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New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City
Essay by David Harvey on cities/ remaking the city.
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The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
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TED Blog | Living, breathing architecture: Today’s TEDTalks playlist
Fascinating:
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Today’s playlist is about way-new architecture — using organic forms and living, growing materials to bring fresh life into the buildings, homes and infrastructure we occupy. Magnus Larsson, for instance, has a bold plan to build in the Sahara desert sands using living bacteria:
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Technology Review: Making Smart Windows that Are Also Cheap
Toward smart skins for buildings?
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Windows that absorb or reflect light and heat at the flick of a switch could help cut heating and cooling bills. A company called Soladigm has developed methods for making these “electrochromic” windows cheaply, making them more viable for homes and office buildings.
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…My heart’s in Accra » Kate Crawford: mobile media and the art of noise
Ethan Zuckerman blogged Kate Crawford’s 8/3/10 talk at the Berkman Center. Great points on the history of “noise” and information overload. Seems it’s hardly a new issue, even if the technology keeps changing. Eg.:
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Because we’re negotiating this [constant connectivity] in realtime, there are fears about “network noise” that seem to invoke a “myth of the fall”, positing a period when media didn’t impinge on our time. She cites Jaron Lanier as making this argument in “You Are Not a Gadget” and Giorgio Agamben, who made the case that the mobile phone as reshaping Italian gesture and speech, and homogenizing Italian society. But this isn’t a new problem – she notes that the philosopher Walter Benjamin was complaining about telephones as “uncanny and violent” in 1932.
The response to these concerns about information overload are well summed up by Clay Shirky’s pithy quote, “There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.” There’s a wave of “productivity porn” (using Merlin Mann’s term) like Lifehacker and Getting Things Done that promises to help readers focus. But total focus was never possible, nor desirable. Excesses of information is part of the human experience – no human could have read all the scrolls in Alexandria – and this tension between too much or too little information – between noise and silence – is an old one.
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Reseeding the Economy – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
Umair Haque raises some interesting questions in this piece:
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It’s 2010, and we still don’t know how to describe the archetypal magnates of the next economy. We don’t have a word for it, so we resort to awkward neologisms, like “information entrepreneur” or “green mogul.” It’s as if we’re still not quite sure just what kinds of “capital” tomorrow’s tycoons will be “ists” of. What are the kernels of tomorrow’s prosperity?
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.