EoS v. EoM - Further thoughts

Rob Steuteville, publisher of Better! Cities & Towns, suggested a follow-up post dealing with how one employs the Economy of Means for real estate development.  This isn't precisely a response to that, but it explores the EoS/EoM dialogue in light of some recent books I've read.  Rob references James H. Kunstler's The Long Emergency.

For a number of years I've been pointing out that among the best lessons Robert Davis taught us was how to develop in this way.  Unfortunately, too few New Urbanist developers/developments followed his wisdom of starting small, working in small increments, etc. even though Andres has included it in his talks/tours of Seaside as long as I've been hearing them (15 years).  The lesson was all but completely lost in the go-go days of the mid-2000's.

One of the things I realized, with regard to the commercial ventures that Robert and Daryl began, was that they scaled the commercial ventures to the market they had at the time.  For example, at the very beginning of Seaside, they sold seasonally, under awnings, with literally "low" overhead!  Daryl even screen-printed Seaside T-shirts in their kitchen.  EoS would  never have recommended that!  As the market grew, the commercial business models grew.  Some grew physically, like Bud and Alley's and Perspicasity.  Collectively the whole commercial realm of Seaside grew along with its market.  Contrast that to the standard model of a chain like Chili's, or Publix.  They have a business model/format (based on EoS) that demands certain market characteristics (traffic counts, rooftops, aggregate spending power, etc.), and they then look for the locations that fit those characteristics.  In another way of looking at it, they scale the market to the business. 

It's not just chain retailers who operate this way.  Homebuilders, Apartment developers, office parks, industrial developers all approach the market this way:  Here's our peg, where's the right sized and shaped "hole" in the market?  EoM approaches it differently:  here's a hole; what sort of peg can I put in it.

EoS brings with it the generic, reductive, mass-produced, which is so anathema to the authentic places people cherish.  New Urbanists have tended to look at this as a design or regulatory problem, but it is fundamentally an economic issue; specifically, the way "economy" is defined (means or scale).  I haven't read Jane Jacobs' post Death and Life work, but I suspect this may be part of why she expanded her focus to economics...

I believe it's not just The Long Emergency that makes this discussion relevant.  The way that technology is progressing these days is frequently in the hands of small entrepreneurs and techno-tinkerers.  These folks are developing RepRap machines, drones, robots, software, iPhone apps, and even manipulating genetic code in an utterly EoM realm of basements, laptops, bedrooms.  And they're frequently doing end-runs around the corporate behemoths, who rely on EoS to fund enormous labs, factories, R&D facilities.

Ironically, it seems post-recession capital markets are searching more voraciously than ever for the mega EoS real estate development deals.  By nature, the larger the deal, the more uniform the "products."  At the same time, market researchers are discovering that consumers are looking for more specific, unique, niche real estate products - with a heavy emphasis on experience rather than "features."  There's a massive de-materialization of consumption going on, and it is bound to have big impacts on urban form (in my opinion, favoring traditional urbanism, but probably not in the ways many would imagine.)  It is apparent that the capital is going one direction, despite the fact that the market is going in the exact opposite direction.  I posed this question to panelists at a recent ULI conference.  The response was dumfoundment:  yep, good question, but we don't know how those two realities will be reconciled.

The book, Abundance, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, is a fascinating compendium of the exponential growth technologies that are advancing at ever-more-rapid paces, with impacts reaching deep into the developing world.  Stewart Brand writes about some of these, as well, in Whole Earth Discipline.  (Both books are a fascinating antidote - or anti-venom - to Kunstler's writings.  I'd love to see all those guys in a live debate!) 

It is my developing belief that the nature of emerging technologies, the consumer market, and the post-Recession real estate market are all much more animated by EoM innovation and customization than the EoS, mass-production, pre-Recession, 20th Century, Modernist paradigms within each of these sectors.  Tactical Urbanism, and the ethos of the CNU NextGen group are excellent examples of this.  The dinosaur developers, homebuilders, equity funds, etc. will figure this out sooner or later - probably later.  So will automobile companies, media companies, "too big to fail" banks, and governments.  It may be a different response to The Long Emergency.  And it just may mitigate some of the nastier effects of it.