Donuts past Middle-Clash

“The position of starting businessmen, who emerge out of social security, is of great importance to the Dutch economy. Their conflicting situation is illustrating how little thought their struggle really gets.” Frank Kalshove; De Volkskrant, zaterdag 13 juni, Economie [1]

The article explains how the institute ‘UWV’, for social security, was demoralising people to emerge out of unemployment with their own business. Kalshoven concludes that entrepreneurs, who are emerging out of the precarious situation of social security, are not as free as others.

In my opinion he describes the obstruction of emerging businessmen and talent. They are trying to arise out of crisis but do not have the same chances, to initiate a business, like others do. This seems a peculiar situation in relation to the current perspectives that we live in. If we like it or not, we do live in a world that faces a luring financial catastrophe. This crisis is one where middle class will be struck by huge losses of employment, making the middle class more and more dependant on their own entrepreneurial initiatives and talent.

Therefore the aforementioned situation seems peculiar and even threatening when policies start to obstruct and even financially punishes[2] small-scale businesses that are emerging in spite of their crisis. This discourages entrepreneurial tendencies instead of a fundamental enhancement of economic activities and trust.

But lets not start off with a doom scenario. Lets have a look at the statement and lesson that could be learned from the article and relate it to a future where governance cannot guarantee your social wellbeing due to a global economical shift or crisis. A future in which more and more people will start their own business out of necessity and not just for fun. It is a future where we’re all businessmen or freelancers in a neoliberalized ‘welfare state’ in which we need to sustain our own residential and economical wellbeing.

The mentioned article stresses the need to improve our financial environment and infrastructure in order to enhance business and talent emergence from crisis situation. It seems valid to describe a future scenario in which we can all save our own souls and enhance a good business environment in heavy weather. Therefore it is important to understand what good came, and crashed, out of crisis. And how we can facilitate initiatives.

As an architect I assemble physical environments and infrastructures for human activity. I would like to believe that my assemblies could facilitate these human activities. A build surrounding that facilitates or helps people to live, dwell and work in good or bad times.

To be able to assist with a building in bad times, it is essential to understand the relation between social activities and infrastructures, specifically in crisis environments.

Therefore I got involved into an elaborative research, with Jouke Sieswerda, on the history of the Bijlmermeer. The Bijlmermeer is a late modern housing area that started out as one of the most popular living environments in its days, but ended up as one of the first ghetto in the Netherlands. The research we did is about the politics, realisation and cutbacks in infrastructure and the build environment, and the consequences this had on human usage and their control over privacy. The title of the book is;

Architecture in Limbo, A short history of public, private and collective spaces in the Bijlmermeer. It describes how physical infrastructures and environments influenced the initiatives of inhabitants to live, dwell or work in a distorted crisis environment.

After this research it was only natural for me to react on our findings and generate a strategy for a sustainable environment for living and working. This strategy enhances the infrastructure and privacy control in order to better live and business possibilities for inhabitants, both in a good or bad economical climate. This way it would be possible to facilitate the emergence of talent that encourages entrepreneurial tendencies even when vicious socioeconomic disasters tend eliminate the middle class from parts of our society.

See ‘Talented Donut – Business in Housing’ by wouter Oostendorp

[2] Recently penalties up to thousands of euros are being given to starting entrepreneurs who are trying to get out of social security. The Uwv (social security) treats non profit hours that one puts into a new business as if these hours directly cause capital accumulation by lets say charging the costumer for it. So don’t think of your company when you are surfing the web, because you will get fined.