In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School where he is teaching Summer Intensive Courses on media and design. In 2005, he became "visionary in residence" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Since the autumn he and his wife Jasmina Tešanović [wikipedia - blog], a Serbian author and filmmaker, have been living in Turin, Italy, where Bruce has been working on the preparation of Torino SHARE festival, where he is the guest curator.
A HISTORY WITH ITALY
What exactly made you come to Turin?
This time, I was asked. But I had already been here several times before. During the first Clinton administration, I was sent to Italy by the US Information Association. I couldn't believe it when it happened, because I had just survived many years of "Reaganism", and suddenly I'm getting an email from the government asking me "Would you like to tour Italy, all expenses paid, as an American cultural export?" This was in the heyday of cyberpunk, so I said: "Are you sure you know who are you talking to here? As you may know, we're mad, bad, and dangerous." But there had been a change of regime and suddenly I was in the good eyes of the federal government.
Of course I had to do it. So they sent me off and I went to several Italian cities. The diplomatic corps had no idea of what the hell I was doing. But it was clear from the questions in the audience that Italians were genuinely interested.
By that time your books were already published.
Yes, I was fairly well known, as far as science fiction writers go, but it was clear that the work was hitting a nerve. So I wanted to know why. I had reasons to go to Italy, because it was a good market for me and for my work. And it has consistently been that way: I have books printed in Italian that don't have an English equivalent. I ended up working for both the American and the Italian press. I have worked for the Italian XL magazine, and write some columns for the La Stampa and La Repubblica newspapers. If you're an author and people like you, you are flattered.
So you have been all over Italy?
I travelled mostly in Northern Italy, which has more of a techno scene than Southern Italy. I have been to Rome a number of times, but Milan is a big cyberpunk centre and so is Torino. I came to Torino repeatedly. I went to the SHARE festival and was very impressed with that. It's a small festival but it is growing every year. They said: "Come and be our guest curator and help us put one together." I thought: "Well that's a crime I haven't yet committed". I was interested in how it works. I literally didn't know. I knew that it was a good festival but I didn't know how one would do such a thing. After four months of hanging out with it, I've got a little education.
Was this the first festival that you organised?
Yes. I've been a regular at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, which is sort of a Texan version of the SHARE Festival. It started 20 years ago, and when it first started it was as modest as SHARE, if not more so. Now it's this huge North American digital industry gig.
What was it that convinced you to come to Turin? Was it just the festival or was it something bigger?
It was the people from the festival. They wanted me to come over and do something.
They had the guts to ask.
Well, yes. I had no particular reason not to come. That is the Carla Bruni response: "I couldn't turn the president down; I had no reason to refuse him!" I lacked a reason to refuse them and I've been getting a lot done here. I do everything here that I normally do.
OBSERVING THE TURINESE
You have been quite "adopted" by the local powers. Not every foreigner that comes here is so adopted by for example the political world. Why do you think that happened?
I think that's because I'm a journalist. I'm interested in what they are doing. I do write for the Italian press, and people are forthcoming to journalists because they like to get coverage.
I am cool with that. If I am going to the opening of the Venaria Reale, for example, I am going over there to write about it, and that's what happens. I am rather impressed by what went on there.
The other reason is that I don't really ask them for anything. I'm not here to put the squeeze on them or to make outrageous demands. I'm harmless good fun, really.
Did your image of Italy change?
Well, I now have a much better feeling for the cultural regions in Italy. I knew there were differences, but I had not been in Italy long enough to really tell. There is a lot of regional variety on the ground. I have spent a lot of time in Yugoslavia, where I have seen a nation come apart at its seams. Italy is a fairly young nation as European nations go, and it's not particularly, thoroughly centripetal. It is a place which by its nature geographically tends to be divided up strongly into regions because it is long, narrow and there are rivers and mountains.
People always told me that the Bolognese were Bolognese, and the Romans were Romans, and the Neapolitans were Neapolitans, and the Milanese were Milanese, and that the Turinese were Turinese. Now I can really tell that the Turinese are Turinese. That part I get.
Nobody ever deserves their stereotypical billing, but if you had to sum up the Turinese, you would have to refer to that standard cartoon version that other Italians have of the people of this region: which is that they are chilly, formal, rectilinear, militarised, engineered, brainiacs, intelligentsia, with a strange mystical streak. Turin can survive without Italy, but Italy can't survive without Turin. They are aristocratic, they are in their own mental world, etcetera, etcetera. I know those are exaggerated things to say, but they also have some grain of truth.
UNDERSTANDING A CITY IN TRANSFORMATION
But Turin is also a city in transformation. Did you want to be part of that?
I'm an American, and when I see a place in big transformation, I just want to figure out where the pieces of clockwork are. So when I first arrived here, I was asking a lot of the wrong questions -- trying to understand who was the secret mastermind pulling all the levers behind the scenes. But the change is not made by a technocratic wonk, as you would see in the U.S.
It's more cultural and social.
What do you mean?
America has a very litigious society and they are also constitutionally based. So if you see a big change underground within American society, it is usually propelled by lawyers, financiers, the rewriting of some kind of legislation. There is also this expectation in American society, that there's a technocratic solution to problems or challenges.
So we Americans apply the same logic also abroad: trying to understand the "tinker toy set of things". Those exist within Italian society, don't get me wrong, but they just don't have the same emphasis. There's a lot more social capital in Italian society, and especially in Turinese society, than there is in American society. America is much more atomised: people's basic relationships are much more economic and legal. In the US it's either about the constitution or the almighty dollar. We want to know the bottom line: either something is illegal, or something made a lot of money.
How is this then different here?
Take this book that just appeared on the stands: "The city of the lawyer". It's a little book published by the La Stampa newspaper, all about Agnelli (the former FIAT chairman) and his relationship to Turin. It's not about the legislation that Agnelli, a lawyer, supplied to Turin, or his political history. It's about Agnelli's romance with Turin. It's a Turin-based romance; it's a relationship like a personal attachment to the house of Savoy.
You wouldn't see a book like that written about an American political figure. Or even, let's say Bill Gates, who has had a huge influence on Seattle. You wouldn't see a book called: "Bill Gates's Seattle," although Seattle changed a great deal due to him. Whereas here you have a patriarchal situation, an old-school Tory, ‘Noblesse Oblige' relationship. But those are just American, English and French terms. They don't properly describe Torino and Agnelli.
You have companies towns there too, think about Rochester and Kodak.
And Detroit. If you'd go to Detroit right now, you would see how it has been abandoned by the powers that be.
When you refer to the Turin change as socially and culturally driven, it also implies insiders and outsiders.
Well, I'm not a player here, and I don't make any bones about that. I'm not Turinese and I'm not going to be Turinese. I wouldn't demand that the insiders view me as a Turinese, because it is not true and that role doesn't suit me.
But I do have a genuinely sympathetic interest in the change here, and I'm not judgmental about it. My philosophy is: let the Turinese be the Turinese.
ABOUT MOVEMENTS AND CORPORATIONS
I see things happening here that impress me. They have a lot to offer the world: like the Slow Food movement.
To begin with, it's the Slow Food "movement" rather than Slow Food Incorporated. In the US, Slow Food would have been an anti-Mc Donald's chain. It would be something like: "I hate Mc Donald's, so I will start my own commercial franchise." Like Apple versus IBM, something along those lines.
Slow Food is socially based.
It is very socially-based, a modus vivendi kind of operation with many different faces: a school, a publishing house, a university, a set of conferences, an international network, a privatised domain of control and guarantee systems, a cultural guru. It's like a Gandhian Ashram, in some ways.
Slow Food is hard to nail down. You can't describe it in easy Anglo-Saxon terms and that impresses me. For me it was initially puzzling -- to understand how it works. But the fact is that it works really well, and it would probably have a hard time being headquartered anywhere else but here.
The Slow Food movement is now also big in the US, among gourmands and so forth. But it's not something that the US could have invented. It's a social invention, a product of Piedmontese genius.
I'll go even further than that: it's a product of the genius of the very small town of Bra! That's an unusual thing, a small regional burgh with a global impact. There aren't that many.
What else impressed you?
Turin's relationship with time: this is the first city on earth that is treating the automobile industry as a part of its heritage economy. It's doing it in a rather delicate and respectful way. It hasn't turned its back on its industrial heritage, or denied the 20th Century. It has just found a polite 21st Century way to deal with relics like Lingotto, which in Detroit would be abandoned, full of crack-heads, and covered in graffiti with trees growing out of it.
An American version of such a transformation likely would have failed. I have said many times that the ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st Century's frontier. The planet is physically saturated and there is no new place to go. Maybe the melting ice caps at the North Pole -- but those frontiers are not going to be kind places.
The modern places with the liveliest development are decaying downtowns that are being gentrified. Or, places like Lingotto, where a giant assembly plant has been turned into a mall and a grocery. And it's a multinational mall and grocery, because it's not just locals who go there.
Eataly defines itself as local.
Eataly has an English name and is pulling in a lot of foreign traffic.
But most of Eataly's products are local. I am not so sure that is the case with the products sold in the next-door mall.
Well, at least there is a mall, with very lively light retail. It's where young people can get a foothold in the economy. It strikes me as impressive.
A 21st CENTURY CITY "AVANT LA LETTRE"
So Lingotto to you is all about the transformation of 20th Century relics into meaningful icons for the 21st Century?
Yes. In fact, Turin has many other retrofitted things, some of which are a little freakier, like the church of the Holy Face ("Santo Volto"). They wrapped a smoke stack and turned into a church steeple. That's weird, frankly. But if you think of it, it's not weirder than the Mole. In some ways it's a gesture of "sprezzatura" (carelessness), like Agnelli's famous "sprezzatura". He used to show up in a blue suit with snow boots and people were aghast: "Gianni is wearing snow boots with a suit!" It's a rehearsed kind of carelessness. "I could do this perfectly, but instead I am going to call attention, so I'll wear my watch on the outside of my suit-sleeve."
Using a smoke stack as a steeple is that kind of gesture. So, when you go over there as an American, you might say "What the hell! What were they thinking?" But I find that attractive. It is weird, but this will be in the guidebooks fifteen years from now.
There's a very similar stack in downtown Belgrade which belongs to a derelict beer factory. There hasn't been any smoke in that smoke stack in fifty years, but it's nevertheless the symbol of this particular neighbourhood. People orient themselves by it. It's a piece of dead industrialism that has become a heritage relic. That's pretty hard to do.
A heritage relic...
In Turin I feel that I'm living in a 21st Century city "avant-la-lettre". It's ahead of the game. The ability to deal with retrofitting the urban landscape is not only very advanced here, but I think it's exportable. What Piemonte has been able to do here could become a regional competitive advantage.
If I were an engineer, an architect or a designer here, I would offer to do over other people's cultural heritage. I would put together a brochure and say: "Remember that hideous, crumbling mound outside your city that nobody has been able to do anything with for two centuries? Well, we rebuilt the Venaria Reale as a major tourist-dive!"
"We can come in and turn your lousy run-down Prussian castle into a fantastic showpiece. We'll help you finance it. We will show up, rebuild the thing, and you'll make a lot of money and you will give us some." It will be like the Texan oil business: "Do you have oil under your sand? We will come in there and drill it up for you and you can have half."
And everybody's doing it.
Some more than others. Piemonte has got much more in the way of UNESCO sites, than say McAllen, Texas. The big heritage challenge is the 20th Century stuff, because there's just more of it than everything else. There's orders of magnitude more 20th century junk, than there is of 19th or 18th or 15th Century stuff. Even Turin has more 20th century junk than everywhere else... The pure size or bulk of it! It's much bigger than the Savoy heritage. You could probably hide every Juvarra or Guarini building inside one of these FIAT structures.
That's the real future challenge. And I'm seeing it being dealt with here in a way that indicates success. I have been to Detroit and downtown Los Angeles, to the South Bronx and to central Washington. I've been all over the Eastern Bloc, where we saw a whole economic system collapse, and then transition into something else. The ability to make that transition, and to not see that come apart at the seams, is rare! And not only is that being done here -- I think it can be exported elsewhere.
A new future for Turin.
It's a new avant-garde for the city. They already have a historical avant-garde. Italy has got the world's oldest futurism. It has got futurism so old that it's on the coinage! It has the world's oldest heritage theme park: the Borgo Medievale, built in 1880, which is so old it in itself could be a relic: the relic of the relic industry. It's the world's oldest heritage place. I'm very impressed by that.
It's a problem I see again and again. "Disney's Epcot World of Tomorrow." It's a classic time-based cultural problem, closely tied to sustainability, long-term thinking, futurism, a more mature relationship with the passage of time and what time does to our creations.
FROM A SENSE OF GRACE
So what drives all of that in Turin?
It's an organic upwelling that is taking place on a social level. It doesn't have much to do with propagandising by design ideologues, like myself. It is very common for theory to follow practice, and it's very common for an avant-garde to arise organically and spontaneously - out of the garages or just from opportunity - and then to refine its chops and be able to export that.
Obviously, you can't export it unless you have a clear idea of its value, can frame what you are going to do, and present that to somebody else. That would imply a professionalisation of what Turin is doing unconsciously -- or just from a sense of grace.
What do you mean by a "sense of grace"?
It's hard to say, but as a foreigner it impinges on you very strongly. For instance, when walking under these grand porticoes here. Stalinist porticoes, like those in Moscow's subway stations, also have grandeur, but it's an oppressive grandeur. Whereas the grandeur here in Turin is very Savoyard and aristocratic, from when Turin was a capital city.
If you, as a citizen, or even as a denizen of the street, are walking down on Via Roma under these extremely large and rather baroque structures, it has an elevating feeling. You don't feel like someone is trying to oppress you, on the contrary, you get the feeling that they are trying to lift your spirits. There is a semiotic message conveyed here.
It's like: "Become one of us! Behave like a gentleman! See what we have built for you here! There's marble, this is a place of dignity and grandeur! Look how straight the streets are, we thought this through, and so should you."
Nietzsche talked about it; how he went to Turin and things felt clearer in his mind. Calvino said that rectilinearity of the streets leads one on to a creative madness: you are relieved of the problem of memorising streets, so it frees you to follow your inner eccentricity.
Uplifting the writers...
This situation is easier for a novelist to describe in a story than it is to describe as a design theorist. There isn't a checklist: "If you want to become Turin: A: find some mountains". That's not what's going to happen. So when I talk about the grace of Turin, I am referring to those urban semiotics. It's present in the buildings and it affects the people. Then those people affect the buildings again -- "we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us," as Churchill used to say.
There are ways to do it that are cheaper and uglier, but the Turinese just wouldn't do that. Not because it's illegal, but because it just doesn't occur to them. They wouldn't do that any more than they would spit on their sidewalks. Their grace is part of their "front".
NUTS AND BOLTS AND INDUSTRY
In your non-science fiction books, like "Shaping Things", you talk a lot about the making of things, production and industry, which is also very important in Turin with its industry and engineering schools. Yet, here you talk about cultural things, the mood and the grace of the city. I don't hear you talking about the nuts and bolts of the city.
Just yesterday, we went to visit the Provel company near Turin who are doing a lot of digital manufacturing and rapid prototyping. I am keenly interested in that, but in studying that, I have come to realise that the nuts and bolts don't count for as much as one would think. They do count in the sense that you need to have some physical production on the ground -- but manufactured objects are really frozen techno-social relationships.
The industrial situation, which people here are trying to handle, is not the deep 21st Century. They are adjusting to the China challenge which is happening right now and hitting everybody, not just Turin, but also, say, the maquiladora plants in Mexico. The Chinese thing is global in scope. It's a big stinking deal. Still, it's only likely to last about 30 years. After that, it will merely be the year 2038, so there's going to be a hell of a lot of 21st Century still ahead of us.
It's not the outmoded industrial hardware here that concerns me. It's more Turin's ability, proven ability, to be a city that thinks and works. It does have great schools and tremendous attention to detail. It's going to lose some of its mass-production capacity, but the mass-production that we have now is doomed anyway. A lot of the stuff that we are doing now, that the 20th century did, is just flat-out unsustainable. It's going to end up as junk whether the Chinese take it or not.
What counts is the ability to survive transitions and be nimble and flexible, while at the same time being practical enough to do something that will generate some revenue. This is not a poor city, even though it's lost one of its major enterprises. FIAT is by no means dead. On the contrary, FIAT has got a big hit all of a sudden. The tradition of small European automobiles is bound to flourish as the SUV goes the way of the dinosaur. That's a problem everybody, including the Chinese, are going to have to adjust to.
I worry more about Italy's demographics than I do about the installed base of its factories. To me, the fact that Italy is top-heavy with old people - you could go to the park and see five grandmothers clustered around one six year old - that's a troublesome indicator. Much more so than the loss of blue-collar jobs or the loss of an assembly line. Those are not permanent; they are going to go no matter what.
ENVISIONING A FUTURE FOR TURIN
You talked about Slow Food and a sophisticated re-use of existing 20th Century structures. But is that enough for a city this size? It has nearly a million people.
It's not that huge a city. It doesn't have to do everything in the world. The car business isn't gone. There is governance and education here, there is tourism and culture, chocolate and coffee. There is the food industry, experience tourism, and the city is a regional centre for Piemonte. When you're from the small mountain towns, you come to Torino for your nightlife.
Torino doesn't have to take over the world in order to be a going concern. If I had my druthers about it, I would see them move very rapidly into sustainability, practices such as manufacturing, green energy and cradle-to-cradle style industries. But, those are very modish, and everybody understands them. I would expect the Turinese also to be in the forefront of that, but that's not a unique selling point for them.
I think their interesting mix of heritage economy and post-industrial futurism has got more promise. Turin is not a major megalopolis, like Berlin or London, but it's a place that hits well above its weight. Every once in a while, it's been a linchpin of history.
The topsoil held up pretty well, over centuries. Northern Italy is blessed by nature. This region has the capacity to support a lot more people than it has. Rents are low here -- by European standards. I like the fact that the City and the Region took over their own fibre optics, and they have their own broadband policy. That was farsighted of them.
They have, by Italian standards, a relatively stable regional and city government. They have been able to carry out urban renovation projects that require -- not just some pretty fast reactions like the Olympics -- but real patience and the ability to take punishment, like the Spina interventions or the subway. They managed to bring those around, almost on time, and sometimes close to the budget. These are difficult matters, because you don't wave your hand out the window and say: "Build a subway". It's an adventure to do such a thing, as Boston learned with its "Big Dig."
People here put up with it, they are a relatively -- by Italian standards -- patient population willing to look ahead. There's not a lot of "not in my backyard" activism here.
There is against the high-speed train.
Yes there is, but a lot of that is taking place in the small villages in the affected areas. They also don't much like the idea of Turinese skyscrapers. Yet big things do happen, they're not frozen in polarised, backstabbing, toxic local politics.
I would never underestimate Italian obstreperousness in politics -- but for a city that has a reputation of being "Fiat-Nam" with class polarisation and political bitterness, they're very lively. Compare Torino to Washington D.C., New Orleans or Detroit. Detroit is a city so broken that they cannot even find the budget to demolish empty buildings. In Turin, they have a more professional grasp of their own possibilities, and more of a willingness to work their way through it.
I wasn't here 15 years ago, when the city was in visible decline, and people were suffering. I know Turin came through a grim period, but in the end it did come through it -- which is more than Detroit can say. And I don't write Detroit off, either.
When I go to places, I look for harbingers. Belgrade is the harbinger of the New World Disorder. Or it was for a while -- right now it looks more like the harbinger of a new Battista Cuba for the new Russian Empire. That's interesting too. You don't see that very often -- but the Serbs are perfect for that.
What is Torino going to do? What's the take-away? The take-away is their brilliant handling of the legacy of the past, their ability to make the 20th Century into the past. That's what I think the culture here has to offer. It's really a 21st Century city: it has somehow managed to deal with problems that many, many other cities and other regions, cultures, nations have not yet faced up to.
This is now a post-automobile city - because FIAT downsized. I expect to see cars around for the rest of my life, but I don't expect to see 500 million Chinese cars. There will not be that many, it's not physically possible. The sky would turn black and there won't be snow left on the Alps. We'll find some other method.
ABOUT DESIGNERS AS DENTISTS AND COALITION BUILDERS
This year Turin is the World Capital of Design. You call yourself a design theorist, a design writer, design journalist. What is the role of design in this city?
Well, design is design. I'm a big fan and I'm very friendly toward designers. As a journalist, I'm keenly aware of what they have to offer. and they are always good copy. I profit very much by my association with that world.
But a designer is not a major industrialist. A designer is usually somebody who is putting together a coalition of engineers and financiers, marketers, advertising people and consumers, who can think the thing through and make it more user-friendly, cheaper, modish and a little ahead of the game.
So what the designer is bringing to the table is a new conception of the product, and the coalition he's able to form by coming in orthogonally and resolving a lot of the issues. If you tear most manufactured objects apart, you'd be able to name the departments who put it together. [Looks at the audio recorder] "This is the electric engineering guy, this is the console guy, these are the optics guys, the marketing department insisted on putting this logo here, and the legal department put that warning there...", et cetera. Whereas the designer can come in, melt these warring things together, get everybody on the same page, and come up with something that looks really great to someone who is not one of the gang.
Torino has the potential to put a lot of its issues behind itself by using design as its lubricant. Somewhat like: "We are a city that acts and thinks! We're changing, but changing flexibly, we're changing the way we change!". Some may say those are merely empty slogans, but not if it works out to become a different city on the ground.
It will work out to become a different city on the ground?
Yes, the end result of this will be things like the Spina. There, people didn't glumly say: "We have got these three huge ruined areas in the middle of our town". No, it was framed like: "We have three areas in transition, that fifteen years from now will really impress people. They'll be walking along here, along this long grassy boulevard that is going be the environment park." Or: "Look! In the middle of this city, there is this gorgeous, multi-featured thing!" Yet it was really a toxic slum a while ago. The environment park was the worst.
They have managed to turn the worst into the best, by assembling a coalition around a vision. These things work, and that's what design can do for you.
The problem comes if you think that all you have to do is write blueprints -- that nobody has to stack up the bricks, come up with money and provide you with grants. You need enough political will to put up with the ugly period of transition, when people complain: "They are tearing up my street! I can't do business here! You're saying the trolley will arrive, but will it ever arrive?"
If you don't trust the government, or you don't trust that a transition will work out for the best, it's very difficult to do these kinds of things. But if you have design -- especially if you have the kind of designers who go out and mix up with the population, trying to involve people in the process a bit, who can "assemble the stakeholders," as they say -- yes, it can work.
Here the design tradition is in architecture. The design community is to a very large extent an architect community.
That doesn't frighten me. The best designer in Italy right now is probably Michele De Lucchi, and he's a radical architect. I love architects. Architects can be really good designers. There isn't an architect in the world that doesn't have a chair in him. Hell, they all have chairs! Some of them have books! Oh, it always kills me that Rem Koolhaas referred to "S, M, L, XL" as his "novel about architecture". I'm a novelist, OK? That is not a novel. But if it helps his business, somehow, I'll indulge him: he is a pretty good writer.
Most designers really think they're dentists. If the designers are sitting there and they've got the stakeholders in the room - the CFO, the CIO and the CTO and the CEO - and one of the clients says: "Boy, my jaw is killing me", the designers will immediately say: "I can have a look at that!" "Really?" "Yes, I'll invent something! We'll get that molar out of your jaw in no time!"
That's what I, as a science fiction writer, find most attractive about designers. They don't primly say "I only do plastic consoles" -- because that's not what they do.
They do a lot of different things now.
They do many, many different things. They are constantly talking about re-designing the industrial process -- or the branding. "What kind of branding?" "Urban branding, Torino's urban branding."
Torino needs some urban branding, but it needs a lot less than it did fifteen years ago, when it had bad urban branding: "City in decline", "Angry workers" and whatever. Negative branding. Now Torino is "City of the Olympics", the "City of Design", the city of this, the city of that, in the "Year of Architecture", the "Year of the Risorgimento". It's doing that for the sake of tourism, which is working out pretty well, but this isn't Prague.
I love Prague, but it is a kind of an Eastern European Amsterdam now, and without Amsterdam's investment muscle. Whereas people in Torino are actually very serious-minded, capable, two handed, engineering, military, technocratic types. They are not all going to be running bed and breakfasts. With that regional temperament they are bound to come up with something, I mean, yes, it's a "City of Architecture".
If there is some danger in its architecture tradition: it is the autocratic streak in Turinese architecture and society. Torino runs some small risk that there would be the emergence of a local oligarchy, which makes its decisions behind closed doors and then tries to present the population with the "fait accompli".
If one launches a really ambitious urban renewal scheme, and people feel like it's being thrust down their throats, you will get a lot of kickback. In the US, windmill people had a lot of problems with that. They built these huge windmills and people could see from hundreds of miles around. People complained that the windmills had ruined their skyline. People were presented with these progressive gizmos, these giant whirling devices, and they felt very put upon.
In Copenhagen they have a cleverer method where you can buy a share in a windmill. You get a check every six months. So people say "Bring'em along!" "Yes, our Danish harbour is full of windmills, my aunt Susan makes money!" So, that's a basic problem of political organisation.
How to enlist cooperation.
Yes, and you can trace that back several hundred years. I would imagine that when the locals were watching Felipe Juvarra come in and launch big Baroque cathedrals, they were probably pretty upset about it: "Who is this theatre designer? What the hell is he doing over there? That was where I was buying my meat and milk!" Ambitious design is a problematic business.
WRITING TURIN
You wrote a book now?
Well, I just wrote a short story.
When will you get it published?
I don't know, I am not even sure it will be published. I have just finished the first draft, I now have to go tinker with it. I'll probably send it to one of my favourite markets, which is the Magazine on Fantasy & Science Fiction. The story is quite long, longer than I expected.
What is it about?
It's a fantasy story set in Turin. The protagonist is a FIAT executive, but he's also a necromancer. The story is set in an esoteric Turin where all the magical things that are said about Turin by New Agers are factually true.
There's a chunk of the New Cross here and the Holy Grail is here. The Shroud of Turin really is drenched in the blood of Jesus Christ himself, there are all these ley-lines and axes of mystical power... Our hero, who is an R&D investment guy at FIAT, is called into hell by Gianni Agnelli, who is dead, yet still upset about urban development issues in Torino. So he calls this former chairman down to hell where they have a board meeting.
My hero, the necromancer, is accompanied by his spiritual advisor who is an Egyptian mummy from the Museo Egizio, whom he raised from the dead. This mummy accompanies him now and gives him good advice. It's like the "Lone Ranger and Tonto" thing - him and his mummy. It's a very comical story, exaggerated and satirical, a fable about Turin and its issues. I could never have written it without being here.
Previously, I did a very brief piece for Wired Magazine, a science-fiction story about a weblogger who is in Turin in 2017. He passes through Torino a couple of times, so we get some glimpses about what life is like in Torino in 2017.
I don't really know the city well enough yet, but I had to get my feet wet by writing this whimsical fantasy. It's as far fetched as something in Calvino, like Cosmicomics. I love that book so much. It's like: "The big bang is occurring, and we are there! Because originally, we were all living inside one proton!" I aspire to that kind of fantastic glee.
THE SHARE FESTIVAL
Tell us something about the festival that you're working on.
Yes, it's coming right along. We have the electronic art installation, which is of course our big draw. Then I'm trying to put together a show on digitally manufactured objects, because our theme is manufacturing.
Most of these hi-tech electronic art things that we have are very physical. They are installations that you put your hands on, grip, push around, that make things and so on. It's like I said in my book "Shaping Things": the Internet will become a manufacturing platform eventually, in the same way that it's already a retail platform, banking platform, publishing platform, media platform, music platform. It has got to move into manufacturing. This isn't news to a lot of people in design -- but I think it will be news to the people who attend our event. We are trying to assemble objects, and we will have something to show. We're also recruiting people for our panels.
It's going to be in March, in the castle of the Valentino?
Yes, there will be one exhibit in the architecture school in the castle there, but most of it will be held in the Accademia Albertina which is Share's traditional stomping ground here. You will find a virtual reality yurt in there, some guys doing terrific things with lumber and music, et cetera. Then we will have some worthy panels on digital design and digital architecture. And Don Norman is going to come, and that should be quite interesting.
Donald Norman, really?
Well, we needed somebody prominent. I happened to know that guy. He blurbed one of my novels. His book Design of everyday things was one of the first design books I read that really made me feel like I needed to know a lot more about that area of discourse. So I'm very happy that he's coming.
It will certainly be the biggest, the most ambitious of the four SHARE festivals to date. You never know: festivals are a crapshoot. Some are great, some are boring and some may drop dead of a coronary, yet I never regret my engagement with them.
A CITY OF DESTINY
Is there something in Turin you still long to do before leaving? I presume you will come back once in a while?
It's like a city of destiny for me. I've been here many times, now I have many more friends here and more reasons to show up. I'm not a Turinese, I'm not a resident of the city, but as a journalist it has become one of my "beats". The thing that will interest me most is its year-by-year progression: how things are turning out here. A lot is riding on it. I would be very pleased if Turin really starts to blossom, if it starts really making money, if there is an influx of new people, if there is a little region here which takes on a global cachet. If people start referring to it as a city of design -- more so than as a tourist draw -- as a little creative class hub, where innovation is arising and spreading elsewhere.
Turin will always be of interest to me. Now, if it fails to work out... if there is a bad economic downturn, or the Po floods from climate change, much worse than before, if there is serious civil discord... then that too would be a lesson for me, but a much sadder one. Naturally I hope for the best. I rather like to show up here in order to get real "Bicerin" coffee.
Are you planning to come back this year still, during the year of design?
That would not surprise me at all. But I have to get back to the US for several months, and in 2009 I'm rather planning on going to Amsterdam, so I will be in Europe for five-six months... Turin is not so far. It is certainly not far from Belgrade where my wife spends a lot of her time. I have the feeling that there will always be something here that intrigues me.
I don't think I'm here by accident; this is one of those places that appeal to my temperament. I'm the son of an engineer: although I am a novelist and a fantasist, I also have a kind of rectilinear, methodical kind of quality. I am interested in manufacturing, finance, design and architecture, in logical, mathematically based, hard-science kinds of activities. As a creative spirit, if I were an Italian person, rather than a Texan, I would likely have been a Turinese. It's not hard to imagine a Turinese Bruce Sterling: some Italian guy who's a novelist with an interest in science and design, who travels a lots, writes for the press.... It's a congenial city for me, the kind of city that breeds people like me.
Austin is not entirely dissimilar: it's a state-government seat, used to be the capital of a republic called Texas. Austin also has a lot of engineers and a lot of computer people. Dell is there. It's about the same size as Turin, it's also on a river. I wouldn't say they are sister cities, but Richard Florida would say that. They likely have more in common as urban systems than they have differences.
Austin is certainly more like Turin that it is like Rome or Milan or Venice or Florence. Well... actually Austin also has a lot in common with Bologna: a southern place, hot, sunshiney, full of leftists... So, Austin might be rather more like Bologna than it is like Turin. But I, myself... I'm definitely more like somebody from Turin than I'm like somebody from Bologna.
Bruce, thank you very much.
This monthly interview series features a number of thought-provoking conversations with leading designers or people who have major impact on the design world. The interviews are conducted by Mark Vanderbeeken.
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