The Land of Simple Living
The countryside often speaks to us in ways that other lived landscapes do not. This still incapsulates an untouched beauty, sprouted from an ambivalence of neglect and possibility, inattention and sociality. In these places we often find ancestral cultures, old methods and genuine products that escape the hasty descent of consumer culture. In such localised, compressed centres of human life there is an intimacy long lost in our modern civilisation, that still values the quality and effort of assiduous tasks, traditional bonds and a religiosity of time.
On the other hand, the city has become an ecosystem designed exclusively to function, that seems to isolate the individual from the material experiences that sustain life through the flat and sleek surfaces of cement buildings. The city does not sing its song, but emanates a constant, deep hum that is ever-present and unescapable, creating a soundscape of distance and fret, where also birds have to sing louder to hear each other.
In the famous essay by Langdon Winner ‘Do artefacts have politics?’, a park bench, an automatic door, a public parkway can be analysed not only according to function, utility, or environmental impact, but also for their embodiment of specific forms of authority and power. The city then becomes a landscape of symbols, that surrounds the individual with labyrinths of control, surveillance, competition, eradicating him from any sense of home and throwing him in a landscape where the soil is thick with asphalt and does not allow him to bury his roots. This is the hidden message of contemporary ‘Hostile Architecture’, a modern design trend that aims to make public spaces unfit or uncomfortable with measures such as studs, bolts or ‘’anti-homeless spikes’’. These exclusionary practices deepen the wound that has now been open across the cities for centuries, and unconsciously moves citizens apart, imprisoning them in social categories and leading to discrimination.
In this sense, the spaces we live help condition our thoughts and beliefs, contributing to the creation of our morality. The prime example of the detachment that has occurred between human beings and locality is the phenomenon of ‘moral commodification’, where products are simply detached from their geographical setting and stripped of their material contexts and productive histories. In a logic of profit such as this, we can recognise the perversion of classic utilitarianism into solely economic terms, where objects, places and often people become valuable only for marketability. This reduction makes us blind to our responsibilities as members of a community and as consumers in a society. Through such practice, the consumer is denied a connection to his suppliers and the conditions they experience, consequently becoming unable to appreciate or even recognise their labour. The danger of this delocalised economy is that the unawareness of people and spaces involved in the processes of production does not enable the consumer to empathise or understand the causality of his actions and as a consequence the political power his consumption can have.
Perhaps now is the time to revalue and reconsider the richness and beauty of simple living. Only though the tracing of our food up to the sources, the practices, the hands that create it, for instance, we are able to find the seeds of hope that may bring together our humanity.
It is then clear that locality also becomes a motivational force, that both sustains life and moves us to engage, identify and defend our environments. As intangible values and physical surroundings co-constitute our world, the necessary connection that involves place and mind, and by extension nature and humanity, becomes the core of our moral landscape, of the constructions of beliefs we collectively build in a society.
In a world where these two elements condition each other so deeply, as our land shapes us through language and identity, whilst we transform it with economy and design, this conjunction of material structures and human values should always aim to coexist and create a space where our ethical judgement involves both external, surrounding life and internal, psychological landscapes.
