"Do you remember the houses, events and people?
All that is now gone and that does not seem to have left any traces. All that is forgotten, so forget that you almost have to wonder if it was completely meaningless.
Yet every action and every choice had their meaning, marked our path to the present, created the foundation and prerequisite for today's city and life.
The road disappears in the mist, behind and in front of us.
And we are on the small piece of land that can be lit by the spotlight of our consciousness and are forced to make our choices, chose our paths.
Paths to a new time and foundations for a city that we will never experience and where new generations will stand puzzled before what may seem to be the meaningless patterns we left behind."
These words were written by Fogelström some fifty years ago and they continue to inspire me. Intrinsically and literally the text is beautiful, but what is more interesting is what happens when you carry the words around for a while. It is all about the passing of time and generations and how the evolution of the city and its life is larger than anyone living within it. But everything changes because of decisions taken, large and small. The decisions made by policymakers and planers, but also those of consumers and people just living their lives. A decision may seem unimportant to the person making it but collectively such decisions may change everything. And some decisions are so important that entire societies notice them.
Big decisions and ordinary people, not everyone will care, but everyone will be affected. For me the thought of the benevolent social planner has always been extremely appealing, although I would like to think of the planner as a deliberative democratic system where the best ideas prevail. My inspiration is "making the spotlight wider". But it is also a question of choosing our path, given what we see. For me it feels very appealing to translate this into choosing our way of producing energy, the way we transport ourselves and our commodities, what we eat and how we plan our surroundings. What will our children think about our current choices? What will they say about global warming, or about how we treat animals and the way we transform our surroundings into built environment? Will they stand puzzled?
The book by Fogelström is"do you remember the city? and it is part of the pentad "city". In part it is about how a new generation grows up in the city and struggles to make a living as much of the old disappears and new and sometimes frightening patterns emerges. I am also a child of Stockholm and for me it sad to see that today what we need to know are the best shortcuts around clogged up freeways, what public beaches are unsafe due to emissions or how to find a black market sub-lease. I would like to think that other things than these are what really matter. We need to make things better.
As scientists we need to understand how things in the past worked and we need to come up with alternatives and route-maps for what we can do in the future to make things better. We need everything that can help us make the best and most efficient choices for how to hand over a good, or at least a decent, society to the generations to come.
This is what inspires me.
This is what I try to remember!
[The pentad City describes the lives of successive generations in Stockholm between 1860 and 1968. In includes the titles: City of my dreams; Children of their city; Do you remember the city? ; In a transformed city; City in the world.]