Author: PGR
-
Feersum endjinn
Or “what I did on my mid-week day off”: The River Don Engine, now housed at Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield, UK. The largest working steam engine left in Britain, and quite possibly in the world. I was surprised by how quiet the engine itself was, though I imagine that’s partly down to it now being…
-
Hard to start again
I’m not sure how many times I’ve tried (more or less performatively, depending on my prevailing level of insecurity) to restart the habit of regular blogging, and I don’t think counting them will make it any easier. Nonetheless I’m left with a lingering sense that it should be easy — because hey, there was a good…
-
Recognise the firm beyond the corporation
Firms are best understood as political entities, rather than merely economic organizations. Of course they have economic dimensions. But saying that they are merely economic organisations would be as reductive as to say that states are merely economic organizations. A firm certainly contains the legal structures of capital investment – this is what the legal…
-
Latour de force
I’m interested in art for the same reason I’m interested in science — it’s a way to handle the fact that we have landed in a completely different world than we thought we were moving toward. We need art now for the same reason that we needed art in the 16th century, when we learned…
-
The language of Smart City is always Global Business English
… the cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either. The future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed…