Tortoise Trumps Hare

Rebecca Solnit on the different tempos of change, particularly transformative change

Ever since I read Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions back in the mid-Sixties, I have been fascinated by the pace of change, both incremental and systemic. Indeed, a long time ago, I was much given to quoting Lenin to the effect that: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” But reading two long-form essays today by Rebecca Solnit has had me wishing I had discovered her a lot sooner.

Thanks to this morning’s edition of Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View, I first read Solnit’s gently searing indictment of the impact of Silicon Valley on San Francisco—a city I first visited, and have long adored, in 1973. Published in the London Review of Books, the essay is titled In The Shadow of Silicon Valley and describes the hollowing out of one of the world’s most creative urban centers.

She contrasts how traditional cities evolved—by trial-and-error, messily, with many upsets and reverses along the way—with the way the tech fraternity likes to live (“gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands”). She mentions Jane Jacobs too, the author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities, who had such an influence on my thinking when I was training to be a city planner back in the early Seventies. She championed cities that were messy, overlapping but, above all, gloriously human.

I still remember standing on a corner of Covent Garden’s Central Market Square in London back in 1973 with one of the planners charged with redeveloping the noisome but abundantly human market area. He compared the area to a coral reef ecosystem, albeit with three major tides during any 24-hour day.

First, he noted, the market started in the early hours, with trucks arriving from all over and discharging vast quantities of fruit, vegetables, flowers. The racket was indescribable, the smell an assault on the senses, particularly when it was raining.

This version of Covent Garden was largely invisible to most Londoners, except when there were overlapping flows of people from this first wave with the second wave office works—and then, later in the day, in a third wave, from people coming to see films and shows in the areas many theatres and cinemas.

Inevitably, there was friction between the different uses of the same spaces, sometimes intense, but for the most part it was good-hearted, taken as part of the full-on London experience. And Mike commented that this constant friction had created and sustained a series of social pearls, whether in terms of conversations or communities.

The very noise and smell of the market also held down property prices locally, which enabled many creative businesses to flourish—including TEST, one of the very first (if not the first) environmental consultancy in the UK, which I would join the following year, 1974.

The second Solnit essay I devoured this morning was Slow Change Can Be Radical Change. Having worked with some of the New Economy multi-millionaires and billionaires who embraced social enterprise in the early years of this century, a phenomenon Pamela Hartigan I discussed in our 2008 book, The Power of Unreasonable People, I have seen both the upsides and downsides of the notion that social change can be radically accelerated.

A decade or so ago, I explained how I had “learned to stop worrying and love the exponential,” after a decade or so of engaging with leading exponential thinkers like Kevin Kelly. I still believe that we live in exponential times—and must play into those trajectories if we are to have any chance of shaping, let along transforming, the future. we got into a lot of that with our Project Breakthrough work for the UN Global Compact.

But now Rebecca Solnit’s voice will be in my ear every time I think of stomping on the exponential accelerator.