The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
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You Don’t Need This “Recovery” – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
Call to arms (sort of) from Umair Haque:
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If we face an imperative, perhaps it’s one as timeless and worn as bedrock: not merely to employ our selves to make the most, but to make the most of our tiny selves. Perhaps it’s this imperative that is the bedrock of the human world, the only firmament solid enough to support the foundations of meaningful lives. And to this imperative, there are no easy answers — just hard questions. The questions we’ve been uncomfortably failing to ask for a long, long while.
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At the 20th Congress for the New Urbanism, a Movement Feels its Age – Design – The Atlantic Cities
The Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) has become gosple of sorts, but there’s still lots to do:
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“If the first phase of CNU has culminated in a broader culture acceptance of urbanism as a force for good, the second phase will be defined by successfully pushing for policy and design reform that actually allows urbanism to get built,” says CNU president John Norquist, a former mayor of Milwaukee.Big foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, and Kresge are supporting transit and see urbanism as the setting for advancing social justice. Others see great public health benefits. A big focus is to get at the anti-urban policies and standards and rules at the federal, state and local level, Norquist says.
If that sounds like nitty-gritty implementation, and a little bit nerdy, too, CNU has always had a mix of rock-star designers and those among the 1,500 architects, designers, planners, elected officials, developers and others expected for the conference, who like nothing better than a lengthy debate on the merits of different varieties of shade trees.
Still, as unglamorous as it is, re-writing the owner’s manual for urbanism makes sense. It’s what another architectural movement – the Congress International Architecture Moderne (CIAM), after which CNU is modeled – did. Leaders like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius wasted little time embedding modernism in codes and academic curricula.
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