“Christine Rosen notes, “You cannot ‘coshape’ an environment” — particularly a painstakingly engineered, shrewdly financed, algorithmically-tuned, master-planned environment — “designed by others to prevent you from influencing it.”” – Instrumental City: The View from New York’s Hudson Yards, circa 2019
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“While some models of smart urbanism embrace the tools of “e-government” — report-a-pothole apps, for example, or community planning software — they typically lack any means of accommodating user input that challenges the underlying principles and ideologies of the tools.” – Instrumental City: The View from New York’s Hudson Yards, circa 2019
“Some of the first writing surfaces, clay and stone, were the same materials used to construct ancient city walls and buildings, whose facades also frequently served as substrates for written texts.” – Netherlands Institute For Cultural Analysis (NICA) | Shannon Mattern: Tourism, Mud, Metropolis
“Some of the first writing surfaces, clay and stone, were the same materials used to construct ancient city walls and buildings, whose facades also frequently served as substrates for written texts.” – Netherlands Institute For Cultural Analysis (NICA) | Shannon Mattern: Tourism, Mud, Metropolis
“cogs in the city’s complicated machinery of mortality” – The Lonely Death of George Bell
“News reports have indicated that thousands of residents have reported seeing the mysterious floating city high above Foshan, located in the Guangdong province of China. Then, only days later, people in Jiangxi were recording the same phenomenon.
Many theories have surfaced to explain the phenomenon, including a theory that NASA is beginning the Blue Beam Project that will use holographs to produce images of UFOs, as well as the second coming of Christ to institute a new world order, according to IntelliHub.” – ‘Floating City’ Recoded High Above China Leads To Theories Of Parallel Universe
“De-fanged by the sickly nostalgia of the new urbanists and the seductive sales patter of the postmodernist forces of ‘regeneration’, our urban discourse has settled into a cosy agreement that all we can and should do with the city is ameliorate and prettify. The consensus disdains intensity and drama, and obsesses about detail and paving and planting. Heavy infrastructure must be ignored, screened or removed. The human scale is venerated above all else.” – The chaos and tangled energy of living cities – Will Wiles – Aeon
“group clustering (the odds that your friends mutually know one another) does not change with city size. It seems that even in large cities we tend to build tightly knit communities, or ‘villages,’ around ourselves. There is an important difference, though: if in a real village our connections might simply be defined by proximity, in a large city we can elect a community based on any number of factors, from affinity to interest to sexual preference.” – The Urban Village