The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

by Yule Heibel on August 15, 2010

  • Essay by David Harvey on cities/ remaking the city.
    QUOTE
    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.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: new_left_review david_harvey cities urbansim

  • Fascinating:
    QUOTE
    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:
    UNQUOTE

    tags: ted_conference video architecture magnus_larsson bioneering

  • Toward smart skins for buildings?
    QUOTE
    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.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: mit_techreview solar_power eco green_technologies windows

  • 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.:
    QUOTE
    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.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: berkman kate_crawford ethan_zuckerman connectedness mobile_technology socialtheory

  • Umair Haque raises some interesting questions in this piece:
    QUOTE
    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?
    UNQUOTE

    tags: economics harvard_business umair_haque

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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