MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS
Introduction Risk & Investment Wealth & Power People & Communities Sustainability & Relationships Industrial Estates or Work Parks Uniformity or Diversity return to top page 7. UNIFORMITY or DIVERSITY Once the decision has been taken to proceed, the "how" will also be very different to the current emphasis on cost effectiveness. If buildings are required the skills of the community will be used to construct plant that reflects the function to be performed - rather than having to make do with an "off the peg" unit on an estate of identical structures. It will also allow for the need to adapt and grow so that, once again, there will be no need to move simply because the operation has outgrown the original premises.
In keeping with the emphasis on human scale and value, its size and appearance is likely to harmonise with its surroundings. Individual skill and craft will be at a premium and technology will be harnessed to that end rather than to the routinisation of the human component - because it is cheaper. As a consequence, there will be less standardisation in what is produced, with local design and character coming to the fore once again.
With the emphasis on life as a whole, considerations of personal safety and environmental impact will become second nature, implicit in discussions from the planning phase to actual building and will, therefore, no longer depend on a bureaucratic, quasi legalistic framework policed by "experts" who look out at the world from their own narrow perspective. Personal, group and communal responsibility will be uppermost and become realisable because the community - and the people who comprise it -will be in control of its destiny.
It is a very different picture to the segregated uniformity of the industrial estate where complying with a raft of environmental and health and safety requirements is seen as a necessary evil rather than a desirable good, and where the ultimate test of success is the level of profit that can been generated - for everyone from the developer to the small business struggling to survive in the market place.
We can only see that, however, if we look beneath the surface at the world we are creating and to try and understand both the forces that are at work and the consequences if a different set of priorities were to be adopted. In that sense the industrial estate is both a symbol of the money economy and a signpost to another world altogether, a world that values people above all else.
The choice is ours. We can decide to move in that direction, or not, just as, every day, we participate in the transactions that underpin a system dedicated to the pursuit of profit at all costs. But we have to choose.
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