• Project for Public Spaces | Toward Place Governance: What If We Reinvented Civic Infrastructure Around Placemaking?

  QUOTE
  Rather than just sustaining and delivering public goods, government can evolve from regulating “the tragedy of the commons” to fostering its triumph. In other words, government can be most efficient at delivering value when structured primarily to facilitate the capacity of a community to drive and sustain its own shared value.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: ethan_kent place_making project_for_public_spaces

• Defining the Worst Type of Street Design – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities

  There’s a video embedded in this article that nicely sums up the negatives associated with “stroads” by explaining the positives associated with “streets” and “roads.”
  QUOTE
  If you want to … truly understand why our development approach is bankrupting us, just watch your speedometer. Anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour, you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: charles_marohn stroads atlantic_cities urban_design

• Evgeny Morozov: Hackers, Makers, and the Next Industrial Revolution : The New Yorker

  Morozov quotes Mary Dennett here. “He must make what his machine is geared to make” is a very potent phrase, but it also reminds me of “program or be programmed” somehow.
  QUOTE
  “The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: evgeny_morozov newyorkmag makerspaces socialcritique socialtheory

• Fifty Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted From Their Jobs – and Denied New Opportunities

  It’s all part of the plan to make throw-away people. Of course it will cost us dearly in the end.
  QUOTE
  We live in an era of planned obsolescence, in which designers deliberately make a thing limited in its useful life. Now this planned obsolescene includes human beings. Is it really an efficient use of our human capital to turn experienced workers into Walmart greeters?
  UNQUOTE

  tags: socialjustice socialtheory ageing aging ageism workforce lynn_parramore jobs

• Thatcher’s slow-motion housing timebomb – Boing Boing

  Full-on indictment of the public housing sell-off in the UK (initiated by Margaret Thatcher).
  QUOTE
  Housing in the UK is a microcosm for everything wrong with neoliberalism: corruption, cronyism, grinding human misery, and funny accounting to prove that it’s all working, honestly.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: affordable_housing housing england

• Roman Fever – Rob Goodman – POLITICO Magazine

  Exigency / decline / disaster IS addictive. And self-fulfilling. Good article.
  QUOTE
  In all, it has become the background drone of our politics, the dull hum of impending doom. Let’s understand why this thinking appeals. Envisioning decline is addictive. It offers us the chance to imagine our times as extraordinary and to cast ourselves in heroic roles to meet them. And the thrill demands a higher dose of doom each year.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: rome republic politico_magazine rob_goodman usa politics

• One code to rule them all: How big data could help the 1 percent and hurt the little guy – Salon.com

  omg, and YIKES.
  QUOTE
  A white paper on “Embedded Governance from the Institute for the Future is even more direct:

  Laws, now written on paper and enforced by people, will be carried on software and enforced through electronically updated and immediately downloadable rules woven into the fabric of our environment. Governance will become automatic, and lawbreaking much more difficult…. Embedded governance will prevent many of the crimes and violations we see today from happening. Firearms will work only when operated by their rightful, registered owners. Office computers will shut down after 40 hours of work unless overtime has been authorized. Disasters and quarantines could also be managed more effectively if information about citizens were known and if laws were downloaded to change behaviors immediately.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: evgeny_morozov algorithm socialcritique salon.com andrew_leonard big_data big_brother

• Evgeny vs. the internet : Columbia Journalism Review

  Good summary.
  QUOTE
  At bottom, Morozov says his work is an attempt to integrate the debates about technology into the broader debates about politics, economics, history, and culture—areas of study with much richer traditions and far greater intellectual resources for tackling the many challenges that technology presents. Such a shift in discourse, he feels, would limit the influence of those advocating narrow technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems—like spreading democracy—and would rob a word like “disruption” of the positive connotation it has acquired as a force for progress, allowing it to be seen instead as a painful example of neoliberal economics. When discussed in purely digital terms, for instance, letting a company like Uber transform a city’s taxi service is a no-brainer. When the digital is integrated into the political, however, this becomes a more complicated debate about regulation and infrastructure and the rights of cab drivers.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: evgeny_morozov socialcritique

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 01|12|14 at 12:27 pm. Filed under: links.

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