Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2014

Gardiner Expressway at the crossroads: Hume | Toronto Star

This article is about an expressway in Toronto, but Christopher Hume’s closing sentences apply to so many other places and situations: low expectations, self-perpetuating, lack of will to re-invest…
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A reason was the low expectations Torontonians had for that part of town. It is viewed as a wasteland, largely because that’s what it has been for so long. Ironically, the Gardiner is at least responsible for that.

But as the waterfront comes back to life, it’s time to demand more. People now live in neighbourhoods that until recently were industrial.
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tags: toronto christopher_hume highways urban_design urban_renewal thestar

Frans van Houten calls for a shift toward a new economic model, based on the use of goods that consumers do not own. – Project Syndicate

A Circular economy: selling a product’s benefits instead of the product itself…
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With this in mind, my company is redesigning its products and considering how to capture their residual value. At the same time, it is shifting from a transaction- to a relationship-based business model – one that entails closer cooperation with customers and suppliers. And it is changing its corporate culture to emphasize long-term solutions. None of these changes is easy to implement, but all of them are necessary.
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tags: economies economy economic_development circular_economy davos leasing renting

Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent. Here’s why – Quartz

Interesting historical background here:
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Economists think German housing policy struck a much better balance between government involvement and private investment than in many other countries. For instance, in the UK, when the government gave housing subsidies to encourage the building of homes after the war, only public-sector entities, local governments, and non-profit developers were eligible for them. That effectively squeezed the private sector out of the rental market. In Germany, “the role of public policy was to follow a third way that involved striking a sensitive balance between ‘letting the market rip’ in an uncontrolled manner and strangling it off by heavy-handed intervention,” wrote economist Jim Kemeny, of the German approach to housing policy.
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tags: germany housing affordable_housing renting

Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report | Wired Design | Wired.com

Ok, but we’re still being mediated *by* technology, subtly primed to respond to its dictates. Would be interesting to think about how that manifests in a supposedly more people-oriented computer technology as depicted in Her… (I’m just thinking about this in the terms laid out by Ursula M. Franklin, viz. growth-oriented and production-oriented technologies, whereby the former is holistic, people-centered, and the latter is geared toward efficiency and fulfilling the needs of production.)
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It’s not just that Her, the movie, is focused on people. It also shows us a future where technology is more people-centric. The world Her shows us is one where the technology has receded, or one where we’ve let it recede. It’s a world where the pendulum has swung back the other direction, where a new generation of designers and consumers have accepted that technology isn’t an end in itself–that it’s the real world we’re supposed to be connecting to.
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tags: technology film movies spike_jonze her userinterface design

Why Do the Smartest Cities Have the Smallest Share of Cars? – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic Cities

Is it true?
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The Atlantic has called “peak car”—not once but twice. We have repeatedly explained why young Americans “don’t care about owning” a vehicle. We predicted a long-term decline of auto sales, and, in a dramatic moment, essentially announced “the end of car ownership,” generally.

We had strong data. Perhaps we had strong biases, too.
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tags: cars cities

Net Neutrality Quashing Will Mean New Pricing Schemes, Throttling, and Business Models | MIT Technology Review

Susan Crawford gets it.
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The theoretical downside is that the Internet devolves into a kind of “pay to play” system, with smaller companies tending to be squeezed out, and prices tending to rise overall.

That is the dystopia envisioned by people like Susan Crawford, a visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “We’ve got very powerful market actors in America who want to make more money from the same infrastructure, without expanding it,” Crawford says. “The way they do that is to divide markets and then steadily charge more. And on the other side, they want to charge people who want to reach subscribers different rates.”
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tags: net_neutrality mit_techreview susan_crawford politics internet

This Sex Offender-Spotting App Sounds Like a Really Bad Idea | Motherboard

What with Google buying Nest (learning about people’s private preferences for how they heat or cool their homes – potential privacy invasion, much?), and apps like this (NameTag), you have to wonder where we’re headed. Creepy creepy.
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Perhaps the most cynical part of the whole idea, though, is that the creators do plan to offer people a way to avoid being face-scanned like this—but it looks like you have to sign up to their site to do it. “People will soon be able to login to www.NameTag.ws and choose whether or not they want their name and information displayed to others,” Tussy explained in the release. Is the true idea behind NameTag, then, a social network that you have to opt out of?
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tags: privacy apps google glass facial_recognition socialnetworks victoria_turk

Chris Christie’s New Jersey Is Everything That’s Wrong With America – James Howard Kunstler – POLITICO Magazine

Something worth reading from Kunstler (for a change).
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To me, the danger of a President Christie is that he is about the last politician one might expect to recognize the nation’s tragic predicament and he is exactly the figure who will mount America’s deadly final campaign to sustain the unsustainable. He represents what amounts to a sort of national debt slavery: We will pay any price to stay where history has marooned us. One vivid example of this was Governor Christie’s decision in 2010 to cancel New Jersey’s participation in building a new commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to relieve the unsustainable pressure on the existing 100-year-old train tunnels. He derided the project as “a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s.” Christie then diverted $4 billion from the tunnel project to New Jersey’s transportation trust fund in a bid to keep the state’s gas tax the second-lowest in the country. (New Jersey’s transit system, meanwhile, ranks among the country’s worst, and Christie has cut its funding.)

This little maneuver highlights one of the nation’s most lamentable political failures of recent decades: the lack of will to invest in public transportation, in particular, upgrading and rehabilitating our conventional passenger railroad system. Governor Christie represents the majority of Americans who have no idea how close we are to the twilight of mass automobile motoring.
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tags: chris_christie james_kunstler motordom peak_oil

The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency’ | The Nation

File under “Uh-oh”?
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NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic permafrost—and its stored carbon—may not be as permanently frosted as its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic’s carbon cycle. He told NASA, “Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures—as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”
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tags: climate_change methane global_warming

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

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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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?
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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).
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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.
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tags: affordable_housing housing england

Roman Fever – Rob Goodman – POLITICO Magazine

Exigency / decline / disaster IS addictive. And self-fulfilling. Good article.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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tags: evgeny_morozov algorithm socialcritique salon.com andrew_leonard big_data big_brother

Evgeny vs. the internet : Columbia Journalism Review

Good summary.
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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.
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tags: evgeny_morozov socialcritique