Nordicum - Real Estate Annual Finland 2014 | Page 67

In Casti’s views, it is no accident that
“futurists” of all types – including economists and political analysts – fail at prediction. They get excited at major peaks in society and cynical at major bottoms; as a result,
investors take risks at major tops and pull
in their horns at major bottoms – just when
they should be doing the opposite.

There’s No Going Back
Casti’s work on the development of earlywarning methods for extreme events in human society has been groundbreaking, so
it was no wonder that the presentation at
Aulanko was met with great interest. What
does the future hold for the real estate sector? According to Casti, the problem with almost all social prediction is that it is based
upon the extrapolation of present trends into the future.
“And this always fails – because trends
change,” Casti says, adding that there has
never been a useful approach to anticipating changes in social trends. He feels that
all that is wrong with social prediction today is due to one simple error: the presump-

tion that “events” cause social moods and
trends. This assumption, in fact, like the predictions it produces, is exactly backward,
Casti argues.
An example: most people think that
a productive economy makes people optimistic and that an unproductive economy
makes people pessimistic. The opposite is
true: Optimistic people make a productive
economy, and pessimistic people make an
unproductive one.
Casti admits that this concept sounds
simple enough, yet no one in the social sciences has made this case before. Still, at
stock markets around the world, this idea is
not totally unheard of as everybody recognizes the significance of sentiment as a driver – and surely “sentiment” is not too far removed from “mood”.

Random Success?
Casti’s torch was carried on by Finnish
thinkers such as Ilkka Kakko and Mika Aaltonen. Ilkka Kakko, founder of Karostech,
commented that in the future, innovation
management will give way to “serendipity management”. Serendipity? Sometimes
called a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”; serendipity involves running into
something good or useful while not specifically searching for it.
For real estate professionals, the concept is highly useful as the need to nurture
creativity is evident in the offices of future.
Via various co-working solutions, for instance, people from various backgrounds
can get together and something new can
emerge from this.
Aalto University Professor Mika Aaltonen painted a vision of Renaissance Society to his audience, predicting a new era
of individualism and creativity. Aaltonen
belives that we are in verge of a new age
where consumer becomes a creator: spurred
on by new technology, there is very little he
can’t achieve.

Reinventing Nature
But what does this mean from real estate
perspective? According to Aaltonen, one answer can be found in urbanization – as the
majority of humanity now lives – for the
first time ever – in cities, this will mean a reevaluation of man’s relationship with nature.
“There will be a market for re-creating nature,” Aaltonen says. From the point
of view of the developers, this means that
the focus will not be on square metres alone,
but also the natural values present in the surrounding areas (or within the building itself).

Aalto University Professor
Mika Aaltonen.
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