Learn more about The Future Embraced, by Kobus Mentz, by joining us for the UDF AGM at 5.30 pm on Tuesday 22 October. Please also note that voting in the UDF Aotearoa election for the 2024-2026 Committee will close this Thursday 17 October. The incoming committee will be announced at the 2024 AGM being held in the three main centres and online – for more details please go to our AGM page.
The Future Embraced by Kobus Mentz: A sense of agency … and urgency
Encountering an independently published book with the rare gravitas of The Future Embraced: Career insights for urban professionals who care about the planet and its people, by Kobus Mentz, is deeply encouraging.
In brief it’s a bold and honest distillation of a lifetime of urban design thinking intended for, but not exclusively limited to, all travellers in urbanism for whom both the existential and complex professional challenges ahead of them lack guidance if not purpose. A big takeaway from the book is that a platform for developing a constructive outlook on the future is within reach for all of us to exercise our own agency over, both in thought and action. What Kobus is putting forward in The Future Embraced amounts to a hitherto hard-to-find modus operandi for acquiring attributes that aspiring urban professionals can apply to that end; in other words, a framework.
Even after a multivarious career, much of it at the head of Urbanismplus, it’s refreshing that Kobus confides in his book that he remains surprised himself whenever he gains a sense of agency, and how empowering that can be.
Equally it’s not unusual, he writes, “for urban professionals’ careers to unfold in wholly unexpected ways”. Kobus: “For my part, I thought I would begin and end my days doing architecture in Africa. I had no idea that events and opportunities would set me off on a journey that zig-zagged through several continents”.
While by choice the book Kobus has written is only lightly sprinkled with biographical details, every chapter is stamped with a tone, and tone of voice, that derives from his experiences, including that of being a teacher set on delivering a steady flow of sage advice and sound theoretical and practical insights.
On the topic of shaping a career he steers readers towards embracing two professional personae that he characterises under the descriptors of ‘Holistic Specialists’ and ‘Specialist Generalists’. The benefits of having such a basis for navigating our working lives and values is now beginning to be identified by other experts as a long-neglected gap that this book helps to fill.
This is the point – chapter 4 – where Kobus sets a platform for nurturing four ‘future-relevant roles’ as a form of motivational career progression: Agent for Change, Cross-Border Raider, Urban Choreographer, Thought Leader.
Kobus has a particular fondness for the term Urban Choreographer, which he carefully sets apart from “the conventional role of the project manager” by stating that it requires a much more comprehensive striving for outcomes “that transcend the norm”.
The Future Embraced is more workbook than self-help book – combining a call to act on imperatives that he suggests are critical to global challenges, along with identifying how to match your responses to local opportunities, and to then adopt or adapt the professional personae already mentioned.
But in the final analysis – and this is one of the book’s deeply encouraging qualities – you’re left to pick your own path rather than follow some form of narrow role modelling.
It’s how Kobus rolls. Nor at any point does he sugar coat how long and arduous achieving a rewarding, planet-enhancing career will be in the face of frequent negativity and a world of declinism. Nor does he fail to mention how default settings within professions can tend to push us into our shells.
“You will experience periods of delay and inertia (where you) oscillate between bouts of confidence and doubt,” writes Kobus, helpfully ending with: “Be careful, however, not to start seeing everything through the lens of this endeavour, as it could make you obsessive, cynical, and very difficult to be friends with! Switch off regularly and take pleasure in your other interests, friends and family”.
Kobus’ notes of acknowledgement to people he calls collaborators and colleagues, patrons and clients sits neatly with a long ‘who’s who’ list of influences. It is touching too that he dedicates his book to architect, writer and teacher Carl “Gus” Gerneke (1928-2023), who he credits for his own “intellectual liberation” at age 20.
All readers of The Future Embraced will find inklings of inspiration on whatever page they care to open to. Speaking as a generalist reader, The Future Embraced is a book that eminently suits those of us who like to regularly pull a ‘learned volume’ off the nearest shelf for a helping of compact, accessible, accomplished and directive edification. And likewise, anyone with the habit of either starting a book by reading the last section first, or by undertaking repeated read-throughs, will be amply rewarded.
It’s easy to imagine a larger imprint taking up interest in the life’s wisdom that Kobus pours into The Future Embraced to further maximise its reach and audience; without the need for a major make-over, save positive tweaks such as transferring the last chapter to the front, a re-framing of the current preface in expanded form at the back perhaps and more captioning of the useful and informative complement of 170 illustrations located within its 400+ pages.
Endorsements and positive recommendations have been streaming in from peers and the wider profession; from those calling The Future Embraced essential reading to comments praising its cogent and focused writing coupled with praise for its integrated scope, inclusive of a lens on ethics and equity, and an exceptional structure and flow.
Kudos to Kobus!
See also: Book reflections on The Future Embraced (NZ Planning Institute, October 2024)
(This book appreciation has been supplied by Stephen Olsen).
