Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 174
The Slow Lane with Sascha Haselmayer
In the first decade of the 2000s, the Spanish shoe company Camper launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “Camina, No Corras.” Walk, don’t run. Beautifully art directed by Shubhankar Ray, then Creative Director for the company, the photos depict people carrying themselves with everyday nobility. Often walking, or ready to. Never hurried. The subjects featured in these ads are in peacefully situated: comfortable even without the creature comforts of the Global North audience at which these images were aimed. The campaign tells you to enjoy what you have and even invites you not to buy new shoes, but of course you still do. Gotta walk!
It’s a remarkably well executed ad campaign and, while I don’t like to admit that an ad has stuck with me for 20+ years, the message has remained in my head as a koan of resistance. Walk, don’t run. Slow down. Do things well. You’ll get there eventually. This week we are sharing a talk by Sascha Haselmayer who, uniquely, is both a social innovator and a tech entrepreneur, and now also the author of a book entitled, The Slow Lane. His book is just what I needed to detach “walk, don’t run” from a branding campaign and connect it instead with a deeper and more useful idea of social change.
Sascha’s talk is also a second point on a line that has emerged this semester around discussing restraint when it comes to tech. There’s something interesting here about finding the right time and the right way to apply technologies of consequence—things that shape your physical world or automate decisions. In a world where AI and robotics are everyday topics, but power and capital imbalances remain significant, the penumbra of that technology casts over society can frequently feel threateningly chilly. Between the doom of ‘decels’ and the blind excitement of the ‘accelerationists,’ The Slow Lane is worth a look.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words.
🚶 The Slow Lane
Recently we were lucky to be joined by Sascha Haselmayer, visiting from Berlin, to give a talk about his new book, The Slow Lane.
If you've heard the phrase "slow food," it conjures local and organic produce, seasonality, manual and straightforward means of production. Goodness. High quality. And for that quality, the slow food movement argues, you should be willing to wait. The "slow lane" in Sascha's book is a related idea, but instead of food, the focus is on change in business, government, and civic society. And guess what? These things also take time!
The Slow Lane is about how to invite people into the process of making a difference. This message is fundamentally one about the power of co-creation and of something more simple: hope. The hope that what we-all-together build can be better than what they-some-elites built by themselves.
Transcript edited and condensed of remarks by Sascha Haselmayer, 10/24/2023:
So take a moment.
Take a deep breath.
Imagine yourself in the rainforest in Peru.
It's 1976 and a 16-year-old young woman who grew up here is leaving her village for Lima to study engineering in Peru, the capital city. The person is Albina Ruiz, and she travels about 1,000 miles by bus and arrives in Lima to study engineering. She lives in a suburb. Her neighborhood is full of trash, actual mountains of trash. She has never seen trash in her life, and as she begins her studies of engineering, she asked her professors, what's with all the trash? And they said, “Oh, the trash gets dumped in the areas where poor people live because they don't mind the dirt. They're dirty themselves.”
Already in her first year, she was contracted by a municipality to help improve their waste management. They were expecting her to do process optimization, so she set out to understand how waste is collected, and she found that waste is collected by men and that those men didn't care. They would falsify the documentation of the routes they had done when they hadn't done them. But they were friends, so to speak, of the decision makers in the city. She also found that the municipality, like any municipality in Peru, was buying really fancy waste collection trucks, very expensive trucks purchased in return for healthy kickbacks from the vendors. And so she began to reimagine what waste management could look like. What she in particular noticed were the waste pickers.
Peru has hundreds of thousands of people who live off waste. Their lives start at the crack of dawn fighting over scraps of waste. A man named Edilberto described how he started working on the waste heap when he was five years old at the crack of dawn and then would go to school, smelling of waste. He said, “I lost all self-esteem already at the age of five in a school yard when the children were making fun of me stinking.” Albina had the insight that these two problems were correlated: the poor operations of waste management, and the social plight of waste pickers who were stigmatized. The police were persecuting them. There was a whole industry around discriminating against the group of people who were actually recycling thousands of tons of waste every day.
She connected the two problems and set out to organize waste pickers into collaboratives, replacing the fancy trucks with affordable and very practical tricycles, and she got municipalities to contract with these associations instead of contracting men in these fancy vehicles. Albina was always, from day one, passionate about the latest sustainable practices, so whatever she did, she always did it adhering to the highest standards of ecological treatment.
What emerged was the same as with so many problems in the world: that it was mostly women who were succeeding in building these associations because they cared for the communities they lived in, so they delivered a really high quality waste collection and recycling service. [A man named] Edilberto crossed paths with Albina’s organization, Ciudad Saludable, when he was 18. He was collecting waste with a gang of friends using tricycles. They would charge 50 cents to collect waste from businesses and then would dump the waste in municipal parks because there were no collection places for waste. Ciudad Saludable gave him a choice and said, “Look, if you stop doing that, we will give you uniforms, we will give you training, and we will help you finance a beautiful collection van.” Now he and his friends treat about 30 tons of waste every month and run one of Peru’s municipal waste collection cooperatives.
In Peru today, he and all the other waste pickers are known as “recyclers,” and they are key to the strategy of building what Albina calls the “Clean Peru.” They also, about 30 years into the journey in the 2000’s, wrote the new national laws of Peru to support recyclers. The laws protect recycling professionals like themselves and guarantee training and certification, accessible even to people who never learned to read or write. It also gave them health protection, social care protection, and a minimum wage nationwide. Later, these laws were adopted in many other countries. Today, Albina is Peru’s minister of environment, taking this agenda to yet another level.
How Peru dealt with waste, the role Albina played, and the role waste pickers had in changing the laws is really a story about how a 40-year journey for change may seem very, very slow. But when you look at the kind of deep and fundamental transformation that happened, I think that it is actually really, really fast.
Isn’t it remarkable that Albina chose not to do the obvious? She could have easily used her training as an engineer and optimized waste collection routes. With that path, we might have some municipalities with better collection efficiency. But Peru would have never addressed the underlying social injustice, with waste being a mirror of a broken society, as Albina would say.
“Isn’t it remarkable that Albina chose not to do the obvious?”
I've studied about 100 movements that pursue this kind of social change, primarily in cities, and I identified five things they had in common. Five principles by which they act. I think is important to mention that Albina didn't go to ‘slow lane school’ and then enacted these five principles. She and her movement learned, oftentimes the hard way, what these principles are and how they apply in their work. This learning played out over decades.
So here are five examples to illustrate these principles, and I think you will find that they resonate with Albina’s story.
Principle #1 is to hold the urgency. This [photo] shows members of the anti-nuclear movement when I grew up. This was on television in the early 1970s in Germany: protesters fighting the construction of nuclear power stations. Over the course of about 40 years, they went from people tied to trees and fighting with the police to becoming a political party. And that 40 year pathway of becoming a political party ended with about 25% of the national vote. So imagine: a country that had a two-party system now having a third major party that speaks to environmental and other future-related issues. And what was particularly exciting is what they did when they had the choice of what tactics to use to pursue their goals.
The environmental movement in the U.S. largely placed their bets on litigation because it seemed faster and more effective in the short term. And initially the idea of starting a political movement was that it would help achieve big things faster. It turned out not to work that way, but it changed the entire political system and infrastructure of the country. It introduced entirely new practices into politics that, I think, led the country overall to be more ready to achieve the change that we need.
The second principle is: Listen. The biggest lesson I personally had happened behind the walls of Pentonville Prison in London, when I saw the first prison council in 176 years, where prisoners elect representatives to meet with the governor of the prison in London. It's the first time the governor asked prisoners to contribute to finding answers to overcrowding, violence, and so forth in the prison. What is special here is that the idea behind it comes from a former prisoner, Mark Johnson, who found that whenever the probation services collected data by asking ex-offenders about their needs and what their situation is, the prisoner experiences it as talking to an almighty decision-maker over their life.
It's very difficult at that point to be honest about problems you have with substance abuse, financial issues, or family issues. So what User Voice, Mark’s organization, did is that they inserted former prisoners into the prisons to conduct these interviews and collect information. They got to the truth, making the data much higher quality because there was trust in a conversation between prisoners and ex-prisoners. In the end, the prison and probation authority gets the data, but the conversation happens outside of that toxic old power dynamic.
The third principle is: Share the agency. Those of you who have in any way followed what happens in Venezuela know that Venezuela is an incredibly oil-rich country like Saudi Arabia, just terribly mismanaged. In the last 20 years, it's been in free fall. Catuche is an area in Caracas where I worked in the mid-1990s as an architecture student. I followed this story over almost thirty years. Yuraima Martín is an architect who, together with her father (also an architect), chose to live and practice in a slum area. What they, together with Jesuit priests and other academics, introduced about 35 years ago was self-governance to this neighborhood because the government was always an unreliable partner.
They said: “We will create the self-governance mechanism, and we will reject public projects implemented by the government.” Instead, they insisted on getting funding to implement their own services. And how that story played out, the resilience it created over time, was really quite incredible as the country around them fell to pieces. They're like the beacon of a community – a highly impoverished community that, on its own, made news by solving gang violence, tackling huge issues around poverty and environmental pollution, as well as making ever more complex urban plans as to how they're managing the community. This idea of sharing agency, of understanding that anyone, including a prisoner or slum dweller, has the full capacity to not just contribute or participate, but to get involved in really complex long-term decisions is one of the core lessons I took out of all of this.
“This idea of sharing agency, of understanding that anyone, including a prisoner or slum dweller, has the full capacity to not just contribute or participate, but get involved in really complex long-term decisions is one of the core lessons that I took out of all of this.”
The fourth principle is: Nurture curiosity. Especially in urban processes, we have political leaders and others who are coming into a conversation lobbying for one specific solution: this is the way we're going to do this. What I found over and over is the people who really succeeded and changed systems always remained open-minded. Even as a movement they remained open-minded and tapped into science, arts, what other movements are doing, and so forth. Successful movements for change are constantly willing to unlearn, and to keep an open mind as to what the actual solution is we're fighting for. The idea of separating your movement and cause from insisting on one solution or idea is really important.
The story here is about Dorica Dan, whose daughter Ona has a rare disease. Ona was the only patient in Romania who had that disease, but Dorica, her husband, and her daughter started an association of people with that disease in the country, even though there was just one patient. Why? What Dorica built over time is a national movement of all rare disease patients. Less than 1% of rare disease patients know they have a rare disease because doctors don't know how to diagnose them. So they built a national lobbying infrastructure to detect rare diseases, to help doctors identify them, and create a national helpline. Romania is only the second country in Europe to have a national rare disease plan.
Rare disease patients like Ona now serve on a national commission with executive power to oversee the implementation of this plan, as well as creating a hyper-local prototype in Zalau, their small hometown in Romania, where they have NoRo, a center operated by people with rare diseases to provide all the integrated social and health support services and employment insertion services that they need in one place.
Dorica and her movement have created more than a prototype for delivering services to rare disease patients. As healthcare becomes more personalized, people have realized that in a way, in the future every patient in Romania will be treated like a rare disease patient. So they're seeing it as the answer for the future of the whole healthcare system.
The fifth principle is this: Use technology as an enabler. Most of us know technology as being a great accelerator of change, but usually the means to doing that is to dominate. Right? Look at the most successful technologies around us. They're run by corporations that have aggregated so much power.
I would say that Facebook, for example, is actually great at listening to users, like our second Slow Lane Principle. But Facebook listens to a point where it's manipulating users, and abusing that power to gain insights into your personal life to actually manipulate your behavior to their interests. It does nothing to share agency. So as I was writing the book, I was looking for stories that showed how technology can be used to empower the kinds of human dynamics I talked about earlier.
One of them is Project Echo. It's a very simple idea by a physician called Dr. Sanjeev Arora in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He treated hepatitis patients and found that patients in remote areas were dying because they couldn't regularly drive the five or seven hours to come to his treatment facility, and there were no local doctors who could treat it. So Project Echo started with him using video conferencing to walk local GP's and remote GP's through the treatment of patients, training them to become fully certified experts remotely and at no cost. This was his gift in a way, and the whole idea is to pay it forward. An expert pays forward the training of others to become experts with highly complex skills.
With time, Project Echo has grown into an incredible global community and technology infrastructure that has three million attendees, 750 training centers, and hundreds of programs, like hepatitis treatment. And it's a technology platform, right? But it's a technology platform that follows human values.
Three years ago he had a big technology entrepreneur, one of the founders of Infosys, make a major investment into Project Echo to build out its digital infrastructure. That happened 10 years into the community having developed its values. And within that community, they are now deploying all the latest things like AI to automate and strengthen that infrastructure because Sanjeev feels that the human values are so strong and embedded that technology will not destroy them, but can actually accelerate the spread of those values and skills he's providing.
And by the way, one of the beneficiaries of this is the training center in Zalau, that small town in Romania, which is using Project Echo to develop expert skills to treat Ona and all these other rare diseases that no university in Romania knows how to teach. It's a really fascinating infrastructure.
“[Building technology] happened 10 years into the community having developed its values.”
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These weeks: First Town Hall with students. Studio build out continues. Studio skirmishes continue. Getting things into place for Winter semester. Had a portfolio info session to talk about UT portfolios and then joked about being nearly a tik tok afterwards. There’s a culture developing, which means things are getting interesting.