Nomadland and the antifragile city

I watched “Nomadland” even before all the awards at that strange Oscars ceremony. The pandemic had an uneven effect on people, each with their own specific manifestations. For me, it brought me an unusual sense of urgency. This sense of urgency made me accelerate projects that were shelved for years and one of them, a child's dream, traveling the Americas by car, which just hasn't happened yet due to the second wave of the pandemic and the impossibility for any Brazilian to leave his own country. 

With subtle directing, special performances mainly for subtlety and accurate photography and art direction, the film took me to a place far beyond nomadism and an alternative life. It made me see the extent and consequences of my own work, or rather, it gave tangibility to some of the central ideas of the “antifragile city”, my new book, and the methodology that I apply worldwide. 

Fern's journey 

We followed the journey of the main character performed by the excellent Frances McDormand in her exile on the roads of the United States. No big cities and postcards, instead, a countryside, a "Deep America", without any glamor and even less dollars. 

Although the film purposely does not go too far into the characters' motivations and their backgrounds, we can understand that the tipping point in Fern's life was the initial death of her husband , but then, even with the insistence on staying in same house that they lived in, she was forced to leave it, simply because the city "ended", since the main company that employed and anchored the place closed. 

In the film, the story takes place in Empire, in the state of Nevada. In a quick search on the internet, we can see that it is a census region in Nevada's Washoe County and that, according to the 2010 census, it had 217 inhabitants. Treated as a “company city” by the United States Gypsum Corporation, it came to house 750 people, all employees of that company, which also happened to own all the properties in the place. 

It is impossible not to think about one of the concepts of not only the antifragile city, but antifragility itself: Optionality. The fewer the vectors of economic development in a place, the bigger its dependence on existing vectors and, therefore, the bigger its fragility as a place. If a city lives around a single company, what happens if that company just closes? What happens to a place where a single economy moved all the commerce and services in the region and supported not only its employees but all local entrepreneurs who had these employees as their main, and only, customers? 

It may seem like something very isolated, doomed to small towns and countryside, but isn't that closer to us than we imagined? The majority of touristic cities worldwide, for example, did they not suffer similar problems with the disappearance of tourists? 

One of the characteristics of the antifragile city is the search for diversity, for a set of development vectors aligned with its identity and vocation. It is no longer possible to deposit all the eggs in the same basket. In fact, this monofunction has always been a mistake, but the world dynamism during the pandemic shows how unsustainable and fragile this type of behavior really is. 

United around a shared behavior 

Although the monofunctionality of the city of Empire is the starting point of the story, two other points connect to antifragile city approach, and they are directly linked with the film's script. There is no specific territory for nomads, of course, as the concept itself tells us. But, if this shared territory does not exist and these people do not travel in packs, and in the film we saw the individualistic character of the characters and a clear delimitation of each one's public and private spaces, how do they form a “nation”? 

Although it may seem at first that the meeting in the desert is this “country” that welcomes them, we quickly realize that it is a time of communion, physical presence, exchange, but that all of this is not limited to this specific territory. What unites them is their identity, their worldview, or at least, the part of their worldview that is shared by the group. Although they are not part of a specific territory, this group is a community, even if “landless”. This idea is in the center of the discussion about deterritorialization, an idea in which we relate by affinity, behavior, worldview, without necessarily sharing the same building hall or even the same nationality in our passports. For these travelers, their “city” is the whole place where their vans are parked, whether in the middle of the desert or in the Amazon parking lot. 

Another essential point addressed in the film, which is present in the antifragile city, is the community vitality. In this case, it is even more relevant as this group does not always share the same territory; in the film, the meetings are annual. Even though, in these times that they spend together in the desert, these ties are clear with the exchanges of products, the bazaars and everything, it is when they separate that we realize the strength of this community. Whether getting temporary jobs together or changing itineraries and the best times to get those temporary jobs, the community does not, and could not, depend on the territory for its survival as a group. 

This postmodern nomadism does not go from food to food like our ancestors, but from temporary work to temporary work. We have no way of knowing if Fern would hit the road if Empire didn’t end, maybe not. The important thing is to understand that, as cities and places, we need to make the nomadic behavior of our citizens an option and never an obligation.