Shouldn’t Crowdsourced New York Apartment Pushing Limits actually be an Onion headline? Either that or the core of a new ResPublica/New School Network collaboration as the Big Society’s contribution to solving the housing crisis. We’ll crowdsource it! If everyone brings a brick, we’ll have…a pile of as many bricks as users who actually bothered showing…
Read More this is what “crowdsourcing” looks likeOwen Hatherley has an immense post about Sheffield, modernism, socialism, privatisation, etc. Which reminded me of an estate agent ad I saw recently, for a gaff in the Highgate New Town estate. The sales-slug referred to a “3 double bedroom apartment in an architecturally-designed ex-local authority development, with 19′ kitchen/diner, 12′ reception, and exclusive access…
Read More architecturally designedAdam Greenfield is reading about the notion of “military urbanism”. I think this is oversold, and also that like a lot of concepts relating to the social aspects of architecture, it’s overbroad – people chuck in bits and pieces of anything that seems to fit. CCTV? Surveillance, whack it in. Temporary buildings? Logistics and containerisation,…
Read More stuff I disagree withAdam Greenfield responds, and anyone who uses the BOAC speedbird as their avatar is probably worth listening to: “But that becomes a political problem, something almost all geeks seem incapable of understanding, probably because its a social rather than a technical problem.” Well, “geeks” may be incapable of understanding that, Cian, but that happens to…
Read More oppression in softwareI recently sent off another report through FixMyStreet, pointing at the horrible state of the roads round here. (I am more than a little disappointed with the Android client app, by the way.) Within a week, some of the worse potholes had been tar’n’gravelled. Meanwhile, even more seem to have appeared or worsened. What it…
Read More ticket punchingOK, so we took the piss out of the Policy Exchange crowd for seeing reds under the seats on the bendy buses. The group rights agenda. But the interesting thing about the Borisbus is that in a sense, it bears Dean Godson and Andy Gilligan out – design and architecture are, of course, deeply political…
Read More shower jobby: the politics of busesOK, so we took the piss out of the Policy Exchange crowd for seeing reds under the seats on the bendy buses. The group rights agenda. But the interesting thing about the Borisbus is that in a sense, it bears Dean Godson and Andy Gilligan out – design and architecture are, of course, deeply political…
Read More shower jobby: the politics of busesI briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in DarfurI briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in DarfurI’ve been reading Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology, a postmodernist account of the failure of a massive French project to develop a Personal Rapid Transit system. Latour’s book contains chunks of fiction, interviews, historical documents, and authorial comment, broken out by the typography – the experience is more like reading a long…
Read More project failure