Deregulation is for losers
The first issue of “Workable Futures”. On limits, innovation and the deregulation fallacy.
In a podcast released a few weeks ago, the Italian architect (and life senator) Renzo Piano, probably the world’s best known in his field and decorated with countless prizes, retraces the episodes and values that have shaped his long career. This relaxed journey takes the form of an extended conversation with novelist Alessandro Baricco, staged on a terrace overlooking the sea.
Genova Tapes is the title: two episodes, each running for more than two and a half hours, contrary to any recent content-creation golden standard of synthesis and nonetheless so mesmerizing that one cannot help but devour them during a couple of longish walks, in the slow intermezzo between a feast and the following one, or while crossing the city to buy the best galette des rois at a trendy bakery (this one, according to recent rankings, in case you were wondering).
The two old friends convivially revisit landmark projects completed by Piano, from the Parisian Centre Georges Pompidou (pictured above), built in the Seventies, to more recent works such as the gigantic Shard in London and the Whitney Museum in New York City. Anecdotes flow, drifting between vivid memories and plain confessions. Piano reflects on his approach to people-centric infrastructure, like a piazza, where relationships are born and flourish. He also revisits the importance of having a solid polar north (a passion, a plan, an obsession) that orients choices even in turbulent times or after a dizzying shake-up.
There is no way I am going to be able to summarise an exchange that ranges from the stubbornness of youth in overturning received wisdom to the role of architecture in sustaining “monumental” revolutions, or in making space for “scandalous beauty”. At some point, however, Piano turns to something of particular interest to anyone concerned with regulation and innovation. Pushed by an input, he calmly states (the translation is mine, as faithful as possible):
“Well, here I’m not talking about freedom from limits, because the designer who says ‘I want to be without limits’ is a bit of an idiot. Limits are necessary. They’re what allow you to concentrate energy, just as in music, just as in everything else. You need limits.
We need anchors, we need an order; only then can we spend our time and energy dissolving that order, disobeying it. But first, we need it. That kind of unfettered freedom would be chaos: the famous blank page. You wouldn’t even know where to begin”.
Undisputable, no? Constraints matter. One could go so far as to say that boundaries foster creativity, and very few would disagree. Human nature is genetically trained to wrestle with problems in search of inventive solutions. We celebrate scientists, entrepreneurs, pioneers, explorers and hackers precisely because they engage, not metaphorically, with impossibility and turn it into something that then becomes the new norm, for the future.
I was thinking about the significance of boundaries when I stumbled upon yet another argument fetishising innovation (per se, with no adjectives), and started wondering how it happened that luminaries have been replaced by a cohort of careless whiners (not winners), now on display across multiple circles, quick to parrot the false, yet popular, meme “the US innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates”. How is it possible that pushing boundaries has been turned into a litany of meaningless complaints and bad excuses?
Piano’s praise for limits is innocently timely, at a moment when the EU’s institutional compass is tilted towards a new deregulatory impetus. Without going into too much detail, since the publication of Draghi’s report, the von der Leyen Commission has invested considerable energy in promoting a grand simplification plan that simultaneously affects environmental and digital legislation. It is ironic that what has long been dubbed the “twin transitions” (digital transformation and climate-action) are now truly united, but in an unfortunate, divestment-like fate.
In a nutshell, the project aims to “reduce red tape to unleash competitiveness”. Large chunks of due diligence reporting and data protection regulation are about to be axed, in the context of a process that is constitutionally weak, to say the least, and procedurally messy to the point that it exacerbates, rather than reduces, uncertainty. In some corridors in Brussels, the conviction seems to be that after years of intense activism, the only way to placate a hungry narrative is to “undo something, whatever it takes”, as an apocryphal motto might recite.
