3/2006 |
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York City, 2005) |
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reviewed by Stephanie
Stubbs, Assoc. AIA Flat. Flat. Flat. Go to any lecture these days, and the speaker undoubtedly will weave The World Is Flat into the talk. The World Is Flat pops up in all kinds of specialty bookstores, including those dealing with something seemingly unrelated as, say, architecture. Your sister read it; your niece gave it to you for Christmas; your engineer loved it (okay—he didn’t read it; he listened to the audiobook). Flat. Flat. Flat. After almost a year on the New York Times and Washington Post best-sellers lists, The World Is Flat has reached the tipping point of popularity reached by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point a few years back. Why is everyone reading and talking about The World Is Flat, a book about globalization, of all esoteric topics? First, author and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has a pellucid and compelling style that keeps you reading about stuff you didn’t know you found interesting. Second, Friedman has created an understandable structure on which to build and make sense of the tangle of complex social and economic forces shaping our increasingly globalized and pancaked planet. Third, because many of these forces increasingly touch our daily lives—sometimes with uncomfortable and seemingly inexorable pressure (CELL PHONES!!!)—it is reassuring, if nothing else, to hold them in front of our consciousness rather than allow them to advance on us from behind. Ten levels of flat Flattener #1. 11/9/89, the day the Berlin Wall came down, and the world
tipped toward democracy Three shades of globalization The second convergence is just coming along now, because it takes time for the new technologies to be paired with the new ways of doing business that can result in leaps in productivity. The technologies themselves were not enough: “We needed the emergence of a large cadre of managers, innovators, business consultants, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs, and workers to get comfortable with and develop, the sorts of horizontal collaboration and value-creation processes and habits that could take advantage of this newer, flatter playing field.” The Age of the Mainframe, Friedman explains, is very vertically organized, while Globalization II, which threw the PC, microprocessor, Internet, and fiber optics into the soup, is horizontal in nature. Convergence III also is unfolding, as three billion people—in China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia—for the first time have access to the economic playing field. “It is this triple convergence—of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration—that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty-first century,” Friedman writes. We see all this coming in snapshots and freeze frames of day-to-day lives and workaday worlds. Friedman does, however, offer a framework around which to order the rapid and radical changes that seem to be driving global, national, local, and even profession-wide economies. After carefully laying out these observations and peppering them with a comfortable number of real-people, real-life examples, he uses the rest of the book to “enter the flat world,” providing examples of how the triple convergence specifically is affecting and will affect Americans, developing countries, and companies. What does this have to do with architecture? Perhaps it is venturing not too close to the planet edge to posit that the Brave Flat World contains a roadmap for where the Institute will travel in the near future as we prepare for our sesquicentennial celebration in 2007. Surely the signs of flattening are there as we strive to be more inclusive and consequently diverse—per our Public Policies—in the best definition of the word. Likewise, efforts to move the three levels toward “One AIA” working together speaks of a flattening from vertical to horizontal structure. It will take the same master ingredient needed by tomorrow’s practice of architecture: capital-T Trust. Who knew? He does not pretend, however that all is rosy for the low- or unskilled American workers likely to lose their jobs to overseas workers. He cautions workers to become “untouchables” by developing skills that can’t be outsourced. In a larger scope, Friedman also discusses the plight of those in developing countries who are stuck in the “unflat” world: those who are “too sick,” “too disempowered,” and “too frustrated” to participate in the new globalization. In the last group he would put al-Qaeda, which points up another interesting facet of globalization: its precariousness in the face of events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He concludes with a chapter on “Imagination” that predicts that the world will be shaped by whether we choose the imagination symbolized by “11/9,” the knocking down of the Berlin Wall or “9/11” and its destruction. Can we of privilege in this country begin to think about steering that boat? We can only approach this question with great humility, Friedman concludes. “Yet 9/11, the flattening of the world, and the continuing threat of world-disrupting terrorism suggest that not thinking about this is its own kind of dangerous naivete. So I insist on trying to do so, but I approach this issue with a keen awareness of the limits of what any outsider can do or know … But one can think about how to collaborate with others to change their context—the context within which people grow up and live their daily lives—to help nurture more people with the imagination of 11/9 rather than 9/11.” He offers a number of examples at the conclusion of the book (sorry, you have to read it). Globalization now? You may conclude that The World Is Flat or that The World Is Flattened, but you can’t ignore it is upon us. Copyright 2006 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved. Home Page |
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