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I find an interesting parallel here to the ideas James Scott proposes in Seeing Like a State (which we covered back in RE #4): a top-down, central planning-style of design can't effectively predict the diversity of user needs. It turns out, contra to the "expert architect", that the users know best what they need from their space. And often even th... See more

Coleman McCormick • MIT's Building 20: a Masterpiece of Utility

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

Dan Gardner • 4 highlights

amazon.com

if there is one element that recurs and stands out for cities, it is the making and using of vertical options.

Liam Young • Planet City

What we build is defined and controlled by its unresolvable conflicts. In responsive design, it’s the text and image conundrum I showed earlier. In other, more grand arenas, there is capital versus labor, or collective control versus anarchic individualism. In technology, I believe it comes down to the power dynamics of convenience. To create conve... See more

Frank Chimero • Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain

In this sense, politics, when organized, is also a kind of technology: the framework of communication and processing which governs everyday interaction and possibility.

James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

The limited remit and strength of international governance create severe bounds on the ability to provide transnational public goods through voting and deliberation, but the almighty dollar (and yuan) is respected in most corners of the planet. Capital flows and the technology it is invested in shape lives around the world.

Audrey Tang • ⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

lack of institutions working seriously on issues where technology and society intersect.

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

Tim Wu • The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Vintage)

Because information technology has undermined the capacity of centralized authority to project power and provide physical security for systems that operate at a large scale, the optimal size of almost every enterprise in the “natural economy” is falling. To respond to this technological change will entail a massive investment requirement (read oppo