February – 2011 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: February 2011

February 27, 2011 – 2:23 pm

400 years of 124 Green Street

Go read this micro history of a block in New York City: We usually analyze Development at the national level. Why not other levels? At the other extreme, here is a short and surprising illustrated history of one city block […] Its history had been a series of unexpected events involving many actors, from Nicholas […]

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February 23, 2011 – 8:00 pm

tahrir square

Apparently anticipating our post yesterday on revolutionary space, Dwell‘s Aaron Britt interviews Nezar AlSayyad, author of the forthcoming Cairo: Histories of a City, about the design of Tahrir Square: Why from a design angle was it so successful as a point of protest? Twenty-three streets lead to different parts of it, which is why it […]

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February 22, 2011 – 2:25 pm

the largest vessel of any type known to be in operation

Bridging the gap between mammoth’s interest in infrastructure, global logistics, economies, and really, really big things is this announcement from Moller-Maersk: Danish shipper Moller-Maersk, the biggest container carrier, confirmed Monday it has signed a contract for a South Korean shipyard to build it 10 giant container ships over the next three years… The new container […]

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February 22, 2011 – 11:43 am

revolutionary space

In saying anything about the past couple weeks’ events in Egypt, we have to begin by saying that we know little about Egypt.  (What we do know — that it is absolutely appropriate to celebrate the downfall of a tyrant, however limited our understanding of Egypt may be and however complicit America has been in […]

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February 21, 2011 – 8:00 pm

kongjian yu and the conscientizacao of the landscape

FASLANYC posts an interview with pioneering Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, who I’ve heard speak a couple times and always been impressed by.  They talk about the origins of Yu’s firm’s name (Turenscape), how Yu worked to convince Chinese officials that landscape architecture was a useful discipline, what defines a productive landscape, and the relationship […]

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February 16, 2011 – 7:00 pm

switches and access points

[Inside Terremark’s “NCR NAP” facility in Northern Virginia, a key data center; photographed by flickr user nlaudermilch.] Alexis Madrigal points out an article in the New York Times this morning which starts to uncover some of the specifics of how the Egyptian government unplugged the internet.  Quoting from that article: Because the Internet’s legendary robustness […]

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February 11, 2011 – 12:58 pm

markets, constituencies, and infrastructure

I’ve been reading the blog Market Urbanism quite a lot recently. Writing recently about “the problem with “public” transportation” (and after noting the frequent use of ‘public transit’ where the broader ‘mass transit’ would be more appropriate), they argue: …although the [New York] Subway was heavily subsidized by the government, the truth is that it […]

By Stephen | Posted in economics, infrastructure, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
February 10, 2011 – 6:00 am

spillway on simcity

At Spillway, Will Wiles writes about a series of contradictory tensions at the heart of SimCity: “…there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? […]

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February 2, 2011 – 6:00 am

“will we all one day be eating away the evidence of government corruption?”

At Domus, Subtopia’s Bryan Finoki relates the troubling story of a secret government cyberwar organization’s efforts to co-opt a current architectural design competition.  Brilliant reportage.

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February 1, 2011 – 6:00 am

geologic city

[SPL’s open-pit salt mine in the Tarapacá salt flats, via Google Maps.] In December, after we began our winter hiatus, Urban Omnibus posted ran a fantastic post by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “Geologic City”, which briefly summarized several of the much longer “Geologic City Field Reports” which have run on the Friends of the […]

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