the built environment

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pages: 222 words: 50,318

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

Of that amount, you would be paying about $70 trillion for the built environment, or thirty-five percent of all assets in the U.S. economy.5 The built environment is the largest asset class in the economy, larger than all corporations traded on all the various stock exchanges, all privately owned companies, cash on hand, all public and private art collections, or any other asset class (figure 0.4). More people listed on the Forbes 400 of the wealthiest Americans made their money in real estate than in any 8 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM FIGURE 0.4. The built environment (corporate, for-sale residential, government buildings and infrastructure, and commercial real estate) represents thirty-five percent of the assets of the American economy—the largest single asset class.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO SATISFY THE PENT- UP DEMAND FOR WALKABLE URBANISM ? The built environment takes far longer to turn than the proverbial supertanker. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the country has been adding about $1.2 trillion dollars in new construction (this does not count rehabilitations, so it undercounts total construction spending) to the built environment each year during the mid-2000s.21 As mentioned in the Introduction, thirty-five percent of the assets of the U.S. economy is invested in the built environment (real estate and infrastructure), which translates into about $70 trillion.

Currently, eighty-three percent of Americans live in the country’s 361 metropolitan areas, as defined by the US Census.2 Another six percent live in “exurbia”3 outside these metropolitan areas and rely on their closest metro area for their livelihood.4 These percentages are projected to increase, continuing a 200-year trend. Changing the built environment is critical for many reasons, but none is more important to most people than economic growth. Economic growth is one of the primary requirements for most people’s personal fulfillment, for societal and personal wealth creation, for the reduction of global tensions, and for environmental protection. It is not generally known that the built environment—the houses, office buildings, manufacturing plants, highways, transit lines, parks, government buildings, power plants, and all the infrastructure that supports them—plays a dominant role in our economy.


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

All urban design actions are, thus, contributions to broader, open and evolving systems and contributions to a greater whole. Although never static, the built environment stands as testament to processes of continuity, change and the passage of time within a particular place. Knox & Ozolins (2000: 3), for example, argue that:‘… a building or other element of the built environment of a given period and type tends to be a carrier of the zeitgeist, or “spirit” of its time. Every city can therefore be “read” as a multi-layered “text”, a narrative of signs and symbols. … the built environment becomes a biography of urban change.’ Similarly, for Mumford (1938), it is by the ‘diversity of its time structures’ that ‘… the city in part escapes the tyranny of a single present and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past.’

Urban Design Quarterly, Spring/Autumn, 9–12 King, R in Knox, P & Ozolins, P (2000) The built environment’, in Knox, P & Ozolins, P (2000) (Editors) Design Professionals and the Built Environment: An Introduction, Wiley, London King, A (2004) Spaces of Global Culture: Architecture Urbanism Identity, Routledge, London Kintrea, K J & Atkinson, R (2000) Owner-occupation, social mix and neighbourhood impacts, Policy & Politics, 28(1), 93–108 Klosterman, R E (1985) Arguments for and against planning, Town Planning Review, 56, 5–20 Knox, P & McCarthy, L (2005) Urbanization: An Introduction to Urban Geography (second edition), Pearson/Prentice Hall,Upper Saddle River, New Jersey Knox, P & Marston, S A (1998) Places and Regions in a Global Context: Human Geography, Prentice Hall, New York Knox, P & Ozolins, P (2000) The built environment’, in Knox, P & Ozolins, P (2000) (Editors) Design Professionals and the Built Environment: An Introduction, Wiley, London, 3–10 Knox, P & Pinch, S (2000) Urban Social Geography: An Introduction, Prentice Hall, Harlow Knox, P (2005) Creating ordinary places: Slow cities in a fast world, Journal of Urban Design, 10(1), 1–12 Knox, P (1994) Urbanisation, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Knox, P (1993) The Restless Urban Landscape, Prentice Hall, Eaglewood Cliffs, New Jersey Knox, P (1987) The social production of the built environment: Architects, architecture and the post-Modern city, Progress in Human Geography, 11, 354–378 Kohn, M (2004) Brave New Neighbourhoods: The Privatisation of Public Space, Routledge, London Komossa, S; Meyer, H; Risselada, M; Thomaes, S; & Jutten, N (2005) Atlas of the Dutch Urban Block, Thoth Uitgeverij, Netherlands Koolhaas, R (1995) Whatever happened to urbanism?

The Need for Urban Design Arguing in 1976 that urban design was still in its ‘prehistoric stage’, Bentley (1976) saw the emergence of express concerns for urban design originating in critiques of the urban environmental product, the process by which the built environment was brought about, and the professional role involved in controlling its production. Each critique detected various kinds of fragmentation, a lack of concern for the totality and overall quality of the urban environment. These problems remain today. Product and Process There have been many critiques of the quality of the built environment. The poor quality of much of the contemporary built environment and the lack of concern for overall quality is a function of both the processes by which it comes about and the forces that act on and within those processes.


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

In many states you can be charged with burglary simply for unnecessarily using a side entrance or coming in through the garage rather than the front door: an indirect approach to the built environment is considered legally suspicious. So I wanted to learn more about how burglars see the city—what a town, a street, a neighborhood, looks like through their eyes, as spaces of seemingly endless possibility. I wanted to learn from cops and robbers both what the built environment can really do, equally fascinated and horrified by the on-again, off-again brilliant stupidity of the burglar’s approach to architecture, with its X-ray vision of secret passages, spatial agents, and the porous world they inhabit together, where everything architects take for granted can literally be undercut, punched through, knocked down, or simply sidestepped.

As we saw with Bill Mason, these vents are part of the architectural dark matter—the invisible backstage—that makes up so much of the built environment. Indeed, McClane’s actions reveal a new type of architectural space altogether—a topological condition that we might call Nakatomi space, wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of nonarchitectural means, with their own exhilarating form of boundless fluidity. As a revelatory look at the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back corridors of the built environment—where the thirty-first floor is connected to the lobby or the twenty-sixth floor leads directly to the roof—the first Die Hard movie remains exemplary.

—who happens to use his or her talents in a morally troubling way. But we shouldn’t hold illegality against them—indeed, we should hold that for them, I thought I might argue, because we would never have discovered the true potential of the built environment had it not been for someone willing to break the rules. In fact, we should celebrate the burglar, this new archetype, this devil in the details of the built environment, a mythic figure who shows us what architecture, all along, could really be and, more important, how we should have been using it all along. But that is too simplistic an inversion, and the upside-down ethics of a position like that quickly become impossible to sustain.


pages: 225 words: 70,590

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

“Social justice is not realizable in the absence of spatial justice: non-fulfillment of the spatial requirements enabling a member of society to live according to a preferred life model, or making this more difficult than it is for others, amounts to a failure of social justice.” She highlights that, after decades of research, it is clear that the built environment is far from neutral. A clear gender disadvantage has been built into the fabric of cities because the needs of women have not been given equal consideration: “Improving gender equality in the professions of the built environment is essential to increasing the quality of cities to make them more responsive to everyone’s needs.” As the gender landscape continues to evolve to include those who identify as transgender or nonbinary, the argument is made that we can no longer consider a gender-neutral city from a strictly feminist perspective.

So, for seemingly the dozenth time since landing at Schiphol Airport, we explained that—at its core—this move was about our children. We wanted to offer them the same liberation and self-determination experienced by most Dutch children (without their even knowing it). This is something we had longed to be able to provide them in Canada, but the built environment did not support or facilitate their needs. What surprised us, however, was how quickly they adapted to—and even reveled in—their newly discovered autonomy in the Netherlands. Etienne’s new elementary school was 3 kilometers (2 miles) south of our apartment; a 15-minute bike ride at his lackadaisical pace.

Those bonds are so strong, in fact, that we now feel remiss in our neighborliness when we think of eventually leaving our rental flat to buy a home elsewhere. What makes this particular street so different from the ones we had previously lived on in Vancouver (and other Canadian cities) is complex. It has as much to do with the human response to social interactions as it does the built environment in which they take place. The connection we now have with our neighborhood—and the feelings it instills in us go beyond the comfort of simply knowing our neighbors—will have a lasting effect on us for years to come. Because, as we would learn and experience for ourselves, the social cohesion of a city—and the mental and physical well-being of its residents—is shaped greatly by the design of its streets and neighborhoods.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Once chosen, though, the tower’s form involved choices rather than being dictated by circumstances: straight rather than curving struts would have been much cheaper, but efficiency alone did not rule Eiffel’s vision. Which is true more largely: the built environment is more than a reflection of economics or politics; beyond these conditions, the forms of the built environment are the product of the maker’s will. It might seem that cité and ville should fit together seamlessly: how people want to live should be expressed in how cities are built. But just here lies a great problem. Experience in a city, as in the bedroom or on the battlefield, is rarely seamless, it is much more often full of contradictions and jagged edges.

In the same way, Festinger found that rupturing a routine – and so creating a cognitive dissonance – provoked and stimulated animals in his laboratory; at the other end of the spectrum, John Dewey argued that artists develop through encountering resistance. In the built environment, rupture does not inevitably improve the quality of building. It can provoke, it can awaken awareness of the surroundings, of contrasting environments – as Pelli’s tower does – but the consequence is not inherently better building. In none of the cities which we have surveyed, from Shanghai to Chicago, has the fact that a building or plan is new form, or that it rips a tear in an existing fabric, in itself improved the quality of the built environment. An idealist philosopher like Benedetto Croce – Dewey’s friendly antagonist – would say, of course, that the quality of a thing is independent of the time in which it exists.

For helpful discussions in creating this book I’d like to thank the late Janet Abu-Lughod, the late Stuart Hall, Ash Amin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, John Bingham-Hall, Craig Calhoun, Daniel Cohen, Diane Davis, Mitchell Duneier, Richard Foley, David Harvey, Eric Klinenberg, John Jungclaussen, Adam Kaasa, Monika Krause, Rahul Mehrotra, Carles Muro, Henk Ovink, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and most of all my partner of thirty years, Saskia Sassen: critic, bonne vivante, playmate. It’s thanks to her that I first began to understand the ethical dimensions of city life. Günter Gassner helped me explore the built environment, as did my students at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Finally, I want to thank those who have worked on producing the book, especially two editors, Alexander Star and Stuart Proffitt, who have been the most careful of readers; one agent, the ever-vigilant and ever-caring Cullen Stanley; and one former assistant, now my colleague and friend, Dominick Bagnato, who has kept me afloat throughout. 1 Introduction: Crooked, Open, Modest I.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Trade in the era of climate change and peak oil Greening trade locally Greening trade globally 123 124 126 129 131 134 9 Relocalizing Economic Relationships Localization to replace globalization Political protection for local economies Self-reliant local economies on the ground The next step: The bioregional economy Conclusion 139 139 142 144 150 153 10 Green Taxation Theory of green taxation Strategic taxation Taxes on commons Ecotaxes 157 157 160 162 164 CONTENTS vii 11 Green Welfare Green approaches to social policy What is poverty? What is welfare? Sharing the wealth; sharing the poverty What is the welfare state? Citizens’ Income and people’s pensions A health service, not an illness service 171 171 173 176 179 181 183 12 Land and the Built Environment Land and economics Taxing land Building on land Growing on the land 187 187 190 193 197 13 Summary and Further Resources 205 Index 219 List of Photographs, Figures, Tables and Boxes PHOTOGRAPHS 1.1 2.1 The men who devised the existing financial system 4 James Robertson with his wife and co-worker Alison Pritchard 22 2.2 Richard Douthwaite 28 3.1 The author modelling a ‘bioregional hat’ 43 3.2 The convivial economy: Stroud farmers’ market 44 4.1 Crests of the London livery companies associated with textiles 67 5.1 Labour note as used at Owen’s Equitable Labour Exchange in 1833 73 5.2 Chiemgauer note, showing the stamps that have to be added to preserve its value over time 82 6.1 Conviviality: Building the bread oven at Springhill co-housing, June 2008 100 9.1 Stroud farmers’ market 144 9.2 The Cuban ‘camel’: Improvised urban public transport in Havana 153 12.1 Springhill Co-housing, Stroud 197 12.2 Stroud Community Agriculture: Weeding in the cabbage path 200 FIGURES 1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 5.1 Widening the consideration of economics beyond the classical economists’ ‘circular flow’ Hazel Henderson’s illustration of the love economy The relationship between economic activity and carbon dioxide emissions Three is a magic number: Re-imaging the relationship between society, economy and environment Permaculture flower Rainwater harvesting system for a domestic property Total debt service of low- and middle-income countries, 1990–2005 6 27 29 37 47 49 76 x 5.2 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 10.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 GREEN ECONOMICS Growth in broad money (M4) compared with growth in the economy (GDP), UK, 1970–2001 The carbon cycle The Passivhaus Illustration of the contraction and convergence model for global CO2 emissions reductions Sharing of ‘universal dividend’ from sale of carbon permits and its impact on incomes in different groups of the US population A comparison of GDP and ISEW in the UK, 1950–2002 Fair trade sales in the leading consumer countries in 2006 and 2007 Relationship between growth in trade and growth in CO2 emissions Production grid illustrating trade subsidiarity Trade gap in agricultural products in the UK, 1990–2005 Comparison of wage rates in a selection of countries, based on purchasing power parities, 2005 NEF’s image of the ‘leaky bucket’ local economy Margaret Legum’s design for building prosperity globally Revenues from environmentally related taxes as a percentage of GDP in various OECD countries Relationship between infant mortality and carbon dioxide emissions Human well-being and sustainability: Ecological footprint and Human Development Index compared, 2003 Illustration of the ability to provide for one’s individual needs over the productive life-course Equity creation through a CLT Agricultural and economic systems of sustainable agriculture Percentage of energy used in different aspects of food production and distribution The turning of the year: The annual cycle of growing and celebration on the land source 79 99 108 111 112 118 129 130 132 141 142 146 154 167 175 178 183 196 198 199 201 TABLES 1.1 1.2 1.3 3.1 Comparison of different strands of economics with a concern for the environment Ecological footprinting and shadow pricing compared The negative consequences of economic growth for quality of life Comparison between the HE (hyper-expansionist) and SHE (sane, humane, ecological) possible futures 8 9 10 41 LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS, FIGURES, TABLES AND BOXES 3.2 3.3 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 12.1 Indicators of consumption and population in different regions of the world Valuation of activities and functions within the patriarchal economy Success of various sectors within a low-carbon economy Percentage of firms engaged in various waste-management activities in UK and Germany, 2001 Comparison of costs to society of various psychological ‘escape routes’ compared with spending in various areas, UK c. 2001 Additions and subtractions from GDP to arrive at the ISEW HDI and HPI rankings for the G8 countries and other nations with high gross GDP Changes in the terms of trade of some country groups, 1980–1982 to 2001–2003 Share of UK wealth owned by different sectors of the population Impact of the congestion charge on traffic in London Examples of environmental taxes and charges Types of installations resulting in tax credits for Oregon citizens in 2006 Examples of ecotaxes in a range of EU countries Revenue from environmental taxes in the UK, 1993–2006 Experiences with LVT in various countries xi 45 46 99 109 116 118 120 127 160 163 165 166 166 167 192 BOXES 1.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Inequality in the UK, 1994–2004 Sustainability values Douthwaite’s criteria for ‘green’ growth Creating a million extra jobs through a green industrial revolution Policies to encourage voluntarism and self-help The expansion of worker cooperatives in Argentina Traditional money in Vanuatu The parable of the South African talents The Chiemgauer local currency in Chiemgau, Germany New Zealand’s complementary currencies Shell and CSR: A cynical view Cooperation for sustainability: The alternative food economy in the UK Principles of production to match the metabolism of the natural world Principles for achieving sustainability according to the Natural Step 3 36 40 58 64 65 77 81 82 84 93 95 97 100 xii 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 GREEN ECONOMICS The European Union Packaging Directive Norway’s experience with national resource accounting Trade and inequality The fight-back: Trade-related direct action in India Key provisions of the General Agreement on Sustainable Trade Provisions of the UK’s Sustainable Communities Act (2007) Essential features of a sustainable territory The Thames Gateway Development as an example of a non-self-reliant community A sufficiency economy in Thailand Kirkpatrick Sale’s essential elements to guide a bioregional economy The London congestion charge Energy tax credit programme in Oregon, US Pesticide taxation in Scandinavia Enduring terrors: The war against terror in global context MST: The land rights campaign in Brazil Land tax in Australia Co-housing in Denmark The principles of permaculture Stroud Community Agriculture 109 119 127 133 135 145 147 148 149 151 163 166 167 179 189 192 197 199 200 Acknowledgements My first and deepest gratitude must be for all those, named and unnamed, who have taxed their minds and spirits to clear the path towards a way of living more comfortably within our environment.

Kunzli (2004) ‘Air pollution attributable postneonatal infant mortality in U.S. metropolitan areas: A risk assessment study’, Environmental Health, 3: 4. 32 S. Cox (2008) Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, London: Pluto. 33 I. Illich (1975) Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, London: Calder and Boyars. 34 Barry and Doherty, ‘The greens’, p. 600. 12 Land and the Built Environment Buy land: they’re not making it any more Mark Twain As discussed in Chapter 3, within the green economics perspective land is a vital part of human and community identity. The view of the land is quite distinct from the reductionist conception of a ‘factor of production’ held by classical and neoclassical economists.

For Aldo Leopold, the intimate relationship with land, which he termed ‘land ethic’, was necessary to underpin both human relationships and ecological respect: ‘when we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man.’7 Other commentators suggest that giving indigenous peoples the rights to their own land is a better guarantee of their protection than leaving them open to exploitation by corporations.8 The LAND AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 189 BOX 12.1 MST: THE LAND RIGHTS CAMPAIGN IN BRAZIL One of the most prominent movements for land reform is the MST in Brazil (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Movement of Landless Rural Workers). The movement began in October 1983, when a large group of landless peasants from across the state of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil occupied a 9200ha cattle ranch which was owned by an absentee landlord.


pages: 304 words: 85,291

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Today, the thriving future of urban religion is seen everywhere from the megachurches of downtown Seoul to the new cathedrals planned in Africa’s growing cities, like Accra’s new National Cathedral, whose design includes a new “ceremonial route” linking it to government buildings and Independence Square. On the more mundane level, by including social awareness in the creation of the built environment, we can reap the soft benefits of secular infrastructure long into the future. To the knowledge of engineers and architects can be added the knowledge base of anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, who remind us of the way that the built environment shapes urban flow. Longitudinal planning should take into account the demographic and social changes that we will face in the future, including the fact that many more people are reaching old age.

In addition to markets and trash, there are multistory buildings, long streets, sewer pipes, water mains, public squares, and a “downtown” zone of financial institutions and government offices. There are a thousand varieties of sounds and smells, competing with the weather and daylight that frame the skyline of the built environment. There are crowds of people—rich, poor, young, old, female, male, gay, straight, trans, abled, disabled, employed, students, jobless, residents, and visitors. Production and consumption opportunities are scaled up in cities to provide not only more things but also more things per person, a completely ironic abundance given that urban residences tend to be much smaller than their rural counterparts.

The Urban Map Long before cities came into being, our ancestors had the capacity for dead reckoning and mental mapmaking. As they moved around the landscape, they made use of natural markers such as trees and stony outcrops to create cognitive maps of movements and desires for themselves. When the natural world became subordinate to the built environment, as increasingly became the case in cities, there were many more ways for people to mark the spaces of their movements from home to work to school to entertainment venues and back again. There were shops and alleyways and distinctive street angles. There were monuments of all kinds: a temple or an obelisk or a minaret.


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

Though our other senses play a role in helping us to feel immersed in and to connect with place, it is gaze that most powerfully defines the boundaries of built space. What and whom we can see and how we understand our own visibility to others is the most important determinant of our behavior in the built environment. Because of this, a device like Google Glass is not simply a novel form of portable computer interface, but rather the beginning of a kind of technology that invades that most primal connection. In its current form, Google Glass is not much more than a kind of heads-up display that allows us to receive a steady stream of annotation about our surroundings with nothing more than an upward flick of the eyeballs.

Walker began his professional life as an aeronautical engineer, but early on in his career, he tired of designing military aircraft and sought to find his thrills in other domains. Now, as the self-described “thrill engineer,” he spends much of his time both trying to understand where excitement arises in the built environment, and learning how to maximize thrill for those who crave a quick knee-trembler with an exciting place. In his early work, Walker was inspired by an unusual source for ideas about how to build thrilling places: he looked at anecdotal accounts of the thrills experienced by criminals during the perpetration of illegal acts.

Customers who self-scan their purchases are scrutinized by a webcam that reads their facial expression, checks their purchasing history, and tailors special offers on the spot to their current mood.18 The overall effects of such technologies, designed to tap into the individual histories of buyers and to read out their current states, is effecting a transformation of our relationship with the built environment that is symptomatic of a wider set of changes in our psychological relationship to built spaces. Until the emergence of the Internet, much of the challenge for merchants was to attract customers to their place of business and to find ways to keep them there for as long as possible. This model for moneymaking is now being eclipsed by the ability of shoppers to make purchases anywhere using online portals, and in tandem with this change we are seeing strong declines in the construction of malls and department stores throughout many parts of the world.


pages: 321 words: 85,267

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, 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, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Let’s face it: most Americans, who don’t think very often about city planning and who haven’t been offered the alternatives, are still settling for sprawl. Turning that ship around is a project for the next decade. —JEFF SPECK, WASHINGTON, D.C. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS The ten years since Suburban Nation was published have seen a great change in American attitudes toward the built environment. Suburban Nation has not been the sole agent of this change, of course, but clearly we got something right—right enough for the book to have a shelf life and a future. A predicated future suggests that the problems described herein remain. Still, one can be encouraged by visible progress.

In once-decanted downtowns, empty parking lots are being replaced by streets and blocks of high-density housing, offices, and retail development. Mixed-use, transit, and walking are words that no longer elicit smirks. Indeed, in cities where public transportation was shunned, the lack of it is now a public complaint. The relationship between public health and the design of the built environment has been firmly established, with scientific data supporting the benefits of urban walking as part of a daily routine. Many organizations have sprung up to promote this change. Among them, the Congress for the New Urbanism, by setting out principles for regional, neighborhood, street, and block design, has influenced many town plans, as well as national standards for traffic engineering.

It is supplemented by a pile of planning codes many inches thick. As exposed in Philip Howard’s The Death of Common Sense, these lengthy codes can be burdensome to the point of farce. But the problem with the current development codes is not just their size; they also seem to have a negative effect on the quality of the built environment. Their size and their result are symptoms of the same problem: they are hollow at their core. They do not emanate from any physical vision. They have no images, no diagrams, no recommended models, only numbers and words. Their authors, it seems, have no clear picture of what they want their communities to be.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

Clearly, property market booms and busts are inextricably intertwined with speculative financial flows, and these booms and busts have serious consequences for the macroeconomy in general, as well as all manner of externality effects upon resource depletion and environmental degra­ dation. Furthermore, the greater the share of property m arkets in GD P, the more significant the connection between financing and investment in the built environment becomes as a potential source of macro crises. In the case of developing countries such as Th ailand-where housing mort­ gages, if the World B ank Report is right, are equivalent to only l 0 percent of GDP- a property crash could certainly contribute to, but not likely totally power, a m acroeconomic collapse (of the sort that occurred in 1 9 97-98), whereas in the United States, where housing mortgage debt is equivalent to 40 percent of GDP, it m ost certainly could and did gen erate a crisis in 2007- 09. 50 .. 4 0 "" c 'ij '5 .., 30 j 20 '0 E ::s z 10 0 ������ 1 9 70 1 890 1910 1930 1 950 1 990 2010 Year Source: after William Godzmamt and Fran/c.

Several times in Volume 1 and repeatedly in Volume 2 , Marx invokes the credit system only to lay it aside as a fact of distribution that he is not prepared yet to confront. The gen eral laws of motion he studies in Volume 2, particula rly those of fixed c apital circulation ( including investment in the built environment) and working periods, pro duction periods, circulation times, and tu r n over times, all end up not only invok­ ing but necessitating the credit system. He is very explicit on this po int. When commenting on how the money capital advanced must always be greater than that applied in surplus-value production in order to deal with differential turnover times, he notes how changes in turnover times 38 R E B E L C I T I ES can "set free" some of the money earlier advanced.

It is th is that led Marx to characterize Isaac Pereire-who, along with h is brother Em ile, was one of the masters of the speculative reconstruction of urban Paris under Haussmann-as having "the nicely m ixed character of swindler and prophet:'18 CA P ITA L ACC U M U LAT I O N T H RO U G H U R BAN IZAT I O N Urbanization, I have long argued, h a s been a key means for the absorp­ tion of capital and labor surpluses throughout capitalism's history.19 It has a very partic ular function in the dynamics of capital accumulation because of the long working periods and turnover times and the long lifetimes of most investments in the built environment. It also has a geographical specificity such that the production of space and of spatial monopolies becomes integral to the dynamics of accumulation, not simply by virtue of the changing patterns of commodity flows over space but a lso by virtue of the very n ature of the created and produced spaces and places over which such movements o ccur.


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

I would like to thank the Gehl team, especially my in-house editor Birgitte Svarre, who has supported me through this project over the last years, as well as my business partner, Gehl CEO Helle Søholt, who entrusted me with this task, and many others. It would not have been possible to publish this book without the support of the Danish foundation Realdania that has a mission to create quality of life for all by developing the built environment. This book shares the mission of Realdania with its focus on the human dimension while considering the challenges of density, diversity, and livability. I hope this book will contribute to the making of better neighborhoods. The process of writing this book has been long and sometimes painful, as I tried to decide what was worth sharing while also recognizing that there is so much I still don’t know.

If we better understand what conditions make for being good neighbors, we can then better accommodate density, difference, and change. We can embrace these as beneficial opportunities rather than unfortunate challenges. We should recognize that every detail in the physical composition of the built environment has the potential to deliver comfort, convenience, and connection to others. The subtle balance of private and public needs, and the colocation of different activities in the same place make it possible to live well without having to travel so much. By getting the relationships right in the physical environment, with everything you need close at hand, an urban neighborhood can offer a better life.

True urban quality comes from accommodating density and diversity of building types and uses in the same place. I believe that different, even conflicting, uses and users can coexist and enjoy the convenience of colocation if they are accommodated in an urban framework that lets them be good neighbors to each other. Enclosure The urban pattern of enclosure seems to be as old as the built environment itself. Ever since the very first formal human settlements, thousands of years ago, there has been a simple pattern of building that could be called urban. The urban pattern is characterized by building to the very edge of the property rather than in the middle, and having joined-up buildings, where different properties are juxtaposed.


pages: 342 words: 86,256

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality.” The New York Times, October 30, 2009. Eversley, Melanie. “Many Cities Changing One-Way Streets Back.” USA Today, December 20, 2006. Ewing, Reid, and Robert Cervero. “Travel and the Built Environment: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 3 (2010): 11. Ewing, Reid, and Eric Dumbaugh. “The Built Environment and Traffic Safety: A Review of Empirical Evidence.” Journal of Planning Literature 23, no. 4 (2009): 347–67. Fallows, James. “Fifty-Nine and a Half Minutes of Brilliance, Thirty Seconds of Hauteur.” theatlantic.com, July 3, 2009.

If she had been killed by a truck going by, the cause of death would have been “motor-vehicle trauma,” and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning, and failed political leadership. That was the “aha!” moment for me. Here I was focusing on remote disease risks when the biggest risks that people faced were coming from the built environment.3 Jackson, who has more recently served as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state public health adviser, spent the next five years quantifying how so much of what ails us can be attributed directly to the demise of walkability in the auto age. The resulting book finally put some technical meat on the bones of the planning profession’s admonitions against sprawl.

., the director of the Minnesota Geriatric Education Center, who says, “Rather than exercising for the sake of exercising, try to make changes to your lifestyle. Ride a bicycle instead of driving. Walk to the store instead of driving.… Build that into your lifestyle.”■ Like most writers on the subject, Buettner and his sources neglect to discuss how these “lifestyle” choices are inevitably a function of the design of the built environment. They may be powerfully linked to place—the Blue Zones are zones, after all—but there is scant admission that walking to the store is more possible, more enjoyable, and more likely to become habit in some places than in others. It is those places that hold the most promise for the physical and social health of our society.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

And the long-drawn-out commercial-property-led savings and loan crisis of 1984–92 in the United States saw more than 1,400 savings and loans companies and 1,860 banks go belly up at the cost of some $200 billion to US taxpayers (a situation that so exercised William Isaacs, then chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, that in 1987 he threatened the American Bankers Association with nationalisation unless they mended their ways). Crises associated with problems in property markets tend to be more long-lasting than the short sharp crises that occasionally rock stock markets and banking directly. This is because, as we shall see, investments in the built environment are typically credit-based, high-risk and long in the making: when over-investment is finally revealed (as recently happened in Dubai) then the financial mess that takes many years to produce takes many years to unwind. There is, therefore, nothing unprecedented, apart from its size and scope, about the current collapse.

This becomes important because, as the eighteenth-century French utopian thinker Saint-Simon long ago argued, it takes the ‘association of capitals’ on a large scale to set in motion the kinds of massive works such as railroads that are required to sustain long-term capitalist development. This was what the nineteenth-century financiers the Péreire brothers, schooled in Saint-Simonian theory, effectively achieved through the new credit institutions they set up to help Baron Haussmann transform the built environment of Second Empire Paris in the 1850s. (The boulevards we see today date from this period.) In the case of limited and joint stock companies and other corporate organisational forms that came into their own in the nineteenth century, enormous quantities of money power are amassed and centralised (often out of myriad small amounts of personal savings) under the control of a few directors and managers.

On the other hand there is nothing unnatural about species, including ours, modifying their environments in ways that are conducive to their own reproduction. Ants do it, bees do it, and beavers do it most spectacularly. In the same way that there is nothing unnatural about an ant hill, so there is, surely, nothing particularly unnatural about New York City. But all of this has taken human energy and ingenuity to construct. The built environment that constitutes a vast field of collective means of production and consumption absorbs huge amounts of capital in both its construction and its maintenance. Urbanisation is one way to absorb the capital surplus. But projects of this sort cannot be mobilised without assembling massive financial power.


pages: 273 words: 76,786

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

Winch and I were drinking Chimay that we’d picked up at a petrol station, and Winch, as usual, was perusing photos on the Internet and scrolling around on his cracked Blackberry, looking at an aerial view of our next location on Google Earth, trying to find a possible entry point. He turned to us slowly and said, ‘So, you guys, we’re staying in a hotel tonight’ – everyone looked stunned – ‘that closed in 1996!’ And we all erupted in riotous laughter. Urban explorers are fascinated by the flotsam of the built environment, locating sites of haunted memory, seeking interaction with the ghosts of lives lived.5 When these places are located, their fragile deteriorations are captured in photos, the snap of the camera shutter like an exploding chemistry experiment where past, present and future are fused.6 Taking the photograph creates a moment of temporal juxtaposition, giving us, as the artist Robert Smithson once wrote, an ‘illusion of control over eternity’.7 In abandoned bunkers, hospitals and industrial sites, we found moments caught between the present and the past, confrontations that flared up with unexpected material traces.

Sometimes even whole buildings are hidden from plain sight, well buried behind the urban façade. The cracks we can access them through – what the urban explorer Michael Cook has called ‘vanishing points’ – reveal the city less as a solid entity and more as a collection of fluctuating particles constantly swirling as people attempt to stall the natural collapse and decay of the built environment.8 Urban exploration is a shallow form of discovery, but it is often a more encompassing way of working through places. It’s about space as much as time, about the event of discovery as much as the accumulation of knowledge, about things as much as people.9 In contrast to a historian working deeply on one topic or site, urban explorers have mental and virtual databases of hundreds of sites, connected though experience.

Sites of exploration become portals to the surreal cut into the everyday landscape, as well as an affirmation of the place and potential of the creation of unsanctioned beauty as part of our explorations of worlds, subjects and knowledge in-the-making.12 In short, we saw these cracks into the underworld as portals to opportunities as well as potential zones of infection. Urban explorer Michael Cook writes: The built environment of the city has always been incomplete, by omission and necessity, and will remain so. Despite the visions of futurists, the work of our planners and cement-layers thankfully remains a fractured and discontinuous whole, an urban field riven with internal margins, pockmarked by decay, underlaid with secret waterways.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

South Korea also joined the ranks in 2009 with its own Green New Deal, signing off on a $36 billion initiative over a four-year period to build out low-carbon projects and create 960,000 new jobs, primarily in the fields of construction, rail, fuel-efficient vehicles, retrofitted buildings, and energy conservation.8 In 2011, I coauthored a book with the famed Spanish architect Enric Ruiz-Geli titled A Green New Deal: From Geopolitics to Biosphere Politics, focusing on the greening of architecture and the built environment in a climate-changing world.9 A few years later, the European Federalist Movement took the Green New Deal forward with a petition titled “New Deal 4 Europe: Campaign for a European Special Plan for Sustainable Development and Employment” and used it to launch a 2015 European-wide citizen initiative to mobilize support for a transition into a zero-carbon green economy.10 The Green New Deal narrative continued to gain momentum over the years, becoming a theme in the 2019 European elections.

In September 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that prepares the ground for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from California’s existing residential and commercial buildings by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.29 The California Public Utilities Commission is also preparing initiatives that will ensure that all new residential buildings be zero net energy by 2020 and all commercial buildings be zero net energy by 2030.30 The global real estate market in 2015 was valued at $217 trillion, nearly 2.7 times the GDP of the world, and represents 60 percent of the investment assets of the global economy.31 Looking ahead, the construction market will grow by another $8 trillion by 2030.32 As alluded to earlier, the paradigm shifts in communication, energy, and mobility change the nature of the built environment. The First Industrial Revolution gave rise to dense urban built environments because of hub-to-hub railroad transportation, while the Second Industrial Revolution birthed widely spread out suburban environments off interstate highway exits. In the Third Industrial Revolution, existing and new buildings—residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional—are transformed into zero-carbon energy-efficient smart nodes and networks embedded in an Internet of Things matrix.

Unfortunately, the financing mechanism that accompanies MEES—called, interestingly enough, the “Green Deal Finance Model,” which would incentivize the owners of dilapidated residential property to make the efficiency changes—was taken away by the government and never even introduced for commercial property, leaving owners with a penalty but without an incentive to upgrade their properties.46 Again, the lesson learned over and over is that transitioning the built environment away from the fossil fuel culture and toward a green renewable energy culture, by necessity, must provide equally powerful carrots and sticks to ensure success. Preparing the American Workforce for the Green Era The decoupling of the communication sector, the electricity sector, the mobility and logistics sector, and the building stock sector from the fossil fuel civilization has barely begun in the United States.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

., the director of the Minnesota Geriatric Education Center, who says, “Rather than exercising for the sake of exercising, try to make changes to your lifestyle. Ride a bicycle instead of driving. Walk to the store instead of driving …. Build that into your lifestyle.”20 Like most writers on the subject, Buettner and his sources neglect to discuss how these lifestyle choices are inevitably a function of the design of the built environment. They may be powerfully linked to place — the Blue Zones are zones, after all — but there is scant admission that walking to the store is more possible, more enjoyable, and more likely to become habit in some places than in others. It is those easily walkable places that hold the most promise for the physical health of our society, because they teach us how we can make all American communities more welcoming to pedestrians.

It is what human settlements that grow up without central planning and control look like: seemingly chaotic, labyrinthine, and fractal, but thick with social and business networks. Echanove and Srivastava have put together startling images of street scenes in Dharavi (the largest informal settlement in Mumbai) overlaid onto a street in Tokyo or Torino. The texture of the built environment in these disparate places is similar because the dynamics that drive it are similar. The result seems unruly, but it works. The leather workshop uses buckles made by the smithy next door, which also supplies the bag maker around the bend. The workshops are also stores, and the laborers and clerks are just a few steps from eateries.

While services like Uber, Waize, Zimride, and Zipcar are disrupting the established regime in the developed world, entrepreneurs in emerging markets are also using information technology and cell phones to radically reinvent transportation, improving services for users and boosting the livelihoods of drivers. Unlike most cities in the U.S., urban centers in the developing world are transit rich. Informal public transit permeates the urban fabric. Just as the built environment in the autocatalytic city is driven by bottom-up processes, the need to move around in rapidly growing cities with inadequate public transportation has given rise to private transit services (also called informal or paratransit). Even supposedly egalitarian public transit can be out of reach for the poorest urban dwellers.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

At Stratford, Chelsfield, a property company run by Nigel Hugill, which already had plans for an enormous shopping mall in London’s Shepherds Bush, signed the deal to develop another huge shopping complex there, along with property company Stanhope, run by Sir Stuart Lipton, who went on to chair the government agency the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He resigned from there in 2004 after an independent audit into conflicts of interest concluded that in future the chairmanship of CABE should not go to a property developer.4 Although London and Continental got into difficulties in 1998 and was restructured, Chelsfield’s deal remained on the drawing board, but in 2004, just before London won the Olympic bid, Chelsfield was bought out by a trio of companies, including Westfield, the biggest shopping centre operator in the world, alongside Multiplex, the company building Wembley, and the Reuben Brothers, property investors who had made billions in investments in the aluminium industry in 1990s Russia.

Spenhill, the regeneration subsidiary of Tesco, is planning ‘district centres’ in Gateshead, Kirby, West Bromwich, Bradley Stoke, Shepton Mallet, Seaton in Devon and in Bromley-by-Bow in East London and Woolwich and Streatham in the south. In Bromley-by-Bow the proposed district centre, which overlooks a dual carriageway, was heavily criticised by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment for an application to build hundreds of homes overlooking the A12 Blackwall Tunnel, while the new school would be tacked onto the Tesco delivery yard, which would mean that children would have to cross the car park to get there. Despite CABE’s criticism, the scheme received planning permission.

Despite CABE’s criticism, the scheme received planning permission. Following the damning review Tesco did go back to the drawing board but CABE’s design review did not approve their revised application either, recommending it should not get planning permission.44 Sir John Sorrell, the former chair of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, described how this was the next wave of development. ‘Our concern is not only the quality of this kind of development – which is generally very poor – but the way in which architecture and places are created in the image of the retailer.’45 In every one of these places the local authority has been very keen to get the proposals through, often in the face of huge public protest accompanied by the kinds of dirty tricks and subterfuge that are well documented in later chapters.


pages: 293 words: 97,431

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

One interesting exception to the low status of the left is found in Asian cultures, in which the primary cardinal direction is the south (the main entrance to the Forbidden City is on its south side, for instance). This being the case, left is the side of the rising sun, and so is afforded privileged status. In the ancient Asian science of feng shui, the orientation of buildings and cities with respect to the cardinal directions was considered to be critical to the health and success of the built environment. Streets and buildings were aligned carefully with such directions, and the human body can be seen in microcosm in some applications of feng shui principles. As our straight, two-legged posture pushes our heads up against the force of gravity, it is a cultural universal that physical height correlates with the direction from which human power emanates.

Nevertheless, serious schools of feng shui, with theoretical roots that are thousands of years old, can include a comprehensive effort to align one’s home with prevailing geological forces such as magnetic fields, and principles that guide the construction of well-organized and connected interior spaces with respect to the world outside the walls of the house. Adhering to feng shui principles or other cultural practices that connect our homes to the world outside, both natural and supernatural, can be difficult in houses that lack the contours provided by square or rectangular rooms. Another good example of the influence of culture on the built environment comes from the prevalence of courtyard homes in certain parts of the world, particularly in Islamic countries. One of the benefits of a courtyard construction is that it affords some privacy for residents of the space, but, within the courtyard, it also allows the construction of separate buildings for men, women, and the generations within a family.

Given the economic hardship typical of first-generation immigrants, the alleged police discrimination, and the systematic persecution of minority groups by certain sectors of France’s right-wing national government, it is easy to reconstruct a set of plausible causes for the widespread incendiary reaction to the deaths of the two boys. But one element that has received less attention is the built environment that was occupied by those who participated in the violence—that is, the ability of buildings or even neighborhoods to shape collective or individual human behavior. At the time of the unrest, Clichy-sous-Bois was occupied by almost 30,000 people, among them some of the most impoverished in all of France.


pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

He is clear about where we find ourselves: ‘In terms of rigour in science and public health we are at that stage where we absolutely know that Homo sapiens were designed, as hunter-gatherers, to be routinely physically active, chasing antelopes across the prairie or whatever it was. And while we have not been able to change our biological destiny, we have changed the built environment. So instead of hunting an antelope we get in the car and drive to Sainsbury’s.’17 This book is the story of how routine activity disappeared, and the many consequences it brought. There are several things this book is not. It is not an argument for simply turning back the clock. No one wants a return to mass, repetitive manual labour.

This is a vital point to consider in our story of vanishing everyday movement – it is a far broader issue than slightly trite discussions about personal responsibility. As soon as you start examining the world from the perspective of adding activity into your routine, you quickly see how thoroughly, how carefully, and at times how cunningly the built environment that surrounds us has been redesigned over the past seventy or so years to make regular exertion an increasingly difficult, at times almost impossible, choice. To take another example, think about the last time you walked into an office block or large hotel. Almost certainly, the lifts would have been in direct view.

I thought: if only everyone in the clinic could get a job as a postman. It was profound. Medicine works, but it’s much better to do it without medicine.’ As we will see in the next chapter, for most people it is, sadly, not that simple. Without something like a job which guarantees daily movement, you are significantly more reliant on the built environment around you, one which often seems to conspire to make physical exertion as difficult as possible. If there is a message for this chapter, perhaps for the entire book, it is that for all the wonders achieved by modern medicine, without concerted, significant, interventionist action at a national political level, the sorts of universal health and social care systems many millions of people take for granted could effectively be gone within a generation.


pages: 224 words: 69,494

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

The social class variability and its significance for public policy has been summarised by IPPR (Grayling, 2002): “We are able to show that the higher injury rate in deprived areas does not appear to be simply because the environment is inherently more dangerous, for example because deprived areas tend to be dense urban areas with more roads and traffic. Environmental factors are important but there appears to be a deprivation effect over and above the effect of the built environment. We estimate that the likelihood of a child pedestrian injury is four times higher in the most deprived ward in England compared to the least deprived ward, independent of factors such as population and employment density and the characteristics of the road network. A reasonable explanation is that the higher rates of child pedestrian casualties in more deprived areas are the consequence of more dangerous environments combined with higher exposure rates.

It downplays the progressive withdrawal of people from public space and it airbrushes out of the picture the social class discrimination that produces disproportionately larger numbers of deaths amongst the poor and disadvantaged. It is an important agent of legitimation and collaboration with a policing, judicial and urban planning system that blames victims and shapes the built environment in favour of the car and to the detriment of the pedestrian, cyclist and public transport user. The Swedish Vision Zero policy is not without faults but it sets out a clear ambition that is so much better than the lack of a clear vision. Reducing deaths and serious injuries to zero is possible and leads inexorably to a fundamental re-engineering of the mobility paradigm.

Perceptions of security improved for all age groups, but the greatest improvements were among older people. The authors concluded that the barrier effect (of high traffic speed) was reduced in the three pilot towns (Herrstedt 1992).” Clearly older people need special consideration in the design of the built environment and road traffic environment in which they live and access local shops and services including trips to the doctor, dentist, optician and other services used intensively by this age group. Current built environment priorities are not sensitive to older people. The Mayor of London has been reported as shortening the green phase on traffic light controlled pedestrian crossings (the time allowed for a pedestrian to cross) in order to smooth the traffic flow and reduce congestion (London Evening Standard, 2008).


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

It is quite possible that sharing remains a niche while most people choose to own their own cars — the 'Out' scenario dominates. Thus exurbanization and cars driving around without people make extensive use of the newly available capacity. To fully mitigate these congestion effects, pricing (Chapter 13) is required. 11. Adapting the Built Environment The previous chapter alluded to ways in which changes in travel will change the built environment. People are changing how they spend their time and their frequency and purpose of travel. They are mixing physical and virtual travel in previously unseen ways. In this chapter we use shopping travel255 as a lens through which to better understand how transport's demand from land use is also changing the land use in more nuanced ways than appear at first blush.

Future transport infrastructure needs to easily change function over time. Adaptability (the ability to change) and Flexibility (the ability to do more than one thing, like serving cars, trucks, buses, and bicycles) are paramount. The prevailing tenor of most transport planning focuses on the built environment, embedded infrastructure, and long-lasting constructs. Such hallmarks are indicative of anti-plasticity. But this is changing. An expert panel of transport specialists from the US recently came to the following conclusion, "The current 'predict and provide' paradigm in transport—in which transport officials plan infrastructure investments based on projected needs 20 or 30 years into the future—was seen as imperiled amid stalled driving demand and growing interest in multimodal alternatives." 287 The tone and content of transport conversations have evolved over recent years.

Report of the American Planning Association, May 2014, https://www.planning.org/policy/polls/investing/pdf/pollinvestingreport.pdf 49 US PIRG (2014) "Millennials in Motion" http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/millennials-motion 50 This has health effects, the beneficial effects of greater walkability (and thus walking) in urban centers is offset by the additional pollution intake in those same places. See Hankey, Steve, Julian Marshall and Michael Brauer (2012) Health Impacts of the Built Environment: Within-Urban Variability in Physical Inactivity, Air Pollution, and Ischemic Heart Disease Mortality. Environ Health Perspectives 120(2): 247–253. 51 Zipcar (2013) Millennials and Technology http://www.slideshare.net/Zipcar_Inc/millennial-slide-share-final-16812323 52 According to Noreen McDonald "Among young adults, lifestyle-related demographic shifts, including decreased employment, explain 10% to 25% of the decrease in driving; Millennial-specific factors such as changing attitudes and use of virtual mobility (online shopping, social media) explain 35% to 50% of the drop in driving; and the general dampening of travel demand that occurred across all age groups accounts for the remaining 40%."


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

A Reexamination of American Discussion Networks,” Social Networks, October 2011: 331–341. ate together every night: Kiefer, Heather, “Empty Seats: Fewer Families Eat Together,” Gallup, www.gallup.com/poll/10336/empty-seats-fewer-families-eat-together.aspx (accessed March 3, 2012). social desert: Halpern, David, Mental Health and the Built Environment: More Than Bricks and Mortar? (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995). psychotic disorders: Park, Alice, “Why City Life Adds to Your Risk of Psychosis,” Time, September 7, 2010, http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/07/living-in-cities-can-add-to-risk-of-psychoses/ (accessed September 11, 2010). parents’ stress: McConnell, D., R.

Forbes, “The Importance of Social Relationships, Socioeconomic Status, and Health Practices with Respect to Mortality Among Healthy Ontario Males,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 1992: 175–82; Veenstra, Gerry, “Social Capital and Health (Plus Wealth, Income Inequality and Regional Health Governance),” Social Science and Medicine, 2002: 849–68; Berkman, Lisa F., “The Role of Social Relations in Health Promotion,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 1995: 245–54. Citizens of sprawl: Leyden, Kevin M., “Social Capital and the Built Environment: The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods,” American Journal of Public Health, 2003: 1546–51; Williamson, Thad, Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). The 2011 study: “Long-Distance Commuters Get Divorced More Often, Swedish Study Finds,” Science Daily, May 25, 2011, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110525085920.htm (accessed March 3, 2012).

Centers for Disease Control: Gardner, Gary, and Erik Assadourian, “Rethinking the Good Life,” in State of the World 2004, 164–79. living in low-density sprawl: Sturm, R, and D. A. Cohen, “Suburban Sprawl and Physical and Mental Health,” Public Health, 2004: 488–96. “death by strangers”: Lucy, William H., “Mortality Risk Associated with Leaving Home: Recognizing the Relevance of the Built Environment,” American Journal of Public Health, 2003: 1564–69. per capita road death rates: “Safety Tips to Keep Your Family Safe: Accident Statistics from the National Safety Council,” Safety Times, www.safetytimes.com/statistics.htm (accessed January 11, 2011). killed by guns: Violence Policy Center, “About the Violence Policy Center,” www.vpc.org/aboutvpc.htm (accessed January 11, 2011).


pages: 537 words: 200,923

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Of course, highway routing is political as well in an urban setting: the Oak Street Connector helped clear out a dense working-class neighborhood, even as it served the purpose of increasing east-west circulation in New Haven’s CBD (its gratuitously ample 500-foot width says a great deal about its implicit purpose). The overall impact of urban renewal may conveniently be parsed into three streams of change: in the built environment, in residential life, and in the fabric of business enterprise. We could, of course, chop the impact into smaller pieces, but these headings will, I believe, serve us well enough. MODERNISM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT Redevelopment brought a wave of modernism to New Haven, and with it, the linear rationalism of its most terrifying proponent: 331 E N D O F U R B A N I S M Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it.

The same would have been true for other manufacturers and was doubtless true for many small retailers suffering scorching competition from chain outlets. COMMUNITY PROGRESS INCORPORATED By about 1962, it had become clear that: (1) the built environment could not be transformed in its entirety with any realistic amount of urban renewal money, and (2) not even the most complete transformation of the built environment would convincingly renew the city. Think about it in dollars: Could $725 per capita reverse history? Could ten times that reverse history? Could micro-policy changes reverse macro-historical movements? Did the Lee administration have the capacity, notoriously lacking in redevelopment efforts worldwide, to allocate money so that it would produce the greatest available market response?

With quicker restriction, the story of 67 U R B A N I S M urban growth in New Haven—as in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and scores of other cities—would have been a smaller and poorer story. BUILDING TOWARD 1910 Centered growth caused, and was caused by, a long, high-crested wave of money washing over the built environment. In 1850, New Haven encompassed 5,353 dwellings. By 1910 it held 17,466 dwelling structures housing 29,271 families—almost twelve thousand too many for a single-family housing stock to accommodate.71 These multiunit homes are mostly the two-deckers and threedeckers that so clearly define New Haven’s neighborhood fabric today.


pages: 175 words: 52,122

Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

game design, informal economy, intentional community, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, the built environment

The extreme do-it-yourself-ism of Morris, the propensity he showed to learn every aspect of the skills and techniques used from the Middle Ages to the present in the art of fabric dying, for example, is itself a reaction against the kind of siloizing of skills and knowledges then getting underway in the universities of the era. It is impossible to detect a will to specialization in their work. Instead, each of the three manifests an almost Balzacian ability to hold together multiple levels of a complex reality in such a tightly knit system of interconnection that failure in one sphere—say, the built environment, or education—is inevitably related to failure in another. It follows, then, that we might find in the geographer Reclus an ecological argument entirely akin to that of Morris, constructed not in a primarily geographical idiom but in view of the need for aesthetic pleasure: It is not only the restoration and embellishment of our cities that we expect from the man who becomes an artist.

Even great buildings can be of admirable beauty when the architects understand the character of the environing site, and when the work of man harmonizes with the geological work of the centuries in a harmonious ensemble.32 In one dialectical movement the communal luxury of public art extends naturally from the built environment—the lived beauty of urban spaces—to fuel the renewal of the fields and of agriculture, and thus human interaction with the natural environment, whereby, renewed, it flows back to the architectural design of great buildings, all in a harmonious continuity between the geological and the human.

A systemic problem demanded a systemic solution. The “state of perpetual war” Morris called commerce was at the root of the ruin of the landscape. Industry’s accelerated surge in producing “what on the one hand is called ‘employment’ and on the other what is called ‘money-making’” had flooded the market with banal goods and transformed the built environment into what anthropologist Marc Augé would later call “non-spaces”: nondescript constructions with no bearing on or relationship to the local site on which they are built. Kropotkin describes the huge factories producing quantities of inferior or, in a word dear to Morris, “shoddy” goods: “an immense bulk of the world’s trade,” he writes, “consists of ‘shoddy,’ patraque, ‘Red Indians’ blankets’ and the like, shipped to distant lands.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

And, as most policy makers and engineers see it, when hard infrastructure fails, as it did in the great Chicago heat wave, it’s the softer, social infrastructure that determines our fate. “Infrastructure” is not a term conventionally used to describe the underpinnings of social life. But this is a consequential oversight, because the built environment—and not just cultural preferences or the existence of voluntary organizations—influences the breadth and depth of our associations. If states and societies do not recognize social infrastructure and how it works, they will fail to see a powerful way to promote civic engagement and social interaction, both within communities and across group lines.

In some cities, we know, poor neighborhoods with high-rise public housing are safer than poor neighborhoods without it, and Newman failed to identify which conditions make some projects more successful than others. He was wrong to conclude that, in the case of crime and housing, “the apartment tower itself…is the real and final villain.” But Newman’s main point, that the built environment helps determine local crime levels, is widely accepted. In fact, the evidence for it is now stronger than ever. Some of that evidence comes from a school of crime prevention that emerged around the same time as Newman’s defensible space theory. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) begins with the insight that a person who is likely to commit a crime in a certain environment would never consider doing so in another.

“is the real and final villain”: Oscar Newman, Defensible Space (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 25. “environment where crimes occur”: C. Ray Jeffery, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 177, 19. “to curb crime”: John MacDonald, “Community Design and Crime: The Impact of the Built Environment,” Crime and Justice 44, no. 1 (2015): 333–383. “That muggings will occur”: James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, “Broken Windows,” Atlantic, March 1982. “the blueprint for community policing”: Quoted in Bernard Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

She has specialized in inclusive environments and accessibility since 2001, ensuring that client facilities are safe, accessible and inclusive for everyone. Her work specializes in access, inclusion and wellbeing in the built environment and includes auditing of existing places, appraisals of new designs (buildings and external environments), stakeholder engagement, co-design and advisory services. She is excited to be technical author for a new BSI guide, PAS 6463: ‘Design for the Mind: Neurodiversity and the built environment’1 informed by a steering group of experts from across the UK. The PAS guide will provide information for designers, planners, specifiers, facilities managers and decision-makers on particular design features (such as lighting, acoustics, and finishes) which can make public and mainstream environments more inclusive for everyone.

It is in fact the diversity that crosses all diversities and if we can crack the cognitive enigma code, we can truly and positively transform the world of work for the better, enable true inclusivity and all live and prosper in a world where we can have a sense of belonging. People with neurological differences are not incomplete versions of ‘typical’ people or flawed. People with neurological differences are not broken and certainly don’t need fixing! The built environment, systems, processes and organizations are more likely to be broken, or there are hurdles in place that limit progress. At no time in the past 50 years have there been the changes that have been seen in recent times. We are seeing forced change on a global scale that will alter the way we see the world of work.

I’m excited to have the opportunity to be involved in developing this guidance and thankful to the huge number of contributors (both professional experts and individuals with a range of conditions) who are helping to make this possible. ‘We all hope to see a shift in approach by everyone in the built environment sector, so that neuro differences are seen in future as a fundamental everyday component considered as part of any good design, not an extra.’ So if this is about buildings and spaces in the future, what about learning and working practices? What will they look like? Is the future a really neurodiverse world?


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Each of them wrote the same three names, in the same order: Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley. I was an adult before I realized we were both part of a revolutionary change in the way Americans lived, worked, and especially moved from place to place. Over the course of the next fifty years, the most important parts of the built environment—the streets on which we lived, played, and worked—were impoverished by the seemingly irresistible centrifugal forces of sprawl and suburbanization. My own block, 83rd Street between 19th and 20th Avenues, stopped hosting stickball games and the kid-run “83rd Street Olympics.” It no longer featured a daily lineup of kids sitting on curbs as if they were benches.

One kid would stand in as a traffic cop to direct traffic at the intersection with a “signal.” Eventually someone would become bored and the game would devolve into “cops and red-light-runner.” When it came time for college, Morgan chose Columbia University in New York City, which was, in terms of the built environment, about as distant from the DC suburbs as Mars. And she adored it. Today she is an engineer and planner working in my company’s Los Angeles office in bike-lane design and bike-share planning for cities. She does so on a computer running very sophisticated programs rather than using a chunk of chalk on a strip of asphalt, but it’s not hard to see the line connecting one with the other.

There she, along with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, a bona fide transportation rock star, led the work on the city’s 2010 Active Design Guidelines, which have become a model for designing buildings, roads, and neighborhoods that promote activity, especially active transportation.g The guidelines should sound familiar by now, recommending, among other things, “accessible, pedestrian-friendly streets with high connectivity, traffic calming features, lighting, benches, and water fountains [and] developing continuous bicycle networks and incorporating infrastructure like safe indoor and outdoor bicycle parking.” There is such broad consensus on these sorts of things that, as Karen Lee reminded me, “not doing anything is a contradiction of every bit of evidence we have.” The Guidelines don’t limit themselves to urban design—those portions of the built environment in public spaces like roads, sidewalks, and bikeways. They also address the “micro” side of active transportation, which is something that transportation engineers tend to forget: the way we design the interiors of our buildings. Thus, the Active Design Guidelines also call for “providing a conveniently located stair for everyday use, posting motivational signage to encourage stair use, and designing visible, appealing, and comfortable stairs . . .


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Cheshire, ‘Urban Containment, Housing Affordability and Price Stability – Irreconcilable Goals’, SERC Policy Paper 4, 2009, p. 9, at eprints.lse.ac.uk) 5.5UK annual housing rental payments, 1985–2015 (Source: Office for National Statistics) 5.6UK real estate sector: gross value added by sub-category, 2005 and 2014 (Source: Office for National Statistics) 5.7UK private non-financial corporations: operating surplus, 1998–2014 (Source: Office for National Statistics) List of Abbreviations ASI Adam Smith Institute BLP Berwin Leighton Paisner BRB British Railways Board BTC British Transport Commission CABE Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment CPS Centre for Policy Studies CLT Community land trust DCLG Department for Communities and Local Government DEFRA Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs DHSS Department of Health and Social Security EFA Education Funding Agency FTE Full-time employee GLA Greater London Authority GLC Greater London Council GPA Government Property Agency GPU Government Property Unit GVA Gross value added HCA Homes and Communities Agency HDV Haringey Development Vehicle IEA Institute of Economic Affairs IFRS International Financial Reporting Standards IPPR Institute for Public Policy Research LCC London City Council LGA Local Government Association LSA Land Settlement Association MoD Ministry of Defence MoJ Ministry of Justice NAO National Audit Office NEF New Economics Foundation NHS National Health Service OFT Office of Fair Trading OGC Office of Government Commerce ONS Office for National Statistics PACE Property Advisers to the Civil Estate PLI Public Land Initiative PRS Property Repayment Services PSA Property Services Agency PSC People with Significant Control register RBS Royal Bank of Scotland RIFW Regeneration Investment Fund for Wales RLA Redundant Lands and Accommodation Acknowledgements My first and most important thanks are to my family: Agneta, Elliot, Oliver and Emilia.

In internalizing the contradictions of capitalism, Harvey therefore points out, the land market ‘thereby imposes those contradictions upon the very physical landscape of capitalism itself’.2 The economic disorder generated by speculative land markets is at once, and necessarily, a disorder that is geographical and developmental, playing out in the built environment and in the area of land use. It is overbuilding booms. It is home foreclosures. It is potentially also, as we shall shortly see, an increase in generalized social disorder. And, of course, the more widely speculative land markets spread as more and more land is privatized, and as actors accordingly are more and more incentivized to chase monopoly rents and capital gains speculatively, the greater the potential for disorder in economies – and geographies, and so forth – and the greater the potential scale of this disorder.

And, significantly, it would probably not have left the government open to misconceived charges of reckless asset-stripping. Ways of seeing matter. One thing that accrual accounting, unlike cash accounting, can help make visible, for instance, is the ‘true’ value of assets owned by local government. In 2009, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) published a fascinating report deploring the fact that parks and green spaces owned by British local authorities were not being ‘properly’ valued in most local authority accounts. Where these particular assets were concerned, the accounts had not yet caught up with the brave new world of accruals, and typically a simple nominal value would instead be recorded: ‘it may come as a shock to learn that most councils value public parks at just £1 each.


pages: 221 words: 68,880

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle) by Elly Blue

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autism spectrum disorder, big-box store, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, food desert, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, job automation, Loma Prieta earthquake, medical residency, oil shale / tar sands, parking minimums, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, science of happiness, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

The book left me queasy and shaken and understanding a bit better why people opt to move to retirement homes rather than living “independently” in trapped isolation. It’s all too easy to place the full responsibility for traffic safety on the actions of individuals; but it’s easier to forget what unforgiving limits the built environment can set on those actions. In a car-oriented world, old age becomes a disability for many, long before it might in a more walkable neighborhood. The more car-reliant your daily life is, the lower the threshold becomes for frailness, injury, or failing eyesight to be experienced as outright disabling.

Distances have become too great, cities are too sprawling, and we are all too deeply invested in lives that are spread out across a landscape that has been designed to suit the automobile. Transit is important, but can only take us so far in this dispersed landscape without massive and costly redevelopment of the built environment that is not always done in a way that proves useful and attractive. This is the genius of the bicycle. Most bike trips are less than 30 minutes. When people ride to get in shape, they tend to go farther,178 and people who already commute by bike seem content to ride greater, on average, distances to and from work.

November 9, 2010 51 Wilmot, E., “Sitting for protracted periods increases risk of diabetes, heart disease, death,” Diabetologia. 2012 52 de Hartog, J., “Do the Health Benefits of Cycling Outweigh the Risks?” Environmental Health Perspectives. 2010 53 Lopez-Zetina, J., “The link between obesity and the built environment,” Health and Place. 2006 54 Saelens, B. et al., “Obesogenic Neighborhood Environments, Child and Parent Obesity,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 2012 55 Goodyear, S. “Fat City: The Way Your Neighborhood is Built Could be Killing You,” Grist. May 19, 2011 56 Rochon, L., “Unhealthy Neighborhoods Play a Big Role in Obesity, Diabetes Epidemic,” The Globe and Mail.


pages: 229 words: 68,426

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

In it, as in the series of seminal papers and articles that followed, Weiser developed the idea of an "invisible" computing, a computing that "does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere." What Weiser was describing would be nothing less than computing without computers. In his telling, desktop machines per se would largely disappear, as the tiny, cheap microprocessors that powered them faded into the built environment. But computation would flourish, becoming intimately intertwined with the stuff of everyday life. In this context, "ubiquitous" meant not merely "in every place," but also "in every thing." Ordinary objects, from coffee cups to raincoats to the paint on the walls, would be reconsidered as sites for the sensing and processing of information, and would wind up endowed with surprising new properties.

Thesis 03 Everyware is information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life. Part of what the everyware paradigm implies is that most of the functionality we now associate with these boxes on our desks, these slabs that warm our laps, will be dispersed into both the built environment and the wide variety of everyday objects we typically use there. Many such objects are already invested with processing power—most contemporary cameras, watches, and phones, to name the most obvious examples, contain microcontrollers. But we understand these things to be technical, and if they have so far rarely participated in the larger conversation of the "Internet of things," we wouldn't necessarily be surprised to see them do so.

Information architect Peter Morville calls such interventions in the city "wayfinding 2.0"—an aspect of the emerging informational milieu he thinks of as "ambient findability," in which a combination of pervasive devices, the social application of semantic metadata, and self-identifying objects renders the built environment (and many other things besides) effectively transparent to inquiry. But as we shall see in some detail, everyware also functions as an extension of power into public space, whether that space be streetscape, commons, station, or stadium—conditioning it, determining who can be there and what services are available to each of them.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

“At worse, half-a-billion-dollar wind farms are dying because 50 people shouted at their county commissioners during a public meeting.”* Building a bigger America and building a cleaner America both require us to break out of the current dysfunctional veto-laden approach to building things, and find a way back to a future-oriented mind-set that says change is good. And that means changes not just to the built environment, but to how we think about family life and the division of labor between parents and society writ large. CHAPTER 3 The Dismal Economics of Child Rearing Back in 2017, the American fertility rate hit a record low of 1.76 expected births over the lifetime of the average woman.

Housing organizer Alex Baca and Brookings Institution housing economist Jenny Schuetz talk about “gentle density,” which “could increase the number of homes available and bring down average housing prices in high-cost locations, while retaining the physical scale of the neighborhood.”* And, indeed, allowing a few small apartments to sprout in a single-family neighborhood can drastically increase the availability of affordable housing without fundamentally altering the scale or character of the built environment. This is a good vision of what today’s pricey, auto-dependent suburbs might look like in a post-reform future. Existing single-family neighborhoods will continue to be single-family neighborhoods but will be dotted with a few apartments or town house clusters here and there. At the same time, it would be a mistake to go too far in offering reassurance.

Not only are these rules uneconomical, but they generally conflict with cities’ other stated goals. Most major urban centers in the United States have voting bases and elected officials who believe that climate change is a big problem. There’s no reasonable way to tackle that problem without replacing much of the built environment with more modern, more energy-efficient structures. But in historically designated neighborhoods this is generally impossible. At times, cities even prevent homeowners from installing modern energy-efficient windows—insisting instead on keeping old-fashioned draftier wooden ones in place. In specific situations one can imagine a rationale for this kind of broad-brush preservation.


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The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

In contrast, Eric Klinenberg strongly supports efforts to densify cities and discourages the building of single-family homes. To him, the 2,500-square-foot (232-square-meter) home in the suburbs represents both an environmental disaster and a threat to the affordability of small residences for “singletons.”115 Nothing better illustrates the shift in the built environment of a post-familial society than the proliferation of plans for the construction of “micro-apartments” in cities like Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. These residences of less than 300 square feet (28 square meters) would make even a two-bedroom co-op in Brooklyn, not to mention a single-family house like that of my Flatbush ancestors, seem like the Ponderosa Ranch and obviously are intended to house single young professionals; it is inconceivable for middle- or even working-class families to inhabit such spaces.116 PRICING OUT FAMILIES As previously mentioned, middle-income housing affordability constitutes a huge constraint on family formation in many cities.

Massive farmland losses in the United States—which, since 1950, represent an area larger than the states of Texas and Oklahoma together—have been more than compensated for by total agricultural productivity, which has increased 160 percent.189 Expanding cities are not the primary cause for the loss of most US farmland—overall, urban areas account for only 3 percent of the country’s land area—but instead, such things as market forces, technological changes, and the business decisions of farmers themselves seem to be the primary cause.190 This is also true in Canada, where urban development covers only 3 percent of the land in the country’s agricultural belt.191 The Malthusian idea is even more absurd in Australia, where the built environment covers only 0.2 percent of the country’s total area.192 Since 1981, Australia’s agricultural land has shrunk by an area double the size of the state of Victoria. Urbanization is not a factor. The agricultural land taken out of production since 1981 is more than 50 times the land area of all the urbanization that has developed in Australia since western colonization began.193 Indeed, the world is not facing a crisis of too little arable land or too poor food production, as commonly asserted by neo-Malthusians.

God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. BLANCHFLOWER, David G. (2010, January 21). “Credit Crisis Creates Lost Generation: David G. Blanchflower,” bloomberg.com, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aJ62ylOdJaAI (webpage discontinued). BOARD ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS. (2009). Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions. BOCK, Arthur E.R. (1955). Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. BOGART, William. (2006). Don’t Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the 21st Century, Cambridge: University Press.


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Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

They are testament to the fact that this oil-rich country of 186 million people has a burgeoning middle and upper-middle class, and how wealth distribution is changing in its urban areas. The boom in such properties is partly a response to high crime rates, as we’ve seen. However, ironically, a 2014 study published in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment suggested that moving to a house inside the fortress might actually increase the chances of someone trying to break into your property. Anyone well off enough to be able to live in a gated community is assumed by burglars to have something worth stealing. The report did acknowledge that the compounds offer levels of protection higher in general than those outside them, but said that they leave public spaces deserted and at higher risk of crime.

.; Christiaensen, Luc; Dabalen, Andrew L.; and Gaddis, Isis, Poverty in a rising Africa: overview (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2015) Breetzke, Gregory D., Landman, Karina and Cohn, Ellen G., ‘Is it safer behind the gates? Crime and gated communities in South Africa’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 2014), pp. 123–139 Ediagbonya, Michael, ‘A Study of the Portuguese–Benin trade relations: Ughoton as a Benin port (1485–1506)’, International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (July–September 2015), pp. 206–221 Fisher, Max, ‘The dividing of a continent: Africa’s separatist problem’, The Atlantic, 10 September 2012 Global Study on Homicide 2013, United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC), March 2014 ‘International Court of Justice gives judgment in Cameroon–Nigeria boundary dispute’, International Court of Justice Press Release, 10 October 2002 (www.un.org/press/en/2002/icj603.doc.htm) ‘Land and Maritime Boundary between Cameroon and Nigeria’, The Hague Justice Portal (www.haguejusticeportal.net/index.php?

Macgoye) 159 Communist Party Chinese government 12, 15, 18–21, 23–33 Soviet Union 188 Congress Party, India 132 Cornish nationalists 225 Coulter, Ann 39 Creemers, Rogier 28–9, 30, 31 crime rates, African 172 Crisis Resolution Security Services 40–1 Croatia 2, 199, 200 Cultural Revolution, Chinese 15 cyber-security legislation, Chinese 30–3 Cyprus 244 D Dalits/Untouchables 146–9 Darling, Patrick 160 d’Azeglio, Massimo 196 defection from East Germany 185–6, 188–90 Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) 107 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 164, 166 Deng Xiaoping 15–16, 21, 26 Denmark 2, 200, 202–3 Deterling, Harry 186 Dome of the Rock 82 drug running 46, 51–2 Duffy, Gillian 234 Durand, Henry Mortimer 143 Durand Line 143 Dynamo Dresden ‘Ultras’ 210 E e-commerce 33 East Germany 183–7, 188–9, 190–1 East Pakistan see Bangladesh Eastern European migrants 194–6, 234–5 Eastern Turkestan Republic 17 The Economist 173 education China 24–5 Germany 191 Israel 85 Middle East 115 United Kingdom 231 United States of America 58–9, 63–4 Edward I of England, King 222 Egypt 78, 89–90, 101, 106 Egyptian–Israel border wall 78 English Channel 200 Eritrea 165 Estonia 2, 198 Ethiopia 165 Europe 2, 6, 116, 186–8 European Commission 197 European Economic Community (EEC) 193 European Union 3, 6, 193 border controls 198–200, 210–11 dilution of sovereignty 193–4 Eurozone 194, 196 financial crash (2008) 196 freedom of movement 194–6 immigration 194–6, 197–202, 203–11, 246, 250–1 Muslim population and integration 203–6, 239–40 nationalism 6, 193, 196–8, 206–12 public services 201–2 terrorism 200, 201, 205 uniting East and West Europe 194–6 see also individual countries by name F Facebook 4, 29 Farook, Syed Rizwan 51 Farrakhan, Louis 65 Fatah 87, 88–9 Federally Administered Tribal Areas 144 Fergany, Nader 112 financial crash (2008) 196 financial inequality 175 Africa 170–1, 172–3, 174, 176–7 China 12, 20, 21–3, 26 Germany 191 Israel 81–2, 85 United Kingdom 231–3 First Intifada (1987–93) 74, 90 flooding 133–6 Foreign Affairs magazine 205–6, 246–7 foreign aid budgets 250 France 201–2, 203, 204–6, 211 Freedom Party, Austria 211 G Gandhi, Indira 129 Gandhi, Mahatma 125, 147 Gandhi, Rajiv 129 gated communities 172–6 Gaza 74, 87–90, 245–6 General Law of Population (1974), Mexican 50 Gerges, Fawaz 78, 114 Germany ageing population 201 Berlin Wall 1, 183–4, 185–6, 188–9, 192 East and West Germany 183–93 immigration 201, 207–11 Muslim population figures 204 right-wing parties 209–11 unification 189–93 Ghana 169, 176 Gleicke, Iris 209 globalization 4, 53, 170, 233, 249 ‘Gold Star parents’, US 61 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 226–7 Goodhart, David 232–3 Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu, King 171 Gorbachev, Mikhail 1, 188 Graham, Lindsey 40 Great Depression 46 Great Firewall of China 27–33 Great Wall of China 12–16 Greece 2, 194, 199, 200–1, 205, 207 Green March, Moroccan 156 Green Zone, Baghdad 100–1, 243–4 Guizhou province, China 24 H Hadith 113 Hadrian, Rod 40 Hadrian’s Wall 217–18, 219, 220–1 Hamas 78, 87–9, 91, 93 Han people 13–14, 17, 18, 19, 27 Handala 72 Haredi Jews 80, 81–4 Hari, Michael 41 Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami 132 Heyer, Heather 64 Hezbollah 102 Himalayas 19, 134, 140 Hindus 125, 128–9, 131–2, 135, 145–50 Hollande, François 205 Honecker, Erich 188 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix 169 Houthis’ forces, Shia 104, 108 hukou system 24 Human Rights Watch 130 human settlement, early 4 Hungary 2, 188, 194, 199–200, 205, 207, 246 hunter-gatherers 2 Hussein, Saddam 101, 107, 109, 111 Hutus 166 I ijtihad 113 immigration within Africa 171–2 Egyptian–Israel border 78 European Union 194–6, 197–202, 205–6, 207–12, 246, 250–1 importance of integration 250–1 India 124–5, 126, 127, 128–32, 135, 248 Kuwait–Iraq border 110 Mexico 44–5, 50 ‘open borders’ theory 246–9 United Kingdom 234–5 United States of America 41, 46–51, 56–7 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 46–7 independence movements, African 155–7, 164–5 India 19 Bangladesh border fence 2, 123–5, 130, 133 Bango Bhoomi theory 132–3 Bhutan and Nepal borders 140 caste system 145–9 Comprehensive Integrated Border Management System (CIBMS) 141–2 immigration 124–5, 126, 127, 128–32, 135 Kashmir – ‘Line of Control’ 141, 142, 143 Myanmar border and Naga tribes 138–40 Pakistan border 2, 140–3, 145 partition of 125–6, 127, 140, 141 religious divisions 125–6, 129, 131–3, 135, 145–9 unrest in Assam 128–30 India Pakistan Border Ground Rules Agreement (1960–61) 142 Initium Media 29 Inkatha Freedom Party 168 Inner Mongolia 17 International Court of Justice (ICJ) 167–8 International Organization for Migration 134–5 internet 5, 27–33, 112, 113 Iran 2, 6, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 116, 144 Iran–Iraq War 5 Iraq 2, 42, 100–1, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 111, 116, 246 Iraq War (2003–11) 100–1, 109, 116 Iraqi Kurdistan 111 Ireland 229, 235 Iron Curtain 184, 186–7 Islam in Africa 170 Dome of the Rock 82 ijtihad and the ‘closing of the Arab mind’ 113 in India 125–6, 129 integration in the EU 203–6 radical organizations 18, 51, 79, 101, 104, 105, 107, 114, 128, 137, 246 Sunni and Shia division 4, 5, 6, 102–3, 104–6, 107–8, 109, 115, 116, 144 Uighur Muslims 18 in the United Kingdom 204, 237–9 Islamic State (IS) 18, 79, 104, 105, 107, 114, 246 Israel 1, 6 Arab population 84–6 Bedouin community 85–6 Christian population 85 comparative stability 92–3 division amongst Jews 80–4 education 85 ethnic divides 79 financial inequality 81–2, 85 gender divisions 82–3 Israel Defense Force (IDF) 86 political divides 83 religious sites 82–3 Israel and Palestine 1, 6, 71–3 East Jerusalem 74 Gaza border 78, 245 history of borders dispute 73–4 Iron Dome anti-missile system 245–6 Israeli point of view 74, 76–8, 79, 84 Jewish settlements in the West Bank 74, 76 Palestinian point of view 74, 76, 78, 90–1 suicide bombers 76–7, 78, 245 two-state solution 77, 84, 88, 92 ‘Walled Off Hotel’ 72–3 West Bank dividing wall 71–3, 74, 76–7 Italy 196, 197, 200, 201, 205 Ivory Coast 169 J Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir) 77–8 Jacobite army 220–1 Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen 132 James VI of Scotland and I of England, King 222 Japan 20 Jerusalem 74, 93 see also Western Wall jihadist organizations 18, 51, 79, 101, 114, 115 see also Islam; Islamic State (IS); terrorism Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 125 Jones, Reece 124, 133 Jordan 76, 91–2, 106–7 Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 175 Judt, Tony 197 Juncker, Jean-Claude 197 Jung, Carl 186 K Karachi Agreement (1949) 142 Kashmir 141, 142, 143 Kassem, Suzy 95 Kenya 159, 165 Khan, Abdur Rahman 143 Khan, Humayun 61 Khan, Khizr and Ghazala 61 Khatun, Felani 124 Klein, Horst 186 Kohl, Helmut 188 Koran 113, 116 Kornbluth, David 77, 79, 84 Krenz, Egon 188 Kshatriyas 146 Kurdistan/Kurds 110–11 Kuwait 2, 106, 109–10 L Labour Party, UK 233 Lagos, Nigeria 174 Lambert, Charles 205–6 Land and Maritime Boundary dispute 164–5, 167 Latin America 174 see also Mexico Latvia 2, 198 Le Guin, Ursula K. 119 Le Monde newspaper 205 Le Pen, Marine 211 Lebanon 42, 91 Liberia 166 Libya 101, 106 Lincoln, Abraham 65 Lithuania 2, 198 Louisiana Purchase 43 Lu Wei 32–3 M Macedonia 2, 200 Machel, Graça 173 Malik, Tashfeen 51 Manchuria 13–14, 17 Manusmriti 145–6 Mao Zedong 15, 18, 20–1 Marshall Plan 250 Mauritania 156 Maximus, General Magnus 219–20 McCain, John 61 Melilla 198–199 Merkel, Angela 192, 207, 210, 211 Mexican–American War 43, 45 Mexican Repatriation 46 Mexico 3, 43–54 Middle East Arab minority groups 110–11, 116 attitude to Palestine 91–2 barrier building 99–100, 106–10 civil wars 104–5, 106–7, 108, 198 defensive city walls 99–100 development reports 112–13, 114–15 education 115 Green Zone, Baghdad 100–1 ijtihad 113 refugees 198 religious division 102–6, 107–8, 109, 115–16 terrorist threat 99–101, 103–4 ‘Three Deficits’ 112–13 uniting Arabia 114–17 see also individual countries by name migration see immigration Mimroth, P.


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Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality by Melissa Bruntlett, Chris Bruntlett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, ASML, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, intermodal, Jones Act, Loma Prieta earthquake, megacity, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, safety bicycle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, starchitect, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Seeing the City at Eye Level Viewing Rotterdam as a place with limitless potential, Laven and his colleagues at STIPO have spent recent years studying the importance of repairing the urban fabric at ground level. After the war, the “blank canvas” created by the bombing removed certain architectural constraints—such as height, color, and context—leading to some stunning and innovative experiments with the built environment. “Rotterdam is known as a place where you can see all of the postwar experiments that ever happened in architecture,” he says. “The attitude was ‘we have to rebuild the city. We have to do it fast because there is a shortage of housing. But it’s okay if we make some mistakes, because we’ll just demolish them and start again.’”

He cites a view of architectural theorist Mark Wigley, a professor at Columbia University, that architecture is one’s outermost layer of clothing. A person dressed down in jeans and a sweater might get away with cursing, but the same person dressed in a suit would have to behave very differently. “Similarly,” Fleming contends, “the built environment dictates our behavior. People will love and care for beautiful architecture and will be proud of it and take care of it.” If anything can be taken from examples like the Hovenring in Eindhoven or even the Dafne Schippersbrug in Utrecht, it’s the value of good design—which is to say, not design for design’s sake, but functional design that serves a purpose beyond simply being attractive.

Part of that shared experience, and something Van der Kloof maintains is vital to the program, is learning to negotiate real-life conditions. She recalls seeing similar schemes where participants learn to ride in a park, building the skills to use a bicycle but not necessarily apply these skills to their daily life. “It may make sense in cities where the built environment is not so great,” she says. “But over here, why would you only teach people to ride circles in a park, when you want them to use it in their daily life?” In fact, she relishes the moments when she passes by former students on the street, using a bike to get from home to school, or the shop, or any other practical location, because it means they are enjoying the incomparable freedom and independence that cycling can offer.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books. Dodd, Nigel. 1994. The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason and Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Doling, John, and Richard Ronald. 2010. ‘Home Ownership and Asset-Based Welfare’. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 25, 165–173. Dolphin, T. 2009. Time for Another People’s Budget. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Dorling, Danny. 2014. All That Is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times, and What We Can Do about It. London: Penguin. Dowling, Tim. 2014. ‘Deep Concerns: The Trouble with Basement Conversions’.

Towards a Sustainable Private Rented Sector: The Lessons from Other Countries. London: The London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www2.lse.ac.uk/geographyAndEnvironment/research/london/Home.aspx. Scanlon, Kathleen, and Christine Whitehead. 2011. ‘The UK Mortgage Market: Responding to Volatility’. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 26 (3): 277–93. Schularick, M., and A. M. Taylor. 2009. ‘Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870–2008’. NBER Working Paper Series no. 15512, November. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1954. History of Economic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1975.

The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-Checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything. Ripon: Little Dice. Solow, Robert M. 1956. ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth’. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1): 65–94. Stephens, Mark. 1993. ‘Housing Finance Deregulation: Britain’s Experience’. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 8 (2): 159–75. Stephens, Mark. 2007. ‘Mortgage Market Deregulation and Its Consequences’. Housing Studies 22 (2): 201–20. Stephens, Mark, C. Whitehead, and M. Munro. 2005. Lessons from the Past, Challenges for the Future for Housing Policy. London: Department of Communities and Local Government.


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Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

One of the amazing gifts of nature is its diversity, and forcing it into standardized boxes or forcing it to produce at a faster pace than its own rhythms can be ecologically destructive. The built environment tends to be homogenized when corporations of ever-increasing size construct it such that industrial parks, strip malls, cities and suburbs everywhere become increasingly indistinguishable. Like “quality time” we can speak of “quality space” as referring to the ever-rarer places of qualitative diversity and uniqueness, which tourists flock to precisely because of the rarity of the qualitatively beautiful in the built environment of recent capitalism. Similarly nature has been so sourced for raw materials and so polluted, or in short so stressed by every increasing rate of turnover and expansion of capital, that tourists will often pay top dollar for a taste of the qualitative in relatively pristine natural places (no place is truly pristine any more).

Capital homogenizes natural landscapes by destroying species diversity, by desertification, by pollution, by monoculture, by harvesting “exotic animals”, by strip mining, by strip malls, by diverting rivers, by urbanization and suburbanization, by overfishing in the oceans, by building dams, by paving over the landscape, by clear-cutting forests or by any smoothing or homogenizing of the landscape that would speed up the turnover of capital’s circuits and thus profits. In general space is homogenized by capital when its diversity gets in the way of capital mobility, when mass production and consumption require standardization, and when the built environment is standardized by capitalist commercialization and profit fixation. The material, qualitative or use-value characteristics of space can be quite resistant to being totally subsumed to short-term profit maximization. A major result of this is that capital has always developed unevenly spatially.


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Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

Along the way, I learned that simplicity can be entirely compatible with comfort and beauty. Compared to what I was used to, ecovillage homes felt less intrusive; often they enhanced the landscape. Their angles were more rounded, they had plenty of natural light, and they felt somehow healthier. Harmonizing the built environment with nature can be as good for people as it is for the Earth. If I had to find one word to describe how ecovillages look and feel – especially the ones that have built themselves from the ground up – it would be “organic.” And, yes, I did see a few funky structures built entirely from natural or recycled materials – including some I would never want to live in.

Co-housing, with its integration of private and shared living spaces, felt like the right balance. Strohpolis, Sieben Linden’s beautiful three-story straw-bale townhouses, also felt comfortable – especially when I experienced how well straw insulates against sound and considered the ecological benefits of shared wall space. As I observed my responses to the built environment in fourteen different ecovillages, I found myself tucking little tips and images into my mental storehouse of ideas for my own home. My mind continually returned to questions about balance: how to find the right balance between my needs for privacy and community, between the trade-offs that come with low-tech and high-tech, between my personal preferences and planetary wellbeing.

It is one thing, though, to make a personal commitment to this way of communicating, and an entirely different thing to live alongside dozens or even hundreds of others who share your commitment. When an entire community dedicates itself to effective communication, the result is powerful and appealing. Box 5.1 Architectures of Intimacy The built environments of ecovillages are not just about saving energy and water. They are about people. Common houses, courtyards, pedestrian walkways, off-leash pet areas, and small alcoves in doorways: all of these are natural gathering places. I recall a wonderful conversation I had in a hand-sculpted window box at Sieben Linden: the soft cob edges seemed to soften the edges of discussion.


Green Interior Design by Lori Dennis

big-box store, carbon footprint, clean water, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), McMansion, the built environment

Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS)—a requirement that is used to ensure the organic status of textiles, from the harvesting of raw materials through environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing, packaging, labeling, exploration, and distribution in order to provide credible assurance to the end consumer. green—philosophy supporting social, economic, and environmental sustainability. green design—a philosophy of designing the built environment with the principles of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. green energy—see clean energy. Green Seal—an independent and nonprofit organization that evaluates and recommends products based on criteria that emphasize pollution prevention and environmentally responsible life cycle management.

Council members work together to develop industry standards, design, and construction practices as well as guidelines, operating practices, policy positions, and educational tools that support the adoption of sustainable design and building practices. Members also forge strategic alliances with industry and research organizations, federal government agencies, and state and local governments to transform the built environment. As the leading organization that represents the entire building industry on environmental building matters, USGBC’s unique perspective and collective power enable members to effect change in the way buildings are designed, built, operated, and maintained. The USGBC’s greatest strength is the diversity of its membership.


The Fundamentals of Interior Design by Dodsworth, Simon, Anderson, Stephen

carbon footprint, country house hotel, folksonomy, Ford Model T, the built environment

Many people understand this, and they also understand that they do not have the necessary insight, skills, and intellectual grasp of the issues to tackle the job themselves. And so there is the need for professional interior designers. What is interior design? Good interior design adds a new dimension to a space. It can increase our efficiency in the way we go about our daily lives, and it adds depth, understanding, and meaning to the built environment. Thoughtful and well-crafted design makes a space easier to understand, and experiencing such a space lifts the spirit, too. It is, therefore, not just about the aesthetic; it is a practical and philosophical discipline. Beautiful spaces show a logical and rational questioning of the status quo and can be an honest attempt to find new and exciting ways to lead our lives.

Some architects will limit their involvement to this, while others will also consider furniture and fittings in addition to materials and finishes. Interior architects generally focus their skills on existing structures and repurposing them to suit new functions, and as such they will often see their work as a sustainable way of dealing with the built environment. They will pay a great deal of regard to the previous life of a building and usually allow this knowledge to provide some connection between the building and their newly created interior. Interior decorators generally work with clients who want to change the look and feel of a space without resorting to major structural change or intervention.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

Contents Introduction 1 Big Capital 2 The Financialization of Housing and Planning 3 Demolitions 4 From Bricks to Benefits 5 Generation Rent 6 The ‘Right to the City’ Notes Acknowledgements Follow Penguin ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anna Minton is a writer, journalist and Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. Her first book, Ground Control, was published in 2009 to widespread acclaim. The Royal Commission’s Fellow in the Built Environment between 2011 and 2014, she is a regular contributor to the Guardian and a frequent broadcaster and commentator. She lives in South London with her partner and their two sons. PENGUIN BOOKS BIG CAPITAL ‘Diligent and determined … eye-opening … Minton builds a powerful case … really it is a call to imagine what is politically possible’ Richard Godwin, Evening Standard ‘Powerfully written … It’s hard not to come away with a fresh sense of outrage’ Matthew Partridge, Moneyweek ‘A studied, sustained attack on a market that has been mishandled by successive governments for 40 years, not because politicians have been unable to remedy it but because it has been expedient not to.

Chazan, Guy, ‘Germany: Berlin’s war on gentrification’, Financial Times, 10 October 2016 15. ‘Land Value Taxation’, House of Commons Library, 17 November 2014 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to the 1851 Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition, which awarded me a two-year fellowship in the Built Environment in 2011, to enable me to continue my research and write a second book, to follow Ground Control. On Big Capital I was very lucky to work again with my editor Helen Conford and agent Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown, ably assisted by the team at Penguin, Shoaib Rokadiya and Richard Duguid, and dedicated copy editor Bela Cunha.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

4 At other times, they were larger: what size should a railroad car be, a city street, or a corporation? Government agencies, industrial consor­ tia, and scientific committees created the standards and category sys­ tems. So did mail-order firms, machine-tool manufacturers, animal breeders, and thousands of other actors. Most of these activities be­ came silently embodied in the built environment and in notions of good practice. The decisions taken in the course of their construction are forever lost to the historical record. In fact, their history is consid­ ered by most to be boring, trivial, and unworthy of investigation. There are some striking similarities to our own late twentieth­ century historical moment in that faced by Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century.

How do we perceive this densely saturated classified and textured world? Under the sway of cognitive idealism, it is easy to see classifications as properties of mind and standards as ideal numbers or floating cultural inheritances. But they have material force in the world . They are built into and embed­ ded in every feature of the built environment (and in many of the nature-culture borderlands, such as with engineered genetic organisms). All classification and standardization schemes are a mixture of physi­ cal entities, such as paper forms, plugs, or software instructions en­ coded in silicon, and conventional arrangements such as speed and rhythm, dimension, and how specifications are implemented.

Many of these choices become standardized and built into the environment around us; for example, the range of clothing we select is institutionalized by the retail stores to which we have access, traditions of costuming, and so forth. To think of this formally, the institutionalization of categorical work across multiple communities of practice, over time, produces the structures of our lives, from clothing to houses. The parts that are sunk into the built environment are called here boundary infrastructures­ objects that cross larger levels of scale than boundary objects. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions for research into classifications, standards, and their complex relation­ ships with memberships in communities of practice.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Culture works because culture is first of all the sum of stories we tell ourselves about who we are and want to be, individually and collectively. Culture works also as the staging ground of these identity narratives and of our daily routines. Culture comprises and constitutes the places where we 1 Richard Ma xwell live; it is the built environment and the peopled landscape. It also works in the memories that reside in the flesh, from the spark of recognition, an uncanny remembrance, to the dull reflex of forgetting and the dogged reminders inhabiting bone and muscle of a body once stretched in sport, childbirth, dance, labor, lovemaking.

The shopping mall, the strip mall, the big-box retailer, the “revitalized” downtown, the hypermarché, hipermercado, the galerías . . . by any other name, spring up everywhere, as Susan G. Davis argues in chapter 7, to form a veritable landscape of shopping. Davis explains how the experience of shopping has been shaped by an ensemble of global enterprises that are working to synchronize development of the built environment, not to the scale and rhythm of human needs and a fragile environment, but attuned instead to cycles of real-estate speculation and the frantic pace of retail turnover. Commercialization has been an extensive process in the sense that values and practices associated with commercial, market criteria have spread across geopolitical territories incorporating previously nonmarket economies or noncommercial areas of life inside market economies.

In-store researchers corner consumers right as they reach for the product on the shelf, accosting them to ask why they have picked out a particular tube of toothpaste, and sometimes paying them for answers.86 Shopping, in short, has become the site of intensive scrutiny, even surveillance. Paco Underhill’s behavioral research firm, Envirosell, has developed a range of techniques for plumbing the interaction between “consumers and products, and consumers and commercial spaces.” As its name implies, Envirosell focuses on the role of the built environment in selling, which is not surprising given that Underhill studied with the late William H. Whyte, the noted analyst of urban public spaces. At the behest of a retailer or a manufacturer, Envirosell deploys “ethnographers” to track people, following them while they shop unawares. Small time-lapse cameras and real-time video cameras, both hidden, are good sources of information on spatial relationships and display problems.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The changes in a city’s built environment largely determine its future income and expenditures. Of course, beyond being useful in projecting future municipal financial situations, the changes in the built environment and its value, determined by rents and real estate prices, are essential to be able to manage what I suggest is the main function of urban planners: maintaining mobility and housing affordability. In many cities, these essential databases concerning the built environment are either not maintained or are poorly maintained. And when they do exist, they are rarely analyzed and used to guide policy. I will repeat Angus Deaton’s quotation that cited in chapter 6: “Without data, anyone who does anything is free to claim success.”

Urban Planners Usually Have a Deep Knowledge of Their Own City Although, in the following chapters I will at times be critical of the planning profession, I think that urban planners are often very competent in managing the day-to-day operations of the city they work in. They usually know their city in great detail, including the history behind the complex features of the built environment. They work under great pressure because a city is constantly transforming itself, and this constant evolution cannot be delayed by asking for more time for reflection or further studies. They are also subject to pressure from various interest groups that have a stake in the changes affecting cities.

I differentiate “urban planning” from “design”: planning involves various tasks, many of them being projections, for instance, demographic and traffic projections or projection of future demand for water or energy. Design is a more specific part of urban planning that involves imposing physical limits on the built environment. Design involves producing the plans of individual buildings but also drawing up zoning plans, limiting the height of buildings, separating land use, establishing urban growth boundaries, and similar activities. 2. Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) was the founder of the garden city movement. He was a social reformer and utopian planner dedicated to improving the social conditions of workers in England in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

The two most plausible pathways for the green-space effect on reducing the social gradient in mortality were reduction of stress and promotion of physical activity. Both are plausible and both may be playing a role. Either way, making access to green space a priority for urban environments should be a priority. In Britain the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment estimates that if the budget for new road building were diverted, it could provide for 1,000 new urban parks at an initial capital cost of £10 million each. Creating 1,000 new parks would save around 74,000 tons of carbon from being emitted.39 Options are available that would create a greener and more health-equitable urban environment.

Available from: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_349054_en.html. 38Mitchell R, Popham F. Effect of exposure to natural environment on health inequalities: an observational population study. Lancet. 2008; 372(9650): 1655–60. 39Bird D. Government advisors demand urgent shift in public investment to green England’s cities. CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), 2009. 40Sloman L, Cavill N, Cope A, Muller L, Kennedy A. Analysis and Synthesis of Evidence on the Effects of Investment in Six Cycling Towns. Report for Department for Transport and Cycling England. 2009. 41City of Copenhagen. The Bicycle Account 2013 [30/06/2014]. Available from: http://subsite.kk.dk/sitecore/content/Subsites/CityOfCopenhagen/SubsiteFrontpage/LivingInCopenhagen/CityAndTraffic. 42Jones SJ, Lyons RA, John A, Palmer SR.

Index AARP, here ACE study, here active transport, here African-Americans, here, here age-friendly cities, here ageing and gender, here, here global populations, here and health behaviours, here and income security, here and political participation, here and quality of life, here and retirement, here and social participation, here Ageing in the Twenty-First Century, here Ahmedabad, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) aid, here air pollution, here, here, here, here Aitsi-Selmi, Amina, here alcohol use, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and adverse childhood experience, here and education, here Iceland and, here price of, here, here, here and public policy, here, here Russia and, here and unemployment, here Allen, Woody, here, here Alzheimer’s, here American Gynaecological and Obstetric Society, here American Medical Association, here Argentina, here, here, here debt repayments, here politics and economics, here Aristotle, here Armenia, here Athenaeum Club, here Atkinson, Sir Tony, here Austen, Jane, here, here austerity, here, here Australia, and cigarette packaging, here Australian aboriginals, here, here Austria, here autism, here autonomic nervous system, here baboons, here Bachelet, Michelle, here, here Baltimore, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Balzac, Honoré de, here, here Ban Ki-moon, here Banerjee, Abhijit, here, here, here Bangladesh, here, here garment workers, here, here improved child mortality, here Barker, David, here Becker, Gary, here behavioural genetics, here Beijing, here Belgium, here Bentham, Jeremy, here Berkman, Lisa, here Beveridge, William, here bicycles, here Birdsall, Nancy, here Birmingham and early child development, here fire fighters, here Björk, here Blair, Tony, here Blinder, Alan, here Bobak, Martin, here Body Mass Index, here, here Bolivia, pension scheme, here Botswana, here Boyce, Tom, here brain development, here Brazil, here, here, here, here, here, here and ageing population, here, here, here, here and commission report, here economic growth, here, here breast screening, here Britain, see United Kingdom British birth cohort study, here British Columbia, here, here, here British Medical Association, here, here British Medical Journal, here British Social Attitudes Survey, here British Virgin Islands, here Bromley-by-Bow, here Brown, Gordon, here Bulgaria, here, here Burns, Sir Harry, here Cambodia, here Cameron, David, here Canada, here, here aboriginal Canadians, here Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, here cancer risk, and diet, here cancer survival rates, here capital punishment, here capitalism, here, here, here patrimonial, here carbon trading, here Cardiff, here Carnochan, DCS John, here, here cash-transfer schemes, here, here, here Castro, Fidel, here Chandler, Michael, here Chandola, Tarani, here Chaplin, Charlie, here chemotherapy, here chess, here child poverty, here childbirth, here childcare, here, here, here childhood development and adult health, here and brain development, here critical periods in, here, here genetic and environmental factors in, here, here improvements in Birmingham, here measures of well-being, here and parenting, here social gradient in, here, here, here, here, here, here and social mobility, here and speech, here children obesity levels in, here, here underweight, here children’s centres, here Chile, here, here, here, here earthquake, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here China, here, here, here, here education system, here, here, here garment exports, here life expectancy, here, here cholesterol, here, here, here Cicero, here, here civil service, see Whitehall Studies Clean Air Act (1956), here climate change (global warming), here, here Closing the Gap, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Coca-Cola, here ‘coca-colonisation’, here cocaine, here Cochrane, John, here cognitive function, here Cohe, G. A., here Colombia, here, here Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, here Commission on Global Governance for Health, here, here Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH), here Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Closing the Gap; European Review of Social Determinants and the Health Divide; Fair Society, Healthy Lives communism, and health outcomes, here congestion charging, here contraception, here, here cooking stoves, here Copenhagen, here cortisol, here, here Costa Rica, here, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here, here, here pre-school education, here cotton farmers, here, here Coubertin, Baron Pierre de, here crèches, here crime, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fear of, here, here, here see also delinquency; gangs Cuba, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here, here, here pre-school education, here, here cultural sensitivity, here Czech Republic, here, here, here Daily Mail, here Daily Telegraph, here Deaton, Angus, here debt repayments, here, here delinquency, here, here, here, here dementia, here democracy, and freedom, here Democratic Republic of Congo, here Denmark, here, here, here social mobility, here, here depression, here, here, here deprivation, European measure of, here, here development states, here diabetes, here, here, here, here and adverse childhood experience, here, here in Australian aboriginals, here Dickens, Charles, here, here, here, here, here, here diet and disease, here Mediterranean, here ‘difference principle’, here disability, and life expectancy, here disempowerment, here, here, here, here Dominican Republic, here, here, here Dostoevsky, Fyodor, here Drèze, Jean, here, here, here, here drug regimens, adherence to, here drug use, here, here, here, here, here, here and adverse childhood experience, here Duflo, Esther, here, here, here Dylan, Bob, here Easterly, William, here Ebola, here economic growth, here, here economic inequality, see income inequalities Economist, here, here, here education and cash-transfer schemes, here and fertility rates, here Finnish system,, here, here, here, here gender equity in, here and intimate partner violence, here and life expectancy, here, here and material deprivation, here and measures of ill-health, here pre-school, here, here, here, here social gradient in, here university education, here, here, here, here, here, here, here women and secondary education, here women and tertiary education, here Egypt, obesity levels, here, here, here, here Eisenhower, Dwight D., here employment conditions, here see also unemployment empowerment, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and education, here and health behaviours, here political, here and social participation, here England, see United Kingdom English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), here, here English Review, see Fair Society, Healthy Lives epigenetics, here equality of opportunity, here, here, here Estonia, here, here Ethiopia, here, here European Central Bank, here, here, here European Review of Social Determinants and the Health Divide, here, here, here, here, here, here Evans, Robert, here Evelyn, John, here Everington, Sam, here exercise, see physical activity Experience Corps, here Fair Society, Healthy Lives, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fairness (definition), here fecklessness, here, here, here, here fertility rates, here Financial Times, here Finland, here, here, here, here education system, here, here, here, here gender equity in education, here fire fighters, here, here, here Fitzgerald, F.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Private investment shapes cities,” she wrote, “but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment.”31 Today city planners swear loyalty to Jane Jacobs’s vision. Her goal of preserving the city’s physical fabric by maintaining the small scale and interactive social life of the streets has been translated into laws for preserving much of the built environment. But these laws go only part of the way toward creating the vibrant city that Jacobs loved. They encourage mixed uses, but not a mixed population. They never speak of maintaining low rents on commercial properties, so they cannot combat the most common means of uprooting the small shop owners who inspired Jacobs’s ideas about social order and the vitality of the street.

Linking herself to an intimate sense of nature and culture, the novelist Paula Fox said she liked “to walk to the grocer on streets lined with old houses that don’t hide the stars, to pass beneath sycamore trees, their changes from leaf to bare branch marking the seasons more intimately than the calendar.” Such an aesthetic appreciation of the built environment was limited, though, to old bourgeois neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Fort Greene, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, whose long blocks of stately, nineteenth-century houses still had an air of dignified distinction.5 During the 1980s and 1990s the migration of more journalists, artists, writers, actors, and filmmakers across the East River began to alter Brooklyn’s image.

And they apply not only to art but to all other forms of culture, including cities.2 If we feel that cities have changed in the renewal and revitalization since Jane Jacobs’s time, and in these processes have lost their authenticity, we are reacting to more than just a measurable change in the built environment: a larger than usual number of buildings torn down, replaced, and renovated beyond recognition. Quantitative has morphed into qualitative change, for both our visual and our emotional experience of the city have been altered. This isn’t just a structural shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society or the result of a periodic boom in investment and construction.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Planning was a matter for ‘negotiation’. As if to symbolize this new balance of power, Blair in 1999 abolished the Royal Fine Art Commission, an independent champion of architectural standards and longstanding thorn in the side of many commercial architects. He replaced it with a Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), astonishing even the developer community by appointing as its chairman their elder statesman, Stuart Lipton. CABE welcomed the Vauxhall tower as ‘clear and attractive’ – though it did object to the Shard. The Blair boom was a long one. It had inherited the upturn in the economy in the later years of the Major administration, and was aided by a declining pound following Britain’s departure from the European Monetary System.

., High Rise 301 Baltic Exchange 131, 215; bombing (1992) 290 Bangladeshi immigrants 275 Bank of England 162, 175, 214; buildings 146, 221, 290; foundation 92, 93 bank holidays, introduction of 182 Bank station 167, 194, 236, 295 banking and financial services industry 92–3, 98, 115, 175, 239, 275, 293–7, 306, 315 Bankside power station 284, 303 Banqueting House (Whitehall) 59, 66, 85, 86 Baptists 66, 84, 136 Barbican 11, 13, 243; estate 253–5, 269, 280, 283, 307, 310; see also Museum of London Barbon, Nicholas 84–5 Barbon, Praise-God 84 Barkers of Kensington (department store) 181 Barking 206, 270 Barlow Commission 232, 240 Barnard’s Inn Hall (Holborn) 49 Barnes 210, 276 Barnett, Dame Henrietta 209 Barons’ War (13th century) 29, 30, 31 baroque architecture 81, 95, 105, 198; revival 198, 199–200, 221–2 Barratt, Nick, Greater London 242 Barry, Sir Charles 146, 153–4 Bartholomew Fair 37 Bart’s see St Bartholomew’s Hospital Basildon 300 Bath House 147 baths and washhouses, public: 19th century 189; 20th century 201, 213; Roman era 11, 12, 13–14, 338 Battersea 8, 17, 136, 165, 272; Arding & Hobbs (department store) 181; power station 284, 327–8 Battersea Fields/Park 183 Bauhaus 232 Baynard’s Castle 26–7 Bayswater 141, 165, 181, 194, 250; Leinster Terrace 141; Porchester Terrace 141; see also Lancaster Gate Bayswater Road 249 Bazalgette, Sir Joseph 164, 168, 176, 177 BBC 299, 329, 334; Broadcasting House 222; Bush House 221 Beatles (band) 261 Beck, Harry 229 Becontree housing estate 223, 228, 252, 269 Bede the Venerable, St 15 Bedford, John Russell, 1st Earl of 45 Bedford, Francis Russell, 4th Earl of 61–2, 70, 83 Bedford, John Russell, 6th Duke of 139 Bedford, Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of 220 Bedford estate 100, 101, 139, 178, 227, 250, 282 Bedford Park 179 Bedford Square 103, 123 beer see brewing and beer Beijing (Peking) 173, 174 Belgravia 72, 100–101, 139–41, 156; Belgrave Square 73, 230; Chester Square 140, 153; churches 137, 153; Eaton Square 137, 153; Wilton Crescent 140; Wilton Place 153 Belsize Park 142 Bentham, Jeremy 145 Bentinck, Hans Willem (later 1st Earl of Portland) 89, 103 Berkeley, George, 1st Earl of 84, 100, 103 Berkeley, Randal, 8th Earl of 220 Berkeley Square 73, 103–4, 123, 220–21, 259, 334 Berkhamsted 24 Berlin 3, 193, 240, 241, 313 Bermondsey 17, 95, 137, 185, 206, 216, 225, 307, 339; abbey 28, 42, 46; see also Shard Bermuda 94 Berners estate 102 Besant, Annie 177 Besant, Sir Walter 2–3, 207–8, 208 Bethnal Green 137, 151, 185, 219, 305; council housing estates 202, 223, 265–6 Betjeman, Sir John 81, 231–2 Bevan, Aneurin 240 Beveridge, William, 1st Baron, report on welfare reform (1942) 240 Bevis Marks (street) 67 Bexley 230 bicycles see cycling Biddle, Martin 15 Big Bang (financial markets deregulation) 293–4, 295–6 Big Ben (bell/clock tower) 154, 179 Bill, Peter 310 Bill Haley and the Comets (band) 248 Bill of Rights (1689) 91 Billingsgate 14, 39, 81; market 163, 284 Birch, John 78 birching (corporal punishment), outlawing 260 Birdcage Walk 197 Birmingham 148, 149, 161, 188, 190, 270, 278, 318; railways 156, 157, 165, 168; town hall 188 Birt, William 209 bishopric of London 17–18 Bishopsgate 11, 27, 49, 310; Pinnacle (22 Bishopsgate) 310, 312 Bismarck, Otto von 176 Black Death (14th-century plague) 33–4, 35, 40, 66 Black Monday (stock market crash, 1987) 296 black population 118, 261, 271, 275, 299 Blackfriars 11, 177; Apothecaries Hall 337; Black Friar pub 27; monastery 27; station 165, 166, 167; theatres 52, 57 Blackfriars Bridge 114, 120 Blackheath 39, 68, 183, 210 Blackwall Docks 131 Blackwall Tunnel 280 Blair, Tony 302–6, 308, 314, 316 Blemond, William de 72 Blériot, Louis 200 Blitz (1940–41) 3, 77, 227, 234–8, 239, 245, 262 Bloomberg Centre (office building) 10, 14 Bloomsbury 72, 100, 101, 123, 139, 172, 250, 284; Bedford Square 103, 123; Bloomsbury Square 72, 100, 139; Brunswick Centre 268; Brunswick Square 125; Friends Meeting House 230; Gordon Square 139; Gower Street 178; Mecklenburgh Square 125; Russell Square 139, 179; St George’s Church 111; Tavistock Square 139; Torrington Square 284; University of London 227, 234, 250, 284; Woburn Square 284; see also British Museum Blore, Edward 146 Blow Up (film) 261 blue plaques scheme 265 Blue Stockings Society 103, 124 Boateng, Paul, Baron 299 Boccaccio, Giovanni 36 Boer War 195 Boleyn, Anne, Queen Consort 44, 46–7 bombing: Great War 216–17; Second World War 3, 77, 227, 234–8, 239, 245, 262; terrorism 290–91, 304–5 Bon, Christoph see Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (architectural practice) Bond, Sir Thomas 84 Bond Street 126, 199, 261, 339 Boodle’s (club) 137 Booth, Charles 184, 187, 208, 334 Boots (chemist) 277 Borough High Street 51, 311 Borough Market 257, 332 boroughs, establishment of 192, 201, 263, 264 Boston (Lincolnshire) 32 Boston (Massachusetts) 118 Boswell, James 107, 126–7 Bosworth Field, Battle of (1485) 39, 40 Boudicca (Celtic queen) 2, 10 Bovis (construction company) 269 Bow 171, 191, 251, 307; Abbey Mills pumping station 164; Bryant & May match factory 189 Bow Street, court 110 Bow Street Runners 112, 148 Bowen, Elizabeth 236 Boyle, Robert 70 Bracknell 251 Bradley, Mary Anne 132 Bradley, Simon 80, 179 Bradwell-on-Sea, St Cedd’s Monastery 18 Bramante, Donato 40 Brasilia 174 Breda, Declaration of (1660) 67 Brentford 125, 206 Brewer Street 338 brewing and beer 42, 96, 112, 206 Brexit (British exit from European Union) 13, 330–31 Brick Lane 261 Bridewell Palace 46, 55 bridges see Albert Bridge; Blackfriars Bridge; Hammersmith Bridge; London Bridge; Putney Bridge; Southwark Bridge; Tower Bridge; Vauxhall Bridge; Waterloo Bridge; Westminster Bridge Bridgewater House 147 Brighton 217; Grand Hotel bombing (1984) 290 Brighton Rock (film) 248 Bristol 40, 57, 131, 278, 318 Britain, Battle of (1940) 234 Britannia (Roman province) 10, 12–13 British Library 145, 250 British Museum 101, 104, 145, 172, 241, 250, 284 British Rail 283, 329 Brixham 89 Brixton 191, 208, 275; Loughborough estate 253; prison 219 Broadgate development 296 Broadwick Street 163 Bromley 230 Brompton Road 256 Bronze Age 8 Brown, George (later Baron George-Brown) 263 Brown, Gordon 314, 315 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 133 Brown’s Hotel 200 Brummell, Beau 138 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 165, 175, 194 Brunelleschi, Filippo 40 Brunswick Centre 268 Brunswick Square 125 Brussels 26, 275, 296, 320 Brutus (legendary founder of London) 8 Brydges Place 338 Brydon, John 198, 199, 283 Brythonic people 16–17 Buchanan, Sir Colin, Traffic in Towns report 278–9, 280, 316 Bucharest 174, 326 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of 84–5 Buckingham and Normanby, John Sheffield, 1st Duke of 85 Buckingham House/Palace 84, 85, 97, 139, 144, 145, 146, 166, 196–7, 304 Buckingham Palace Road 199 Bucklersbury House (office building) 14 Buenos Aires 174 Building Act (1774) 121–2, 123, 135, 159, 188, 211 Bulstrode Park 103 Burbage, James 52 Burbage, Richard 52 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 1st Baroness 187 Burghley, William Cecil, 1st Baron 47, 48 Burke, Edmund 118, 129, 130 Burlington, Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of 84, 102 Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of 105–6, 122 Burnham, Daniel 200 Burns, John 191 Burton, Decimus 135, 138 Burton, James 125, 135 Burton, Sir Montague 245 bus lanes 281 buses 144, 167, 177, 204, 205, 309, 317; double-decker 205, 309, 317; fares 288, 309; routes 23, 205 Bush, George W. 304 Bush, Irving T. 221 Bush House 221 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of 115–16 Byron, George, 6th Baron 127, 183 Byzantium 16, 21 CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) 314 cable car (cross-Thames) 316 Cable Street 42, 131 Cadogan, Charles, 2nd Baron 104 Cadogan estate 104, 140 Cadogan Square 179 Cadwgan ap Elystan (Welsh warlord) 104 Calcutta 37 California 48, 320; gold rush 158; see also Los Angeles; San Francisco Callaghan, James, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff 276 Camberwell 125, 143, 171, 201, 210, 272 Cambridge University 266 Camden, Charles Pratt, 1st Baron 124, 125, 143 Camden, Borough of 264, 270, 330; council housing 268, 272 Camden Lock 330 Camden Town 143, 157, 160, 230, 257 Camelford House 220 Cameron, David 315, 319, 330 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 262, 291 Campbell, Colen 97, 103, 105 Canaletto 99, 206 Canary Wharf 293–5, 329, 338 cannabis 276–7, 305, 318 Cannes, MIPIM construction industry fair 313 Canning Town 313; Ronan Point 267, 273, 323 Cannon Street 7–8; station 7, 165 Canonbury 143 Canova, Antonio 145 Canterbury 17, 18, 35 Carausius (Roman military commander) 12 Carlton Club 192 Carlton House 132, 133, 134, 144 Carlton House Terrace 144, 283 Carnaby Street 261, 338–9 Caroline of Ansbach, Queen Consort 128 Carpaccio, Vittore, ‘Miracle of the True Cross’ 37–8 cars, motor 205, 211, 228, 239, 242, 278; accident rates 205; see also congestion charge zone; dual-carriage way roads; motorways Carshalton 8 Carter Lane 8, 337 Casanova, Giacomo 108, 110, 127, 206 Cassivellaunus (tribal chief) 9 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount (later 2nd Marquess of Londonderry) 137 Catford 208, 230, 240 Catherine of Aragon, Queen Consort 42, 43, 44 Catherine of Braganza, Queen Consort 69, 87 Catherine of Medici, Queen Consort of France 48 Catholicism 17, 38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 61, 88–9, 105, 117; see also papacy Cavendish, Lady Margaret (later Duchess of Newcastle) 102 Cavendish Square 73, 102, 103, 123, 134 Caxton, William 41 Cecil Court 60 Cecil Hotel 177, 221 Cedd, Bishop of London 18 Celts 10, 16–17; language 7, 8, 17 censorship 98, 129, 260 Central Line 194, 204 Centre Point (New Oxford Street; skyscraper) 255–6, 257, 258, 265, 325 Chadwick, Sir Edwin 154–5, 156, 162, 163, 164, 166 Chalcot estate 142–3 Chamberlain, Joseph 190, 224 Chamberlain, Neville 223–4, 226, 232, 234, 240 Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (architectural practice) 253, 254 Chambers, Sir William 122, 123 Chandos, James Brydges, 1st Duke of 102, 106 Charing Cross 84; station 146, 165, 166, 203, 216 Charing Cross Road 177, 256 Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor 18, 24 Charles I, King 60–64, 65, 68; execution 66 Charles II, King 67–70, 73–4, 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 85–6, 87–8, 132 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 44 Charles, Prince of Wales 299 Charlotte Street 207; Schmidt’s restaurant 207 Charterhouse 45, 46 Chartists 161–2, 175, 192 Chatham, William Pitt, 1st Earl of 115, 116, 118 Chaucer, Geoffrey 36–8, 75, 106, 332; The Canterbury Tales 36–7 Cheapside 19, 31, 37, 51, 82, 126; St Mary-le-Bow Church 39, 161 Chelmsford 251, 300 Chelsea 171, 179; Albert Bridge 284; Cheyne Row 104; Cheyne Walk 104; King’s Road 140, 261, 323; Lots Road Power Station 203; Peter Jones (department store) 181; town hall 201; see also Kensington and Chelsea, Royal Borough of Chengdu 326 Chester Square 140; St Michael’s Church 153 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl of 126 Chesterfield House 126, 220 Chesterton, G.

., The Napoleon of Notting Hill 192 Cheyne, Charles (later 1st Viscount Newhaven) 104 Cheyne, William (later 2nd Viscount Newhaven) 104 Chigwell 210 Chinatown 207, 338 Chingford 210 Chislehurst 230 Chiswick 106, 125 cholera 154–5, 162, 163, 164, 176 Christ Church, Spitalfields 95 Christianity 12, 16–18, 136–7; see also Catholicism; Protestantism Christie, James 128 Christ’s Hospital 46 church building: 17th century 61, 66, 80–82; 18th century 94–5, 108, 136; 19th century 136–7, 153, 198; 20th century 209; Norman and medieval 22, 27, 30–31; Saxon 12, 17, 21; Tudor 40 Church Building Act (1818) 136–7 church demolitions 198 Church of England 17–18, 28, 38, 44, 65, 108–9, 136–7, 187; Dissenters and Nonconformists 66, 93, 109, 136 Churchill, Caryl, Serious Money 299 Churchill, John (later 1st Duke of Marlborough) 89, 93 Churchill, Sir Winston 219, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 247 Churchill Gardens estate 252 CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) 241 Cibber, Colley 108 cinemas 213, 232 Circle Line 168, 193, 194 City airport 295 City Hall 309 City of London: 17th century (early) 58, 60, 63; 17th (late) and early 18th centuries 87–9, 90–91, 92–4, 95; 1970s 275, 283–5; 1980s 293–4, 295–7; 1990s 290; 21st century 290, 309, 310, 312, 337–8; Civil War and Commonwealth 63–7, 68; Edwardian 198; Georgian 110, 113–14, 115–18, 126, 130–31, 136, 146, 148; Great Plague 1, 73–5, 80; Great Fire 1, 75–6, 80, 81; Great War 214–15; interwar 221, 227; Norman and medieval 22–3, 25–32, 34–9; post-fire reconstruction 76–83, 86, 244; post-war 239, 242–3, 251, 252–3, 253–5; Restoration 68, 88; Roman 9–14; Saxon 15–21; topography 7–8; Second World War 235, 236, 239; Tudor 39–42, 45–6, 47–50, 55; under William IV 151, 155; Victorian (early) 155, 162–3, 167; Victorian (late) 175, 177, 179–80, 188, 193–4; Viking attacks 18–19, 20–21 City of London Club 284 City of London School 177 City Road 325; Wesley’s Chapel 109 City and South London Railway (CSLR) 193–4 Civic Amenities Act (1967) 270, 282 Civil War, English 1, 2, 63–6, 68, 88, 90 Clapham 17, 143, 242 Clapham Common 183 Clapham sect 136 Clapton 143, 307 Clare Market 197 Clarence House 147 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of 84 Claridge’s (hotel) 200 Claudius, Roman Emperor 9 Clean Air Act (1956) 259, 262, 271 Cleary Garden 13 Clegg, Sir Nick 315 Clerkenwell 27, 51, 76, 82, 207, 306, 339; Northampton estate 143, 187, 220 Cleveland House 147 Clifford Street 106 climate change activism 291 Clockwork Orange, A (film) 269 Clore, Sir Charles 245, 258 Cloth Fair (street) 86 clubs, private members’ 137–8, 147, 180, 192, 284 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 262, 291 Cnut, King 20–21 Coade, Eleanor 123 Coade stone 123 Coal Drops Yard 330 Coal Exchange 284 coal fires 87, 259 coal tax 79, 95 Cobbett, William 171 Cockerell, Samuel Pepys 141 ‘cockney’, use of term 161 coffee houses 67, 93, 131, 137, 306 Coin Street Community Builders 288 Colchester 9, 10 Colechurch, Peter 28 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 153 Coliseum (theatre) 200 College of Arms 86 College of Estate Management 245 College Street 338 Collet, Clara 184 Colman, George, The Clandestine Marriage 126 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) 314 Commission for Local Democracy 308 Commission of Woods and Forests 133 Common Council (City of London) 34–5, 63, 64 Common Market see European Economic Community Commons Preservation Society 183 Commonwealth of England (1649–60) 32, 63, 66–8 Commonwealth Immigrants Acts (1962/1968) 274 Compton, Francis 84 Compton, William, 2nd Baron (later 1st Earl of Northampton) 143, 190 Comyn Ching Triangle 283 congestion charge zone 309–10 Congregationalists 66 Conrad, Joseph, The Heart of Darkness 324 conservation areas 205, 270–71, 282, 325, 326–7 Constable, John 182–3 Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor 12 Constantinople 33, 57 Constantius Chlorus, Roman Emperor 12 contraception 260 Cooper’s Row 13 Copenhagen, Battle of (1807) 130 Coram, Thomas 111, 112, 125 Corbusier, Le (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) 121, 241, 253 Cork Street 84, 106 Corn Laws, repeal of (1841) 161 Cornelys, Teresa 108 Cornhill 93 Cotton, Jack 245, 256, 257, 258, 281 council housing 190, 202, 222–3, 225, 226, 252–3, 255, 265–9, 272, 285, 298, 321–3, 335; selling of 289, 298–9, 322 Council for the Preservation of Rural England 242 council tax 290, 321 counter-reformation 47, 50 County Hall 199, 289, 309 Covent Garden 8, 15, 61–2, 82, 100, 127, 147, 220, 338; market 16, 61–2, 281; piazza 61–2, 70, 100, 220, 333; proposed redevelopment 281–3, 337; shops 128, 283; theatres and opera house 128, 181, 195, 200, 283 Coward, Sir Noël, ‘London Pride’ 236 Cranach, Lucas 40 Cranbourn Street 60 Crawley 251 Crichlow, Frank 261 Cripplegate 253–4; fort 11 Critical Review 126 Cromwell, Oliver 32, 63, 65, 66–7, 68, 74, 171 Cromwell, Richard 67 Cromwell, Thomas 45 Cromwell Road 171, 263 Cross, Richard Assheton, 1st Viscount, Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act (1875) 188 Crossness pumping station 164 Crossrail 204, 281, 303, 318 Crown Estate 133, 169, 221–2, 339 Croydon 270, 317; aerodrome 239 Cruikshank, George, March of Bricks and Mortar 141 Crusades 29 Crystal Palace 170 Cubitt, Thomas 139–41, 142, 152, 156, 169, 250, 333 Cumberland Terrace 134, 135 Cundy, Joseph 140 Cundy, Thomas 153 ‘Cundy’ churches 153 Curtain Theatre 52 Cutler, Sir Horace 285, 287 cycling 205, 316 Dagenham 223, 228, 324 Daily Courant (newspaper) 93, 108 Dalston 17, 216, 301; Fassett Square 334 Dalyell, Sir Tam 303 Dance, George the Elder 113 Dance, George the Younger 113, 121 dandyism 59, 138 Danelaw territory 19 Danes 14, 18–19, 20–21, 24, 26 Darling (film) 261 Dartford 324 Davies, Mary 100–101 de Montfort, Simon, 6th Earl of Leicester 31 De Montfort University 51 death duties 220 death penalty, abolition 260 Debenham & Freebody (department store) 180 decks and decking (architectural design features) 254, 268, 278–9, 280, 281 Defoe, Daniel 74, 96, 98 Dekker, Thomas 53 Delaney, Shelagh 262 demonstrations, political 162, 260–61, 262, 291, 304 department stores 180–81, 200, 222 depression (1929–33) 227, 228 Deptford 95, 109, 175; Pepys estate 253, 322; station 156; town hall 201 Deutsche Bank 296 Devereux Street 84 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 6th Duke of 170 Devonshire, Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of 220 Devonshire House 147, 220 Diana (goddess) 11 Diana, Princess of Wales 299; death 303 Dickens, Charles 160–61, 164, 180, 181, 184–5, 186, 187, 259; Bleak House 160; A Christmas Carol 160; Dombey and Son 157; The Old Curiosity Shop 197; Oliver Twist 185; Our Mutual Friend 160; The Pickwick Papers 161, 180, 182 Dickins & Jones (department store) 180 Diderot, Denis 106, 107 Dilke, Sir Charles 191 Diocletian’s Palace 122 Dior, Christian 239 Disraeli, Benjamin (later 1st Earl of Beaconsfield) 122, 164, 175 Dissenters and Nonconformists 66, 93, 109, 136 dissolution of the monasteries 45–6, 47, 48–9, 53, 56 District Line 168, 194, 203 Dobson, Frank 308 Docklands Light Railway 295 docks and docklands 9, 32, 42, 131, 175, 189, 206, 235, 275, 291; redevelopment 291–5, 313–14, 323–4 Domesday Book 25 Dominicans 30 Dorchester House 220 Dorking 251 Dorling, Danny 320 Dorset, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of 45 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 184 Dover 165 Dowgate 58, 338 Downing, Sir George 98 Downing Street 98, 120; No. 10 98–9, 290 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 186 D’Oyly Carte Opera Company 200 Drake, Sir Francis 48, 258 drugs (narcotics) 185, 276–7, 305, 318 Drury Lane 128, 181, 200; Theatre Royal 69, 108 Dryden, John 107 dual-carriageway roads 243, 270, 279–80, 281, 282 Duke of York’s Theatre (Lincoln’s Inn Fields) 69–70 Dulwich 17, 171, 210 Dulwich College 143 Dunbar, William 43 Dürer, Albrecht 40, 62 Dutch style (architecture) 89, 178, 179, 198 Dyckhoff, Tom 272 Eagle (comic) 246 Ealing 179, 270 Ealing comedies (films) 246, 248, 261 Earls Court motor show 239 East Cross Route (dual-carriageway road) 280 East Ham 201 East India Company 92 Eastcheap 7, 19 EastEnders (soap opera) 334 Eastern Avenue 228 Eastminster Abbey 42 Eaton Square, St Peter’s Church 137, 153 Ebury, manor of 139–40 Economist Buildings, St James Street 280 ecstasy (drug) 305 Edgar Atheling 24 Edgware 229 Edgware Road 9, 10, 263 Edington, Battle of (878) 19 Edmonds, Richard 257 Edmonton 208 Education Act (1870) 176–7 Edward the Confessor, King 21–2, 30 Edward I, King 31–2, 67 Edward II, King 32 Edward III, King 32, 34, 35, 36, 42 Edward IV, King 39 Edward VI, King 47, 49 Edward VII, King 197; as Prince of Wales 195 Edwards, John 132–3 Egremont House 147 Eia, Manor of 100 Eleanor of Provence, Queen Consort 30 elections, general: (1830) 149; (1831) 149; (1907) 202; (1918) 218; (1945) 238; (1964) 260, 262; (1970) 275; (1974) 276, 277; (1979) 287; (1987) 299; (1997) 302, 307; (2015) 330 elections, GLC 264, 274–5, 280, 282, 285, 287 elections, LCC 191, 202, 203, 218, 227 elections, mayoral 309, 315, 317 electoral reform 117, 119, 149–50, 161–2, 175–6, 191 electrification of railways and Underground 193–4, 203, 228, 230 Elementary Education Act (1870) 176–7 Elephant and Castle 251, 322, 325; pub 3, 208 Elizabeth I, Queen 47–8, 49, 51–2, 55–6, 57, 59, 60, 77, 258 Elizabeth II, Queen 296; Diamond Jubilee (2012) 154 Ellerman, Sir John 220 Eltham 230 Embankment 122, 164, 168, 177, 197, 221, 316, 338; gardens 168 Emma of Normandy, Queen Consort 21 Enfield 317 Enfield Chase 230–31 Enlightenment 106–7 Epping Forest 183, 210, 309 Epsom 230 Erasmus 40 Erconwald, Bishop of London 18 Erith 164 Ermine Street 10 Escoffier, Auguste 200 Escorial Palace 99 Esher, Lionel Brett, 4th Viscount 229, 245, 246, 254, 266 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of 84 Ethelred the Unready, King 20, 21 Eton College 142, 315 European Economic Community/European Union: British admission 275, 276; British exit 13, 330–31 European Monetary System, sterling’s forced withdrawal (1992) 314 Euston Road 104, 167, 256, 279, 316; British Library 250; St Pancras New Church 137; underpass 256; see also New Road Euston Square 101, 125; station 157, 168 Euston station 125, 165, 168, 283 evacuation, wartime 235, 236 Evelyn, John 67, 68, 70, 75–6, 77, 83, 87, 90 Evening Standard (newspaper), planning campaigns 282, 284 Evesham, Battle of (1265) 31 Ewell, Nonsuch Palace/Park 51, 230–31 executions, public 109–10; see also death penalty Eyre estate 142 Fabians 190–91 fairs 31; Bartholomew Fair 37; frost fair 87; ‘Tyburn fairs’ 109–10 Farrell, Sir Terry 283 Farringdon 51, 53, 76, 126, 167, 168 fashion (clothing) 59, 138, 239, 245, 248, 261 Fawkes, Guy 288 Fenston, Felix 245 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon 42 ferries, river 113 Festival of Britain (1951) 246–7 Festival Hall 247 Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) 44 Fielding, Henry 98, 110–11, 112, 159 Fielding, Sir John 112, 159 Fifty Shilling Tailors (shop chain) 245 film industry 185, 248, 261, 269, 306, 338; Ealing comedies 246, 248, 261; see also cinemas financial crises: (1720) 98, 102, 158; (1847) 158; (1866) 175, 176; (1929) 227; (1973) 276; (1987) 296; (2008) 316, 320 financial services industry see banking and financial services industry Finchley 112, 207 Finchley Road 141 Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (musical) 248 Finsbury 10, 51, 52, 53, 82; Moorfields 60, 76, 109 fires: 16th century 52; 18th century 128; 19th century 152; 21st century 322; Great Fire (1666) 1, 75–6, 80, 81; Middle Ages 27, 28, 76; Roman era 11; Saxon era 19 Firestone Tyre Factory 228 First World War see Great War Fiske, Bill, Baron 257 Fitz-Ailwyn, Henry 28–9 Fitzrovia 124–5, 206–7, 279; Charlotte Street 207; Fitzroy Square 124, 279 Fitzroy family 124, 142 Fitzstephen, William 41, 333 Fleet river/ditch 8, 11, 16, 23, 26, 42, 113, 143, 162 Fleet Street 8, 11, 27, 107, 127; journalism and printing trade 26, 93, 292; Temple Bar 65, 120 Flemish immigrants 34, 48, 49 Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew 94 Florence 40 Florida, Richard 306 fog 71, 186, 259 Foley, Thomas, 2nd Baron 124 Foley House 124 Fontainebleau Palace 51 Ford Motor Company 228 Forster, William, Elementary Education Act (1870) 176–7 Fortnum, William 128 Fortnum & Mason (shop) 128 Foster, Norman, Baron Foster of Thames Bank 309, 327; Canary Wharf station 294–5; City Hall 309; Gherkin 290, 310, 312 foundation myth 8 Foundling Hospital and estate 111, 112, 125, 135, 143 Fowler, Sir John 167–8 Fox, Charles James 118, 129 Foxe, John, Book of Martyrs 47 franchise see voting rights Francis I, King of France 44 Francis, John 158 Franciscans 30 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 176 Frankfurt 275, 296 Franks 18, 24 Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria 174 Frayn, Michael 246 French immigrants 172, 206, 207; see also Huguenots French Revolution 119, 129–30, 136, 149, 152 Friends Meeting House (Bloomsbury) 230 frost fair 87 Fry, Maxwell 232, 241 Fryth, Richard 84 Fulham 171, 257, 268, 272 Gainsborough, Thomas 117, 128 Galsworthy, John 172, 180 gangs and gangsterism 34, 277, 305, 318 ‘garden bridge’ project (cancelled) 317 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 172 Garrick, David 117, 128 gas supplies 147 Gatwick airport 291 gay community 260, 261, 299 Gay, John, Beggar’s Opera 98 Geddes, Sir Eric 218, 223 Gehry, Frank 327 General Strike (1926) 219, 276 gentrification 73, 271–2, 275, 282–3, 300, 307–8, 335 Geoffrey of Monmouth 8 George I, King 97–8, 108 George II, King 97, 98, 128 George III, King 97, 109, 115–16, 118, 131, 144 George IV, King 144–6, 149; as Prince Regent 131–3, 134, 139, 183 George, M.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Through our success, however, we collectively developed a low tolerance for uncomfortable feedback and a reduction in our ability to adapt to stress. We’re more comfortable behaving as if our cities are merely complicated. Increasingly, they are not. Notes 1 Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander, Cognitive Architecture: Designing For How We Respond to the Built Environment (New York: Routledge, 2015). 2 Ibid. 3 Neil Johnson, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017). 2 Incremental Growth Take a tentative step in the dark. If you do not run into something, you just gained knowledge. If you hit a wall, the incremental nature of your advance gives you wisdom without much lost.

We are finding our way back to the core through the realization that we can no longer afford to acquire any more land and that we are at reckoning if we want to strengthen our city. My group, ReForm Shreveport, began in 2016 as four friends on a mission to get Shreveporters to reconsider their relationship with the built environment. We host small group discussions about Strong Towns concepts. We tour the most productive parts of our city and discuss our failures and successes. We communicate with businesses about the potential of human-scaled retail and service sector development. We reach out to city leaders to encourage policy changes.


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 implication is that if the physical environment doesn’t fully register to a person so equipped, neither will other people. Nor is the body by any means the only domain that the would-be posthuman subject may wish to transcend via augmentation. Subject as it is to the corrosive effects of entropy and time, forcing those occupying it to contend with the inconvenient demands of others, the built environment is another. Especially given current levels of investment in physical infrastructure in the United States, there is a very real risk that those who are able to do so will prefer retreat behind a wall of mediation to the difficult work of being fully present in public. At its zenith, this tendency implies both a dereliction of public space, and an almost total abandonment of any notion of a shared public realm.

Writers like Srnicek and Williams even propose this be accomplished as nearly as possible without the application of human effort, leading to a state of being since described by others—with tongue only partly in cheek—as “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”7 As a consequence, we would have to rethink the organization of the built environment. We know that economic forces, and requirements founded in the material conditions of production, shape the organization of human settlements at every scale. Local and precise control over the physical form of things therefore challenges the way we think about the spatial form and social life of cities.

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: 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

We need to better understand the myriad dynamic systems of more sustainable regions, places, and buildings. Above all, we need informed imaginations that can look at entrenched patterns and question alternative possibilities—while working with communities. This is an exciting agenda for all of the professions involved with the built environment. We would do well to heed Michael Sorkin’s wise advice to see “the good city as an evolving project.”25 PART TWO THE EXAMPLES Chapter 2 Retrofitting Garden Apartments and Residential Subdivisions to Address Density and the New Demographics In 2000, U.S. Census data confirmed that more than 50% of the population of the United States was living in urbanized areas outside of central cities—in other words, in suburbs.

., “Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Physical Activity, Obesity, and Morbidity,” American Journal of Health Promotion 18:1 (2003); and Lawrence Frank, Martin Andresen, and Tom Schmidt, “Obesity Relationships with Community Design, Physical Activity, and Time Spent in Cars,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 27:2 (2004). 17 A useful summary of the wide range of research in this area is presented in “Understanding the Relationship between Public Health and the Built Environment,” prepared by Design, Community & Environment; Dr. Reid Ewing; Lawrence Frank and Company; and Dr. Richard Kreutzer for the LEED-ND Core Committee, http://www.cnu.org/sites/files/leed_public_health.pdf. 18 See the writings of William Fulton, “Are Edge Cities Losing Their Edge?” Planning 62, May 1996; Charles Lockwood, “Edge Cities on the Brink,” Wall Street Journal (eastern edition), December 21, 1994, A14; Scheer, “Edge City Monopoly”; and Woody Carter, Robert Frolick, and Tim Frye, “Edge Cities or Edge Suburbs?”

The report is available at http://www.rpa.org. 33 Fulton, “Are Edge Cities Losing Their Edge?” 34 The percentage gains are not always dramatic but are promising considering that the examples studied were not deliberately designed to promote walk-ability. Several studies are summarized in LEED-ND Core Committee, “Understanding the Relationship Between Public Health and the Built Environment,” 21–23. More salient findings include the following: having convenience-oriented retail located near work sites doubled the use of transit from 3.4% to 7.2% (Cambridge Systematics, The Effects of Land Use and Travel Demand Management Strategies on Commuting Behavior [Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, 1994]); each 10% increase in retail to an employment center resulted in a 3% increase in the mode share of transit and ride-sharing trips (Robert Cervero, “Land Use Mixing and Suburban Mobility,” Transportation Quarterly 42 (1988): 429–446); residents in communities with a balance of employment and residential uses commute, on average, one-third less distance than do workers living in areas with more housing than employment (Reid Ewing, “Characteristics, Causes and Effects of Sprawl: A Literature Review,” in Environmental and Urban Issues [Miami: Florida Atlantic University/Florida International University, 1994], 7). 35 Gloria Ohland’s 2002 case study of Addison Circle describes the project in some detail and clarifies Robert Shaw’s involvement first with Columbus Realty Trust, then Post Properties, and then Amicus Partners.


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The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

environment The archaic concept which, separating humans from the rest of the world, identified the nonhuman component as something which carried particular aesthetic, recreational, or biological value (see environmental protection). Sometimes the “natural” environment was distinguished from the “built” environment, contribut-ing to the difficulty that twentieth-century humans had in recognizing and admitting the pervasive and global extent 56 L e x i c o n o f A r c h A i c T e r m s of their impact. Radical thinkers, such as Paul Ehrlich and Dennis and Donella Meadows (a twentieth-century hus-band and wife team), recognized that humans are part of their environment and dependent upon it, and that its value was more than aesthetic and recreational; that the natural world was essential for human employment, growth, prosperity, and health.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The purpose of this book is to examine the potential impact of the development of driverless cars in more depth than is possible in a blog or article. Although at first glance, driverless cars may seem like just another cool technology, they may in fact be one of the most profound change-enablers in human history, with far-reaching implications for employment, mobility, the built environment and beyond. Much of the commentary on this topic to date has been quite extreme - from advocates saying it’s nearly ready to doubters claiming it’s more like 30 years away to opponents saying it’ll never work or shouldn’t be allowed. There are many players in this drama - technology companies, auto companies, regulators, professional drivers and ordinary citizens.

A huge contributor to the growth of cities and suburbs that are home to most of the people on the planet, the car is becoming a victim of its own success. The growth in the number of cars has become unsustainable considering the space and budgets available for roads and infrastructure. For all its influence in shaping the built environment and unquestionable personal convenience, the rise of the personal automobile is not without several negatives. Most car drivers attest that owning a car is expensive and frequently frustrating - often failing to get you where you want in the timeframe you wish, and then presenting storage challenges when you do reach your destination, either in terms of availability, cost or both.


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Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

But a person at Çatalhöyük could be descended from a revered, shared ancestor represented by an animal; they often lived in houses with people who weren’t blood relatives; and they could spend most of the day making stone tools while other people brought food in from the fields to cook. Identity was fungible and intersectional. It’s no wonder that urbanites carried stamps around to explain themselves and show their allegiances. Over time, an even more complex symbolic pattern began to emerge out of the built environment at Çatalhöyük. While I was visiting the site, the State University of New York at Buffalo anthropologist Peter Biehl suggested that the act of rebuilding a house repeatedly is the first step toward creating an idea of history. Perhaps, he mused, the people of Çatalhöyük belonged to one of the first civilizations to move beyond memory into historical thinking.

At the same time, an odd liberalization crept into the Roman world through these laws. To encourage marriage, Augustus allowed freeborn men to marry freedwomen for the first time, making their children legitimate. Now a woman born a slave might be freed to become the wife of a citizen, and her children would be freeborn. We can’t fully appreciate the built environment of Pompeii without understanding how it was shaped by women, and why. Though women couldn’t run for office or vote, they could own property. They could become entrepreneurs or patrons of powerful cults. The outsized footprint occupied by the Temple of Isis and the property of Julia Felix are both testimonies to female power at Pompeii, and how women were reshaping the cityscape.


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A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

Are we having a decrease in this soil microbial population? Are you changing the microbial dynamics in any way that could in turn be very harmful to the plants?” You might be wondering what the big deal is, since we don’t rely on urban green spaces for food or anything. Urban folk do, however, rely on them to make life bearable. The built environment—roads, sidewalks, structures—absorbs the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releases it at night. Consequently, urban areas can be 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the summer than surrounding rural areas, where vegetation cools the landscape.31 So as the planet warms, healthy green spaces will be ever a land corrupted more critical for attenuating this urban heat island effect, as it’s known.

Gilbreath, Alicia, Lester McKee, Ila Shimabuku, Diana Lin, Larissa M. Werbowski, Xia Zhu, Jelena Grbic, and Chelsea Rochman. 2019. “Multiyear Water Quality Performance and Mass Accumulation of PCBs, Mercury, Methylmercury, Copper, and Microplastics in a Bioretention Rain Garden.” Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment 5 (4). https://doi.org/10.1061/JSWBAY.0000883; Rochman, Chelsea M., Keenan Munno, Carolynn Box, Anna Cummins, Xia Zhu, and Rebecca Sutton. 2021. “Think Global, Act Local: Local Knowledge Is Critical to Inform Positive Change When It Comes to Microplastics.” Environmental Science and Technology 55 (1): 4–6. https://doi.org/10 .1021/acs. est.0c05746. 30.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Unlike activist groups that attempt to physically transform roads through direct action or sabotage, Critical Mass riders take over the street to “assert a positive vision of how things should be in order to expose the current injustice of car dominated public space.”27 This mobile intervention points to the city as contested space of automobility—one mediated and dominated by auto infrastructure and the norms of driving.28 in this sense, it shares a commonality with skateboarding, a practice iain Borden describes as a method of appropriating and ultimately transforming the meaning and uses of urban space(s).29 Borden specifically theorizes skateboarding as a critique of the dominant capitalist ideology governing the built environment inasmuch as skaters advocate use value over exchange value, pleasure rather than work, and activity instead of passivity.30 Skateboarding’s representational mode, Borden argues, is not that of writing, drawing, or theorizing, but performing—a way of articulating meaning through movement.31 Despite the obvious and substantive differences between bicycling and skateboarding, a performative critique is an apt way of describing what bicyclists do when they take to the streets in Mass or en masse: not only do they use the environment in an unintended way (i.e., for a non-utilitarian purpose); they also simultaneously call attention to the cultural norms dictating both the prescribed function of the environment and the different ways it could potentially be utilized, traversed, or reterritorialized. another important distinction between skateboarding and Critical Mass is that skating is an individual practice that, with notable exceptions, is not “consciously theorized,” whereas Mass is typically used to amplify a critique: Bicycling is generally a very individual experience, especially on streets filled with stressed-out motorists who don’t think cyclists have a right to be on the road.

We Are Bored in the City . . . artists previously involved with the avant-garde groups COBra, lettrist international, and the international Movement for an imaginist Bauhaus formed the Si in 1957 with the goal of creating a “revolutionary program in culture.”33 The situationists formulated a radical critique of the built environment called unitary urbanism—a premise at the heart of their opposition to the spectacle of capitalism.34 They described the process of urbanism as the solidification of a passive, consumerist ideology that renders alienation tactile and material. Disrupting the physical and mental patterns nurtured by capitalism was fundamental to their belief in the revolutionary potential of everyday life, arguing that revolution would “originate in the appropriation and alteration of the material environment and its space.”35 Guy Debord, arguably the most well known Si theorist, claimed this revolutionary process could be initiated through the construction of “situations,” or moments of everyday life transformed into “a superior passional quality.”36 Simon Sadler explains the theory of situationism advocated most fervently in the late 1950s and early 1960s: One only appreciated the desperate need to take action over the city, situationists felt, once one had seen through the veil of refinement draped over it by planning and capital. if one peeled away this official representation of modernity and urbanism—this “spectacle,” as situationists termed the collapse of reality into the streams of images, products, and activities sanctioned by business and bureaucracy— one discovered the authentic life of the city teeming underneath.37 as part of their attempt to uncover the “beach under the pavement,” situationists utilized the technique of the dérive, a method of exploration in which small groups of people “drift” through urban spaces to “notice the way things resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires.”38 Though the technique was influenced by surrealism and the parisian fláneur, the dérive is not based on a willful submission to unconscious desires; rather, it is a means to creatively explore aspects of the city that have not been totally incorporated by the spectacle.39 Dérives are typically conducted over a period of hours or days (even weeks), involving one or more people who drop their usual motives and routines—their work, leisure activities, and normal relations—to let themselves be “drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they might find there.”40 By studying the maps and notes taken from lengthy dérives, a practice called psychogeography, the situationists formulated different theories about how people could, or more precisely should, collectively disengage from the spectacle.

at the most basic level, cycling slows down the world in ways that tangibly affect interpersonal communication, most notably by promoting face-to-face encounters.56 Scott larkin, author of the zine Go by Bicycle, points this out in interview with the author: “The prospect of someone stopping to talk to someone when they’re jamming by at thirty-five miles an hour is unlikely.”57 in addition, there is a sense among critics that habitual driving engenders an experience of cities that is not unlike tourism, inasmuch as urban spaces and landscapes are often abstracted into “pure, rapid, superficial spectacles.”58 Driving, according to this line of reasoning, physically distances people from both the materiality and the material realities of cities (i.e., the built environment as well as prevailing socioeconomic conditions) by facilitating a process that allows people to metaphorically and sometimes quite literally bypass the problems of cities altogether. The driver’s gaze shaped through privatized mobility, nigel Taylor argues, also objectifies and depersonalizes the world outside of the car in such as way that it transforms the environment, other vehicles, and even human beings into mere “things” that obstruct one’s movement.59 That is to say, while the car—like all transportation technologies— operates as a framing device, the “visuality of the windshield” becomes more than a casual or temporary looking glass when one considers both the ever-increasing amounts of time people individually spend “sealed off from the public and the street,” as well as a broader cultural/legal context in which “the public” is increasingly being seen as a mere amalgamation of mobile private spheres—a condition Don Mitchell calls the “SUv model of citizenship.”60 The problem, in other words, is not necessarily what one sees or does not see each time one gets behind the wheel, but rather, the way driving shapes subjectivity and fosters a broader disposition toward urban space and urban life: an entire way of seeing.61 in contrast, the bicycle is construed as an “anti-spectacular device” inasmuch as it disarticulates autonomous mobility from the privatized experience of the automobile “capsule” and rearticulates it to a more tactile, direct experience of urbanity or “the urban.”62 lee Williams highlights this sensation in an issue of Cranked, a zine devoted to bike culture in the northwest: as urban cyclists we are intimately engaged with our city’s neighborhoods in a way automobile commuters may never experience.


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The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

This suggested that hotel staff had been exposed from time to time and had managed to acquire immunity, which was why so few of them had succumbed to the infection in 1976. By contrast, the Legionnaires had no such history of exposure. THE LEGIONNAIRES’ disease outbreak is a classic example of how new technologies and changes to the built environment designed to improve hygiene and ameliorate the conditions of life are constantly giving rise to new threats to health and well-being. It also illustrates how, in certain political and cultural contexts, epidemics that might otherwise have gone unnoticed can command wide public attention and provoke considerable anxiety.

To the extent that Legionnaires’ disease tapped into Cold War fears about biological weapons and chemical toxins, it seemed to hark back to the preoccupations of the 1950s; hence, Congress’s concern that it was a “missed alarm.” But to the extent that it was a disease completely new to medical science, and one that could be traced to new technologies and alterations to the built environment, it seemed to represent a new paradigm of public health, one that would become increasingly relevant in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, by 1994, with the publication of Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, Legionnaires’ disease was being seen as one of a series of “emerging infectious diseases” (EIDs), whose appearance was threatening to undo the medical advances of the postwar years and, with it, the certitude that advanced industrialized societies no longer needed to fear the plagues that had bedeviled previous eras.

Certainly urbanization and globalization would appear to be key factors. The mega-cities of Asia, Africa, and South America, like Athens in the time of Thucydides, provide ideal conditions for the amplification and spread of novel pathogens by concentrating large numbers of people in cramped and often unsanitary spaces. Sometimes technology and alterations of the built environment can mitigate the risks that such overcrowding presents for the transfer of pathogens to people. The plague abatement measures in the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles in 1924 may have been brutal and morally questionable (certainly, it is hard to imagine community activists in California tolerating the wholesale demolition of minority neighborhoods and the mass slaughter of squirrels today), but at the time they were effective in removing the threat of plague from downtown Los Angeles and its harbor.


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Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

If we think of global just-in-time supply chains, for example, these are economically efficient under capitalism, but also exceptionally effective in breaking the power of unions. In other words, hegemony, or rule by the engineering of consent, is as much a material force as it is a social one. It is something embedded in human minds, social and political organisations, individual technologies and the built environment that constitutes our world.20 And, whereas the social forces of hegemony must be continually maintained, the materialised aspects of hegemony exert a force of momentum that lasts long past their initial creation.21 Once in place, infrastructures are difficult to dislodge or alter, despite changing political conditions.

Working systematically to develop pluralism, economic research and public education will play a significant role in strengthening the utopian narratives outlined in the previous section, and providing the necessary navigational tools to chart a course out of capitalism. REPURPOSING TECHNOLOGY As we argued above, hegemony is embedded not only in the ideas of a society, but also in the built environment and technologies that surround us. These objects carry a politics within them: they facilitate particular uses and actions, while simultaneously constraining others. For instance, our current infrastructure tends to shape our societies into individualistic, carbon-based, competitive forms, regardless of what individuals or collectives may want.


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Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

From commercial lighting systems and airplane engines to jeans, carpets and cars, the question has become: why buy when you have the option of ‘renting’ a product that is upgradeable, maintained and available on demand? There is increasing innovation towards making cities more liveable and less polluting, with the revamping of transport systems and the built environment and the promotion of the ‘sharing economy’, in which ICT-enabled communication allows citizens to share goods, either through a centralised, fee-paying service, such as a car club, or using direct peer-to-peer exchange for such items as household tools and garden equipment. And lifestyle aspirations are stimulating industries in the areas of personal health and individual fulfilment—from innovations in local food networks to high-tech ICT and bio-science-driven preventive and personalised medicine, and the championing of the ‘collaborative’ and ‘creative’ economies.

Just as the Marshall Plan aided the reconstruction of Europe while increasing transatlantic trade, the international community needs to implement new and effective ways of giving support to development, recognising the new possibilities opened by ICT and globalisation.38 As discussed above, the rise of these countries would benefit advanced, emerging and developing nations, creating new and important trade flows in all directions. Reorient finance not by controls but by taxing short-term gains highly and lowering the rate with time, thus making it more profitable to invest in the real economy and to do so long-term. In addition, public investment in green research, development and market creation,39 in revamping the built environment and in funding private green projects is necessary to provide support for the riskier innovations in the green direction and to increase the synergies for others to invest. This list is far from complete—but it is a list that is grounded not only in the historical discussion above, but also in examples already being tried out and explored in villages, towns, cities and nations around the world.


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Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

But the 1970s created a major shift within these general conditions, away from secure employment and unwieldy industrial behemoths and towards flexible labour and lean business models. During the 1990s a technological revolution was laid out when finance drove a bubble in the new internet industry that led to massive investment in the built environment. This phenomenon also heralded a turn towards a new model of growth: America was definitively giving up on its manufacturing base and turning towards asset-price Keynesianism as the best viable option. This new model of growth led to the housing bubble of the early twenty-first century and has driven the response to the 2008 crisis.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

We’re in a new phase of the technology revolution— not technology for technology’s sake, but technology in the service of commerce.”31 The school, named Cornell NYC Tech, will eventually be home to 280 faculty members and up to 2,750 graduate students doing applied research in “hubs”—not traditional academic departments—of media, health industries, and the built environment.32 Cornell, Technion, 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 26 5/20/13 6:48 PM NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY 27 New York City, and the NYCEDC all hope that graduates will help New York–based companies, nonprofits, and industries—ranging from hospitals to news companies, from museums to real estate developers—use new technologies to work better, more efficiently, or at a grander scale than they can with existing tools.

Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop.”51 More specifically, if a metropolitan area starts to lose its export orientation and forgets about the need to make things or provide services that are competitive on a national or international scale, eventually even its local market will become stuck.52 The Applied Sciences campuses are, in essence, a major push for New York to create more things to sell to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. The vast Greater New York metropolitan area sells only about 7 percent of what it produces to other countries—ranking it 93rd of the largest 100 U.S. metros.53 But the “built environment” solutions that all of the Applied Sciences campuses are working on could be in tremendous demand across the globe. As more and more people move to megacities in the coming decades, and the demand for energy soars, cities will need ways to build more efficient buildings in more efficient configurations.


pages: 387 words: 120,155

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

I. (2008), ‘Spending money on others promotes happiness’, Science, 319(5870): 1687–8. 27 https://www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Publications/SRI-National-Citizen-Service-2013-evaluation-main-report-August2014.PDF 28 http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/publications/evaluating-youth-social-action 29 Halpern, D., (1995), Mental health and the built environment. Taylor and Francis. Also, Halpern, D. (2008) ‘An evidence-based approach to building happiness building for happiness, in RIBA-edited volume, Jane Wernick, J (ed) Building happiness: architecture to make you smile. RIBA Building Futures, Black Dog Publishers. 30 This is an idea suggested by Paul Resnick in the USA, that is still oddly rare. 31 Alice Isen, ibid. – ref. 6 in ‘Social’ (Ch. 5). 32 Revision of the ‘magenta book’, which sets out how evaluations are done, has also been undertaken – the impacts of policies on well-being should also be measured, and where possible using the newly developed ONS measures. 33 Brickman, P., Coates, D., and Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978), ‘Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?’

., and Welzel, C. (2008), ‘Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness A Global Perspective (1981– 2007)’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(4): 264–85. DOI. Abstract. Public Access. Local Access. 36 Halpern, D. and Reid, J. (1992); ‘Effect of unexpected demolition announcement on health of residents’. BMJ 304:1229; Halpern, D (1995), Mental health and the built environment. Taylor and Francis. 37 Buell, Ryan W., and Michael I. Norton. The Labor Illusion: How Operational Transparency Increases Perceived Value.’ Management Science 57, no. 9 (September 2011): 1564–1579. Buell, Ryan W., and Michael I. Norton. ‘Think Customers Hate Waiting? Not So Fast…’ Harvard Business Review 89, no. 5 (May 2011). 38 The event was run in March 2007, with Ipsos MORI selecting a random stratified sample of the public. 39 See Halpern, D., (2009), Hidden Wealth of Nations, Polity Press, for more detail on background, including of the Canadian work.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

The gentrifiers and Rouse presented a selective vision of this past that emphasized lively markets, colorful waterfronts, and charming neighborhoods; the steel, soot, hectic pace, and huddled masses of America’s urban tradition were missing from their back-to-the-city vision. Yet this vision seemed to offer a viable alternative to the suburbs, where little of the built environment predated 1945. For at least some consumers, the reconstructed urban heritage of Rouse and the gentrifiers was an appealing commodity that was worth buying. Moreover, it was an attractive commodity to millions of tourists and suburban visitors because it did not represent the metropolitan norm.

Focusing on the Los Angeles of gang conflict, police repression, social and economic inequities, and public warfare on the poor, Davis depicted the end-of the-century city as a place of fear and seething tension, an environment ready to explode and worthy of destruction. Davis posited the existence of a “new class war … at the level of the built environment,” with Los Angeles as “an especially disquieting catalogue of the emergent liaisons between architecture and the American police state.”70 In other words, the glittering high-rise monuments to global capitalism so admired by many observers were actually stakes driven into the heart of the poor.


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

Go to note reference in text on some afternoons streetcar operators: Barrett, Automobile and Urban Transit, 63. Go to note reference in text Property owners responded immediately: Mark Bottles, “Mass Politics and the Automobile in Los Angeles,” in The Car and the City: The Automobile the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life, ed. Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 198–200. Go to note reference in text There were rumors of a woman: Eran Ben-Joseph, Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 69.

Go to note reference in text He had tried to put: Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela, Garage (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 32. Go to note reference in text “Putting a garage in a house”: Drummond Buckley, “A Garage in the House,” in The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life, ed. Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 133. Go to note reference in text As late as 1936: Buckley, “A Garage in the House,” 138. Go to note reference in text “the ruin of the backyard”: Jackson, “Domestication of the Garage.”


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Yet their effects do discriminate against the bodies of the underclass, because those bodies have been placed in proximity to danger by the structural design of powerful humans. In a hurricane, water drowns the underclass not because two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen discriminate by income or race. Rather, the inequitable drownings happen because the built environment of society makes it so water will physically be kept away from the rich, while stormwaters will flow through the cracks in flimsy barriers to flood the poor. Similarly, viruses show us where the cracks in our society are; they offer a stark revelation of inequality. In times of mass crisis, those cracks get wider and more people fall into them.

And despite this clearly ableist stance—and even though he reaffirmed it in 2019—Emanuel was appointed to then-President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 transition task force in 2020. Similarly to how racism privileges whiteness and punishes people of color, ableism privileges able-bodied people and punishes people who are disabled in law, culture, and the built environment, among other arenas. And it is a defining, structural force in U.S. society. America is designed to accommodate a mythical person who is a certain size and whose body has certain idealized, profit-generating abilities. Decisions are made all the time that affect this. For instance, a building with stairs in front of its entry and no ramp privileges people who can climb those stairs and disadvantages people in wheelchairs (young and old), people using crutches, and babies in strollers.


pages: 162 words: 42,595

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Ballantyne

dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, late capitalism, means of production, plutocrats, Stewart Brand, the built environment

As individuals we might have made a different decision, but as a society, given the flows and concentrations of money that circulate, and given the political processes that mediate the decisions, the buildings that surround us are produced. As individuals, most of us can do very little to shape the built environment in general. In some circumstances, though, concentrations of wealth and power have made it possible for individuals to command great changes. It was said of the Roman emperor Augustus that when he came to Rome it was built in brick, but when he left it was marble. And Ozymandias (Rameses II) evidently commissioned grand and extensive works.


New Localism and Regeneration Management by Jon Coaffee

glass ceiling, Kickstarter, place-making, post-industrial society, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal

Gomes Caribbean Centre for Development Administration, St Michael, Barbados Dr Stephen Ackroyd The Management School, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, UK Dr Chira Hongladarom Human Resources Institute, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand Professor Refat Al-faouri Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan Professor Owen Hughes Department of Management, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Dr Michael Barzelay Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, London School of Economics, London, UK Professor Mathias Beck Division of Risk, Caledonian Business School, Glasgow, UK John Hutton Henley Management College, Henley-on-Thames, UK Dr Douglas McCready School of Business and Finance, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Professor Jonathan Boston School of Government, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand Penny McKeown Senior Lecturer, Queen’s University, Belfast Dr Richard Boyle Institute of Public Administration, Clonkskeagh, Ireland Dr Anthony B.L. Cheung Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong John G. Corcoran Economist, School of the Built Environment, Limerick Institute of Technology, Limerick, Eire Joan Corkery European Centre for Development, Maastricht, The Netherlands Dr Carolyn Currie School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology, Broadway, Sydney, Australia Editorial advisory board 107 Geoff Merchant Civil Service College, Ascot, Berkshire, UK Peter Noordhoek Northedge Ltd, Gouda, The Netherlands Dr James Nti Management Development Institute, Serrekunda, The Gambia Dr Vinod Shanbhag All India Management Association, New Delhi, India David Shand Financial Management Board, OPCFM, The World Bank, Washington DC, USA Kuppusamy Singaravelloo Department of Administrative Studies and Politics, University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Dr Andrew L.S.


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

p=25015 55 https://www.boell.de/en/2014/06/11/we-were-not-invited-party-women-and-world-cup 56 http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/09/how-design-city-women/6739/ 57 Ibid. 58 http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GGGR16/WEF_Global_Gender_Gap_Report_2016.pdf 59 Alexis Grenell (2015), ‘Sex & the Stadt: Reimagining Gender in the Built Environment’, http://www.academia.edu/10324825/Sex_and_the_Stadt_Reimagining_Gender_in_the_Built_Environment 60 Architekturzentrum Wien (2008), Housing in Vienna: Innovative, Social, Ecological, Vienna 61 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007–12-25-Designingwomen_N.htm Chapter 2 1 https://twitter.com/SamiraAhmedUK/status/849338626202886144 2 https://www.barbican.org.uk/about-barbican/people 3 Banks, Taunya Lovell (1991), ‘Toilets as a Feminist Issue: A True Story’, Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, 6:2 263–289 4 Greed, Clara (2014), ‘Global gendered toilet provision’, in ‘More Public than Private: Toilet Adoption and Menstrual Hygiene Management II’, AAG Annual Conference, Tampa, Florida, USA, 8–12 April 2014 5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749018/ 6 Greed (2014) 7 http://www.unric.org/en/latest-un-buzz/29530-one-out-of-three-women-without-a-toilet 8 http://womendeliver.org/2016/yale-study-examines-link-sexual-violence-access-sanitation/ 9 http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/india-has-60-4-per-cent-people-without-access-to-toilet-study/ 10 Greed (2014) 11 Ibid. 12 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rose-george/open-defecation-india_b_7898834.html https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/aug/28/toilets-india-health-rural-women-safety 13 https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/wrdsanitation0417_web_0.pdf 2017 14 Sommer, Marni, Chandraratna, Sahani, Cavill, Sue, Mahon, Therese, and Phillips-Howard, Penelope (2016), ‘Managing menstruation in the workplace: an overlooked issue in low- and middle-income countries’, Int.


pages: 159 words: 48,021

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton

Frank Gehry, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl

Nietzsche observed that the development portentously known as the ‘Italian Renaissance’, which we might imagine to have been engineered by innumerable actors, was in fact the work of only about a hundred people, while the related innovation which textbooks call the ‘rebirth of Classicism’ depended on even fewer advocates: a single structure, Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital, and one treatise, Leone Battista Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture (1452), were enough to impress a new sensibility on the world. It took just one volume, Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1715), to entrench the Palladian style in the English landscape, and a mere 200 or so pages of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1923) to decide the appearance of much of the built environment of the twentieth century. Certain buildings – the Schröder House, the Farnsworth House, the California Case Study Houses – have had an impact quite out of proportion to their size or cost. Learning to recognise the charms of raw concrete: Marte. Marte Architects, house, Voralberg, 1999 In all of these tectonic shifts, the tenacity of the prime movers was every bit as important as the resources at their disposal.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

Time spent in a car is also correlated with social isolation: every ten minutes spent in daily commuting cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent. North Americans now spend so much time in cars that oncologists say drivers have significantly higher rates of skin cancer on the left side of their bodies. But the automobile’s most insidious impact is on the built environment. Between cul-de-sacs and hundred-acre Wal-Mart parking lots, metropolitan areas now eat up mind-boggling amounts of land. The cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, for example, have merged into a single conurbation the size of the nation of Israel. A large percentage of Americans now live in what is considered sprawl—fracts of low-density, single-family homes scattered over the urban fringes with little planning oversight.

“The Sensuous City.” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 8, 2010. Stilgoe, John R. Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Sturm, Roland. “Urban Design, Lifestyle, and the Development of Chronic Conditions, the Built Environment and Childhood Obesity.” National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, http://www.niehs.nih.gov, 2005. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions.” http://www.epa.gov/dced/construction_trends.htm, January 2010. 11. The Toronto Tragedy Agrell, Siri.


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

Thanks to the car industry, Detroit grew from a city of 300,000 to nearly a million in the period 1900 to 1920, making it the fastest growing city in America at the time, after Los Angeles. 39. Sam Bass Warner, ‘Learning from the Past: Services to Families’, in Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford, eds, The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 9. Before the automobile, Los Angeles had a light rail system known as the ‘Yellow Cars’. Electric rail returned to Los Angeles in 1990 and there are plans for extending the network. 40. Jean Baudrillard, America, tr.

Kruse (eds), The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) Roth, Ralf, and Marie-Noelle Polino (eds), The City and the Railway in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Vanderbilt, Tom, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (London: Penguin, 2009) Wachs, Martin, and Margaret Crawford (eds), The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) Wolmar, Christian, The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever (London: Atlantic Books, 2005) 6 Money Ali, Syed, Dubai: Gilded Cage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Vintage, 1990) Ferguson, Niall, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London: Allen Lane, 2008) Crossick, Geoffrey and Serge Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) Geiste, Johann Friedrich, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) Gilfoyle, Timothy J., A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of 19th-century New York (New York: Norton, 2006) Mattie, Erik, World’s Fairs (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) Miller, Michael B., The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1896–1920 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981) Minton, Anna, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-Century City (London: Penguin, 2009) Parker, Geoffrey, Sovereign City: The City-State Through History (London: Reaktion, 2004) Parkins, Helen and Christopher Smith (eds), Trade, Traders and the Ancient City (London: Routledge, 1998) Reader, John, Cities (London: Heinemann, 2004) Scarpa, Tiziano, Venice Is a Fish: A Cultural Guide (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009) Tittler, Robert, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community c. 1500–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) Zecker, Robert, Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture (Westport: Praeger, 2008) 7 Time Out Berman, Marshall, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (London: Verso, 2009) Carcopino, Jérôme, tr.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But private landowners naturally want to make a living from their land – whether that’s farming, forestry, mining or hunting – and these industries can all too readily come into conflict with nature conservation. NPAs do have some planning powers which enable them to put the brakes on development within national parks, but these are mostly limited to the built environment and extractive industries. Sir Sebastian Anstruther, for example, one of the major landowners in the South Downs National Park, wanted to dig up 75,000 tonnes of sand every year on his estate, but was dissuaded from doing when his planning application prompted a public outcry. Yet planning constraints within national parks don’t prevent Sir Sebastian’s neighbour, the Duke of Richmond, from operating a golf course and racecourse on his Goodwood Estate, both of them within the park boundary.

UK agriculture generates around 46 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year – 10 per cent of the UK total – yet farmers and landowners are under no binding obligations to bring these down. Seventy per cent of England is farmland, yet decisions about how this land is best used barely ever come within the ambit of the planning system, where the focus instead is on the built environment. The National Farmers’ Union constantly complains about bureaucratic red tape tying up farmers. But history shows that governments have typically remained wary about doing anything at all to infringe the absolute rights of landowners to private property, whether that’s around planning, access rights or the operation of SSSIs.


pages: 489 words: 136,195

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

Arguably the world’s first urban explorer, and probably the worst.’ ~ For some years before coming to the catacombs, I had been finding my way into the subculture of urban exploration: this was how I had come to know Lina. Urban exploration might best be defined as adventurous trespass in the built environment. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to climb fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the varying laws of access across different jurisdictions. Among the sites favoured by urban explorers are skyscrapers, disused factories and hospitals, former military installations, bunkers, bridges and storm-drain networks.

Bradley and I made a number of exploration trips together, and while planning these trips we communicated by postcard, on the grounds that this open form of correspondence – readable by anyone who cared to pick our postcards up and flip them over – was the most secure way to be in contact, given the authorities’ interest in Bradley. No security agency still steams open letters or reads people’s postcards; instead they watch text and WhatsApp conversations, and packet-sniff emails. Travelling with Bradley both deepened and heightened my sense of landscape, and of the built environment in particular. We found our ways into many strange sites and places. As well as a daredevil adventurer’s streak, Bradley had an archaeologist’s interest in contemporary forms of obsolescence, and a natural historian’s interest in how the wild returned to abandoned places. One night we set out to climb a transporter bridge in Newport, ascending the supply staircase and then inching out along its trunk-thick cables strung above the dark river.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

A lot of times, we would get in trouble for stealing apples, they would tell our mother. Then a lot of times, the Italians would come down, they would give us stuff. And in turn, my dad and my mom gardened, they would give them tomatoes.”31 This older ethnic pattern had solidified in the durable form of the built environment, not only homes but also churches, schools, and public accommodations—giving rise to both informal interracial sociality and also customary practices of segregation rather than institutionalized ones. This contradictory mix of racial feeling and practice was the result of the durability of the region’s class structure, within which the neighborhood was a source of security for the working class.

On the city’s industrial history, see Kenneth J. Kobus, City of Steel: How Pittsburgh Became the World’s Steelmaking Capital during the Carnegie Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 10. Herb Edwards, interview, box 2, folder 16, SOHP; Anne Yurcon, interview with James R. Barrett, May 12, 1976, HAOHPR. On the built environment in cultures of production generally, see Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25, vol. 2 (1993), 152–174; Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001); Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).


pages: 204 words: 54,395

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

You can do the same with your online presence if you listen to Shirky and: ¥ Create an environment that makes people feel good about participating. ¥ Give users autonomy. ¥ Keep the system as open as possible. And what matters in cyberspace matters equally in physical space. Ask yourself: How does the built environment of your workplace promote or inhibit autonomy, mastery, and purpose? PROMOTE GOLDILOCKS FOR GROUPS A lmost everyone has experienced the satisfaction of a Goldilocks task the kind that's neither too easy nor too hard, that delivers a delicious sense of flow. But sometimes it's difficult to replicate that experience when you're working in a team.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The Big Data is analyzed 24/7 to recalibrate supply chain inventories, production and distribution processes, and to initiate new business practices to increase thermodynamic efficiencies and productivity across the value chain. The IoT is also beginning to be used to create smart cities. Sensors measure vibrations and material conditions in buildings, bridges, roads, and other infrastructure to assess the structural health of the built environment and when to make needed repairs. Other sensors track noise pollution from neighborhood to neighborhood, monitor traffic congestion on streets, and pedestrian density on sidewalks to optimize driving and walking routes. Sensors placed along street curbs inform drivers of the availability of parking spaces.

Arguably, the IoT’s most dramatic impact thus far has been in security systems. Homes, offices, factories, stores, and even public gathering places have been outfitted with cameras and sensors to detect criminal activity. The IoT alerts security services and police for a quick response and provides a data trail for apprehending perpetrators. The IoT embeds the built environment and the natural environment in a coherent operating network, allowing every human being and every thing to communicate with one another in searching out synergies and facilitating interconnections in ways that optimize the thermodynamic efficiencies of society while ensuring the well-being of the Earth as a whole.


pages: 195 words: 58,462

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

Djemaa el-Fnaa speaks to the unique character of the Maghreb region of North Africa. Due to the Mediterranean coastline, the urban character of this region is quite different from the others. These are complex cities with layers of history, both distant and recent, with a more complete architectural record of their history than most African cities. The built environments of these cities give you a palpable sense of their vast trajectory through different kingdoms and different times. Cities in this region contain some of the few examples on the continent of indigenous architecture that have survived the tide of modernity. These preserved buildings provide great insight into how, prior to our current culture of globalization, groups used local materials and original designs to respond to the specificities of their climate and geography.


pages: 225 words: 55,458

Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education by Mike Rose

blue-collar work, centre right, confounding variable, creative destruction, delayed gratification, digital divide, George Santayana, income inequality, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, new economy, Ronald Reagan, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Colleges that can afford to, devote considerable effort to creating a particular environment and use that environment—and images of it—in marketing their institution. Many of the institutions that are the focus of this book do not have the kinds of resources that support large-scale construction or renovation projects or lush landscaping and aesthetic refinements. But the basic principle still holds: The built environment both constrains and enhances student experience. So upkeep and maintenance, routine landscaping, custodial and sanitation services all matter immensely. The condition of bathrooms tells students a whole lot about how students are valued. Within an institution’s budgetary constraints, are there inviting common spaces?


pages: 215 words: 55,212

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

It is a phenomenal weekend event that brings Makers from all over the world together with other Makers, Maker wannabes, and Maker appreciators. Many are good early adopters—they can usually put up with setbacks and laugh them off. The community includes people interested in robotics, architecture, clothing, food, parachutes, bicycles, and many other things. They think about the built environment, energy, and transportation. The world of people who are passionate about how to design, make, repair, and embellish things is zooming along. Hackerspaces, for example, are sites that support those who want to start or join a local community where people share a physical space, equipment, and ideas for working on projects.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Fischhoff, and S. Lichtenstein, “Accident Probabilities and Seat Belt Usage: A Psychological Perspective,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 13 (1978), pp. 281–85. “the danger of leaving home”: William H. Lucy, “Mortality Risk Associated with Leaving Home: Recognizing the Relevance of the Built Environment,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 9 (September 2003), pp. 1564–69. eleven times that: This figure was provided to me by Per Garder, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maine. Using the required risk exposure levels as quoted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (in “Occupational Exposure to Asbestos,” Federal Register 59:40964-41161, 1994, and OSHA Preambles, “Blood Borne Pathogens,” 29 CFR 1910.1030, Federal Register 56:64004, 1991: 29206), Garder notes that the risk of dying over a lifetime in manufacturing and service employment, respectively, “must be less than 1. 8 and 1.0 deaths per 1,000 employees.”

more dangerous it is: This information comes from a study by William Lucy, a University of Virginia professor of urban planning. His findings are based on two key mortality indices: chance of being killed by a stranger and risk of being killed in traffic. See Lucy, “Mortality Risk Associated with Leaving Home: Recognizing the Relevance of the Built Environment,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 9 (September 2003), pp. 1564–69. (roughly 22 miles per hour): In 2006, there were 14 traffic fatalities recorded in Bermuda, though that number was set to rise to 20 in 2007. See Tim Smith, “Call for Greater Police Presence to Tackle Road Deaths ‘Epidemic,’” Royal Gazette, November 24, 2007.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Living in the suburbs made a household twice as likely to own an auto as those living in the city.10 That better-earning suburbanites tended to own more autos is no great stretch of the imagination, but what is important is that they tended to even after their higher incomes are taken into consideration. The suburbs were not just wealthier; the built environment of the suburbs promoted auto ownership, and auto ownership, despite those higher incomes, meant more debt. Just owning an auto made a household 2.3 times as likely to have other debt as an autoless one.11 Auto owners, after adjusting for other factors, were 2.6 times as likely as non-auto owners to be in debt.12 Mortgages and auto payments made households more likely to be in debt in other areas of their lives, but what influenced that first decision to borrow, and how much did households borrow?

Consumers’ achievement of the middle-class dream in the 1950s had been enabled by debt. Debt policies and practices underpinned a consumer order by the 1970s that made it difficult for consumers to extricate themselves from indebtedness even if they had wanted to. The lifestyle of debt was as inscribed in the built environment as it was in the habits of the shopping public. As the economy began to erode in the early 1970s, just after the federal census announced that the majority of Americans then lived in suburbia, the debt requirement of suburban living began to take its toll. Even if people wanted to reduce their borrowing, the very environment in which they lived made reduction difficult.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We are entirely on Level III turf here. For example, the military culture in most developed countries assumes a professional, highly trained core around which volunteers or draftees are assembled. But operations in Bosnia and Afghanistan are more like policing operations, aimed at protecting civilians and the built environment rather than blowing it up and looking for bad guys. Policing and combat require very different kinds of training, and very different institutional cultures. Good soldiers are seldom good policemen, and certainly not both at the same time. Technology ramps up the complexity further. In his book Wired for War, Peter Singer reports that the United States had no ground robots when it invaded Afghanistan in 2002, 150 of them by the end of 2004, 2,400 by the end of 2005,5,000 by the end of 2006, and 12,000 by the end of 2008.


pages: 235 words: 65,885

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Surely we can do better. Are there some good things that are not at or near their historic peaks? I can think of a few:• Community • Personal autonomy • Satisfaction from honest work well done • Intergenerational solidarity • Cooperation • Leisure time • Happiness • Ingenuity • Artistry • Beauty of the built environment Of course, some of these items are hard to quantify. But a few can indeed be measured, and efforts to do so often yield surprising results. Let’s consider two that have been subjects of quantitative study. Leisure time is perhaps the element on this list that lends itself most readily to measurement.


pages: 231 words: 69,673

How Cycling Can Save the World by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, car-free, correlation does not imply causation, Crossrail, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, New Journalism, New Urbanism, post-work, publication bias, safety bicycle, Sidewalk Labs, Stop de Kindermoord, TED Talk, the built environment, traffic fines, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, transit-oriented development, urban planning

Global experience over the decades has shown that if mixing with the motor traffic is your chosen bike environment, then almost all your cyclists will be a small group who are mainly young, predominantly male, and disproportionately gung ho. Often this discussion becomes reduced to talk of various types of bike lanes. As we’ll see below, to create mass cycling you need to shape the built environment in several other ways, too. And for all the occasionally opaque discussions about curb heights, lane barriers, and traffic light phases, this is about something more fundamental. Bike infrastructure is, at its heart, about a changed vision for the place occupied by human beings in the modern urban world.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

These solutions range from confronting the so-called wicked problems—those most intractable issues of poverty, hunger, and determining what constitutes the good life well lived—to smaller concerns about the individual, household, and even neighborhood or school. The point of MaSAI is to take the maxim of open-source software developers—“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”—and apply this to other realms of social life and the built environment. 121 CHAPTER 5 One project that points the way is called Stardust@home, which has assembled a huge group of people to use the network to search for interstellar dust collected by a recent space mission.33 In 2004, the Stardust interstellar dust collector passed through the coma of a comet named Wild2 and captured potentially thousands of dust grains in its aerogel collectors.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Tourism to Chernobyl had expanded rapidly over the last decade or so—according to Igor, there were thirty-six thousand visitors in 2016—boosted by popular entertainments using Pripyat as a postapocalyptic verité setting. Films like Chernobyl Diaries and A Good Day to Die Hard, television shows like the History Channel’s Life After People (an entire series devoted to the fetishistic representation of nature’s reclamation of the built environment after the disappearance of the human species) and video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fallout 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. This latter game was in fact among the reasons why Dylan was so quick to agree to this trip: it had a certain sentimental resonance for him, as the game his company—a provider of networking software for online multiplayer games—was working on when it was acquired by Activision, the game’s developer.


pages: 215 words: 71,155

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

He served with co-contributor Steve Balkin on the board of directors of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition. Raised on Chicago’s north side, Meir currently lives in northeast Brazil, where he’s found that there is no shortage of third places. Richard Sexton is a noted photographer and writer on the topics of architecture, design, and the built environment. He is the author of Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana’s River Road and Parallel Utopias:The Quest for Community and coauthor of New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence and In the Victorian Style. His photographs have appeared in publications including Harpers, Preservation, and Smithsonian.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

For one thing, airliners are more virtuous and resilient than you might expect. China’s airports aren’t the source of its noxious air; its coal-burning power plants are. (China burns more coal than the United States, Europe, and Japan combined.) In the United States, as many as half of our own emissions emanate from “the built environment,” the energy consumed to build and service sprawl. We emit more carbon living in McMansions. For another, air travel’s actual share of our carbon footprints is currently 3 percent and falling (at least in the United States), thanks to a bounty of incremental and potentially revolutionary advances meant to slow and hopefully end its carbon contributions.

My capsule summary is drawn primarily from The New York Times, although the plight of Kenyan rose farmers was covered by the BBC, and estimates of airline losses and the number of stranded passengers were provided by the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation. “The airport leaves the city …” was given to me by Maurits Schaafsma, a senior planner at Schiphol Real Estate. The best account of “Terminal City” is found in Kurt C. Schlichting’s Grand Central Terminal. Statistics on the energy use and carbon emissions of the built environment are taken from Linda Tischler’s “The Green Housing Boom” (Fast Company, July/August 2008). Figures on aviation’s declining share of carbon emissions are from the Air Transport Association, an airline industry lobbying group, and from Climate Change 2007: Mitigation, a report by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

International Air Passenger and Freight Statistics, Federal Communications Commission, 2007 (sharp ascent); David Nielson, chief engineer for Airport Strategy at Boeing, “Boeing’s Contribution to Aviation Sustainability,” Pacific Basin Development Council, August 27, 2007 (By 2026); Jeffery Smisek, speech, CERA Week, March 11, 2011. 19 Observer, January 29, 2006 (“negative effects”); Rough Guides, press release, March 1, 2006; Times (London), July 23, 2006; Lonely Planet: Discover Europe (2010), p. 790. 20 Interview with Andris Piebalgs. Chapter 32: Closing the Conservation Gap 1 Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1878 (“Apprehension”). 2 Leon Glicksman, “Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment,” Physics Today 61, no. 7 (2008), p. 2. 3 Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and Controlled Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 9–10; Mechanical Engineering, May 2000 (jackets). 4 Claude Wampler, “Dr. Willis H. Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning,” The Newcomen Society of England, 1949; Margaret Ingels, Willis Haviland Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning (Louisville: Fetter Printing Company, 1991), pp. 33–34 (“manufactured weather”). 5 Ingels, Willis Haviland Carrier, pp. 63–79 (Madison Square Garden); “The Milam Building,” American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1991 (high-rise); Popular Mechanics, July 1939 (Damascus and Baghdad). 6 New York Times, June 2, 2002. 7 Interview with Leon Glicksman. 8 Gary Simon to author. 9 Interview with Lee Schipper. 10 National Association of Home Builders, Housing Facts, Figures, and Trends, May 2007, p. 13; National Petroleum Council, “Residential Commercial Efficiency,” July 18, 2007, p. 12. 11 Jone-Lin Wang, “Why Are We Using More Electricity?”

Meijer, “Cooling Energy-Hungry Data Centers,” Science 328, no. 5976 (2010), pp. 318–19. 12 Lawrence Makovich, “Meeting the Power Conservation Investment Challenge,” IHS CERA, 2007 (“conservation gap”); World Economic Forum and IHS CERA, Energy Vision Update 2010: Towards a More Energy Efficient World, 2010, p. 4 (“investment grade”). 13 Interview with George Caraghiaur. 14 Glicksman, “Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment,” pp. 3–6 (“high-tech versions”); interview with Leon Glicksman; U.S. Green Buildings Council Web site, http://www.usgbc.org. 15 Interview with Naohiro Amaya. 16 Interview with Yoriko Kawaguchi. 17 Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Top Runner Program, rev. ed., March 2010, at http://www.enecho.meti.go.jp/policy/saveenergy/toprunner2010.03en.pdf. 18 Kateri Callahan, “Building the Infrastructure for Energy Efficiency,” in World Economic Forum and IHS CERA, Energy Vision Update 2010: Towards a More Energy Efficient World, 2010, p. 24 (“public policy support”); James Rogers, speech, CERAWeek, February 15 2008. 19 IHS CERA, Smart Grid: Closing the Gap Between Perception and Reality (2010); Brookings Institution Center for Technology and Innovation, “Smart Grid Future: Evaluating Policy Opportunities and Challenges after the Recovery Act,” forum, July 14, 2010. 20 Scientific American, August 13, 2008. 21 Sewart Baker, Natalie Filipiak, and Katrina Timlin, “In the Dark: Crucial Industries Confront Cyberattacks,” (CSIS and McAfee: 2011).

.: GPO, 1921. Gibb, George, and Evelyn Knowlton. History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey). Vol. II, The Resurgent Years 1911–1927. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956. Gibbons, Herbert Adams. The New Map of South America. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Glicksman, Leon. “Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment.” Physics Today 61, no. 7 (2008). Goffman, Joseph, and Daniel J. Dudek. “The Clean Air Act Acid Rain Program: Lessons for Success in Creating a New Paradigm.” Presentation. 88th Annual Meeting. Air & Waste Management Association. June 18–23, 1995. Goldemberg, José. “Ethanol for a Sustainable Energy Future.”


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

The spatial fix effects a way out of crisis by creating a physical framework for development and further geographic expansion.1 It thus “provides a way to productively soak up capital by transforming the geography of capitalism,” adds the economic geographer Erica Schoenberger. The spatial fix induces massive investment in and expansion of infrastructure and the built environment, which effectively freezes “a significant tranche of accumulated capital in the earth, while using it to support the further accumulation of capital.”2 Spatial fixes work for a while, but they are not permanent solutions; rather, they are part of an ongoing cycle. Spatial fixes initially overcome crises and channel capital into more productive uses.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

More vital is how digitisation has allowed progressively greater amounts of cognition and memory to be performed in 0s and 1s, with the price–performance ratio of anything that does so falling every year for decades. It is this which allows contemporary camera technology to land rockets and, increasingly, drive autonomous vehicles; it is what will provide robots with fine motor coordination and dexterity equivalent to that found in humans; it will permit the built environment to know more about us, in certain respects, than we know about ourselves. It will even allow us to edit DNA – the building blocks of life – to remove hereditary disease and sequence genomes at such low cost, and with such regularity, that we will cure ourselves of cancer before it reaches Stage 1.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Specifically, Dumbaugh found: Eric Dumbaugh and Robert Rae, “Safe Urban Form: Revisiting the Relationship Between Community Design and Traffic Safety,” Journal of the American Planning Association 75, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 309–29. A recent report authored by experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found: Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, and Chris Kochtitzky, MSP, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Creating a Healthy Environment: The Impact of the Built Environment on Public Health,” Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse, sprawlwatch.org, p. 11. Another study: Ibid. Studies using pedometers: David R. Basset Jr. et al., “Pedometer-Measured Physical Activity and Health Behaviors in United States Adults,” National Institutes of Health, October 2010. In the United States, roughly half of all trips taken by car are three miles or less: 2001 National Household Transportation Survey; also see “Complete Streets Change Travel Patterns,” Smart Growth America.


pages: 301 words: 77,626

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

The rise of networked lifestyles has socialised many aspects of urban living, from Starbucks to the gym – so that what people want from the space they live in might be changing. There is also the challenge of meeting tough targets on carbon use and circularity (inbuilt recyclability). The biggest mistake would be to look at the current state of the built environment and see it as the product of randomness plus demographic change. It is the precise outcome of planned action by the rich against the poor. From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

For generously taking time from their busy schedules to offer us their wisdom, we would like to thank: Ed Glaeser, Chairman of the economics department at Harvard and one of the world’s leading experts on the economics of cities; Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford and a renowned authority on the Silk Roads; John-Paul Ghobrial, Professor of Global and Modern History at Oxford and a valued colleague of Ian’s at Balliol College; Lord Norman Foster, not only a world-renowned architect but also an insightful observer of the built environment; Billy Cobbett, director of Slum Dwellers International with a lifetime of experience working to understand and improve cities in developing countries; Robert Muggah, co-author with Ian of Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years and an expert on all things cities; and Carl Frey, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Work and an innovative economic historian.


pages: 314 words: 75,678

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

In 2019, we bought more than 5 million cars: S&P Global Market Intelligence, https://www.spglobal.com/​marketintelligence/​en/. Chapter 8: How We Keep Cool and Stay Warm Humans have been trying: A. A’zami, “Badgir in Traditional Iranian Architecture,” Passive and Low Energy Cooling for the Built Environment conference, Santorini, Greece, May 2005. But the first known machine: U.S. Department of Energy, “History of Air Conditioning,” www.energy.gov. Also “The Invention of Air Conditioning,” Panama City Living, March 13, 2014, www.panamacityliving.com. Barely more than a century: International Energy Agency, “The Future of Cooling,” www.iea.org.


pages: 349 words: 86,224

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.23 The domestication of plants as represented ultimately by fixed-field farming, then, enmeshed us in an annual set of routines that organized our work life, our settlement patterns, our social structure, the built environment of the domus, and much of our ritual life. From field clearing (by fire, plough, harrow), to sowing, to weeding, to watering, to constant vigilance as the crop ripens, the dominant cultivar organizes much of our timetable. The harvest itself sets in train another sequence of routines: in the case of cereal crops, cutting, bundling, threshing, gleaning, separation of straw, winnowing chaff, sieving, drying, sorting—most of which has historically been coded as women’s work.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

China has massive labour surpluses, and if it is to achieve social and political stability it must either absorb or violently repress that surplus. It can do the former only by debt-financing infrastructural and fixed-capital formation projects on a massive scale (fixed-capital investment increased by 25 per cent in 2003). The danger lurks of a severe crisis of over-accumulation of fixed capital (particularly in the built environment). Abundant signs exist of excess production capacity (for example in automobile production and electronics) and a boom and bust cycle in urban investments has already occurred. But all of this requires that the Chinese state depart from neoliberal orthodoxy and act like a Keynesian state. This requires that it maintain capital and exchange rate controls.


pages: 309 words: 84,038

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling by Carlton Reid

1960s counterculture, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, Yom Kippur War

And the theory of “peak car”—that motor-vehicle use has peaked, and is now falling—is not as statistically solid as it looked during the last recession, when driving most definitely dipped. Terrible for the planet, and bad for both congestion and health, but car purchasing and car use are on the rise again. The joyful practicality of cycling. This is due, in great part, to the built environment. Over the last sixty years, planners designed for “King Car” to the exclusion of all else, and we now have toxic, congested cities where one of the obvious solutions (obvious to cycle advocates, that is) is to plan for the bicycle. Dutch cities do such planning, so why can’t others? It might come as a surprise to find out that cycle use in the Netherlands did not “boom” when the good existing network of cycleways was upgraded in the mid-1970s to became a dense grid.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Each of these examples illustrates how crucial computation is to contemporary life, while also revealing its blind spots, structural dangers, and engineered weaknesses. To take another example from aviation, consider the experience of being in an airport. An airport is a canonical example of what geographers call ‘code/space’.30 Code/spaces describe the interweaving of computation with the built environment and daily experience to a very specific extent: rather than merely overlaying and augmenting them, computation becomes a crucial component of them, such that the environment and the experience of it actually ceases to function in the absence of code. In the case of the airport, code both facilitates and coproduces the environment.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

With the PRSC, though, he may have created his most controversial and rebellious project yet—an entire neighbourhood that rejects the digital status quo of surveillance, the internet, and big data. “Everywhere you go, even in your own home, you’re not only being watched by cameras, but you’re generating data,” Manaan tells me. “We’ve reached a point, in cities like Bristol, where we’re in a state of total surveillance. Where every square inch of the built environment has been mapped, is being watched. And I don’t mean just by cameras, the city is also covered in sensors—from LIDAR through to embedded microphones and pressure pads under the pavements that can measure how many people have walked past. “And all that’s before we start to even include what we do online, how big data companies like Google or Facebook track us across the internet, from site to site and service to service.


pages: 306 words: 85,836

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, feminist movement, food miles, George Akerlof, global pandemic, information asymmetry, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, Netflix Prize, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Pareto efficiency, peak oil, pre–internet, price anchoring, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, Sam Peltzman, security theater, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549

In this sense, rotational grazing supports one of the more appealing (if damaging) myths at the core of contemporary environmentalism: the notion that nature is more natural in the absence of human beings. Put differently, rotational grazing speaks powerfully to the aesthetics of environmentalism while confirming a bias against the built environment; a pipeline, not so much. A final reason that McKibben, 350.org, and mainstream environmentalism remain agnostic about meat centers on the idea of personal agency. For most people, meat is essentially something we cook and eat. Naturally, it’s much more than that. But for most consumers, meat is first and foremost a personal decision about what we put into our body.


Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes

Asperger Syndrome, behavioural economics, classic study, complexity theory, epigenetics, Higgs boson, intermodal, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, phenotype, social intelligence, the built environment, theory of mind, twin studies

In many parts of the world, turnstiles or “thigh-beaters” regulate access to train platforms and sports stadiums. When a person learns to use a turnstile—to get through without having their thighs beaten—they learn something that most people would say is not only social but cultural because it relates to an aspect of the built environment and varies across human populations. But learning to use a turnstile does not inevitably involve social learning or cultural learning. Turnstile learning is an example of both social learning and cultural learning when it depends on verbal instruction (“First put your ticket in this slot, then lean gently on the cross bar,” and so forth).


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Yet it didn’t seem that way to people living fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, because of the pace of change they themselves had seen. And not just the pace but also the scope: as Gordon argues, in past eras, the West saw dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas—energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment. Whereas the story of the last two developed-world generations is of a society where progress has become increasingly monodimensional, all tech and nothing else. Indeed, it’s telling that even within the Silicon Valley landscape, the most stable success stories are often the purest computer-and-Internet enterprises—social media companies, device manufacturers, software companies—while the frauds and failures and big money-losers and possible catastrophes tend to involve efforts to use tech to transform some other industry, from music festivals to office-space rentals to food delivery to blood tests.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.” That captures the essence of what the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs loved about cities—their diversity. It’s why she believed that the architecture of cities should grow organically in an unplanned, haphazard way. As she put it, “Genuine, rich diversity of the built environment is always the product of many, many different minds, and at its richest is also the product of different periods of time with their different aims and fashions.” She also celebrated the diversity of a city’s population. What attracted so many people to cities through the centuries was that they would meet people unlike them and see the world through different eyes.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

As a friend who bought a house from a wheelchair user observed, “Damn, it’s nice to have wide doorways, and a toilet positioned this way—they should just do it for everyone.” That’s the premise of universal design—that products designed for older people and people with disabilities work great for everyone else too. “Age-friendly” products improve the built environment and make it more accessible, but stigma keeps them off the market. Realtors advise removing ramps and grip bars before putting a house on the market, as though no buyer could see accessibility as a bonus or aging into it as a necessity. Alas, thanks to internalized ageism, they’ve got a point.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

., Suarez, G. (2009) “The Evolution of a Financial Crisis: Panic in the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Market”, Finance and Economics Discussion Series Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.; Gorton, G. and Metrick, A. (2012) “Securitized Banking and the Run On Repo”, Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 104 14 Scanlon, K. and Whitehead, C. (2011) “The UK Mortgage Market: Responding to Volatility”, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol. 26; Milne, A. and Wood, J.A. (2013) “An Old Fashioned Banking Crisis: Credit Growth and Loan Losses in the UK 1997-2012”, Paper prepared for conference: The Causes and Consequences of the Long UK Expansion: 1992 to 2007, 19-20 September 2013, Clare College Cambridge 15 Financial Conduct Authority (2019) “Statistics on Mortgage Lending: March 2019 Edition: MLAR Detailed Tables”, FCA https://www.fca.org.uk/data/mortgage-lending-statistics; Office for National Statistics (2019) “Gross Domestic Product: Chained Volume Measures: Seasonally Adjusted £m” https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/abmi/pn2. 16 Bank of England (2017; 2018) 17 This account draws on: Bank of England (2018; 2017); Scanlon and Whitehead (2011); Milne and Wood (2013); Boyer (2013). 18 Ellis, L. (2008) “The Housing Meltdown: Why Did It Happen in the United States?”


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Since it was harder for Black residents to buy homes, they also did not share in the wealth that came with rising property values throughout the twentieth century, further cementing the gap between white and Black Americans. However, the FHA’s standards were not the only initiative taken by various levels of government to promote a car-oriented society. Zoning policies that were originally embraced because they were perceived to be good for business homogenized different areas of cities, regulated the built environment as a means of excluding undesirable people from certain neighborhoods, and were ultimately justified in the name of increasing property values. They had the effect of breaking the city up into distinct zones designed for specific uses, such as separating residential neighborhoods from where people worked and where they engaged in leisure activities.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Robert Ellickson proposed a form of street votes in 1998, when awareness of NIMBYism was beginning to rise. Robert Nelson, an American zoning expert, proposed something similar in 1999. More recently, the United Kingdom’s Royal Town Planning Institute lent support to this sort of “microdemocracy” in a 2020 position paper. A high-profile UK government commission on the built environment recommended trials of street votes and block votes.24 Bumping planning decisions up to state or national governments in order to avoid resistance at the city level is appealing from a theoretical point of view. A bigger government should in theory be able to resolve the coordination problem.


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

The good news is that many energy-efficient technologies and renewable-energy solutions are commercially available today, and they are already being applied. Renewable-energy supplies, cross-laminated timber, prefabricated modules, and super insulation are making a positive impact. Now we need a lot more. Despite advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, the built environment is still mostly a brick-and-mortar industry, capital-intensive and locally fragmented. It tends to lag behind. The vast majority of buildings will become greener only if regulations both force and incentivize them to do so. Change is coming; however, there is potential for trouble. For instance, as much as outfitting buildings with sensors helps monitor and optimize energy efficiency, they are also adding prying mechanical eyes to our lives.


pages: 279 words: 85,552

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, COVID-19, forensic accounting, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, the built environment, University of East Anglia, value engineering

‘These emergent flames could re-enter the block via windows.’11 Nonetheless, it was keen to investigate the use of such systems. In 1989, the government committed almost £1m to install a pilot cladding system on Knowsley Heights, an eleven-storey block in Merseyside. The work was to be monitored by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) – then a state-owned testing and research facility for the built environment. The tower was fitted with a ‘rainscreen’ cladding system. Rolls of non-combustible insulation were fitted flush to the concrete walls. Then panels made of glass-reinforced plastic were fitted to an aluminium frame in front of this insulation. A similar system would be used on Grenfell Tower twenty-five years later.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Spatial forms and processes are formed by the dynamics of the overall social structure. This includes contradictory trends derived from conflicts and strategies between social actors playing out their opposing interests and values. Furthermore, social processes influence space by acting on the built environment inherited from previous socio-spatial structures. Indeed, space is crystallized time. To approach in the simplest possible terms such a complexity, let us proceed step by step. What is space? In physics, it cannot be defined outside the dynamics of matter. In social theory, it cannot be defined without reference to social practices.

Panofsky on Gothic cathedrals, Tafuri on American skyscrapers, Venturi on the surprisingly kitsch American city, Lynch on city images, Harvey on postmodernism as the expression of time/space compression by capitalism, are some of the best illustrations of an intellectual tradition that has used the forms of the built environment as one of the most signifying codes to read the basic structures of society’s dominant values.80 To be sure, there is no simple, direct inter- pretation of the formal expression of social values. But as research by scholars and analysts has revealed, and as works by architects have demonstrated, there has always been a strong, semiconscious connection between what society (in its diversity) was saying and what architects wanted to say.81 Not any more.


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

Another group of individuals who provided a bridge to the past are the ROMEOS (Retired Opinion-Makers Eating Out), a group of former journalists and public officials who lived through Logue’s Boston years. They connected me to several crucial interviewees. Robert Hannan and Edward Quill have worked tirelessly to keep this group going. Although I have long been interested in cities and the built environment, I was not trained as an architect or a planner. Over the years at Harvard, I have benefited enormously from the instruction of colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Some are singled out above, but many more have tutored me and warmly welcomed me into their ranks, including the former dean Mohsen Mostafavi.

In Boston, materials at the Boston City Archives, the Boston Public Library, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, and the always astonishingly wide-ranging holdings of the Harvard Libraries proved indispensable as well, particularly the GSD’s Loeb Library, whose diverse collections are a reminder that architects and planners leave behind impressive work in print, not just their imprint on the built environment. I signed on with Farrar, Straus and Giroux early in this book’s development, which has given me the benefit of Eric Chinski’s wise counsel for a long time. But it was when I presented him with a full draft that I really understood why he has earned a reputation as such a brilliant editor.


pages: 262 words: 73,439

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) by Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox

BRICs, centre right, classic study, dematerialisation, informal economy, Kickstarter, land reform, new economy, the built environment, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, urban renewal

To be an engineer is to be able to understand and navigate the proliferating systems of standardization that enable calculations and predictions to be made and, ultimately, things to be built. Standards allow for figures to be evaluated for their accuracy, workability, and usefulness, and in this sense they have a determining relationship to the look, feel, and functionality of the built environment. Moreover, in their capacity to produce a normative effect, standards are also tools that allow for the production of legitimacy.10 The politics of numerical production in the feasibility documents was thus intimately linked to the production and adherence to standards. These standards enabled those writing reports to produce aggregated figures about the constantly shifting and mutable social and material environments where they intended to make an intervention—figures that could be used as the basis for projections about the future viability of the road.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

When it comes to broad urban policy and investment, the United States will fall further behind other nations. Canada’s Liberal government is working to connect infrastructure investment to city-building and is developing a new strategy for affordable housing and urban development (involving me and other leading urbanists). Australia’s conservative leadership created a new minister of cities and the built environment to coordinate urban development at the national level. However, even with a Trump victory and Republican control of the federal government, there are still things that can be accomplished. The most important thing we can do is to help cities and communities get the increased control they need to build their economies and address the challenges of the New Urban Crisis.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

If they were walking down the street together, Mike might point out different types of street lamps in various locations and ask Jonathan why he thought they were different: how the light would fall and what weather conditions might affect the choice of their designs. They were constantly keeping up a conversation about the built environment and what made-objects were all around them . . . and how they could be made better.”6 “Mike was a person who had a quiet strength about him and was relentlessly good at his job,” added Tabberer. “He was a very gentle character, very knowledgeable, very generous and courteous. He was a classic English gentleman.”


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Walter Mischel, the researcher behind the famous “marshmallow study” from the 1970s, has developed effective strategies to train impatient children to be patient—an important success, given that impatient children have a high likelihood of growing up to be impatient adults.14 There are other potentially fruitful ventures, such as what Richard Thaler (of the two-self model) and coauthor Cass Sunstein call “choice architecture.” The term refers to carefully designed technologies, infrastructure, and other pieces of the built environment that subtly “nudge” us to act with more patience and long-term thought. An example: smartphone apps that automatically track our daily expenses and warn us when we’re exceeding our budget. But such efforts are swimming upstream against a current of world-historic proportions. Consider our political culture, which more and more encourages a rapid, visceral response to policy or events.


pages: 305 words: 73,935

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community by Chris Scotthanson, Kelly Scotthanson

Buy land – they’re not making it any more, card file, index card, intentional community, land bank, off grid, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering

But don’t let spontaneous brainstorming drive the marketing effort in the meantime, as it will tend to divert you from implementing your well-considered marketing plan. Training members Selling cohousing is different from selling a product. Cohousing is a way of life, it is a set of relationships, it is the design of the built environment, and most of all, it is the experience of community. However, in some ways, cohousing is also a product, and many of the ideas used in selling a product or service have some application that make them useful in presenting cohousing to a person for the first time. 221 222 THE COHOUSING HANDBOOK Try what is called “needs satisfaction selling.”


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

We now assume, correctly or not, that every new media experience is rewiring our brains in some fundamental way; today’s disorders—attention deficit disorder, autism, teen violence—are regularly chalked up to the sensory overload of television, or video games, or social media. We take it for granted that the brain is shaped by the built environment that surrounds it, for better and for worse. That way of seeing the mind—and understanding its occasional defects—first came into view with the unlikely criminals of the department-store disease. Architects had long constructed environments designed to trigger certain emotional responses in their visitors: think of the soaring interiors of the medieval cathedral, meant to inspire awe and wonder.


Istanbul Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, low cost airline, supply-chain management, the built environment, urban sprawl, yield management

Architecture Architects and urban designers wanting to study the world's best practice need go no further than İstanbul. Here, delicate minarets reach towards the heavens, distinctive domes crown hills, elegant mansions adorn the water's edge and edgy art spaces claim contemporary landmark status. The skyline has the wow factor in spades and the historical layers of the built environment are both handsome and fascinating – together, they offer travellers an exhilarating architectural experience. Blue Mosque TETRA IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES © Byzantine Architecture After Mehmet the Conquerer stormed into İstanbul in 1453 many churches were converted into mosques; despite the minarets, you can usually tell a church-cum-mosque by the distinctive red bricks that are characteristic of all Byzantine churches.


EcoVillage at Ithaca Pioneering a Sustainable Culture (2005) by Liz Walker

car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, intentional community, microcredit, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, systems thinking, the built environment, transit-oriented development, World Values Survey

It was good to see such a full exchange of perspectives on the often difficult topic of future development. Throughout its proceedings and in the international media it generated, the conference honored traditional village values and sought ways to integrate African village wisdom into strategies for bringing ecological sustainability to the built environment. In a final plenary session, the conference endorsed an international strategy for rebuilding cities, towns, and villages everywhere that included: • an end to automobile subsidies; • the reshaping of cities away from sprawl and toward pedestrianaccessible centers; • the restoration of large natural spaces; • the revitalization of traditional villages; • the establishment of biodiverse local agriculture; • the creation of strong economic incentives for ecologically oriented businesses; • new funding efforts to support the retooling necessary for ecological building and technology; and • the establishment of government departments with a wholesystems perspective that could assist ecological rebuilding.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Source: FIMo—How to Interpret Sanborn Maps, 2019, http://www.historicalinfo.com/fimo-interpret-sanborn-maps/#Utilization. Sanborn maps and their London cousins, the Goad Fire Insurance Plans (1886–1930), became an invaluable resource for land use information. Because they were focused on the built environment, however, the maps did not measure socioeconomic conditions of the city. Charles Booth, a London philanthropist, set out to change that. He believed a survey of poverty on the scale of these maps would be essential to study the condition of the poor.34 This led Booth to conduct the most extensive survey on race and class London had ever seen.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

But the town center ruckus was a different kind of conflict. In this case, the adversary was not a builder in a hurry to get the job done and leave before the defects were discovered. Rather, Lexin had come to town as a real estate raider, seeking only to ruthlessly exploit an asset. Unlike the developers, the company added nothing to the built environment. Given his heavy reliance on debt financing—even the initial $21 million sale was financed with a $19.1 million GMAC loan—Negrin and his partners probably did not even have much skin in the game. What makes the private equity business so attractive for investors is that the potential downside for those involved is quite limited.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

These are legitimate considerations when you are designing an embassy, but do not really apply to a shopping center, a middle school, or an apartment complex […] Very few architectural firms will ever have the opportunity to design a State Department building or maximum-security prison” [17]. Examples of this type of thinking can be found in post-9/11 books on security for the built environment. One text, on a landscape-architectural approach to security, contains as its worked design examples the Federal Center and International Trade Center in Washington DC, the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, the White House, New York City Hall, the Sacramento State House, and the Hanley Federal Building and US Courthouse in New York, supported by data such as tables 244 Threats of blast pressure levels caused by various types of car and truck bombs [18].

An architect, armed with some understanding of the structure of criminal encounter, can simply avoid providing the space which supports it” [112]. More succinctly it “reduces the propensity of the physical environment to support criminal behaviour” [114]. CPTED includes not only standard security measures that are traditionally applied to the built environment like providing adequate lighting (but see the discussion further down for more on this) and minimising dense shrubs and trees that provide cover for miscreants but extends to a whole host of less immediately-obvious ones as well. One frequently-advocated (but less frequently-applied) measure involves positioning windows for so-called passive surveillance of outside public spaces, based on the “eyes on the street” concept of influential urban activist Jane Jacobs [115], with the intended goal being that “abnormal users [of the environment] will feel at greater risk of detection” [114].

Security through Diversity 317 Other measures can include using slippery paints for columns and supports to prevent them from being scaled, planting climbing plants along walls subject to graffiti (a socalled “living wall”) and thorny plants to discourage people from entering certain areas, or where a living wall isn’t feasible for combating graffiti, using textured or boldly patterned coloured surfaces to the same effect (there’s a whole science built around just this aspect of CPTED alone), eliminating architectural features that provide easy access to roofs, painting areas around night-time lighting with white, reflective paint to increase the illumination being provided, and so on. Some of these security measures like the choice of paint used are extremely trivial and all can be bypassed, but in combination they add up to make a considerable integrated defensive system for attackers to overcome. As with computer security, security for the built environment is rarely a case of blindly following a fixed set of rules. For example trying to bolt on security through the simple expedient of adding CCTV cameras doesn’t work in schools because “many of the kids committing school crimes are trying to have their moment of fame on video. CCTV gives the kids their chance to be famous” [116].


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

These new technologies may indeed be our future guardians against some of the unpredictable consequences of climate change, and may also help us adapt to and survive an unpredictable future and ultimately create a much cleaner, healthier environment that will benefit the wellbeing of many. References Armstrong, Rachel (2009) “Systems Architecture: A New Model for Sustainability and the Built Environment Using Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science with Living Technology.” Artificial Life (MIT Press) 16, pp. 1–15. Armstrong, Rachel and Spiller, Neill (2011) “Synthetic Biology: Living Quarters.” Nature 467 (October 21, 2010), pp. 916–918. Hanczyc Martin and Ikegami, Takashi (2009) “Protocells as Smart Agents for Architectural Design.”

Traube, Moritz (1867) Archiv für Anatomie Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, pp. 87–128, 129–165. Toyota, Taro, Maru, Naoto, Hanczyc, Martin, Ikegami, Takashi, and Sugawara Tadashi (2009) “Self-Propelled Oil Droplets Consuming “Fuel’ Surfactant.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 131/14, pp. 5012–5013. Further Reading Armstrong, Rachel (2011) “Unconventional Computing in the Built Environment.” International Journal of Nanotechnology and Molecular Computation 3/1, pp. 1–12. Part III Human Enhancement The Cognitive Sphere Enhancing the human brain’s cognitive capacities is another crucial goal of transhumanism. In a new essay Andy Clark, author of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, considers how the merging of humans and machines will enable us to redesign ourselves for the better.


pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

But it’s clear to me that the future of for-hire car services will be a lot more on-demand-in-your-hand and a lot less like the 1930s model of taxis. How to deal with this new “genie” of mobility is playing out all over the world, and it’s not going back into the lamp. Fully self-driving vehicles will have even more widespread impacts on safety, mobility, land use, and the built environment. By eliminating human emotions and opportunism from the act of driving, a disinterested technology system can keep vehicles away from one another, operating at a speed appropriate for safety, optimizing road capacity, and closing the divide between those who have access to mobility and those who don’t.


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

Conceivably those climates could get considerably more micro, down to particular farms or soccer stadiums or beach resorts. These interventions, should they ever become feasible, are decades away, at least. But even rapid and quotidian-seeming projects will leave a profoundly different imprint on the shape of the world. In the nineteenth century, the built environment of the most advanced countries reflected the prerogatives of industry—think of railroad tracks laid across whole continents to move coal. In the twentieth century, those same environments were made to reflect the needs of capital—think of global urbanization agglomerating labor supply for a new service economy.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

Humans have changed each and every environment. We are eco-engineers for the entire planet. We have to fix farming. Without changes to farming practices, the natural environment farmers manage will continue to decline. Intensive farming is, from an environmental perspective, a desert of monocultures. It can be less biodiverse than the built environments. Despite all the subsidies, farmers are not doing well, and many smaller farms are in danger of going under. Since World War II, 70 years of subsidies have not brought prosperity to the bulk of farmers. Modern British agriculture is bad for the environment, bad for farmers and bad for taxpayers.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

Emily Eakin, “The Excrement Experiment,” The New Yorker, December 1, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/excrement-experiment; Freakonomics Radio, “The Power of Poop,” March 3, 2011, http://freakonomics.com/2011/03/03/the-power-of-poop-full-transcript/. 7. Emily Eakin, “Bacteria on the Brain,” The New Yorker, December 7, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/bacteria-on-the-brain. 8. This study was done by researchers at the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon. See Jessica Green, “Are We Filtering the Wrong Microbes?” TED Talks, 2011, http://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_green_are_we_filtering_the_wrong_microbes/transcript?language=en. 9. Alanna Collen, “‘Microbial Birthday Suit’ for C-Section Babies,” BBC Magazine, September 11, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34064012. 10.


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

In 1994 the age of same-sex consent was lowered to eighteen and it was reduced again in 2001 to sixteen, bringing it into line with the consensual age for everyone else. The 1994 bill was also the first British legislation ever to mention lesbian sex, setting the age of consent between two women at sixteen. Who lives in Europe’s smallest houses? We do. According to a survey by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the British build the pokiest homes in Europe. The UK has both the smallest new houses and smallest average room size. The average size of a room in a new house in France is 26.9 square metres. The equivalent in the UK is 15.8 square metres – only a smidgeon larger than a standard parking space (14 square metres).


pages: 351 words: 100,791

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

The deepening of our understanding, and our affections, requires partners in triangulation: other people as other people, in relation to whom we may achieve an earned individuality of outlook. Absent such differentiation, there is a certain flattening of the human landscape. In the next chapter, I’d like to consider how the built environment of our shared spaces may contribute to this flattening. When they are saturated with mass media, our attention is appropriated in such a way that the Public—an abstraction—comes to stand in for concrete others, and it becomes harder for us to show up for one another as individuals. 11 THE FLATTENING I started lifting weights when I was thirteen, in the basement of the YMCA that is kitty-corner from Berkeley High.


Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, index card, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prenzlauer Berg, telemarketer, the built environment

This place seems to have been designed on the same one-size-fits-all architectural principle as everything else: the Runden Ecke in Leipzig and Stasi HQ at Normannenstrasse; the same as prisons and hospitals and schools and administrative buildings all over this country, and probably the same as inside the brown Palast der Republik only it’s behind bars and I can’t get in. From here to Vladivostok this was Communism’s gift to the built environment—linoleum and grey cement, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors with all-purpose rooms. Behind these doors anything could be happening: interrogations, imprisonment, examinations, education, administration, hiding out from nuclear catastrophe or, in this case, propaganda.


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

For the User, these maps cohere the range of possible interactions and transactions not only with the City layer, but also with the Cloud and Earth layers as mediated through it; Interfaces provide a channel for the User to model and monitor his or her own position within the range that they describe. Furthermore, The Stack is not only mediated through the City layer; the entire apparatus also expresses itself at the scale of the city and the built environment, and it does so in sometimes contradictory ways, characterized as much by centralization (e.g., the continental consolidation of key bandwidth channels into meganodes and megacities) and decentralization (e.g., the global predominance of increasingly powerful mobile handsets as an essential provision for everyday urban life).11 Below we examine several ways that The Stack is grounded at the City layer, from the scale of global networks to that of the individual envelope, and back again.

For the individual, habitus can also refer to how embodied dispositions become codified into the organization of place and how this comes to reconfigure how they are occupied and programmed in their reflective image. The repetition of habit produces an inscription, a “groove,” in the figural contours of the built environment, and in fact it builds the environment precisely through such repetitions, while habitats in turn produce and enunciate themselves though bodies, manifested as habits. Spaces contain and constrain, and are configured by the bodies they constrain. Spaces are not just expressions of embodiment; they also express themselves as and through bodily form (prisoner, worker, individual, mass).


pages: 319 words: 105,949

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

The term built environment typically refers to the totality of man-made features such as streets, parks, and buildings. But one subset of this, the cocoon of glassed-off insulation that is modern travel—in particular, the global house of sealed comfort that air travelers are presumed to want—is a more compelling object for the name. The completeness of the built environment, the built sky, is often taken as a mark of the quality of the airport, or even of the level of development in a country. Few travelers enjoy boarding a plane that is parked away from the terminal, which may involve waiting on stairs in the wind and the rain. Jetways—or air bridges, a term in which the increasingly sealed-off modern traveler might hear a touch of irony—are added as airports develop and expand.


pages: 321 words: 85,893

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, longitudinal study, McMansion, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, out of africa, peak oil, placebo effect, Rosa Parks, the built environment, vertical integration

There will be a great battle to preserve the supposed entitlements to suburbia and it will be an epochal act of futility, a huge waste of effort and resources that might have been much better spent in finding new ways to carry on.14 He paints a post-industrial still-life of the suburbs become unlivable, as oil prices rise and the built environment arranged entirely for cars stops working entirely. Housing is the largest investment the average person has. It will soon be worthless if it’s in the suburbs. Most of the world has invested in infrastructure built on a promise of infinite fossil fuel; most of the human race has also reproduced on the premise of infinite food from that same fossil fuel.


pages: 540 words: 103,101

Building Microservices by Sam Newman

airport security, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, continuous integration, Conway's law, create, read, update, delete, defense in depth, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, index card, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, job automation, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, platform as a service, premature optimization, pull request, recommendation engine, Salesforce, SimCity, social graph, software as a service, source of truth, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, the built environment, the long tail, two-pizza team, web application, WebSocket

Although I have spent much of the chapter so far warning you off comparing ourselves too much to other professions, there is one analogy that I like when it comes to the role of the IT architect and that I think better encapsulates what we want this role to be. Erik Doernenburg first shared with me the idea that we should think of our role more as town planners than architects for the built environment. The role of the town planner should be familiar to any of you who have played SimCity before. A town planner’s role is to look at a multitude of sources of information, and then attempt to optimize the layout of a city to best suit the needs of the citizens today, taking into account future use.


pages: 297 words: 108,353

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

.), Housing Markets in the U.S. and Japan, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Noguchi, Y. ‘The “bubble” and economic policies in the 1980s’, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 20, 291–329, 1994. 275 BIBLIOGRAPHY Norris, M. and Coates, D. ‘How housing killed the Celtic tiger: anatomy and consequences of Ireland’s housing boom and bust’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 29, 299–315, 2014. Norris, M. and Coates, D. ‘Mortgage availability, qualifications and risks in Ireland, 2000-2009’, Journal of Current Issues in Finance, Business and Economics, 4, 191–206, 2011. Noyes, A. D. Forty Years of American Finance, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. Nyberg, P.


A History of British Motorways by G. Charlesworth

New Urbanism, North Sea oil, restrictive zoning, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, urban renewal

FREEMAN FOX, WILBUR SMITH AND ASSOCIATES. The West Midlands Transport Study. Birmingham, 1968. 41. SIR OWEN WILLIAMS AND PARTNERS. MIdland Links motorway. Sir Owen Williams and Partners, London, 1972. 42. LAWSON B.R. and WALTERS D. The effects ofa new motorway on an established residential area. Psychology and the built environment. Architectural Press, London, 1974. 43. WALL J .S. and BURR M.A. Aston Expressway signing and signalling system. Traffic engineering and control, 1972, 14, No. 8. 44. READ G.F. Parkway concept for Bolton's first motorway. Surveyor, 1971,38, No. 4150. 45. STEERING COMMITTEE ON MERSEYSIDE TRAFFIC AND TRANSPORT.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In this way we are also constructing democracy … A city is a physical entity, a place where people go to schools or libraries that are physical buildings, they walk on sidewalks, and use public transit and roads. If the physical quality of the city is poor, the quality of life there also will be poor.14 This was enshrined in the 2000 Territorial Ordering Plan of the Capital District that emphasised the need to work on urban renewal, the built environment, sustainable development and low-income housing. New schools, parks and libraries were built. There were 100 new nurseries for children under five years old. Water was provided to all slum regions and wide-scale housing schemes were developed for the homeless. Yet Peñalosa also wanted the Bogotános to rethink the city itself.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

“If she were to collapse,” he thought, “the cause of death would be listed as heat stroke, and there would be no mention of the upstream causes—the absence of trees, a black tar road, too many cars, too much air pollution, and lack of public transport.” And if she were hit by a truck, the cause of death would be motor vehicle trauma, not lack of sidewalks and insufficient pedestrian crossings. That incident served as an epiphany for Jackson, who subsequently became an ardent proponent for rethinking and restructuring the “built environment,” recognizing that how we build our cities, transportation systems, and infrastructure has a profound public health impact. In his 2012 four-part public television documentary and accompanying book, Designing Healthy Communities, he preached a New Urbanist health mantra. Children should be able to walk or ride bikes to school.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

Though considered ugly and unsanitary by mainstream Turkish architects and urban planners at the time (and the hygiene levels certainly were lacking), these rugged, haphazard houses later came to be praised for their tight-knit beauty and their intrinsically earthquake-proof design: “Typical gecekondu settlements are composed of one- or two-story houses with gardens or courtyards,” one admirer wrote 30 years later. “There is an irregular settlement pattern with narrow paths and passages between the plots. This kind of space is a result of a long-term consolidation process and provides a special kind of environmental quality for the inhabitants. The built environment offers variety, flexibility in the uses of immediate environment of the houses, fluid spaces between indoors and outdoors and an opportunity for socialization.” Established city-dwellers looked at the outskirts and saw a million rural villages popping up. In reality, though there were certainly aspects of village life in the gecekondu, the houses and their surroundings bore little resemblance to the villages their occupants had fled.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

As I see it, this work has a clear upshot for human beings. As we grapple with the challenges of automation, we may want to arrange our own environment like that of the happy rats, rather than the overdetermined world of their anxious counterparts. Of course, we do not simply live in the natural environment. But the built environment of technology and cultural practices can likewise be rich enough that it demands the use of our full repertoire of intelligence. Flourishing—that of rats and humans alike—seems to require an environment with “open problem spaces” that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development.


pages: 426 words: 118,913

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

We leave behind our private appetites and subjective preferences in order to achieve a consensus that will provide a public background to what we are and what we do. In such circumstances aesthetic disagreements are not comfortable disagreements like disagreements over taste in food (which are not so much disagreements as differences). When it comes to the built environment we should not be surprised that aesthetic disagreements are the subjects of fierce litigation and legislative enforcement – even in America, where each person is sovereign in his land. We can reject the assumption that beauty is merely subjective without embracing the view that it is objective.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Pointing across the street to a row of two-story buildings, Norman said the ground-level units would house commercial and retail shops, "so people won't have to drive a car to buy milk or have a coffee with a friend." "Preparing a community against climate change isn't just about using green materials," Norman said. "It's about designing the built environment to integrate home, work, retail, and transit so people are less vulnerable to climate impacts and don't have to use cars as much." Norman cited a second housing project he had supervised, near the Microsoft campus in Redmond. "That's a very desirable part of King County, with lots of good restaurants and amenities, but who was going to wash the dishes and cut the grass?"


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Leonie Sandercock draws attention to the “glaring absences in the mainstream accounts of planning history,” namely, the voices of ethno-racial minorities, women, and those lacking in power.9 Dory Reeves advises professionals to “value diversity, promote equality and become more conscious of power relations.”10 Most of the writings on multicultural planning are couched in prescriptive terms, describing what should be done rather than what is the practice.11 The following five propositions summarize the current theoretical discourse on multicultural planning. They encompass almost the full range of planning theorists’ arguments about urban planning’s responsiveness to socio-cultural diversity. 1. Urban planning is coded in Anglo-European cultural precepts. Those are held to be the universal norms of people’s needs and preferences. The built environment is inscribed with these so-called universal precepts, privileging the culture of the dominant community. Urban planning is the agency for doing so.12 2. The modernist bias of planning, its “enlightenment epistemology,” rational-positivist approach, and scientific analytics have been held to be a barrier keeping out the voices and stories of minorities, women, and other citizens.13 Leonie Sandercock calls the current approach a “heroic model of modernist planning” in which rationality, comprehensiveness, the scientific method, and faith in planners’ ability to know what is good for people generally and political neutrality come together.14 3.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

James Post and Fiona Wilson, “Too Good to Fail,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2010, accessed March 15, 2015, www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/too_good_to_fail. 3. David Moberg, “The Left Bank,” Chicago Reader, May 26, 1994, accessed March 15, 2015, www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-left-bank/Content?oid=884620. 4. Ibid; Maf Smith et al. Greening the Built Environment, 188 (New York: EarthScan, 1998); Central Illinois 9/12 Project, “Shorebank’s Evolution from Community-Based Banking to the Microfinancing Arena,” Breitbart, March 5, 2010, accessed March 15, 2015, www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2010/03/05/ShoreBanks-Evolution-from-Community-Based-Banking-to-the-Microfinancing-Arena. 5.


pages: 459 words: 123,220

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

Saelens, Adam Drewnowski, and Paula Lozano, “Child Obesity Associated with Social Disadvantage of Children’s Neighborhoods,” Social Science & Medicine 71 (2010): 584–91. 42. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Physical Activity Levels Among Children Aged 9–13 Years—United States, 2002,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 52 (August 22, 2003): 785–88; Penny Gordon-Larsen, Melissa C. Nelson, Phil Page, and Barry M. Popkin, “Inequality in the Built Environment Underlies Key Health Disparities in Physical Activity and Obesity,” Pediatrics 117 (February 2006): 417–24; Billie Giles-Corti and Robert J. Donovan, “Relative Influences of Individual, Social Environmental, and Physical Environmental Correlates of Walking,” American Journal of Public Health 93 (September 2003): 1583–89; Jens Ludwig et al., “Neighborhoods, Obesity, and Diabetes—A Randomized Social Experiment,” New England Journal of Medicine 365 (2011): 1509–19. 43.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The real numbers must be an official secret, or maybe they are just ignored because they are excluded from the Kyoto Protocol. A lot of research has been done recently into carbon footprints. It is only part of our total footprint, of course. But the figures are interesting. The Carbon Trust, for instance, shows that half of all Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the ‘built environment’, and a quarter from our homes. That phrase is rather a catch-all. It includes not just the construction and maintenance of buildings, but also heating and lighting them, running their phone lines and computers, and most of the things that we do in buildings, like cooking and bathing and turning on the TV.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Effect of electrical stimulation on fruit body formation in cultivating mushrooms. Microorganisms 2: 58–72. Talou T, Gaset A, Delmas M, Kulifaj M, Montant C. 1990. Dimethyl sulphide: the secret for black truffle hunting by animals? Mycological Research 94: 277–78. Tanney JB, Visagie CM, Yilmaz N, Seifert KA. 2017. Aspergillus subgenus Polypaecilum from the built environment. Studies in Mycology 88: 237–67. Taschen E, Rousset F, Sauve M, Benoit L, Dubois M-P, Richard F, Selosse M-A. 2016. How the truffle got its mate: insights from genetic structure in spontaneous and planted Mediterranean populations of Tuber melanosporum. Molecular Ecology 25: 5611–627. Taylor A, Flatt A, Beutel M, Wolff M, Brownson K, Stamets P. 2015.


Policing the Open Road by Sarah A. Seo

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, jitney, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, strikebreaker, the built environment, traffic fines, War on Poverty

Scanning the list gives the impression that the automobile left no area of law, or aspect of everyday life, untouched.12 Notwithstanding Professor Hurst’s insights, scholars have not studied the law or its histories through the automobile. A prominent judge skeptical of such analytical frameworks once retorted, “Isn’t this just the law of the horse?” But Americans did not think of the twentieth century as the Automotive Age for nothing. Cars radically changed daily lives and aspirations, culture and the built environment, and people’s relationships with each other and their communities. Even more profoundly, the automobile came to represent individual solitude and freedom. The poet Stephen Dunn described the car as a “sacred place,” where one can be “in it alone, his tape deck playing / things he’d chosen.”


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The situation, she told me, is compounded by the relatively stagnant wages of renters who end up experiencing fuel poverty and, in some cases, poor health. This is where the housing and climate emergencies overlap with public health even when we are not in the crisis of a pandemic. In 2016, a report from the Building Research Establishment Trust – an independent charity dedicated to improving the built environment – analysed one year’s worth of data and estimated that poor housing could be costing the NHS as much as £1.4 billion a year. Had it been properly implemented, and people actively urged to take it up, the Green Homes Grant could have been a joined-up approach to the crisis of conditions in the private rented sector, the public health risks that come with that, rising energy costs and the climate emergency.


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

Elevator/Lift: Going Up 1Ryan Sayre, ‘The Colonization of the “Up”: Building up and to the Light in Postwar Japan’, Architectonic Tokyo, 2011, available at architectonictokyo.com. 2See Jeannot Simmen, ‘Elevation: A Cultural History of the Elevator’, in Wolfgang Christ, ed., Access for All: Approaches to the Built Environment, Basel: Birkhauser, 2009, pp. 15–30. 3Quoted in Tim Catts, ‘Otis Elevator Vies for the Ultratall Skyscraper Market’, Business Week, 31 January 2013, available at businessweek.com. 4Len Rosen, ‘Materials Science Update: New Discovery May Lead to Mile-High Buildings’, 21st Century Science, 21 June 2013, available at 21stcentech.com. 5Nick Ames, ‘KONE Wins Elevator Pitch for World’s Tallest Tower’, Construction Week Online, 5 June 2014, available at constructionweekonline.com. 6See George Strakosch and Robert Caporale, The Vertical Transportation Handbook, London: Wiley, 2010. 7Nick Paumgarten, ‘Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators’, New Yorker, 21 April 2008. 8Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz and Thomas Kvan.


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

The argument, then, that our grid wouldn’t be in such a dire state if only people were willing to pay more for their electricity is largely moot. People are willing to pay more, but only for certain things. The less solid these things, the less visible, and the more thoroughly integrated into the built environment they are, the more likely individuals and companies are to volunteer their money for the cause. The ways in which these immaterial power sources also fit into the rising tide of concern for “green” energy makes the utilities’ job easier. If renewables will help raise revenue, then renewables will show up on the bill.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

In other cases—like the mix-and-match collection of laws and agencies with overlapping areas of jurisdiction—the structure is bad. In either case, we clearly need another way. We need regulators and scientists who are working for the well-being of people, not for specific industries. And we need laws and agencies that understand and reflect the complexity of the planet, including the natural environment, the built environment, communities, workers, kids, mothers—the whole package. Professor Ken Geiser, who is also the director of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, laid out a vision for a different approach in his 2008 paper Comprehensive Chemicals Policies for the Future. According to Geiser, a new chemicals policy would consider chemicals as components of the broader system of production in which they are used, not as isolated individual entities, which is never how they actually show up.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the conviction that something is not real until it is captured on camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view. The still further diffusion of cameras embedded into the built environment, peeking from every city corner and peering down from every room’s ceiling, forces a transparency upon society. Eventually, every surface of the built world will be covered with a screen and every screen will double as an eye. When the camera is fully ubiquitous, everything is recorded for all time.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Even without explicit property rights, this absorptive capacity is being taken from the commons. 2. Filmmakers, for instance, need entire “rights clearance” legal departments in order to make sure they haven’t inadvertently used some copyrighted image in their movie. These could include images of designer furniture, buildings, brand logos, and clothing—almost everything in the built environment. The result has been to stifle creativity and relegate much of the most interesting art illegal. (This is inevitable when art uses the stuff of life around us for its subject and that stuff is in the realm of property already.) 3. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 142. Of course, the person at the last stage of the invention process deserves reward for his or her ingenuity and toil, but the social context must also be acknowledged.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.” United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, 2006, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR06-complete.pdf. Watson, Georgia Butina, Ian Bentley, Sue Roaf, and Pete Smith. Learning from Poundbury: Research for the West Dorset District Council and Duchy of Cornwall. School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, 2004. Webster, Ben. “Congestion Charge Will Rise to £25 for ‘Chelsea Tractors.’” Times (London), July 13, 2006, Home News. Webster, Philip. “Miliband Attacks Prince for Flying to Collect Green Award in New York.” Times (London), Jan. 20, 2007, Home News. Weis, René.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Zhang Qun, Didier Sornette, and Hao Zhang, “Anticipating Critical Transitions of Chinese Housing Markets,” Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper, nos. 17–18 (May 2017), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2969801; or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2969801 39. Dayong Zhang, Ziyin Liu, Gang-Shi Fan, and Nicholas Horsewood, “Price Bubbles and Policy Interventions in the Chinese Housing Market,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32 (2017): 133–55, doi:10.1007/s10901-016-9505-6. 40. Francisco Becerril, “The Sign of China’s ‘Rebound’ May Be a Housing Bubble,” Financial Times, 25 April 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/71d237aa-6520-11e9-9adc-98bf1d35a056. 41. International Labour Organisation, Global Wage Report 2018/19: What Lies behind Gender Pay Gaps (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2018), https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_650553.pdf. 42.


The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg

bread and circuses, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, feminist movement, fixed income, global village, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, New Urbanism, place-making, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, wage slave, young professional

We can achieve more to improve our relationships with others by participating in community planning, rather than group therapy encounters. What ails us—most of us, anyway—is not that we are incapable of living a satisfactory and creative life in harmony with ourselves, but that our habitat does not offer sufficient opportunities. It hems us in. It isolates us. It irritates and disrupts.3 The speed with which the built environment is being transformed, the rate at which a new and wanting order is being created, is remarkable. Two factors seem to account for this overnight transformation of the environment. First, it is all done without involving the people who must use the facilities that are being constructed. As the socioeconomist Robert Theobald has noted, planners are averse to involving people because “people foul up systems, they get in the way.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Now is when advertising was first woven into the fabric of most Americans’ lives, as bit by bit the major brands planted themselves in the collective consciousness, like so many mighty trees—as if Cadillac or Coca-Cola could never have been just names but were somehow imbued with meaning from the beginning of time. The built environment created by advertising began to seem like a natural ecosystem; the incessant barrage of commercial propositions became a fact of life. It is therefore all the more stunning to imagine that the industrialization of human attention capture as we know it had really only begun. The possibilities of electronic media and the Internet still lay in the future.


Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, intentional community, land reform, off grid, search costs, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, urban sprawl

To take a more sustainable approach, he suggests we must first see our community land as a long-term dwelling place both for humans and the other creatures living there. Secondly, he suggests “we must seek out the soul of that land, the spirit of the place. What is sacred, untouchable? What is inspiring or uplifting?” One quick method, he says, is to find the most beautiful place on the property, then build somewhere else. Lastly, he says,“design the built environment with an eye for minimal harm and maximum enrichment of the place.”As we’ve seen, Earthaven founders followed these design principles. The other communities we’ve studied have engaged in a similar process. Dancing Rabbit observed their land for several seasons, studied permaculture design principles as a group, and created a permaculture-based site plan for their 280 acres.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Strausbaugh, John. The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village. New York: Ecco, 2014. Sussman, Ann, and Justin Hollander. Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment. New York: Routledge, 2014. Tippins, Sherill. Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Tissot, Sylvie. Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2015. Traub, James.


Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer

back-to-the-land, clean water, commoditize, double helix, food desert, invisible hand, music of the spheres, oil shale / tar sands, p-value, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, rewilding, scientific worldview, the built environment, the scientific method

In terms of systems science, the Windigo is a case study of a positive feedback loop, in which a change in one entity promotes a similar change in another, connected part of the system. In this case, an increase in Windigo hunger causes an increase in Windigo eating, and that increased eating promotes only more rampant hunger in an eventual frenzy of uncontrolled consumption. In the natural as well as the built environment, positive feedback leads inexorably to change— sometimes to growth, sometimes to destruction. When growth is unbalanced, however, you can’t always tell the difference. Stable, balanced systems are typified by negative feedback loops, in which a change in one component incites an opposite change in another, so they balance each other out.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

ASIA IS THE EPICENTER OF POTENTIAL CLIMATE-RELATED DISASTERS Credit pai1.10 Populations most at risk from droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures. 11. INTER-CITY NETWORKS FLOURISH WITH THE RISE OF “DIPLOMACITY” Credit pai1.11 Learning networks are proliferating among cities sharing lessons in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, integrating sensor technologies into the built environment, promoting public safety, and enhancing societal resilience to natural disasters. There are more such inter-city networks today than international organizations. 12. EUROPE FRAGMENTS AS IT GROWS TOGETHER Credit pai1.12 Europe has a substantial number of separatist movements, but even as it devolves, new nations can become members of the collective European Union (EU). 13.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

But cathedrals and other big buildings had interior spaces organized for very different activities than manufacturing.34 To accommodate large-scale production, power-driven machinery, and masses of workers, new architectural designs and improved building techniques and materials were needed. Innovations to meet the specific needs of the cotton industry soon spread beyond it, shaping the built environment in England and elsewhere for the next two centuries. Arkwright apparently modelled his first Cromford mill on the Lombes’, also five stories high. Its “long, narrow proportions, height, range of windows . . . and large areas of relatively unbroken interior space,” wrote historian R. S. Fitton, “became the basic design in industrial architecture for the remainder of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth centuries.”


pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

A number of friends have taken the time to read and critique portions of the manuscript in its various iterations: thank you Travis Logan, Andrew Kelly, Reverend Sean Mullen, Gregory Nickerson, Bryan Fields, and Andrew Fink for your proofreading and editorial suggestions. Thanks also to my professors at Harvard College and the Penn School of Design, who taught me how to think and write about the history of the built environment: the late William Gienapp, Stephan Thernstrom, Brian Domitrovic, Randall Mason, John C. Keene, Frank Matero, and Donovan Rypkema. The Board of the SS United States Conservancy has become my extended family. In July 2010, a $5.8 million grant from philanthropist H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest (USNR retired) saved the ship from certain destruction.


On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways by Christian Wolmar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Beeching cuts, Boeing 747, book value, congestion charging, Crossrail, joint-stock company, profit motive, railway mania, the built environment, vertical integration, yield management, zero-sum game

Nowadays, the functions of design, construction and project management are divided amongst a number of private companies, each of which needs to be run profitably, There are reasons other than privatisation which caused some of the cost escalation on the railways. Enhanced safety requirements during the construction phase add to the cost, as do new directives for the provision of access for wheelchair users and other facilities for the disabled, required by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. Higher expectations of quality for the built environment mean that cheap, concrete structures and rolled hardcore for car parks can no longer be contemplated. BR also used to have the advantage of an annual Parliamentary Bill to allow developments, whereas Network Rail has to go through the lengthy Transport and Works Act process which, inevitably, is expensive.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

As a result, the computer industry has largely succeeded in declaring itself outside of this history, and therefore independent of the political, social, and environmental controls that have been developed to constrain and mediate industrialization.23 By describing itself as an e-commerce entrepreneur and not simply an email order company, Amazon was awarded a decades-long tax subsidy that allowed it to decimate its traditional competitors.24 In claiming to be an internet service provider and not a telecommunications carrier, Comcast can circumvent the rules and regulations intended to prevent monopolies.25 By transforming its drivers from employees into contractors, Uber can avoid paying Social Security benefits.26 In rendering invisible the material infrastructure that makes possible the digital economy, the metaphor of the Cloud allows the computer industry to conceal and externalize a whole host of problems, from energy costs to e-waste pollution. But the reality is the world is burning. The Cloud is a factory. Let us bring back to earth this deliberately ambiguous and ethereal metaphor by grounding it in a larger history of technology, labor, and the built environment—before it is too late. To begin our interrogation of the claim that the Cloud is a factory, let us return for a moment to the earliest of the information organizations that I have thus far identified, namely, the Sears, Roebuck company. Of the many industrial-era corporations with which we might compare Amazon and other Silicon Valley tech firms, Sears stands out as the most relevant: not only did it share a business model with Amazon, but it survived long enough into the twenty-first century to be a competitor.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Continuous monitoring shows that between 1993 and 2009 the overall human footprint score increased by less than 9% even as the human population grew by 23% and the global economic output expanded by 153%. In total, about 75% of the planet was experiencing measurable human pressures in 2009, and the previous 16 years had seen the largest relative increases for the built environment (about 11%), croplands (21%), and night lights (24%). High-resolution maps—available at https://wcshumanfootprint.org/—make it possible to trace the progress of human impacts and to identify the areas of lessening and rising pressure, the former concentrated in the US Midwest, the Canadian Prairies, and parts of Europe and Southeast Africa, the latter most prominent in Brazil, Sahel, India, Indonesia, China, and parts of Ukraine and Russia.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Additional possessions were put in storehouses, out of sight.78 This culture of simple comfort, in part inspired by Zen Buddhism, made eminent sense in a country with few natural resources. Arguably, it gave Japan a higher well-being than Europe. In Britain and the Netherlands, by contrast, the domestic interior was the centre stage for sociability and self-fashioning; the built environment was secondary. Furniture, wallpaper, chinaware and other possessions showed that one was in harmony with refined taste. They needed to change with the times. In the year 1713, 197,000 yards of wallpaper were sold in England. Seventy years later, it was over 2 million.79 By that time, it was common to repaper the home every few years.

In addition to the energy embodied in goods, therefore, we need also to consider the energy needed to make use of them. In other words, we want to know about flow as well as stock. Thanks to Patrick Troy and colleagues, we have some idea what this looked like for six districts in Adelaide in Australia in the 1990s. Troy’s team reconstructed what historic data they could find on the built environment, from the thickness of the walls in houses and whether floors were made of wood or concrete to the size and age of vehicles and water pipes. This was their embodied energy. They then compared it to the operational energy needed to run the show, that is, the gas that fired the boiler, the electricity that ran the appliances and the fuel to drive from A to B.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Much as Minister Molano Vega did for phone service in Colombia, rebates to customers for failures to live up to coverage promises could potentially create a much more self-regulating system. THE ROLE OF SENSORS IN FUTURE REGULATION Increasingly, our interactions with businesses, government, and the built environment are becoming digital, and thus amenable to creative forms of measurement, and ultimately responsive regulation. For example, fines are routinely issued to motorists running red lights or making illegal turns by cameras mounted over highly trafficked intersections. With the rise of GPS, we are heading for a future where speeding motorists are no longer pulled over by police officers who happen to spot them, but instead automatically ticketed whenever they exceed the speed limit.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The French reading of English history, their study of Newton and Locke, and their personal discovery of the open, curious, ambitious, and industrious society of eighteenth century England gave birth to the idea that the old regime could be reformed, a more important thought than that it should be.49 The conspicuous changes in the built environment acted on the imagination as surely as the questions that philosophers posed. A peculiarly intense form of curiosity drew the countries of Western Europe along the path of innovation, which grew ever wider as people brushed aside customary practices. On this broad avenue of human inventiveness Europeans encountered themselves as the creators of their own social universe.


Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, independent contractor, intermodal, Loma Prieta earthquake, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, transcontinental railway

Just as so many New York City bridges owe their existence and appearance to a group of engineers who worked for government bodies of one form or another, so did the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge owe its final form to the talents and abilities of California state engineers like Purcell and Andrew. Consulting engineers play a crucial role whenever it comes to particular questions of detail, experience, and precedent, but the creative and political sympathy and savvy of career government employees around the nation have also played significant roles in shaping the built environment. Among such engineers was Conde McCullough. Conde Balcom McCullough was born to a physician and his wife in 1887 in Redfield, South Dakota. As a young man, he attended Iowa State College, from which he received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1910. After a first engineering job in Des Moines, he joined the Iowa State Highway Department, beginning as a designing engineer in 1911 and rising to assistant state highway engineer by the time he left, in 1916, to join the Civil Engineering Department at Oregon State College.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

To treat phenomena as things is to treat them as data, and this constitutes the starting point for science’ Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) In the digital lifeworld, a growing amount of social activity will be captured and recorded as data then sorted, stored, and processed by digital systems. More and more of our actions, utterances, movements, relationships, emotions, and beliefs will leave a permanent or semi-permanent digital mark. As well as chronicling human life, data will increasingly be gathered on the natural world, the activity of machines, and the built environment. All this data, in turn, will be used for commercial purposes, to train machine learning AI systems, and to predict and control human behaviour. This is increasingly quantified society. The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the amount of data generated and processed by human beings and machines.


pages: 561 words: 167,631

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

Much of it Swan had not heard about yet, but the pattern was depressingly clear. Nothing new to learn here: the Earth was fucked. Wahram had come to a more measured conclusion, as was his way. “I’ve been thinking that our first wave of help has been too… too blunt, for lack of a better word. Too focused on the built environment, and on housing in particular. Maybe people like to feel they’ve had a hand in building their homes.” “I don’t think people care who builds it,” Swan said. “Well, but in space we do. Why not here?” “Because when your home can fall apart and kill you and your kids just because it rains, then you’re happy to see a machine replace it with something better!


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

For Brownsword, then, the real problem is not that the moral and prudential registers are being overtaken by the technological one. Rather, it is that once laws and norms become cast in technology, they become harder to question and revise. They just fade into the background and feel entirely natural; indeed, they are often seen as an extension of the built environment rather than the outcome of deliberate planning by some wise social engineer. However, if we want to live in a world where norms and laws are constantly subject to revision and debate, then perhaps we should be wary of delegating so much regulation to technology. As Brownsword puts it, “Moral communities need to keep debating their commitments.


pages: 632 words: 166,729

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

(It should be noted that my use of the term “zone,” which derives from gamblers themselves, accords more importance to the affective and phenomenological aspects of the zone than that of Barry [2006], who has proposed the term “technological zone” to indicate assemblages of common measurement, communication, and regulatory standards relating to technical artifacts and practices.) PART ONE: DESIGN 1. Hellicker 2006. CHAPTER 1: INTERIOR DESIGN FOR INTERIOR STATES 1. Venturi, Izenour, and Brown 1972. Today the book is regarded as an inaugural text on postmodern aesthetics and the built environment. 2. Ibid., 50. 3. Ibid., 49. 4. Reisman 1950. 5. The titans of “corporate splendor” in post-1980s Las Vegas, writes architectural scholar Alan Hess, “often erred on the side of stylistic safety when commissioning new architecture,” erecting “look-alike slabs that reflect mass economics but not mass taste” (1993, 100, 102).


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

A wealthy, urban family going vegan, flight-free, and car-free might reduce its carbon emissions by a few tonnes a year, when the world’s problems are measured in the tens of billions of tonnes. Moreover, families’ carbon budgets and broader environmental impact are in no small part determined by the built environment they live in, the economy they work in and the policy choices made for them by their representatives. Given those dynamics, it will take governmental and corporate action to help heal the planet. Yet individuals are the ultimate consumers of much of what gets pumped, built, slaughtered, mined, woven, cut, processed and shipped around the world, year in and year out.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Writer, researcher, and editor, the veteran Times reporter grew up in Chicago loving both architecture and newspapers—he had his own, “The Daily Dunlap,” at the age of twelve. Architecture was family conversation: His father was a student and colleague of Mies van der Rohe. After studying architectural history at Yale, the younger Dunlap joined the Times in 1975. As a metropolitan reporter, Dunlap has covered the broad gamut of city issues that shape the built environment: architecture, landmark preservation, urban history, public space, and city planning. An accomplished photographer, he spent nearly five years as graphics editor (1976–1981), during which time he helped the Times find new imaginative ways to better tell a news story. Since 2003, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center has been his chief beat, and the longevity with which he’s been on the Trade Center story brings comprehensive depth and wisdom, along with sidebars of incisive humor and witty juxtapositions.

Bloomberg; managed the city’s negotiations culminating in the 2006 realignment deal. Robert R. Douglass, attorney, civic leader, chairman emeritus of the Alliance for Downtown New York and longtime associate of the Rockefeller family. David W. Dunlap, veteran reporter for the New York Times covering issues of planning, preservation, and the built environment. Douglas Durst, developer and scion of the family real estate firm, the Durst Organization; bought into ownership of 1 World Trade Center in 2010. Stanton Eckstut, urban designer, architect, and partner in Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects hired by the Port Authority to do in-house transportation, infrastructure, and urban design planning for Ground Zero.


Sweden by Becky Ohlsen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, car-free, centre right, clean water, financial independence, glass ceiling, haute couture, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, period drama, place-making, post-work, retail therapy, starchitect, the built environment, white picket fence

Bibliophiles and design fans will adore the well-stocked gift shop. The adjoining Arkitekturmuseet (Museum of Architecture; 58 72 70 02; Exercisplan 4; www.arkitekturmuseet.se; adult/under 19yr Skr50/free, admission free 4-6pm Fri; 10am-8pm Tue, 10am-6pm Wed-Sun), housed in a converted navy drill hall, focuses on the built environment, with a permanent exhibition spanning 1000 years of Swedish architecture and an archive of 2.5 million documents, photographs, plans, drawings and models. Temporary exhibitions also cover international names and work. The museum organises occasional themed architectural tours of Stockholm; check the website or ask at the information desk.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

In all, Burnham worked on his plan for six months, and that left time for travel, tourism, and his simultaneous work in Baguio. Burnham could never have gotten away with such haste in Chicago. In Manila, however, it was fine. Three days after the government approved his plan (with no changes), construction began. Things could move quickly because power over the built environment lay in the hands of a single man, the consulting architect (initially called the insular architect). There was no such position on the mainland. But in the Philippines, Forbes explained, “we so fixed it that the Insular Architect prepared plans for all public buildings, whether insular, municipal, or provincial.”


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

The population simply lacks the small accessible spaces that they could colonize and stamp with the character of their activity, as they have done historically in Rio and Sao Paulo. To be sure, the inhabitants of Brasilia haven't had much time to modify the city through their practices, but the city is designed to be fairly recalcitrant to their efforts.61 "Brasilite," as a term, also underscores how the built environment affects those who dwell in it. Compared to life in Rio and Sao Paulo, with their color and variety, the daily round in bland, repetitive, austere Brasilia must have resembled life in a sensory deprivation tank. The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have created formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment-an environment that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.


pages: 714 words: 188,602

Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq by Ashley Jackson

Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, out of africa, power law, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment

Nuri as-Said, in his fourteenth term as prime minister, was murdered and buried the following day, but his corpse was dug up, mutilated, run over repeatedly by municipal buses and dragged through the streets. Legacies of the Second World War in the Iran–Iraq region can be traced through the modern histories of both nations, in physical objects and the built environment, and in less tangible ways. For instance, nearly 3,000 Polish refugees died and were buried in Iran, mostly perishing from typhus. Tehran’s Doulab cemetery alone accommodates nearly 2,000 graves in a section subsequently purchased by the Polish government. The name Darius would become a common Polish boys’ name.


pages: 704 words: 182,312

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, different worldview, Eyjafjallajökull, fail fast, glass ceiling, Internet of things, iterative process, Kanban, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, RFID, scientific management, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, stealth mode startup, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, urban planning, work culture

Architecture has been viewed since modernity as a single static building or conglomerate of various forms. There is a great opportunity in perceiving architecture as a process rather than a static building. In service design, we look at the whole system as the product, whereas in architecture the one product is the building. In order to make architecture part of a service ecosystem, the built environment must be redefined as one touchpoint and the building itself as a physical manifestation. Stakeholder maps can be used to make sure all the people involved in the lifecycle of a building (everyone involved in designing, building, using, monitoring) are represented. This helps to set the groundwork for integrating all (built) needs during the process.


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

Having managed that, they rode the wind and canal current up C to Fourteenth, fought through the left turn there and headed into the wind to Park, then turned right up Park and rumbled up to Thirty-second, where the NYU hospital, looking as crowded as their tug, took in all their wounded people through a north-side window on the fourth floor, broken open for that purpose, as it was now the current water level, and there was no other way to get people in. The surge was a big problem, and a big part of every other problem. It was indeed a vision of what a Third Pulse would do, or a nightmare flashback to half a century before. This was what it must have been like: the ground floor underwater, that entire part of the built environment devastated, after which a desperate improvisation to make use of the higher floors. Injured passengers unloaded, they motored on along Thirty-second to Madison and another wicked left turn there, and after that pushed on in a tough but steady slog directly upwind. Back down to their building, where they could make an easier left turn on Twenty-fourth, and stop right under the utility door they had used to get on the barge.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Kaufmann, ‘Racial self-interest is not racism: ethno-demographic interests and the immigration debate’, Policy Exchange, 3 March 2017. PART III: FLEE 9. Hunkering Down 1. M. van Ham and D. Manley, ‘Social housing allocation, choice and neighbourhood ethnic mix in England’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 24:4 (2009), 407–22. 2. G. Knies, A. Nandi and L. Platt, ‘Life satisfaction, ethnicity and neighbourhoods: Is there an effect of neighbourhood ethnic composition on life satisfaction?’, Social Science Research 60 (2016), 110–24. 3. S. L. S. Arbaci, ‘The residential insertion of immigrants in Europe: Patterns and mechanisms in southern European cities’, PhD dissertation, University of London, 2007. 4.


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

Fuller transformed himself into a corporation to free himself from capitalism, but his example enabled others to surrender to it completely. Although he became a conduit for the ideals of modernism—with its bold program to reimagine society—into the cult of technology, his story can make Silicon Valley seem resolutely conventional. As a practical matter, most start-ups have abandoned the built environment for what the journalist Derek Thompson has called “the ethereal world of software.” Fuller’s success in pulling it off in the field of housing is astonishing. To make it possible, he found himself living permanently in the world of tomorrow, until the vision that he used to advance his goals became an end in itself.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

Watching wrestling became popular, as did pigeon racing, both favoured Central Asian pastimes.68 Innovation in architecture and garden design was even more pronounced, with the influence of buildings and landscapes honed and perfected in Samarkand soon becoming evident across the empire. The results can be seen today. Humāyūn’s magnificent tomb stands in Delhi not only as a masterpiece of Timurid design, constructed by an architect from Bukhara, but as testimony to a new era in Indian history.69 New landscaping styles were also introduced, transforming the built environment and its relationship with its surroundings further still, heavily influenced by practices and ideas from Central Asia.70 Lahore flourished with grand new monuments and carefully planned open spaces.71 With huge resources at their disposal and the wind in their sails, the Mughals transformed the empire in their own image.


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

SKEPPSHOLMEN Moderna Museet MUSEUM ( www.modernamuseet.se; Exercisplan 4; adult/under 19yr Skr100/free; 10am-8pm Tue, 10am-6pm Wed-Sun) Across the bridge by the Nationalmuseum is the sleek, impressive Moderna, which boasts a world-class collection of modern art, sculpture, photography and installations, temporary exhibitions and an outdoor sculpture garden. The adjacent Arkitekturmuseet (Museum of Architecture; www.arkitekturmuseet.se; Exercisplan 4; adult/under 19yr Skr50/free, admission free 4-6pm Fri; 10am-8pm Tue, 10am-6pm Wed-Sun) , housed in a converted navy drill hall, focuses on the built environment, with a permanent exhibition spanning 1000 years of Swedish architecture and an archive of 2.5 million documents, photographs, plans, drawings and models. Combination tickets for both museums cost adult/child Skr130/free. KUNGSHOLMEN Stadshuset CIVIC BUILDING (City Hall; Click here ; 50 82 90 58; Hantverkargatan 1; admission by tour only, adult/child Skr80/40; tours in English 10am, 11am, noon, 2pm, 3pm & 4pm Jun-Aug, 10am, noon & 2pm rest of yr) The main visitor sight here is the landmark Stadshuset, resembling a large church with two internal courtyards.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

History Meet the characters who shaped Northern California’s past, from Native Americans and crooked priests, to gun-slinging forty-niners and guitar-strumming hippies. The Way of Life Computer programmers, political outcasts and tree sitters – Northern Californians are a different breed. Music & the Arts Delve into the heritage of Northern California’s vibrant cultural scene in this primer on music, art and the built environment. By the Book This literary trip takes you on the road with Mark Twain, the Beatniks and Cali's modern authors and essayists. The Land & Wildlife Comprehend the wild forces of nature that formed the NorCal landscape, and the menagerie of wild animals that inhabit it. Northern California Today The drought may be over, but water – and climate change – remain deeply concerning for Northern Californians.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

National Building Museum MUSEUM (www.nbm.org; 401 F St NW; adult/child $8/5; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, from 11am Sun) Devoted to architecture and urban design, this under-appreciated museum is appropriately housed in a magnificent 19th-century edifice modeled after the Renaissance-era Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Four stories of ornamented balconies flank the dramatic 316ft-wide atrium, and the gold Corinthian columns rise 75ft high. Rotating exhibits on different aspects of the built environment are hidden in rooms off the atrium. Renwick Gallery MUSEUM (cnr 17th St & Pennsylvania Ave NW) Near the White House, the Renwick Gallery is set in a stately 1859 mansion and exhibits a superb collection of American crafts and decorative art pieces. Highlights include over-the-top works like Larry Fuente’s extravagantly kitsch Game Fish and Beth Lipman’s ethereal Bancketje (Banquet).


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

After the fall of Communism, reports surfaced that some products meant for Western consumption were manufactured by prison labor.37 A double hypocrisy thus lay at the heart of the Cold War: The East reserved its best products for the class enemy, while Western capitalists undercut one another with products made, at times, by slaves of the Communist system they castigated for crushing human freedom. Perhaps the most oppressive reflection of the socialist state’s disregard for its consumer citizens was the built environment. As the anthropologist Krisztina Fehérváry notes, in the 1960s modernist apartment complexes—every structure, every apartment the same—emerged throughout the bloc. Their austerity mixed the design ideologies of architects with the production biases of economies facing challenges in maintaining growth rates.


pages: 1,318 words: 403,894

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

But as he came down the steps and it became obvious that he was being followed by a petite Asian female who was, in turn, being followed by an Asian man, they all seemed to jump to the same conclusion, and they turned their backs on him and drifted away in the direction of other buses that were pulling in. And yet it was an orderly place, and none of them felt any particular sense that they had stepped into a slum. To Csongor it felt very little different from Xiamen. The built environment was cheaply constructed three-to six-story buildings jammed in next to one another to form contiguous blocks, separated by crowded streets and fronted by a mixture of colorful signs and makeshift antitheft measures. It was, in other words, the classic streetscape of emerging Asian economies, and the only thing that made it unusual was that the signs were in English.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

National Building Museum MUSEUM Offline map Google map (www.nbm.org; 401 F St NW; adult/child $8/5; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, from 11am Sun) Devoted to architecture and urban design, this under-appreciated museum is appropriately housed in a magnificent 19th-century edifice modeled after the Renaissance-era Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Four stories of ornamented balconies flank the dramatic 316ft-wide atrium, and the gold Corinthian columns rise 75ft high. Rotating exhibits on different aspects of the built environment are hidden in rooms off the atrium. Renwick Gallery MUSEUM (cnr 17th St & Pennsylvania Ave NW) Near the White House, the Renwick Gallery is set in a stately 1859 mansion and exhibits a superb collection of American crafts and decorative art pieces. Highlights include over-the-top works like Larry Fuente’s extravagantly kitsch Game Fish and Beth Lipman’s ethereal Bancketje (Banquet) .