Category: Reading Journal
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Urbanism 101
“… I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.” “I…
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“Man-made, artificial, mutable” — Dunne (2005), (In)human Factors
Chapter 2: (In)Human Factors (pp. 21-42) from Dunne, A. (2005). Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. MIT Press. # Paradigm of user-friendly design generates “enslavement […] to the conceptual models, values and systems of thought the machines embody” (p21) “By poeticizing the distance between people and electronic objects, sensitive skepticism must be…
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“Deviant and non-average practices” — Fam, Lahiri-Dutt & Sofoulis (2015), Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices
Fam, D., Lahiri-Dutt, K., & Sofoulis, Z. (2015). Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(3), 639-651. [link] # (A timely rediscovery that echoes with Carson’s digs at Accelerationism… ) This is the introductory editorial piece from a special issue devoted to qualitative demand-side approaches to water consumption research; while the…
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“A model of how to be and how to behave”: Szeman (2015), Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense
Szeman, I. (2015). Entrepreneurship as the new common sense. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(3), 471-490. [link] # Via a Wired article on the start-up Boomtrain, Szeman introduces the increasingly ubiquitous entrepreneurial story, “narratives that make it seem as if financial and social success is, in the main, inevitable in the new world of the devices and gadgets that increasingly…
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Surrealism comes for us all: Miéville’s Last Days of New Paris
The Rex’s guards search them and incompetently question them and let them in to noise and warmth and the smell of drink, dirt, and sweat. Rows of seat-stubs slope down the tumbling hall. people are dancing. Women and men watch the huge screen from a raised half-floor above. What is showing is snips of images,…