February 1, 2012 – 8:00 pm
Speaking of the geography of financialization, Alex Schafran had a fantastic post at Polis last December on race, foreclosure, and rhetoric surrounding the “death of the fringe suburb”. In forthcoming work done with my colleague Jake Wegmann, analyzing real-estate data in the region since 1988, we can show that the zip codes to which African [...]
January 30, 2012 – 6:00 am
[Warehouse at 1200 E McNichols Road, Highland Park, Michigan. The small red sign at the bottom right corner of the second image says "Metro".] The warehouse above — and a network of others like it, scattered around the industrial abandonia of Detroit — is a crucial bottleneck in the global aluminium trade. Before I explain how this [...]
December 5, 2011 – 7:00 pm
[The following piece, on the surprising ways that the residents of the Mumbai settlement of Dharavi have integrated that urban agglomeration into global economic networks, and the value of the unique spatial formatting that both enables and results from that integration, is the second thoroughly-footnoted guest post we've run from Peter Nunns. (The first was [...]
November 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm
["Interior components of the cooling system" at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal's report for Domus on Facebook's Open Computer Project, which "describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre".] “Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the [...]
October 11, 2011 – 6:00 am
Quilian Riano interviews Chris Reed (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) for Places; the interview touches on a broad range of topics, including Stoss’s recent work, the importance of an expanded field for landscape architecture, and possibilities for inventing flexible alliances between design teams and collaborators in “related fields such as engineering, ecology, economics, etc.”: “Within this expanded [...]
September 27, 2011 – 11:00 am
The following piece is a guest post from Peter Nunns. Peter is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland, with a MA in Political Science; mammoth readers may be familiar with him from his contributions to last summer’s discussion of the Infrastructural City. His current research interests include shelter and urban development challenges in developing-world cities, the [...]
By pnunns
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Also posted in fecal-matters, guest post, infrastructure, landscape
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Tagged agency, fecal-politics, india, mumbai, peter-nunns, politics, poverty, pune, right-to-the-city, slums, waste
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September 20, 2011 – 6:00 pm
[The Haringvliet Dam] In recent years, as they seek to rethink the flood control infrastructures and climate defense systems of the Mississippi Delta, American politicians, engineers, planners, and designers have, with good reason, looked to the Netherlands for inspiration and expertise. This is entirely natural, as the Netherlands has long been the world’s most sophisticated [...]
Grist recently cross-posted an article by Per Square Mile’s Tim De Chant which mines an old (2009) study from the Journal of Urban Economics to argue that “only the steepest increases in density could reduce car usage”. Unfortunately, I think that’s entirely the wrong conclusion to draw from the study. Here’s the key graph that [...]
[Photographs from Christoph Engel's series "Exterieur", which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.] Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out. Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the [...]
A minor point, but this is kind of fascinating — a critique of New Urbanism which, rather than going the common route of charging New Urbanism with nostalgic pre-modernism, argues that New Urbanism is insufficiently pre-modern — in this specific case, arguing that New Urbanists have praised a certain kind of narrow traditional street but [...]
[Hong Kong's West Kowloon Reclamation project, photographed in the mid-nineties while under construction; photographs via GAKEI.com.] ["Since land reclamation first began in 1841, [Victoria] harbor has shrunk to half its original size. Meanwhile, more than 17,000 acres of developed land have been added to the waterfront throughout the region — accounting for nearly 7 percent [...]
In advance of another event related to Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda’s recently-published Aerotropolis, Andrew Blum asked twitter for questions for Lindsay. I responded with the central point from my previous post on Aerotropolis: ajblum Good chatter about tonight’s Aerotropolis event so I’ll put it out there: Any questions from the cloud*? (*Not actually a [...]
[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking "our subterranean infrastructure"; image source.] Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue: “Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of [...]
April 15, 2011 – 11:51 am
The Guardian interviews Benjamin Bratton: What can be done to foster and encourage more social entrepreneurs and innovators? …I don’t believe that innovation ultimately comes down to people’s attitudes so much as to systemic opportunities for ideas to actually take root and scale. Part of the reason that the internet was able to support innovation [...]
[FedEx's "Superhub" at Memphis International Airport; via Bing maps.] 1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis. (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.) The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree [...]
[Slug sites in suburban Northern Virginia, via Slug-lines.com.] Emily Badger looks at the peculiar practice of ‘slugging’, which is pretty easily Northern Virginia’s best contribution to the lexicon of infrastructural hacks: People here have created their own transit system using their private cars. On [fourteen] corners, in Arlington and the District of Columbia, more strangers [...]
[Top: land-use patterns in Johannesburg, shaped by the trace of mines, mine dumps, and tailings ponds, via Bing maps; bottom: a drive-in movie theater, now closed, on top of the Top Star gold mine dump in Johannesburg, photographed by Dorothy Tang] Last year, because reading thesis blogs is one of Stephen and I’s favorite (and [...]
February 27, 2011 – 2:23 pm
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 [...]
February 23, 2011 – 8:00 pm
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 [...]
February 22, 2011 – 11:43 am
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 [...]
