Tag: flattening

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The Great Flattening

Jim Crace’s book Harvest provides fascinating portrait of rural life in England just before the start of the Industrial Revolution. What is so striking is the way the pattern of life is dictated by the availability of light and labour to do work. They make hay while the sun shines and rest in the winter.

The arrival of energy-dense coal was a game-changer. Now we had energy on tap, factories could be set up and run continuously. The natural rhythms and pace that we had evolved with became smoothed out.

Enter Taylorism in the twentieth century and every hour is a productive unit to be optimised.

I call it the Great Flattening. The removal of all the contours of energy, light and even culture in the name of constant productivity, enabled by cheap energy.

Now, I am not trying to be romantic about living 250 years ago. There are plenty of things not to like (not least the dentistry). But I find it interesting to consider what is the impact of this great flattening of our experience of life and the world that we design.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in 2024.

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Smoothing things out

One of earliest childhood memories of travel is riding in the back of the car driving along a motorway in mountains in the north of Italy. To traverse a terrain of deep valleys and high ridges the engineers had taken a midline. The road leaps across the ravines on high viaducts, plunging straight into a tunnel only to fly out again across the next bridge. With the sea glistening deep below it was an exhilarating journey. (Did this sow the seed of going into civil engineering?)

Faced with a series of peaks and troughs the engineers flattened the journey. They saved journey time and energy on every single car journey on that route, every day for over half a century.

Smoothing things out is something that engineers seem to be generally good at. For example we’ve been straightening rivers to make them more navigable for centuries. 

But building faster, straighter roads also increases traffic. Straightening rivers increases flood risk. 

When we start to consider the unintended consequences smoothing things out we might find that working with the ups and downs and twists and turns is better. The friction slows down the flow. People or water, in these examples, spend longer in each place. There is greater interaction and opportunity exchange and creation of wealth in its many forms.

Next time I cross the Italian Alps hopefully I can do it on a bicycle, following the contours of the river valleys.

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in 2024.