The Design Of Scarcity

A surprising and intriguing examination of how scarcity—and our flawed responses to it—shapes our lives, our society, and our culture

Leading analysts of all the major resource domains - water, food, material, energy and finance - are all telling us that our global industrial growth models are taking the planet to the brink of chronic scarcity. In architecture, concerns about depleting material and energy sources have largely been centered on the more emollient category of 'sustainability.' This book brings together leading thinkers for the first time in a single volume, including Ezio Manzini, Erik Swyngedouw, John Thackara and Jeremy Till. In addition, featured architects and designers include Jody Boehnert, Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen.

Architects, development practitioners and designers are working in a global environment and issues such as environmental and cultural sustainability matter more than ever. Past interactions and interventions between developed and developing countries have often been unequal and inappropriate. We now need to embrace fresh design practices based on respect for diversity and equality, participation and empowerment. This book explores what it means for development activists to practise architecture on a global scale, and provides a blueprint for developing architectural practices based on reciprocal working methods. The content is based on real situations - through extended field research and contacts with architecture schools and architects, as well as participating NGOs. It demonstrates that the ability to produce appropriate and sustainable design is increasingly relevant, whether in the field of disaster relief, longer-term development or wider urban contexts, both in rich countries and poor countries.

Powerful challenge to the current neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Asserts that economic democracy should be the new guiding principle for humanity.

How can we build a sustainable, moneyless, world?How can we balance our needs with those of the eco-system?How would a moneyless society work?

The conditions for strategic health communication campaigns as a public health tool are examined for low-income contexts. The theoretical framework drafts a socioecological model with an extension of poverty influences to bring into focus the dynamics of a resource-poor environment and its impact on health-related behaviours and health campaigns. The research design includes two studies conducted in Sierra Leone. Study 1 triangulated three qualitative methods to explore past and current health communication practice in Sierra Leone. Study 2 is a mixed-methods field experiment on handwashing which explored the effects of different campaign strategies. Results show that a community-based participatory approach with the inclusion of local leaders as health messengers was associated with higher chances of behaviour change than a non-treated setting. Further pathways for context-sensitive approaches for deprived audiences are suggested.

Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured—but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new 'frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.