Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: urbanism

  • far from the ideological panoply promised

    Aware that the regulations concerning feedback to the Central Civic Authority limit my initial complaint to one hundred sentences, I am indulging in sentence structures more complex and digressive than would be my inclination otherwise. It is my understanding that the daemon constructed to assess and rout complaints to the relevant authorities is equipped to…

  • plastiCity

    For better or worse, [the city] invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form round you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map…

  • In search of a dialectical utopianism : Harvey (2000), Spaces of Hope

    Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press. Focussing here, for reasons presumably obvious to long-term readers of this site, on Chapters 8 (“The spaces of Utopia”, p133-81) and 9 (“Dialectical utopianism”, p182-95) of what is now a vintage part of the David Harvey canon. Reading these pieces really brought home just how…

  • the city bureaucrat of the future learns, not preaches

    The appearance of this piece by Barcelona’s chief technology and digital innovation officer, Francesca Bria [via Sentiers] is serendipitous, given that one of the tasks on my slate this week is to do the edits and tweaks on a long-overdue chapter on the “smart city” for a forthcoming Handbook of Social Futures. Five guidelines for…

  • “A revenant hybrid narrative”: Söderström, Paasche & Klauser (2014), Smart cities as corporate storytelling

    Söderström, Paasche & Klauser (2014) “Smart cities as corporate storytelling”. City 18(3), pp307–320 This paper makes a loose grab of Callon and Latour’s early-A-NT notion of translation through “obligatory passage points” for the formation of scientific truths, and uses that lens to look at IBM’s construction of a “smart city” story which positioned it as…