos Bryant Manor draugai nustebino ją užkandžiais.

 

 Įrenginys buvo senas, o ant virtuvės lubų buvo vandens dėmė. Miegamieji buvo maži. Bet ten buvo du pilni vonios kambariai. Negalėjau pasakyti, kad namas buvo pastatytas gamykloje. Galėjau pasakyti, kad jį mylėjo ir gerai prižiūrėjo jo gyventojai. Ir, svarbiausia, Mohamedas, dirbęs netoliese esančioje dienos priežiūros įstaigoje, galėjo sau leisti vietą iš būsto talono.

 

 Kai kalbėjausi su Rupniku, jį labiau domino pramoninio būsto lygties produktyvumo dalis, o ne įperkamumo dalis. Tai mane supainiojo. Tačiau praleidęs laiką Švedijoje, kalbėdamas su modulių gamintojais, architektais, vyriausybės pareigūnais ir medienos pramonės lyderiais, pradėjau matyti ryšį. Produktyvumas reiškia daugiau nuolatinių namų didesniam skaičiui žmonių ir greičiau. Greitis užtikrina bene didžiausias ilgalaikes santaupas – užkertamas kelias benamystės traumoms ir užtikrinamas saugumas, bendruomeniškumas, nuolatinis mokymasis toje pačioje mokykloje. Buvo liūdna matyti gražų Švedijos modulinį korpusą, tačiau Amerikoje pamačiau tikrąjį net ir netobulai suprojektuoto modulinio korpuso potencialą.

 

 Greitis yra tai, kaip industrializacija pasiekia įperkamumą. Net kai sutaupoma nedaug darbo ir medžiagų sąnaudų, per gana trumpą laiką įvedus daug daugiau vienetų, sumažėja visų vienetų rinkos kaina. Tai buvo operacijos „Breakthrough“ tikslas ir pagrindinis MOD X žingsnis.

 

 Rupnikas baigia savo ataskaitą Būsto ir urbanistinės plėtros departamentui ir ruošiasi kitam MOD X HUD tyrimo etapui, kuris apima reguliavimo kliūtis statyboms už objekto šešiuose bandomuosiuose regionuose. Jį nustebino teorijos, kuriomis grindžiama operacija „Breakthrough“, pasitvirtinimas. Tai jį taip pat vargina. Jei būtų atkreiptas dėmesys prieš 50 metų, būstas Jungtinėse Valstijose šiandien atrodytų visai kitaip. Galbūt, architektai kurtų gražesnius gamyklinius būstus. Galbūt, būtų buvę patobulinti nurodymai, slopinantys naujoves. Galbūt, sako Rupnikas, įperkamą būstą įsigyti nebūtų taip sunku. Namų statyba, kaip dabar daroma, riboja statybininkų pasirengimo gaminti asortimentą: žemesnės kainos būstas nėra toks pelningas, todėl kenčia, mažesnes pajamas gaunantys, žmonės.

 

 Vienintelis būdas judėti į priekį, Rupnikas mano, yra grįžti prie operacijos „Proveržis“ užmojų ir atskleisti industrializacijos galią. Kaip jis man pasakė: „Mums tikrai pritrūko alternatyvų“.

 

 „Headway“ iniciatyva finansuojama iš „Ford Foundation“, „William and Flora Hewlett“ fondo ir „Stavros Niarchos Foundation“ (SNF) dotacijų, o „Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors“ yra fiskalinis rėmėjas. Woodcock fondas yra Headway viešosios aikštės finansuotojas. Finansuotojai nekontroliuoja istorijų pasirinkimo, dėmesio ar redagavimo proceso ir neperžiūri istorijų, prieš paskelbdami. „The Times“ išlaiko visišką „Headway“ iniciatyvos redakcinę kontrolę.“ [1]

 

1. How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden: Headway. Mari, Francesca;
Hamja, Amir.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 8, 2024.

How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden

"As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to America’s affordable housing shortage is obvious: Build more houses. Start today. But the way homes are built in the United States makes speed impossible.

Years ago, Rupnik’s Croatian grandmother, an architect herself, pointed him to an intriguing answer to this conundrum: modular housing projects built in Europe in the 1950s and ’60s. Rupnik was awed. Sure, prefab complexes, and especially Soviet bloc housing, could be ugly and too homogenous, but the process created millions of housing units in a flash.

Hooked, Rupnik started researching modular housing for his doctoral dissertation. In the archives of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he stumbled upon a reference in an old journal article that took him by surprise: an industrialized housing initiative called Operation Breakthrough that built nearly 3,000 units between 1971 and 1973 — in the United States. How had he never heard about it?

It turned out few people had. Unable to find much more information, Rupnik turned to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which created the program. In 1969, when Operation Breakthrough was announced, HUD was less than four years old and affordable housing was still a bipartisan issue. The plan’s visionary, HUD Secretary George Romney, a former Republican governor and Nixon appointee (and, yes, Mitt’s father) pitched it as Economics 101: If you quickly increase the supply of housing, you drive down the price for all.

Romney said the country needed to build 26 million houses in 10 years, almost three times as many as had been built in the previous 10. Industrializing construction, he argued, was the only way to do it.

While nearly every other industry has become more productive since 1968, productivity in home-building — the amount of work done by one worker in one hour, essentially — has declined by half. The country is barely building enough to maintain the status quo, which is some four million units short of need, according to Freddie Mac. In the coming years, with population growth, climate change and the natural deterioration of housing stock, we’ll only need more.

Housing shortages were already a problem in 1969. Romney understood that companies wouldn’t invest in the machinery and overhead needed to industrialize because varied local building and zoning codes made it impossible to scale up. Operation Breakthrough proposed using the vast purchasing power of the federal government to guarantee a large market, and in the process, document and change the regulatory barriers to industrialization.

Operation Breakthrough selected nine sites around the country. Among its factory-built experiments was housing for the elderly in Kalamazoo, Mich., and owner-occupied co-ops on a lake in Macon, Ga. The program created public housing in Memphis and 58 townhouses in downtown Seattle for renters with housing vouchers. But in 1976, Congress decided that the program was too costly and that HUD shouldn’t be doing demonstration projects. Less than a decade after it was announced, Operation Breakthrough was dead.

But as Rupnik pored over the record, he was struck by what the program had accomplished. It had led to a national code that regulated and greatly expanded the previously lawless trailer home sector, which now accounts for 10 percent of single-family homes. To Rupnik, the experiment demonstrated something powerful: When a uniform national building code was implemented, industry would respond. The barriers to building housing fast, in other words, weren’t technological, but institutional.

While Operation Breakthrough made little impact in the United States, it radically influenced other countries. Japan sent a delegation to tour the Operation Breakthrough construction sites and to study its reports: Nearly all construction in Japan now is industrialized and 15 percent of homes are prefabricated in steel. In Sweden, 45 percent of construction is industrialized. Builders there also erect tall structures with wood, the preferred housing material in the United States, and the one that’s most climate friendly.

After he got his doctorate, Rupnik co-founded a firm called MOD X that focuses on advancing industrialized construction. He couldn’t shake the absurdity that in the United States, where Operation Breakthrough was tested, industrialized housing makes up just a 3 percent market share. So he and his MOD X co-directors got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to let them re-evaluate Operation Breakthrough with the goal of figuring out how to produce efficient industrialized housing in the United States.

In June 2023, I joined one of the firm’s research trips. The team wanted to see what housing in the United States might be like if Congress hadn’t canceled Operation Breakthrough. We flew to Sweden to find out.

How to Build a House Like a Volvo

The premise of Operation Breakthrough was essentially: What if we could build houses in the same way the automotive industry produces cars? Lindbäcks, a family-owned construction company in Sweden, just shy of the Arctic Circle, took that question literally. Before opening a housing factory in 2017, its management visited the factories of Toyota and Volvo as well as nearby pulp and paper plants, borrowing their best ideas.

The Lindbäcks factory now spans 10 acres, an aircraft hangar for the most earthbound of structures. On a foggy June day, Stefan Lindbäck, the fourth-generation chief executive of the company, gave a tour to our delegation. We put on safety boots before being led onto a metal walkway overlooking the vast factory floor. Humans moved around machines, like people on the track of a music box.

Everything in the factory was oriented around one main line — a slow-moving conveyor belt on which finished components were assembled into fully formed modules. The main line was the spine. More time-consuming subassemblies — shorter lines with machines building floors, walls, ceilings and so-called logistics, like countertops and cabinets — fed into the spine like ribs. One boxy unit was completed every 30 minutes. The units could be connected to create apartments of different sizes and floor plans.

On one rib, an interior wall traveled onto a rack where it stood vertical for painting. This trick struck Mary Tingerthal, former commissioner of Minnesota Housing and now a special adviser to a modular company called RISE, as almost revolutionary. The little industrialized construction that happens in the United States tends to proceed down a single assembly line. Wet construction, like painting and staining, generally happens within a closed box and slows the progress. In this factory, she marveled, “It’s constantly out in the air!”

But the most remarkable difference between the United States and Sweden is regulatory. Building codes in the U.S. try to make buildings safe by prescribing exactly what materials must be used and how (a prescriptive code). In Sweden, the government does this by setting goals and letting builders come up with a way to achieve them (a performance code).

So, for instance, U.S. building codes dictate the thickness of drywall that must be used for fire resistance, how many layers are needed and how many nails are required to attach it. In Sweden, the code requires that a wall must resist burning for two hours, say, and lets engineers and manufacturers figure out how to accomplish that. The regulator’s job is to check the engineer’s work.

The result of both is fire resistance and structural safety, but in the United States, each residential building needs to be granted a permit. During construction, work often halts for inspectors to make periodic visual inspections. That contributes to a stop-and-go pace that frustrates pretty much everybody except lenders, who get interest on financing. Sweden’s codes require more work on the front end when builders have to demonstrate that their methods are up to snuff, but factory processes that comply with the performance code can be certified. This encourages innovative solutions and results in less waste.

Building quality homes, whether on-site or off-site, will never be cheap. You don’t want to scrimp on materials or labor, and the savings of factory-built homes might not be obvious at the start, Lindbäck told our group. A conventional builder might bid lower than Lindbäcks, but then there are the costs of supervising the construction on-site and paying for delays in interest charges. And conventional builders profit from changes late in the process.

With factory-built houses, modifications are minimized because customers generally select from a standardized framework and changes are allowed only up to a certain point. The factory builder’s advantage is quality control and speed. Real profit, long-term profit, comes from streamlining the building system for predictable outcomes and fast delivery.

“It’s not about the cheapest product,” Lindbäck said. “We want the cheapest solution.”

An Alchemy of Design and Wood

As we rode on a bus about an hour and a half south of the Lindbäcks factory, sun flickered for miles through thin bars of pine and spruce outside the windows. Then the boreal forest parted onto a small city where one building towered above the rest: Sara Kulturhus, a cultural center topped by a hotel, a 20-story mass timber building, constructed with factory-made units. The hotel tower contains 205 identical rooms sheathed in double-pane windows, like cubbies sealed in glass.

Before Sweden adopted its performance-based code in 1995, wood buildings had been limited to two stories; almost overnight, wooden buildings could be as tall as engineers could prove safe.

Construction accounts for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, but in Sweden it’s 20 percent because so much is built with the country’s plentiful wood. Carbon is captured in the trees harvested and in the trees planted to replace them. While wood costs more than some other materials, building with it requires less energy and allows for faster construction. That means developers can both pay off construction loans and rent units sooner.

A wooden key card clicked me into a spruce hotel room with a floor-to-ceiling window. The boxiness felt more a function of minimalist Scandinavian design than volumetric modular construction. It was well past midnight, but at the end of June, the sun merely dipped below the horizon for a few hours, casting a dim glow, like a lamp from a room around the corner. More even than the light at this magical, crepuscular hour, the critical element of the room’s alchemy of architecture and interior design was the soft, soothing wood.

Oskar Norelius, a partner at the firm White Arkitekter, which designed Sara Kulturhus and the hotel, told me that quality timber was expensive, so he economized by designing for industrial production. Hotels are perfect for this, as are dorms, offices and hospitals. “One module,” he said, referring to the hotel room itself, “is large enough that you can fit everything into it: the bathroom, all the finishes, and it will still be quite easy to transport.”

The volumetric modular units were assembled at Derome, a factory not dissimilar from Lindbäcks. They were then driven, 95 percent complete, to the site, where they were stacked by crane, as quickly as one 16-unit floor per week, depending on the wind. When units were bolted together, gaskets around their perimeters suctioned together, airtight. Hotel modules could be assembled off-site at the same time that the cultural center, the base of the hotel, was being built on-site. This parallel construction saved a year, according to the contractor.

Norelius walked us through the cultural center, which contains a public library, two art galleries and six theaters. As we passed through the monumental lobby into an open gallery space, Rupnik excitedly identified the standardized timber modules that had been designed for this project. The main entrance opened onto a staircase with seating for community readings and events. Above, a kinetic wooden chandelier opened and closed its wooden petals to reflect whether the building and its solar panels were adding or subtracting energy from the grid.

To Rupnik and others on the trip, the advantages of modular housing were obvious. But efforts to build this way in the U.S. have had difficulty flourishing.

The most famous U.S. off-site housing manufacturer is actually infamous: Katerra, founded in 2015, was the start-up that everyone believed would make the leap. It had oodles of money — SoftBank invested $2.4 billion — but it tried to do everything, everywhere, all at once. “They went on a very rapid growth acquisition,” said Todd Beyreuther, the former senior director of advanced building materials at Katerra, who had come on the Sweden trip. A year into the pandemic, having splurged on state-of-the-art factories and acquisitions, the company imploded and filed for bankruptcy.

But Rupnik is excited about other initiatives across the country. A company in Philadelphia bought Katerra’s factory in Tracy, Calif., and has completed more than 6,000 modules. In Vallejo, Calif., Factory OS has made housing for clients like Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and Oakland developers. In Minneapolis, the Public Housing Authority commissioned RISE Modular to build 16 buildings around the city.

What may ultimately force the adoption of industrialized housing in the United States is a skilled labor shortage. This has already affected one area of home-building: roof trusses, the structural timber frameworks that support a roof. Trusses require precisely cutting angles, a skill few workers possess, and so the structures are now mostly made in factories.

Worker shortages are bound to get worse. The median age of a construction worker is 42,according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Traditional construction means working unpredictable hours in unpredictable elements and requires physical strength to climb and hoist materials on a job site. In a factory, those constraints don’t necessarily apply. One data point: women make up less than 15 percent of U.S. construction workers; at Lindbäcks, more than 30 percent of the work force is female.

The controlled environment isn’t just good for workers; it’s also good for the product. Rupnik recalled watching a stack of timber sit on a job site in Boston all winter. It snowed, the snow melted into sooty slush, and the lumber soaked in a dirty puddle for weeks, compromising the construction quality.

The Need for Speed

No one seems to know exactly how many of the 3,000 units built by Operation Breakthrough still stand. Bryant Manor, the complex of 58 townhouses in downtown Seattle, is being torn down in stages without fanfare. In its place will be a building with 250 apartments, 58 of which will remain affordable.

On a recent Sunday, I dropped by. I approached one resident, Fatuma Hussein, as she was leaving the complex. Now a student at the University of Washington, she had grown up in Bryant Manor. “It’s gated and the kids can play outdoors — water balloon fights, soccer, everything you can think of,” she said. “The elders walk the green space in the morning. I know every family.”

She asked if I wanted a tour and led me inside. A toddler pressed her cheeks against a window with a doughy smile. As Hussein waved hello, two more smiling children appeared at the glass to greet us.

I followed Hussein into the townhouse where she lives with her mother and two sisters. We took off our shoes before entering. Hussein’s corner unit was one of the smaller ones, and yet it was adequate for a family.

Hussein’s mother, Asha Mohamed, a Somali refugee, stood in the galley kitchen, stirring a delicious Ethiopian lamb stew, a recipe she learned from neighbors at a community center event. She was cooking for a former neighbor who had lived in one of the units that had been razed. The former neighbor was lonely since relocating temporarily and her Bryant Manor friends were surprising her with a potluck.

The unit was old, and there was a water stain on the kitchen ceiling. The bedrooms were small. But there were two full bathrooms. I could not tell that the home was factory-built. What I could tell was that it was loved and well-cared-for by its occupants. And most important, Mohamed, who worked at a nearby day care, could afford the place on a housing voucher.

Whenever I talked to Rupnik, he was more interested in the productivity part of the industrialized housing equation than the affordability part. This had confused me. But after spending time in Sweden talking to modular manufacturers, architects, government officials and leaders in the timber industry, I started to see the connection. Productivity means more permanent homes for more people, faster. Speed secures perhaps the greatest long-term savings — preventing the trauma of homelessness and offering security, community, continuous enrollment at the same school. It had been lulling to see the beautiful Swedish modular housing, but America is where I saw the real potential of even imperfectly designed modular housing.

Speed is how industrialization achieves affordability. Even when the labor and material cost savings are modest, the introduction of many more units in a relatively short period of time has the effect of lowering the market price of all units. That was Operation Breakthrough’s objective and MOD X’s main takeaway.

Rupnik is finishing his report for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and preparing for the next phase of MOD X’s HUD research, which involves dissecting the regulatory barriers to off-site construction in six pilot regions. He has been struck by how well the theories underpinning Operation Breakthrough have held up. It also frustrates him. Had attention been paid 50 years ago, housing in the United States might look very different today. Maybe architects would be designing more beautiful factory-built housing. Maybe prescriptive codes that stifle innovation would have been ameliorated. Maybe, Rupnik says, affordable housing would not be so hard to come by. House-building as it’s done now limits the range of what builders are willing to produce: Lower-priced housing isn’t as profitable and so, lower-income people suffer.

The only way to move forward, Rupnik believes, is to return to the ambition of Operation Breakthrough and unleash the power of industrialization. As he told me: “We really have run out of alternatives.”

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative." [1]

1. How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden: Headway. Mari, Francesca;
Hamja, Amir.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 8, 2024.