Learning Governments (2)

More people are now working from home. Once the furlough  ends, most of them will go back to the office. But a majority also does not want to travel to the workplace every day. Instead, they prefer to continue to work from home for one or two days  in the week. As a result, part of the large office buildings will stay empty for ever. Private houses, on the other hand, have also become part-time offices and have to create space for that. All this has not only consequences for housing policy, but also for city planning, recreational space, transport etc.

Xander Vermeulen Windsant is an architect who pleads for this re-orientation. He underlines that similar suggestions have been made during and after the financial crisis. But the urge to go “back to normal” prevented that we learned more from the experiments of that period. (Het Financieele Dagblad, 11 June 2020)

The short memory of public authorities has also come to the fore at many other occasions. The Corona crisis has drawn the attention to the precarious situation of temporary migrants in agriculture and construction, who very often live in crampy accommodations and are ferried back and force to their work by mushrooming manpower agencies that pack as many as possible in too small vans. This situation, too, has been documented extensively in the past, without any political consequences.

Youth services are another field in the Netherlands, where past analyses, for example of the lacking cooperation between the many institutions involved, have still not lead to far-reaching change. Studies pile up, but they form more a substitute for political action rather than leading to effective policies.  

What lacks in most institutions is a careful documentation of past analysis and actions and the reasons why they did or did not lead to the expected results –  in their own geographical area and beyond.

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