Product Life Cycles in a Globalized Century

In understanding the distinctions between "formal" and "informal" peri-urban growth, the mechanisms that govern resource accessibility and decision making patterns ought to first be observed. While the patterns of decision and control describing the development systems within the formal and informal sectors appear to follow similar general progressions, they are actually representative of completely opposite modes of behavior. In the formal model above, decisions and resources flow from a peak of authority down through divisions of labor at successive levels to the base. The formal model is logically and rigidly linear and concludes at a determinate lower level where the "product(s)" are supplied as categorical goods or services to separate parties. That is, categories of institutionally designed products are made available to institutionally defined categories of consumers. However, in the absence of centralized authority, there is no linear mechanism of decision making, and an entirely different production/supply network emerges -- that is a "non-hierarchic" network of autonomous decision makers is created where participants are free to combine as they will so long as they operate exclusively within their designated sector.

These two types of socio-economic systems are important mechanisms in understanding how goods and products are built, supplied, used and reused by both makers and consumers, and frame an important theoretical framework that describes the limits of growth as a conflict between proscriptive law (i.e. "thou shalt not...") and prescriptive law (i.e. "thou shalt..."). The contention between proscriptive law as a constraint that limits freedom/actions, and a prescriptive law that condones behavior is more literally analogized in the distinction between railway routes and road routes. That is, in the difference between moving between any two positions along railway tracks in a marshaling yard which must be followed and between any two positions along streets in a city which are merely defined as boundaries which should not be crossed. Thus a hierarchy provides only one route between any two points at any one time, while a network is undetermanistic and can provide a variety of routes between any two points. The mundane significance of these facts is crucial to understanding the difference between how products are built and used in both the formal and informal sectors and in more deftly understanding the evolutionary paradigm of the built environment in the Global South.

Notes:

W.C. Ashby, Self Regualtion and the Theory of Requisite Variety. Penguin Modern Management Readings, London 1969.

John F.C. Turner. Routes and Hierarchies the Autonomously Built Environment. Marion, Boyers Publishers, London 1976.