megastructure

33 results back to index


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

The Stack, as a whole, structures the City layer through the consolidation of urban nodes into megacities and also through the consolidation of both public and private urban systems in megastructures. We'll find that instead of heterogeneous and open interfacial platforms, for their own footprints Cloud platforms prioritize instead urban-scale walled gardens. The megastructure provides a bounded total space in which architectural and software program can be composed by complete managerial visualization; for it, the border, the gate, and the wall bend into closed loops containing vast interiors, sometimes in pursuit of utopian idealization and isolation. The megastructure is an enclave within the city that also holds a miniaturized city within itself, and so the specific and different terms of that miniaturization are the vocabularies of differing utopian agendas, whether explicit or suppressed.

The City layer of The Stack itself operates as a massively distributed megastructure and draws on, however obliquely and opportunistically, the reservoir of speculative, even utopian megastructural design projects of years past (built and unbuilt), even realizing them after the fact with a sometimes perverse inversion of their original intent. As discussed in the Earth chapter, in and around the years when the first photographs of Earth were taken from space, speculative architectural design was inspired by the visual scale of the whole Earth as a comprehensive site condition and spawned scores of now canonical megastructure projects. Many proposed total utopian spaces (islands cut off from the rest of the world, per Fredric Jameson's discussion of the utopian genre in science fiction), including, as already mentioned, OMA's Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (1972) and Superstudio's planet-spanning Continuous Monument (1969), while others sought the utopian through the maximal perforation of boundaries by ludic interfaces and absolute grids, including No-Stop City (1969) or Constant's New Babylon (1959–1974).

In anticipation of the ultimate footprint and expression of the Apple Cloud platform into the City layer of The Stack, we also note that the integration of the closed megastructural platform model is now planned to include Foster's refresh and redesign of Apple's most public terrestrial presence, its hundreds of brand retail stores. That Foster's office would become the house architect of the Apple platform's human-facing earthly permeation suggests that his acumen with megastructures serves to organize the physical expression of the Apple Cloud Polis's City layer more generally. Apple has invested in the biological extravagance of the iconic megastructure in ways that the other platforms have not, including its resolute ambition to utopian totality.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Skywalk/Skytrain/Skydeck: Multilevel Cities 1See Antonio Sant’Elia, Luciano Caramel and Alberto Longatti, Antonio Sant’Elia: The Complete Works, Rome: Rizzoli International Publications, 1988. 2Antonio Sant’Elia, Architettura Futurista, Milan: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1984 [1914]. 3Ibid, p. 280. 4See Jean-Louis Cohen and Hubert Damisch, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960, Paris: Flammarion, 1995. 5See Peter Cook and Michael Webb, Archigram, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. 6Japanese architect Maki Fumihiko defined a ‘megastructure’ in 1964 as a ‘large frame in which all the functions of a city are housed’. Megastructures had, he argued, ‘been made possible by present day technology’, Maki Fumihiko, Investigations in Collective Form, St Louis: Washington University Press, 1964, p. 1. 7Hideo Obitsu and Nagase Ichirou, ‘Japan’s Urban Environment: The Potential of Technology in Future City Concepts’, in Gideon Golany, Keisuke Hanaki and Osamu Koide, eds, Japanese Urban Environment, Oxford: Elsevier Science, 1988, pp. 324–36; and Zhong-Jie Lin, ‘From Megastructure to Megalopolis: Formation and Transformation of Mega-Projects in Tokyo Bay’, Journal of Urban Design 12:1, 2007, pp. 73–92. 8Cook and Webb, Archigram.

Crucial here was the shift from one all-purpose system of roads to a labyrinth of single-purpose ones, organised three-dimensionally within the huge new concrete megastructures of the city. (Critics suspected from the outset that the dominating motivation behind the idea of raised walkways in the UK was simply to remove people from the accelerating momentum of proliferating vehicles.) City centres would thus be progressively re-engineered into huge multifunctional and multilevel containers12: three-dimensional megastructures designed using the latest modernist and functionalist concepts to ‘heap up’ housing, commerce, retailing and leisure while providing enough space for the mass-automobile society.

Megastructures had, he argued, ‘been made possible by present day technology’, Maki Fumihiko, Investigations in Collective Form, St Louis: Washington University Press, 1964, p. 1. 7Hideo Obitsu and Nagase Ichirou, ‘Japan’s Urban Environment: The Potential of Technology in Future City Concepts’, in Gideon Golany, Keisuke Hanaki and Osamu Koide, eds, Japanese Urban Environment, Oxford: Elsevier Science, 1988, pp. 324–36; and Zhong-Jie Lin, ‘From Megastructure to Megalopolis: Formation and Transformation of Mega-Projects in Tokyo Bay’, Journal of Urban Design 12:1, 2007, pp. 73–92. 8Cook and Webb, Archigram. See Reyner Banham’s definitive Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, London: Harper Collins, 1976. 9Ibid., p. 10. 10Aileen Tatton-Brown, and William Tatton-Brown, ‘Three-Dimensional Town Planning’, Architectural Review 40, September 1941, p. 83. 11Newcastle City Council, ‘Central Area Redevelopment Plan’, Newcastle, 1963, p. 12. 12The quote comes from John Gold, ‘The Making of a Megastructure: Architectural Modernism, Town Planning and Cumbernauld’s Central Area, 1955–75’, Planning Perspectives 21:2, 2006, p. 113. 13Institution of Municipal Engineers, Town Centre Redevelopment, Proceedings of the Institution’s Convention, London: Institution of Municipal Engineers, 1962. 14London County Council, The Administrative County of London: Development Plan First Review, London: London County Council, 1960, p. 169.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

For some people, this may be terrifying, maybe even leading them to cling to the ground. From an urbanistic perspective, however, it is unprecedented. More than just a building, this is a vertical city, where tens of thousands of people can live, work, and play in one single complex, without ever having to leave. The world of megastructures is fundamentally different from the world of regular buildings. Decades before megastructures became a reality, avant-garde architects like Frank Lloyd Wright obsessed over structures this size. It wasn’t all about height, however. Some toiled over highly efficient circulation, like the Italian futurist Antonio Sant’Elia, who in 1914 envisioned La Città Nuova (“The New City”) as an array of monolithic skyscrapers articulated with snaking lifts, railways, and aerial bridges.

Five years later, the city of Chengdu, in China, constructed a building that is bigger and perhaps even bolder: New Century Global Center is a shopping mall with offices, several hotels, an ice-skating rink, a Mediterranean village, and an artificial beach enlivened by a 500-foot-long screen displaying sunrises and sunsets. What stopped us seventy years ago from erecting these megastructures, and why are we building them today? It wasn’t the geometry of Wright’s proposal. Surprisingly, both the Jeddah Tower and the Burj Khalifa resemble Wright’s vision. The towers have a footprint shaped like a tripod, from which the building rises and tapers to a spire, giving it the silhouette of a minaret.

We then built it with concrete-filled steel tubes, instead of Shukhov’s bare steel beams, creating a stronger structure. We embedded hundreds of sensors into the tower, allegedly the world’s first structural health-monitoring system, making sure it would continue to stand. Technological advances alone do not explain the first hyperboloid megastructure. After all, who needs a TV-tower antenna in the age of cable and satellite? Almost as soon as our building was completed, our tower was no longer the world’s only hyperboloid structure breaking the Shukhov barrier. In 2011, the hyperboloid Tower of Fortune was completed in Zhengzhou at 1,273 feet (388 meters).


pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

‘A Natural Evolution of Living Conditions’: Newcastle Gets the System Building Bug (1959–69) 5. ‘A Contemporary Canaletto’: How Office Blocks Transformed our Skyline (1956–75) 6. ‘A Village With Your Children in Mind’: Span and the Hippy Dreams of New Ash Green (1957–72) 7. ‘A Veritable Jewel in the Navel of Scotland’: Cumbernauld’s Curious Megastructure (1955–72) Part 3: No Future 1. ‘A Pack of Cards’: Tower Block Highs and Lows (1968–74) 2. ‘A Terrible Confession of Defeat’: Protests and Preservation (1969–79) 3. ‘As Corrupt a City as You’ll Find’: Uncovering the Lies at the Heart of the Boom (1969–77) 4. ‘A Little Bit of Exclusivity’: Milton Keynes, the Last New Town (1967–79) 5.

Even Buchanan was moved to speculate that ‘perhaps some kind of individual jet-propulsion unit will eventually be developed’ though, practical as ever, he was one of the first to think through the issues around jet packs: ‘The problems of weather, navigation, air space and traffic control appear so formidable that it may be questioned whether such a device would ever be practical for mass use.’63 The Smithsons, naturally, were less cautious, writing in 1970 that ‘we may find that a revolutionised railway system, or the use of helicopters for local high speed passenger services, will make our proposed 120 foot wide “ring roads” ridiculous.’64 So what would Britain look like by the impossibly distant year 2000? Sixties planners did their best to imagine. One of the most ambitious schemes was the superhuman speculative shopping megastructure named High Market. It had been sponsored by the glass manufacturers Pilkington Brothers, and drawn up by yet another husband and wife team, Gordon and Eleanor Michell (who had advised Colin Buchanan while he was writing Traffic in Towns). The Michells imagined an artificial ridge stretching between two hills in the countryside near Dudley in the Midlands, creating what was effectively a dam of shops.

‘The ideal town,’ wrote Jellicoe, ‘would seem to be one in which the traffic circulation were piped like drainage and water; out of sight and out of mind, to go as fast as it likes, to smell as it wants, and to make noises.’67 The designs and models he produced looked like a cross between postwar Plymouth’s town centre and Tron. What was the best thing about it? ‘It can be extended indefinitely,’ enthused Jellicoe.68 The countryside may not have become home to High Market-style megastructures, but American-style out-of-town malls and European-style hypermarkets did begin to appear. Sadly lacking space-age transport infrastructure, these malls would instead continue to rely heavily on the car. The early sixties planners would no doubt be shocked that their futuristic plans for city centres never came to pass, and by the ongoing ad hoc sprawl of car-dependent trading estates.


pages: 232 words: 60,093

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The first neighborhood center, Lake Anne Village, opened in 1965 and garnered national attention for its modernist architecture (designed by architects Julian H. Whittlesey, William J. Conklin, and Cloethiel Woodward Smith) and its picturesque lakeside plan, said to be influenced by the Italian seaside town of Portofino.13 However, for the main town center, Whittlesey and Conklin designed a conventional sixties megastructure, with all the functions in what was effectively a single building. Simon objected that this solution was too expensive, and too difficult to implement in phases, and suggested a more traditional approach using streets and sidewalks.14 Instead, the planners, some of whom had been involved in the design of Radburn, proposed an all-pedestrian scheme, with car traffic and parking on a lower level.

The new projects generally downplayed these constraints and concentrated on architectural form: Foster designed an unusual pair of connected skyscrapers; the team of Meier, Eisenman, Holl, and Gwathmey produced a striking composition of five identical towers; Libeskind placed his buildings around a huge memorial excavation; and the team that included Foreign Office Architects and UNStudio proposed a colossal megastructure of a type that had never been built before—and was, perhaps, unbuildable. Although architecture critics generally praised the results, not everyone was pleased. “It is like putting lipstick on a hog,” complained Yaro. “Nothing has changed except you have a lot of fancy architects on this go-round.

The ninety-two-acre project was planned and coordinated by the Battery Park City Authority, a public-benefit corporation created by New York State in 1968, about the same time as the Penn’s Landing Corporation came into being. As in Philadelphia, the first designs for Battery Park City were ambitious megastructures on superblocks, and they suffered the same fate. The project took a different turn in 1979, when the Authority commissioned Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut to create a plan that could be implemented by several different developers in successive phases. Cooper and Eckstut extended the uneven Lower Manhattan street grid into the site, creating small parcels of land that could be filled in with medium- and high-rise apartment blocks.* Like Reston Town Center, Battery Park City was designed to grow piecemeal, building by building, with individual projects financed and built by different developers, in response to changing market demand, but following the architectural guidelines of the master plan.


Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

It is also the problem of the architect, as planners and developers have failed to rebuild our cities. They are obsessed with numbers (people, money, acreage, units, cars, roads, etc) and forget life itself and the spirit of man,’ Rudolph wrote in his unusually discursive brief for the students. Their proposal took the form of a megastructure, stepping towards the existing campus buildings. A continuous series of buildings, running one into another, was organised around a spine of lower structures that housed car parks, and cafés, with the laboratories radiating off it. What is most striking about Yale in Rudolph’s time is that he produced students with wildly divergent outlooks on architecture.

Their campuses were conceived as self-contained worlds that demonstrated new ways to live and work, reflected in an architecture that was more adventurous than would be possible on the outside. Lasdun designed a remarkably powerful, even ruthless scheme that created a continuous wall of concrete structures, like a set of linked stepped pyramids, perhaps the most ambitious attempt at that feverish, half-dystopian, biggest-of-the-big architectural idea of the 1960s – building a megastructure in Britain. Tradition had been abolished. The University of East Anglia wall, backed by an elevated walkway, contains student residences, as well as laboratories, teaching spaces, and classrooms. It has the massive presence of an aircraft carrier beached in a wheat field. As an expression of a single, ruthless architectural will, it would have attracted attention anywhere.

To avoid that impression, he wanted Lasdun’s endorsement. Foster conceived of the Sainsbury Centre as a gleaming silver tube, turning away from the campus to look out over the green landscape, and a lake. Foster’s building seems barely to touch the ground; it is tethered to Lasdun’s concrete megastructure by the most tenuous of umbilical cords, a high-level glass walkway. It penetrates the tube at an oblique angle, and then descends into the gallery by way of a sculptural spiral staircase with no visible means of support. It was typical of Foster’s approach at the time. He abolished design problems – the joint between two materials, for example, or how to make a formal approach to a building – by avoiding them altogether.


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

It’s a bit like climbing up into an airport control tower, and in some ways, that’s exactly what you’ve done. The building’s landing deck is the size of an aircraft carrier: a vast meadow of painted concrete baking in the Southern California sun. This makes the Air Support Division’s HQ a kind of beached warship in the heart of the city. The inner sanctum of this megastructure is a dense sequence of small corridors and stairways, and even this at times resembles the guts of a military ship. Helicopter timetables and safety-procedure posters are tacked up on the walls, and an erasable whiteboard keeps track of who is flying what and when. I have never seen the facility crowded, although there are an awful lot of chairs, as if waiting for some future gathering.

He would describe things to me in precisely detailed sequences, hoping I would come to see these intricate geometries the way he could, every metal-on-metal contact and even the tiniest of grooved surfaces invisible within the lock itself. For Towne, each lock could clearly be blown up to the scale of a megastructure, a palace the size of a city block, its inner gates and cylinders like cavernous hallways and rooms his mind could then wander through. He seemed to hold a detailed, three-dimensional model of each lock in his head, and he could manipulate it back and forth, round and round, like a hologram rotating in space.

Codella describes a monstrous residential complex known only as the Site Four and Five Houses: “Site Four and Five was a multistory poured concrete rabbit warren so sprawling and generic that even seasoned cops would get completely lost in its hallways or not be able to give the correct address for where they were when calling Central for backup.” If we recall LAPD tactical flight officer Cole Burdette’s interest in clarifying the city’s system of house numbers and addresses, Codella is just describing the indoor equivalent: making state-funded megastructures numerically legible to the police forces tasked with patrolling them. Even navigating their behemoth interiors required tactical innovation. Residential tower blocks require what are known as vertical patrols, for example, during which officers will walk the stairways up and down, often navigating only by flashlight, as dead bulbs can go for days or weeks at a time without being replaced.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

For too long there has been minimal progress made against these dangers because of what is a stupendous case of cosmic myopia. The time of change is now. It is time for a clear-cut change in the top strategic goals for all the world’s space agencies. Save Earth first! Explore and research outer space second. 4. The Unrealized Potential of Mega-structures and Intellectual Infrastructure in Space. It is possible that some space scientists and experts will say, “But the Sun’s power and processes are much too vast for human tools to change its behavior.” The answer is that one does not have to change the Sun’s behavior. We only need to create a solar shield, most likely at the L-1 Lagrange Point some 1.5 million km away from Earth—at the “balance point” between the Sun’s and Earth’s gravitational forces.

If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.</SimplePara> Reference 1. Joseph N. Pelton, “Let’s Build a Megastructure in Space to Save Earth,” Room Space Journal, Summer, 2016. Appendix: Current Status of the U. S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, Public Law 114-90 , as of June 2016 In December 2015 the U. S. Congress passed Public Law 114-90 that was signed into law by President Obama. Part of the requirements of that act was that the President was required to recommend a process whereby the U.S. would fulfill the requirements of the Outer Space Treaty to provide oversight of activities carried out by U.S. entities in space.

S. regulatory actions Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) Space navigation Space R&D programs Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 common heritage of mankind global commons legal enforcement outer space change policing regulatory system Sentinel infrared telescope space colonies traffic control and management Space Resource Utilization Space Swiss Systems (S3) Space tourism Space transportation ICAO radiation danger radio frequencies, allocation of SARPS traffic management and control Space-based navigation Space-based war-fighting systems SpaceHab Spaceplane system aerospace organizations safe and non-polluting development Space Ship 2 Space Swiss Systems (S3) SpaceShipOne and space tourism SpaceShipOne SpaceShipTwo Star wars Stratobus Stratolaunch Subspace/protospace Super automation Super urbanization Syncom 2 T TASI SeeTime Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI) TDRS SeeTracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system Ten Point Program the global commons global population control humanity laws and regulation mega-structures and intellectual infrastructure planetary protection programs singularity space- and ground-based infrastructure sustainability urban sprawl Time and human technological progress Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI) Tiny 40-kg Early Bird satellite Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system Transformational Satellite System (TSat) Transitional satellite (TSAT) Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space Tripartite space governance unit TSat SeeTransformational Satellite System (TSat) TSAT SeeTransitional satellite (TSAT) U U.


pages: 211 words: 55,075

Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life by David Sim

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, anti-fragile, autonomous vehicles, car-free, carbon footprint, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, place-making, smart cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city

However, there are particular challenges in accommodating buildings with uses that require very large surfaces in a way that makes them good neighbors to the medium-sized and smaller structures surrounding them. Clearly, some larger activities can fill an entire block, or at least a significant part of one. The larger buildings should be integrated into the local streetscape without breaking up the smaller-scale rhythm and life of local streets. 01. Edinburgh, Scotland. In a polite gesture, the mega-structure of the Victorian Balmoral Hotel (left) lifts its skirts to present small shops (unrelated to the hotel business) to the back steps leading to Edinburgh’s main railway station, offering useful services to hurried passengers. The 1980s shopping mall (right) does not afford such courtesy. 02.

The building has an active ground floor, which brings life to the surrounding streets, with independent restaurants, cafés, and shops. The hotel takes advantage of the enclosed block with a loop for servicing and access/evacuation. Section through hotel showing central atrium and aquarium tank. Landing a Big-Box Megastructure in a Fine-grained Neighborhood: IKEA, Altona, Hamburg, Germany In a time when online retail is increasing and large stores are pushed farther into suburban locations, the placement of a full-size IKEA store in a human-scale city neighborhood in Altona, Hamburg, Germany is a significant achievement.


pages: 693 words: 204,042

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail

You don’t know; you can’t see it, and the whole story has never been told to you. Sorry. Just the way it is. But if you then think furthermore that the bankers and financiers of this world know more than you do—wrong again. No one knows this system. It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No single individual can know any one of these megastructures, much less the mega-megastructure that is the global system entire, the system of all systems. The bankers—when they’re young they’re traders. They grab a tiger by the tail and ride it wherever it goes, proclaiming that they are piloting a hydrofoil. Expert overconfidence. As they age out, a good percentage of them have made their pile, feel in their guts (literally) how burned out they are, and go away and do something else.

Over the scrubby pine barrens, then the green and empty New Jersey shore, which had been a drowned coastline even before the floods; then out over the blue Atlantic. Thus, as she reminded her audience, they had flown over one corridor in the great system of corridors that now shared the continent with its cities and farms, and the interstate highways and the railways and power lines. Overlapping worlds, a stack of overlays, an accidental megastructure, a postcarbon landscape, each of the many networks performing its function in the great dance, and the habitat corridors providing a life space for their horizontal brothers and sisters, as Amelia called them on her broadcasts. All creatures made good use of these corridors, which if not pure wilderness were at least wildernessy, and it was easy to wax enthusiastic about their success while flying over them at five hundred feet.

But they were on the hunt, so she sat in the corner and waited. Eventually they split off an inquiry and gave it to her to work on. She settled in and began to apply overlay maps to the snaps of the days when Rosen and Muttchopf had been kidnapped. Stacks within the great stack that was the city in four dimensions. An accidental megastructure, a maze they could reconstruct and then weave threads through. Outside the carrel the station emptied as people went home or out to dinner. They ate sandwiches brought in for them. More time passed, and the graveyard shift came in on a waft of cold air and bad coffee. On they worked. Gen paused at one point to regard her assistants.


From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak

Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

the electronic new some was There point, a Marshall media as the "global village" that was 30 somehow cozy, participative, and yet at the same time technologically sophisticated. There was Paolo Soleri, who believed that the solution to the ecologi- modern world was the building of megastructural "arcologies" - beehive cities in cal crisis of the which the urban billions could tally environments. artificial who barnstormed O'Neill, be compacted into to- There was Gerard the country whipping enthusiasm for one of the zaniest schemes of all: up the launching of self-contained space colonies for the millions.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Although Jordan was disappointed by its presentation, she remained close to Fuller, whose support allowed her to pursue her studies of community planning “for participation by Harlem residents in the birth of their new reality.” In an era when the journalist Jane Jacobs was exposing the failures of urban projects in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Fuller continued to think in terms of megastructures, which kept him in the public eye at the expense of his vision of decentralization. By contrast, many of his other views were strikingly progressive. Fuller said that America was already “the most socialized of all countries in the world,” although it concealed this by underwriting corporations rather than individuals.

The project included a park, but Disney was more interested in a futuristic planned community, as the general manager of Disneyland recalled: “He expected a house that would be completely self-sufficient, its own power plant, its own electricity.” In the original plan, the town center was covered by a dome—a concept that was based partially on the Houston Astrodome, which had made a strong impression on Disney. Beneath this megastructure, conceived to enclose fifty acres, internal buildings such as a hotel tower, stores, and theaters would benefit from total climate control, allowing for a variety of architectural styles, while emissions would be minimized by an electric transit system. Disney called it the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or Epcot.

Some time later, however, the admiral was asked to chair a task force on wind power, and he confessed to Luce that Fuller might have had a point. Fuller busied himself with a hexagonal hanging bookshelf that gained stability as its weight increased, which became his last patent, and he asked his Cleveland office—to which he owed tens of thousands of dollars—to work on a huge model of a megastructure called the Gigundo Dome. With Norman Foster, he designed the Autonomous House, a rigid “double deresonated dome” with concentric shells that could rotate to regulate the capture of solar energy. Fuller hoped that a prototype could become his home in Los Angeles, as well as a house in Wiltshire County, England, for Foster’s family.


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

Dustlike material orbiting the star—­typical of stars as they form, but absent from the vicinity of mature stars—­could swirl in complex ways, blocking dif­ fer­ent amounts of light at dif­fer­ent times.2 Rings of material in the far outer solar system might provide the answer, if ­those rings happened to lie between Kepler’s line of sight and the star.3 Perhaps the data have errors, ­either in the mea­sured light variations or in the spectral observations that establish Tabby’s Star as no youngster. Or perhaps—­and ­here the public mind grows most heavi­ly engaged—­a megastructure surrounds the star, a variation on a “Dyson sphere,” the enormous light-­and heat-­trapping shield around a star that the physicist Freeman Dyson suggested in 1960 could result from an advanced civilization’s attempt to capture all of its star’s energy. If the shield ­were only partial, perhaps composed of many parts in orbit around the star, its motions could at times block a large portion of the stellar output from our view.4 In scientific circles, all hypotheses remain subject to a basic approach: How can we attempt to check on their validity?

,” Scientific American news posting, May 1, 2017, available at https://­www​.­scientificamerican​.­com​/­article​ /­have​-­aliens​-­built​-­huge​-­structures​-­around​-­boyajian​-­rsquo​-­s​-­star​ /­#; see also Jason Wright et al., “The G Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies: IV. The Signatures and ­Information Content of Transiting Megastructures,” Astrophysical Journal 816 (2016): 17. 5. Gerry Harp et al., “Radio SETI Observations of the Anomalous Star KIC 8462852,” Astrophysical Journal 825 (2016): 155. 6. Jason Wright and Steinn Sigurðsson, “Families of Plausible Solutions to the Puzzle of Boyajian’s Star,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 829 (2016): L3. 7.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

We live today in an age of rapidly expanding megacities, and it is therefore not difficult to imagine a future in which the world itself has become a continuous city, such as Trantor in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire series of novels, a phenomenon known as ‘Ecumenopolis’, a word first used in 1967. In a future world with ever more people and fewer resources, it no longer seems fanciful to imagine the creation of ‘megastructures’ (a word coined by Rayner Banham in the 1970s), in which a whole city is contained within a single building. The Situationist architect Constant Nieuwenhuys proposed a utopian megastructure called New Babylon as early as 1956. If, as scientists predict, the glaciers melt and sea levels rise dramatically, then ship-cities such as Armada in China Miéville’s The Scar, or cities built out across water, as in architect Kenzo Tange’s elegant ‘Plan for Tokyo’ (1960) which extended the Japanese capital out into the bay, might become reality.

Every building would be ‘a city in itself, completely self-sustaining, receiving its supplies from great merchandise ways far below the ground’. The magazine predicted that an urban utopia awaited us in which pollution would be eliminated and people would ‘live in the healthy atmosphere of the building tops’.32 A Walking City, a robotic megastructure designed by Ron Herron of Archigram in 1964. In the same year as this was published, Dorothy and her fellow travellers in The Wizard of Oz caught their first glimpse of the sky-high crystalline towers and domes of the Emerald City glittering on the horizon. ‘It’s beautiful isn’t it? Just like I knew it would be,’ says Dorothy.


The Paths Between Worlds: This Alien Earth Book One by Paul Antony Jones

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, machine readable, megastructure, period drama

I will automatically recognize it and assimilate the information.” I nodded at the robot. “Will do.” “Thank you, Meredith.” Silas dipped his shoulders in acknowledgment. I leaned back against the rocks. The clouds that had earlier obscured the monolith had moved on, so now most of the huge mega-structure was visible. It was hard to look at it without feeling uneasy; it was just so massive. But it was also beautiful. The reflected sunlight shone like a distant beacon. A sudden realization hit me like a slap across my face. I jumped to my feet. “Are you okay, Meredith?” Silas said. “I’m fine,” I replied, then, “Come on.

“I would not even hazard a guess,” Chou admitted quietly, in a rare moment of technical ignorance. “It is just like a leisurely boat ride on a Sunday afternoon,” Freuchen said, only half joking. I playfully elbowed him in his ribs and laughed. “Sure is,” I said, “if you ignore the robot, the woman from the far-flung future, and the mega-structures built by some long forgotten unknown hand.” “Vell, ven you put it like that.” We all laughed. “It is a pleasant change,” Chou said, a smile playing across her lips. Freuchen stood up, placed a foot on the gunwale, and leaned against the roof of the pilothouse, his eyes fixed on the ever-nearing coastline.


pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

Thus, the vision of an architect becomes less constrained by the nature of factory production. If we ever get to a point where an architect can design a building and then just tell the machines to go build it, we’ll have cheaper, better, faster housing for regular homes, and we’ll have more incredible, beautiful, wondrous megastructures. So let’s get to it. Actually, wait. First can we just for a moment discuss how weird some of the architecture literature is? It’s like, for a second someone will talk about the technical details of how to build a certain steel facade, then suddenly they’re rhapsodizing about “exploring a new digitally influenced materiality.”

.* One possible virtue of solar arrays was that they might (in the very distant future) be valuable for space transport. The idea is that you harvest energy from panels near the sun and then beam power to vehicles that are already in space. This might actually be the way things go in the long term, since the sun represents an enormous amount of free energy. But by the time we can launch megastructures with robot repairmen onboard, we’re guessing there’ll be better options. We looked at a lot of far-out technologies for this book, and no doubt some of them will not materialize, or at least not materialize in the form we find most exciting. But space solar seemed to us to be undesirable even under its most ideal conditions.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

The entire ecosystem was not developed with a single well-thought-out design plan, and security has largely been an afterthought. New applications have been slapped on top of legacy systems and then patched backwards haphazardly, leaving persistent and sometimes gaping vulnerabilities up and down the entire environment for a multitude of bad actors to exploit.12 It’s all an “accidental megastructure,” as media theorist Benjamin Bratton aptly put it.13 The global communications ecosystem is not a fixed “thing.” It’s not anywhere near stasis either. It’s a continuously evolving mixture of elements, some slow-moving and persistent and others quickly mutating. There are deeper layers, like those legacy standards and protocols, that remain largely fixed.

Why information security is hard — An economic perspective. Seventeenth Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (358–365). IEEE; Anderson, R. (2000). Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, 3rd Edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Retrieved from https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html An “accidental megastructure”: Bratton, B. H. (2016). The stack — On software and sovereignty. MIT Press. A bewildering array of new applications: Lindsay, J. R. (2017). Restrained by design: The political economy of cybersecurity. Digital Policy, Regulation and Governance, 19(6), 493–514. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPRG-05-2017-0023 Merriam-Webster defines social media: Merriam-Webster.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Stern, already embarked on his own path toward postmodernism, accused urban renewal’s architects of promoting “heroic” designs rigidly loyal to orthodox modernist principles rather than more flexibly responding to how people actually used a particular urban site. He singled out “piazza compulsion,” obsession with towers, and technologically innovative “mega-structures” as common mistakes.122 Even the Temple Street Parking Garage, designed by Stern’s Yale professor Paul Rudolph, came in for criticism, with its “arbitrary” and “unbending geometry of stacks of identically sized structural elements”—the aqueduct-inspired arches much beloved by Logue and Lee—and for an accommodation to the automobile that was “perhaps too expensive and too prominent.”123 Logue, Abrams, and many other patrons of the era’s urban architecture would not have agreed with Stern’s critique.

Rudolph brilliantly figured out a way of integrating three fragmented, uninspiring designs into one cohesive, triangular, and sculptural complex enclosing a bowl-like central courtyard intended as a counterpoint to the convex dome on the Massachusetts State House several blocks away.60 He gave the megastructure the massiveness he felt its social importance required, prescribed ambitious design standards for all three units, planned a grand serpentine stairway entrance, and faced the entire surface with his distinctive corrugated concrete, originally developed for the Yale Art and Architecture Building.

Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 561–62, originally published in Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), chapter 9. 122. Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 8, 10, 80–108; for “piazza compulsion,” 91–94; for towers, 94–98; on technologically inspired mega-structures, 105–8. 123. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture, 15, 17; also see discussion of Rudolph, 12. 124. Logue to Eugene Rostow, December 5, 1961, EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 445. 125. Quotes from Logue, interview, Schussheim, 20; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 127, 131, also see 117–18, 126–34.


pages: 153 words: 45,871

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

Business Times editor Patrick Daniel, Monetary Authority of Singapore official Shanmugaratnam Tharman, and two economists for regional brokerage Crosby Securities, Manu Bhaskaran and Raymond Foo Jong Chen, pleaded not guilty to violating Singapore’s Official Secrets Act. South China Morning Post, 4/29/93 Reddy Kilowatt’s Singapore looks like an infinitely more livable version of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a festive party hat by the designer of Loew’s Chinese Theater. Rococo pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies. Along Orchard Road, the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chockablock with multilevel shopping centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly. Young, for the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the local Gap clone, they’re a handsome populace; they look good in their shorts and Reeboks and Matsuda shades.


pages: 331 words: 47,993

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

Indeed, barring blaringly obvious scenarios in which alien ships hover over Earth, as in films like Arrival and Independence Day, I wonder if we could even recognize the technological markers of a truly advanced superintelligence. Some scientists project that superintelligent AIs could be found near black holes, feeding off their energy.8 Alternately, perhaps superintelligences would create Dyson spheres, megastructures such as that pictured on the following page, which harness the energy of an entire star. But these are just speculations from the vantage point of our current technology; it’s simply the height of hubris to claim that we can foresee the computational structure or energy needs of a civilization that is millions or even billions of years ahead of our own.


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

Next he offered Remp access to geological and seismic documents containing the most vital secrets of Baku’s “elephants.” Until now, the materials had been kept carefully hidden from outside eyes. Remp could see why. They depicted world-class oil fields waiting to be drilled, clearly visible in painstakingly drawn maps and sketches and well logs that revealed what Remp recognized as “super megastructures” offshore. In August 1990, Remp returned to Scotland, where he drafted a five-page letter to the two big oil companies with U.K. headquarters, British Petroleum and Shell. In it, he noted his appointment as agent for Azerbaijan’s oil industry, summarized Effendiev’s data, and invited their inquiries.

Out came his personal: Khoshbakht Yusufzade took the photograph from his office safe, November 28, 1996. “was dead”: Author interview with Remp. “You never felt”: Author interview with Tim Hartnett, August 29, 1996. “We will liquidate”: Author interview with Tom Doss (September 15, 2004), who headed Amoco’s Baku negotiations starting in 1991. “super megastructures”: Author interview with Remp. “What do you suggest?”: Author interview with Fehlberg, April 1, 1996. “coming-out party”: Ibid. an American citizen, “one in ten”: Author interview with Ray Leonard, Amoco’s vice president for frontier exploration, February 7, 2005. “risk-taker,” “liked technical people”: Author interview with Doss.


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Intrinsically then, Zandberg portrayed the local International Style architecture as neither part of a great historical movement nor a revolutionary aesthetic, but primarily as a useful model for everyday city life, as a vehicle to promote values such as usability, economy, modesty, cleanliness, logic and common sense. Tel Aviv had only just begun to digest Israel’s post-1967 war testosterone-pumped architecture and its huge megastructures, like the Atarim Piazza, the Dizengoff Center and the New Central Bus Station. With the corporate offensive of the 1990s already emerging, such ‘effeminate’ values were certainly needed. Zandberg helped set the moral ground for the transformation of the White City narrative from being an academic chapter in an architectural journal into an integral part of the city’s urban agenda.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

Since reunification in 1871, Germany has been the economic powerhouse of Europe. Even after World War II, when Germany had lost its political will and confidence, it remained the most dynamic economic power on the continent. After 2020 that will no longer be the case. The German economy will be burdened by an aging population. The German proclivity for huge corporate megastructures will create long-term inefficiencies and will keep its economy enormous but sluggish. A host of problems, common to much of Central and Western Europe, will plague the Germans. But the Eastern Europeans will have fought a second cold war (allied with the leading technological power in the world, the United States).


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

When I conducted research at the site in 2012, my interest in the building, though perhaps connected to the tumult over gentrification, was more pedestrian—and literally so. On my first visit to the location, undertaken to plan a series of psychogeographic studies in collaboration with New York’s Guggenheim Museum, I was mostly interested in how this gigantic megastructure, plopped into a neighborhood more commonly populated with tiny bars and restaurants, bodegas, pocket parks, playgrounds, and many different styles of housing might influence the psychological state of the urban pedestrian. What happens inside the mind of a city-dweller who turns out of a tiny, historic restaurant with a belly full of delicious knish, and then encounters a full city block filled with nothing but empty sidewalk beneath their feet, a long bank of frosted glass on one side, and a steady stream of honking taxicabs on the other?


pages: 278 words: 91,332

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Oddly enough in the architectural drawings it was never raining, the concrete was shiny and white, and the cars seem to be moving at a decent pace, never stuck in traffic. Yet as Saumarez Smith, an enthusiast for the period’s optimism, wrote in his book, Boom Cities, when constructed, the actual result was largely schemes “made up of a gimcrack modernism of tacky pedestrian precincts, grim underpasses, budget megastructures and gargantuan car parks.” The need for developers to make money meant that architects did not always get their visionary way. Instead, car parking did. And Britain was scarcely alone in this. All of Europe was doing it. Italy began building an orbital motorway around Rome, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, in 1952.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

There is the “zoo hypothesis,” which suggests that aliens are just watching over us and letting us be for now, presumably until we reach their level of sophistication; and something like its inverse—that we haven’t heard from aliens because they’re the ones sleeping, in a civilization-scale system of extended-sleep pods like the ones we know from science fiction spaceships, waiting while the universe evolves a shape more suitable to their needs. As far back as 1960, the polymath physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that we may be unable to find alien life in our telescopes because advanced civilizations may have literally closed themselves off from the rest of space—encasing whole solar systems in megastructures designed to capture the energy of a central star, a system so efficient that from elsewhere in the universe it would not appear to glow. Climate change suggests another kind of sphere, manufactured not out of technological mastery but first through ignorance, then indolence, then indifference—a civilization enclosing itself in a gaseous suicide, a running car in a sealed garage.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

BOX 4.2 The Battery Park City Method Masterplanned by Cooper & Eckstut (adopted in 1979), Battery Park City has become established as a ‘durable paradigm for larger-scale urban real estate development in North America (Love 2009: 210). Based on extending the streets of the Manhattan grid, as Panerai et al (2004: 181) explain:‘Instead of the superblocks and megastructure that implied one designer and a single investor for a few very large and expensive projects, these streets defined moderately sized urban blocks that were capable of accommodating buildings designed by a variety of architects using different developers’ Love (2009: 212) suggests it has endured because of its real estate development logic, whereby dividing large development parcels into independent ‘blocks’ has two main benefits: first, it is divided into flexible phases, readily adaptable to suit the changing real estate market and, second, by dimensioning blocks to correspond to the optimum parcel size for a typical residential or commercial development project, the resulting building is guaranteed open exposures and free access on all sides (i.e. no party walls).

Hillier (1996a: 169) argues that:‘It is this positive feedback loop built on a foundation of the relation between the grid structure and movement which gives rise to the urban buzz, which we prefer to be romantic or mystical about – but which arises from the co-incidence in certain locations of large numbers of different activities involving people going about their business in different ways.’ Hillier (1996a: 169) illustrates this by a negative example – London’s South Bank, an area built in the 1970s of Modernist megastructures and separated pedestrian walkways. Despite (at the time) the co-existence in a small area of many major functions, there was little ‘urban buzz’. Hillier attributed this to the configuration of space, which failed to bring the different groups of space users – concert attendees, gallery visitors, residents, office workers, etc. – into patterns of movement prioritising the same spaces – groups moved through the area like ‘ships in the night’, depriving the area of the multiplier effects of different space users ‘sparking off’ each other.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

His account of the past thirty years of British architecture reduces Norman Foster, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson and Denys Lasdun to walk-on parts; the greater part of the action is focused on such figures as Owen Luder, Rodney Gordon and Robert Lister, responsible for provincial shopping-centre megastructures, bush-hammered concrete car parks and trade union offices. Blueprint’s tabloid format, powerfully designed by Simon Esterson, was borrowed from Skyline, a short-lived New York magazine art directed by Massimo Vignelli that set a worrying precedent by going under just before our first issue came out.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

It wasn't the final solution, but it might do as long as the buildings lasted-which was not necessarily long. One infamous project, the crime-plagued Pruitt-Igoe apartment complex in St. Louis, was demolished only four­ teen years after completion. Another type of Radiant City, the "big footprint" megastructure 7 9 _ T HE GE O G RA P H Y O F N O W HE RE embedded in an old bulldozed central business district, such as the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, and the Renaissance Center in Detroit, were grimly tole;;rted by the new postwar leg�oureaU:­ crats and corporate drones. The employee--a step above "worker"­ arrived from a green suburb in his car, parked in an underground garage, ate lunch within the complex, and had no need to venture out into the agoraphobic voids between the high-rise office slabs, let alone beyond the voids to the actual city, with its messy street life, crime, and squalor.


pages: 396 words: 117,897

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

DocID=54693 (accessed 23 May 2013). Porada, E. (1965) The Art of Ancient Iran: Pre-Islamic Cultures, Crown Publishers, New York. Potonik, J. (2012) Any Future for the Plastic Industry in Europe? http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-12-632_en.htm (accessed 23 May 2013). Prak, M. (2011) Mega-structures of the middle ages: the construction of religious buildings in Europe and Asia, c. 1000-1500. Journal of Global History, 6: 381–406. President's Materials Policy Commission (1952) Resources for Freedom, A Report to the President by the President's Materials Policy Commission, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Venturi described his thinking in a subsequent book, Learning from Las Vegas (written with Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown). “Times Square is not dramatic space,” he wrote, “but dramatic decoration. It is two-dimensional, decorated by symbols, lights and movement.” Thus he concluded that “a decorated shed” would be a more apt homage to its traditions than “megastructural bridges, balconies and spaces.” Venturi was the first architect to propose a new idiom faithful to Times Square’s helter-skelter, mongrelized past; but since he had done so with an almost perverse indifference to the site’s economic value, the developer rejected the idea. Sharp was, on the other hand, dazzled by the work of John Portman, the architect-developer who had built the Peachtree Center in Atlanta, and who was becoming known for his glass hotels with soaring interior spaces.


pages: 399 words: 118,576

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

These fibrils then bind together, along with various other molecules, to form even thicker structures called fibres – like the thick, many-stranded cables which hold up a suspension bridge. The exact structure of individual collagen molecules is absolutely critical to the multi-thousand-molecule megastructure of a collagen fibre. It dictates how the molecules coalesce into fibrils, and how the fibrils assemble into fibres, and what other molecules are drawn in to act as support, glue or lubricant. The result, in turn, controls a fibre’s properties – not too stiff, not too flexible, but just right in a huge range of biological contexts.


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-sized, infill apartment buildings like row houses, brownstones, and triple-deckers; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021. What apartments did get built were clustered in megastructures whose design was dictated by parking placement. One popular model is the “Texas donut,” in which a ring of apartments encircles a five- or six-story parking garage (this is the type of building you see in the cool neighborhoods of growing cities). Another is the “parking podium tower,” like Chicago’s corncob Marina City, in which the housing sits atop the parking.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

So-called fifth wave technologies begin to emerge: antimatter engines, light sails, ramjet fusion engines and nanoships. Nanotechnology assemblers are a reality, rendering the physical world an effortlessly malleable creative platform, even as robotic fabricators grow to the next level of sophistication, constructing vast gossamer megastructures in space. Yet more significant are the first fully functioning Von Neumann probes: self-replicating robots thrown out into the galaxy to endlessly reproduce themselves, ultimately to form a numberless swarm strung out across space. A full Type II civilisation is eventually realised with the construction of a Dyson sphere around the Sun, collecting all its energy.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The more audacious observers of technical advancement dare to speculate that the point is not far off at which molecular nanotechnology and the “effectively complete control over the structure of matter” it affords finally bring the age of material scarcity to its close.25 In places where Green Plenty has broken out, most large-scale interventions in the built environment are intended to democratize access to the last major resource truly subject to conditions of scarcity: the land itself. Placeless urban sprawl is overwritten by high-density megastructures woven of recovered garbage by fleets of swarming robots.26 Equal parts habitat and ecosystem, they bear the signature aesthetic of computationally generated forms no human architect or engineer would ever spontaneously devise, and are threaded into the existing built fabric in peculiar and counterintuitive ways.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

From then on, Rockefeller treated the reconstruction of a city as if he were an eighteenth-century English landowner adding a wing to his country seat and supervising the construction of a series of follies in the grounds. It was Rockefeller’s idea that Harrison should design an artificial ground level for the mall, creating a megastructure, spanning a shallow valley. The inspiration, bizarrely enough, seems to have been the Dalai Lama’s palace in Lhasa. According to Harrison, Rockefeller showed him how ‘he wanted to stop the valley with a great wall going north and south. He had seen a something like it on a trip to Tibet. He wanted the feeling of separating the mall into a localized community, up on top of the hill so that he could not only get the vista of the wall, but of the whole capitol adjunct at the top.


pages: 512 words: 131,112

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Well intended to separate people from fast-moving cars, this is an urbanism of superblocks with separated uses, separated transportation systems, and buildings separated from streets. A mix of mostly horizontal pedestrian linkages are then employed to connect the parts back together, including megastructures, pedestrian malls, raised walkways, plinths, plazas, and public art pieces.24 Housing was rarely integrated into the mix, especially in the edge-city examples, and the pedestrian infrastructure generally stopped at the ring of surface or structured parking, discouraging connection to future or existing adjacent development except by car.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

* While the foundations of even the simplest intercontinental weather control apparatus are unfortunately too complex to be included in this book, we promise that once you invent umbrellas (the recipe is “fabric plus a few sticks,” and they were first invented in China around 400 BCE), you’ll hardly notice. Honest. * Specifically, give it several decades of sustained interplanetary engineering advances before your civilization can begin to think about constructing variable solar megastructures. * And by “allows,” we mean “induces.” * Wheelbarrows are easy to invent: they’re just a wheel combined with a lever. Mount the wheel at the end of two planks, and build a box on top of those planks to carry the load. Add feet to the end of the planks opposite the wheel so that when it’s not being lifted the box rests flat, and there’s your wheelbarrow.


pages: 460 words: 130,621

The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, clean water, crewed spaceflight, gravity well, low earth orbit, megastructure, operational security, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, telepresence

Trying to keep her breathing normal and calm, she twisted it all the way to the left. The suitport connection behind her gasped as it released. She felt herself drift forward, just a few centimeters. She was free of the ship. Floating free, eight million kilometers above the Earth. Two kilometers away from an alien megastructure. Very much alone, with nothing at all above or below her, forever. “Suit is responding as expected,” she said. “Internal temperature is a comfortable twenty-one Celsius.” There was a reason astronauts endlessly reported their status while on EVAs. It wasn’t for the sake of NASA, which was too far away to do anything if something went wrong.


pages: 635 words: 186,208

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

autonomous vehicles, cosmic microwave background, data acquisition, disinformation, gravity well, megastructure, planetary scale, space junk, sparse data, time dilation

Enough worry for a lifetime, even by Line standards. But despite all of that we’re still alive. We’re still alive and we still have friends, and somewhere to stay, and it’s a beautiful evening and the dunes of Neume are singing to us. Those dunes aren’t just any old dunes, you know. They’re the shattered remains of the Provider mega-structures, after their culture fell out of the sky. We’re being serenaded by the twinkling remains of a dead supercivilisation, the relics of people who thought themselves gods, if only for a few instants of galactic time. Now - how does that make you feel?’ ‘Like I’m living too late,’ I said. The Line was in private session for breakfast, on a terrace near the top of the building’s onion-shaped summit.


pages: 348 words: 185,704

Matter by Iain M. Banks

air gap, back-to-the-land, germ theory of disease, gravity well, lateral thinking, megastructure, off-the-grid

Now rare and generally Developmentally/Inherently/Pervasively Senile; see WorldGod, the Xolpe: humanoid; Nariscene client species, at war ynt: quadruped equivalent of small tame otter; L8&9S Zeloy: humanoid, one of the contending species on Prasadal General Glossary 34th Pendant Floret: region of space 512th Degree FifthStrand: Humanoid Guest Facility, Syaung-un aboriginistas: those with obsessive interest in ‘primitives’ Aciculate: bush-like afap: as fast as possible (C) Altruist: a civilisation purposefully and consistently eschewing naked self-interest Anjrinh: district in Hicture; home to a Scholastery Aoud: star/system, home of Gadampth Orbital aquaticised: (humanoids) fully converted to water-dwelling Arithmetic: re a Shellworld, term given to one whose levels occur in simple multiples Articles of Inhabitation: rules by which Shellworld inhabitants live Aspirant: civilisations wanting to be Involveds Asulious IV: Morthanveld planet, Lesser Yattlian Spray autoscender: uncrewed transport within Shellworld Tower backing: direction (opposite of facing) Baeng-yon: Surface crater, Sursamen bald-head fruit: edible by caude, common to L8&9S Bare: places on Shellworld with no ground cover Baron Lepessi : classic play by Prode the younger Baskers: species type; absorb sunlight directly bell-goblet: vibrating crystal container used when drinking Chapantlic spirit billow bed: C bed with 99% AG, multiple soft wisps of material and smart “feathers” able to avoid being breathed in Bilpier: Nariscene planet, Heisp system black-backed borm: C animal Botrey’s: gambling/whore house in Pourl’s Schtip district Bowlsea: body of water filling Prime depression in Shellworld brattle: bush, L8&9S, Sursamen bravard: lusty, drinking, up-for-a-fight kind of man Bulthmaas: planet in Chyme system where Xide Hyrlis found camoufield: (C) projected field camouflaging objects Chapantlic spirit: type of booze (see bell-goblet) Charvin: a county of Sarl Cherien: ridge, near Sarl city, L8S Chone: a star in the Lesser Yattlian Spray Chyme: stellar system, home of Bulthmaas CleaveHull: type of Morthanveld ship Clissens: a Rollstar of the Ninth, Sursamen cloud trees: flora, L8&9S, Sursamen Conducer: (species) those which make habit of taking over and (usually) exploiting structures, artefacts and habitats built by earlier civilisations – from ancients to the recently Sublimed Core: solid centre of a Shellworld crackball: C game played with solid wooden ball Crater: re a Shellworld, a high-walled habitable area on Surface crile leaf: cocoa-like drug, chewed; L8&9S Curbed Lands: type of (originally Deldeyn) province cut-rot: gangrene (Sarl term) Dengroal: town, L8S, beneath the D’neng-oal Tower deSept: Nariscene clanlet without a Sept or major clan/family Despairationals: extremist group, Syaung-un Dillser: ducal house by Boiling Sea of Yakid, L9S director general: high rank of the Morthanveld Disputed: re a Shellworld, one whose Towers are not all controlled by the same species D’neng-oal Tower: Oct transport Tower, Sursamen Domity: a Rollstar of L8S Enabler: (machine) device used to find ways to communicate with alien species and artifacts Evingreath: a town on the Xilisk road from Pourl Exaltinates: elite troops under Chasque Exaltine: top Sarlian religious rank; chief priest Exponential: see logarithmic facing: direction; from facing direction of world’s rotation (opposite of backing) Facing Approach Street: near royal palace in Pourl Falls Merchant Explorer: guild of merchants exploiting Falls Falls, the: cataract on the Sulpitine river, L9S (aka the Hyeng-zhar) Far Landing: peripatetic port on far side of Sulpitine from the Settlement farpole: direction to pole of world furthest from Sarl heartlands (opposite of nearpole) Feyrla: river, Xilisk, L8S Fifth deSept: minor, unaligned clanlet, Nariscene/Sursamen Filigree: complexes of Shellworld Tower ceiling supporting inverted buttresses Fixstars: Shellworld interior stars, unmoving floater: slightly derogatory term used for aquatic peoples by landgoing peoples Foerlinteul: C Orbital FOIADSFBF: First Original Indigent Alien Deep Space Farers’ Benevolent Fund (Morthanveld) Forelight: pre-dawn light cast by Rollstar Gadampth: C Orbital Gavantille Prime: waterworld planet, Morthanveld space Gazan-g’ya: a Crater of Sursamen Gilder’s Lament, the: tavern, Pourl Godded: a Shellworld with a Xinthian at its core Grahy: Morthanveld planet, Lesser Yattlian Spray Grand Zamerin: exalted rank of the Nariscene (see also Zamerin) Greater Army: combined armies gathered by Hausk to resist Deldeyn and invade their level Great Palace: Rasselle, L9S Great Park: Rasselle, L9S Great Ship: type of very large Morthanveld ship Great Tower: one of six fortifications within Rasselle Guime: a Rollstar of L8S habiform: technically correct term for what is usually called terraforming; altering any already existing environment to suit it to the needs of one or more species Heavenly Host: Deldeyn religious sect tyl Loesp empowers Heisp: Nariscene colony system Hemerje: ducal palace near the Great Park, Rasselle Heurimo: a fallstar of L9S Hicture: a region of L8S Hicturean: Tower (L8S, not far from Pourl) Hollow World: see Shellworld House of Many Roofs, The : play by Sinnel Hyeng-zhar: cataract on the Sulpitine river, L9S, aka the Falls Hyeng-zharia Mission: religious order; controlled the Falls’ excavation Hyeng-zhar Settlement: ever-temporary city, the Falls, Sursamen Ichteuen: (Godwarriors) fight for Sarl; L8S Illsipine Tower: Sursamen Imperial Procreational College: on Nariscene homeworld; regulates Spawnings Incremental: re a Shellworld, term given to one whose levels occur in exponential increments (hence aka Exponential) injectiles: any organisms or mechanisms capable of being injected (usually into metre-scale entities, in context especially humans) In Loco’d: placed under care (Morthanveld term) Inner Caferlitician Tendril: region of space interior star: artificial suns emplaced by secondary Shellworld species within these worlds; anti-gravitational, pressing against ceiling of given level; most mobile (Rollstars); some not (Fixstars) Ischuer: city, Bilpier Jhouheyre: city-cluster, Oct planet of Zaranche Jiluence: a Monthian (megawhales) ancestral homeworld Keande-yi: region near Pourl, L8S Keande-yiine: Tower in region near Pourl, L8S Khatach Solus: Nariscene homeworld Kheretesuhr: archipelagic province, Vilamian Ocean, L8S Kiesestraal: a fading Rollstar of L9S Klusse: city, Lesuus Plate krisk nuts: caude stimulant, L8&9S Kuertile Pinch: region of space Lalance: continent, Prasadal lampstone: carbide Lemitte: general, Sarl army Lepoort: plate, Stafl Orbital Lesser Yattlian Spray: region of space Lesuus: plate, Gadampth level: re a Shellworld, one of the world’s spherical shells lifebowls: see mottled Logarithmic: re: a Shellworld, term given to one whose levels occur in exponential increments (hence aka Exponential) Machine Core/level: level immediately surrounding a Shellworld Core Meast: water-nest city, Gavantille Prime Meseriphine: star in the Tertiary Hulian Spine MHE: Monopathic Hegemonising Event (usually runway nanotech) MOA: Mysterious Object from Afar Moiliou: Hausk family estate, L8S Mottled: re a Shellworld, term given to one whose Surface is partially (mostly) free of atmosphere, with significant areas – within large, high-walled (normally original) Surface features – of nominally inhabitable pseudo-planetary environments, called Lifebowls Multiply Inhabited: re a Shellworld, one with more than one intelligent species in residence Nameless City: of L9S; long buried metropolis being uncovered by the Hyeng-zhar nanorgs: nano-scale organisms; often aka injectiles (though this covers non-biological material too) Natherley: a Rollstar of L9S nearpole: direction (opposite of farpole) Nearpole Gate: a main gate of Pourl city, L8S Nestworld: usually, and always in context of Morthanveld, a type of artificial habitat composed of multiple twisting tubes, complexly intertwined and generally water-filled Night: re a Shellworld, places within a level which are totally or almost totally dark, over the horizon from both direct and reflected sunlight or vane-blocked Oausillac: a Fixstar of L9S, Sursamen Obor: a Rollstar of L8S, Sursamen Oerten: Surface crater, Sursamen Optimae: name given to Culture, Morthanveld, etc. by more lowly civilisations; roughly equivalent to HLI Oversquare: re a Shellworld, levels beyond which increasing separation of secondary supporting filaments branching from Towers no longer allows intra-filament inter-Tower travel (usually in top half of levels); opposite of undersquare Pandil-fwa Tower: Oct transport Tower, Sursamen Parade Field: Pourl, L8S Pentrl: a Rollstar of L8S Peremethine Tower: Oct transport Tower, Sursamen Pierced: re a Shellworld, a level-accessible Tower Placed: placed under care (Morthanveld term) Pliyr: star, Morthanveld space Pourl: region and capital city of Sarl, L8S Prasadal: planet, Zoveli system Prille: country on Sketevi Primarian: type of large Oct ship Prime: re a Shellworld, term given to structure of world as originally built by Veil Quoline: river, draining the Quoluk Lakes Quoluk Lakes: of L8S, near Pourl Quonber : module platform, Prasadal Rasselle: Deldeyn capital city, L9S Reshigue: city, L8S roasoaril: fruit plant, L8&9S (refinable) Rollstars: Shellworld interior stars which move roving scendship: (Oct) scendship air- and underwater- capable Safe: (multi-million-year) re a Shellworld, term given to one with no recent history of world-caused gigadeaths saltmeat: (Sarl) salted meat Sarl: people and kingdom, L8S, Sursamen (also planet) scend tubes: tubes scendships use scendship: ship which ascends or descends within a Shellworld Tower Scholastery: recessional university, like a secular monastery devoted to learning Schtip: district of Pourl, L8S scrimp: dismissive name for Falls workers seatrider: C skeletal AG device; personal transport Secondary: re a Shellworld, term given to structural additions to world added by later possessors shade: areas on a Shellworld level without direct sunlight (effect severity varies with shell diameter, vane geometry, etc.) Shellworld: artificial planet, part of ancient megastructure; also known as Hollow World and Slaughter World (archaic) Shield world: see Shellworld Shilda: province of Sarl, L8S silse: collective term for class of Shellworld creatures which transport silt particles from seabeds and other aquatic environments to land, via hydrogen sacs, evaporation, clouds and rainfall Sketevi: continent on Bulthmaas Slaughter World: see Shellworld SlimHull: type of Morthanveld ship Sournier: county within Sarl, L8S Spiniform: (world) a partially collapsed Shellworld spiniform: applied to species, indicates a spiny, pointed body type Stafl: C Orbital Stalks: slightly derogatory term used for landgoing peoples by aquatic peoples Starfall: (rare) phenomenon occurring when the remains of an exhausted Shellworld interior star fall from the ceiling of a level to its floor; generally catastrophic Sterut: Nariscene Globular Transfer Facility Sull: Deldeyn region, L9S Sullir: Deldeyn regional capital, L9S Sulpitine: river, L9S Superintendent: judicial rank, Sursamen Surface Sursamen: Arithmetic Shellworld, orbiting Meseriphine Swarmata: the detritus of competing MHEs SwellHull: type of Morthanveld ship Syaung-un: Morthanveld Nestworld in the 34th Pendant Floret Taciturn: of a species, one which is especially uncommunicative tangfruit: C fruit, pan-human edible terraf: short for terraformed; a planet so amended, or any other large-scale constructed environment (see habiform) Tertiary Hulian Spine: region of space; location of Meseriphine thin-film: screen; goes over eyes to show virtual reality (Morthanveld term) Tierpe Ancestral: port, Syaung-un tink: dismissive name for Falls worker T’leish: sub-group of Morthanveld, on Gavantille Prime Tower: re a Shellworld, a hollow supporting column or stem, normally with vacuum inside, also used as transport tube Tresker: a Rollstar of L9S tropel trees: C flora; common on ships Twinned Crater: Surface crater, Sursamen Uliast: general, Sarl army undersquare: see oversquare unge: drug, smoked; L8&9S Upstart: (species) generally recognised if mildly pejorative term for (usually intelligent and even Involved) species which is regarded as having achieved such status by the exploitation of its relationship with another, already advanced, civilisation Urletine: (mercenaries) fight for Sarl; L8S Uzretean: a Rollstar of L9S Vaw-yei: Tower, Sursamen Veil World: see Shellworld Vilamian Ocean: on L8S Voette: country, L8S Vruise: location of Falls, L9S wallcreep: foliage, L8&9S Wars of Unity: sequence waged by Hausk to unite the Eighth Wiriniti: capital of Voette, L8S Xilisk: region near Pourl, L8S Xiliskine Tower: Tower nearest to Pourl, L8S xirze: crop, common on L8&9S Yakid: Boiling Sea of, L9S Yakid City: on shores of above, L9S Yattle: planet, Greater Yattlian Spray Zamerin: high rank of the Nariscene (see also Grand Zamerin) Zaranche: planet, Inner Caferlitician Tendril Za’s Revenge: C cocktail Zoveli: star and system, location of Prasadal Zuevelous: Morthanveld family, Gavantille Prime Zunzil Ligature: region of space; location of Iln home world/s Ships Culture Don’t Try This At Home: Steppe-class MSV Eight Rounds Rapid: Delinquent-class FP exGOU Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall: GCU It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To: Escarpment-class GCU Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill: GCU Liveware Problem: Stream-class Superlifter (modified Delta class, Absconded) Now We Try It My Way: Erratic-class (ex-Interstellar-class General Transport Craft) Pure Big Mad Boat Man: GCU Qualifier: Trench-class MSV Seed Drill: Ocean-class GSV Subtle Shift In Emphasis: Plains-class GCV Transient Atmospheric Phenomenon: GCU Xenoglossicist: Air-class LSV You Naughty Monsters: GCU You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave: Gangster-class VFP ex-ROU Nariscene Hence the Fortress: Comet-class star-cruiser Hundredth Idiot, The: White Dwarf-class Morthanveld “Fasilyce, Upon Waking”: Cat.5 SwellHull Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown: Great Ship “On First Seeing Jhiriit”: Cat.4 CleaveHull “Now, Turning to Reason, & Its Just Sweetness”: Cat.3 SlimHull Sursamen Levels: Inhabitants Level Inhabitant 0Surface; vacuum/habiformed Nariscene/Baskers/others 1Vacuum Seedsail nursery 2Vacuum Baskers 3Vacuum Dark 4O2ocean Cumuloforms 5Methane shallows Kites/Avians 6Higher Gas Giant Tendrils – Naiant 7Methane Ocean Vesiculars – Monthian megawhales 8Land – O2 Sarl 9Land – O2 Deldeyn/Sarl (Under-/Over square division) 10Mid Gas Giant Tendrils – Variolous 11Methane ocean Vesiculars – Monthian megawhales 12Lower Gas Giant Swimmers 13Water/slush matrices Tubers/Hydrals 14Ice/water Dark 15Machinery the WorldGod – a Xinthian 16Core – solid the WorldGod – a Xinthian Time Intervals Term Years aeon 1 000 000 000 deciaeon 100 000 000 centiaeon 10 000 000 eon 1 000 000 decieon 100 000 centieon 10 000 millennium 1 000 century 100 decade 10 year 1 Epilogue Senble Holse was hunched over a tub with a washboard, furiously scrubbing, when her husband walked in.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Numbers that people trust; unlikely from the get-go. But then, if that trust was lost, boom, it was gone. Meanwhile they were all part of a global financial system that had become so complex that even the people running it didn’t understand it. She looked around at them as she said this: yes, she meant them. An accidental megastructure, she went on, enjoying the sound of J-A’s phrase, right at the heart of society. Right in this secret Swiss mountain fortress, which ultimately protects not just your countryside and your society, but your banks. Which means also people’s trust in civilization. Their faith in a system that no one really understands.


pages: 773 words: 214,465

The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

battle of ideas, clean water, dematerialisation, disinformation, invisible hand, mass immigration, megastructure, quantum entanglement

However, they can’t prove a damn thing thanks to the excellent encryption and strange lack of records your slippery ex has muddled his life with. Then there’s my fee, which is ten percent seeing as how you’re family and I admire your late-found pride. So the rest is yours, clear and free.” “How much?” “Eighty-three thousand.” Araminta could not speak. It was a fortune. Agreed, nothing like the corporate megastructure Laril had claimed he owned and controlled, but more than she had expected and asked for in the divorce petition. Ever since she had walked into Cressida’s office, she had allowed herself to dream that she might, just might, come out of this with thirty or forty thousand, that Laril would pay just to be rid of her.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

‘Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Human Behavior’, Science, 324(5932) (5 June 2009), pp. 1298–1301. Prak, Maarten. ‘Painters, Guilds, and the Market during the Dutch Golden Age’, in S.R. Epstein & Maarten Prak (eds), Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), pp. 143–71. Prak, Maarten. ‘Mega-Structures of the Middle Ages: The Construction of Religious Buildings in Europe and Asia, c.1000–1500’, in Maarten Prak & Jan Luiten van Zanden (eds), Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West. Essays Dedicated to the Memory of S.R. Epstein (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 131–59.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Completely unrelated, and structurally different, Mesoamerican pyramids, particularly those at Teotihuacan dated to the 2nd century CE, were also smaller and their construction was much easier because their cores were made of packed earth, rubble, and adobe bricks, with only the exterior of stone (Baldwin 1977). Stone pyramids are thus megastructures whose peak achievements came shortly after their ancient origins and that were never surpassed, not even equaled, by any later projects. Churches and Cathedrals Christian churches had a much more gradual trajectory than Egyptian pyramids, but major basilicas (derived from such large Roman civic structures as Trajan’s Basilica Ulpia) had large dimensions even from the earliest period of Rome’s new official religion (Ching et al. 2011).


pages: 1,171 words: 309,640

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

All but one. That one ship had aimed itself at Ruslan’s space elevator, the Petrovich Express. Despite the planet’s orbital batteries. Despite the UMC battleship, the Surfeit of Gravitas, stationed around Vyyborg. Despite the numerous lasers and missile batteries mounted around the crown and base of the mega-structure. And despite the best design-work of countless engineers and physicists … despite all of those things, the alien ship had succeeded in ramming and severing the ribbon-shaped cable of the space elevator, three-quarters of the way to the asteroid that served as a counterweight. As Kira watched, the upper part of the elevator (counterweight included) hurtled away from Ruslan at greater than escape velocity while the lower section began to curve toward the planet, like a giant whip wrapping around a ball.


pages: 1,386 words: 379,115

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton

car-free, complexity theory, disinformation, forensic accounting, gravity well, megacity, megastructure, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, restrictive zoning, trade route, trickle-down economics, VTOL

Nuclear explosions erupted, stabbing vast tracts of coherent radiation towards the tiny emission point betraying the Charybdis’s existence. Force field warning icons glared red. Ozzie increased their acceleration to twelve gees. His own anguished whimper joined Mark’s. * MorningLightMountain had never given the alien mega-structure much consideration. Not that it ignored the strange artefact. It had noticed the structure almost as soon as the barrier withdrew. Ships sent to investigate found a planet-sized machine with incomprehensible mass properties. Given its scale, MorningLightMountain concluded it had to be associated with the barrier; in all probability it was the generator or a part of it.