An impressive, holistic critique of the commodification of housing and public space that brings theory and everyday observation together into a compelAn impressive, holistic critique of the commodification of housing and public space that brings theory and everyday observation together into a compelling package.
That said, the writing definitely gives away its origins as an expansion of papers he's published in journals elsewhere, and ... Well, I've always been a nag about lefty Critiques written in a joyless, meandering dribble, and I kinda think this could've been a 4 or 5 star zinger with some more loving-but-stern editing to really bring the various parts together for a wider audience?...more
One of those very special sorts of books so dense with clearly-stated ideas that I eventually just give up on highlighting passages to save myself theOne of those very special sorts of books so dense with clearly-stated ideas that I eventually just give up on highlighting passages to save myself the trouble of figuring out what *not* to highlight.
Sennet advances a critique of and re-imagining of the city along anarchist lines, drawing from the fields of psychoanalysis and emerging sociological research as he goes, but incredibly, does it in the unfussy, persuasive style of a top-notch letter to the editor. While the thinkers he references are sometimes academic or clinical, his topic is unwaveringly material and familiar: bars, apartments, schools; neighborhood meetings, commutes, strikes; the black working class, wealthy suburbanites, idealistic university graduates, and city planners.
Handy, broadly accessible, straight-to-the-point survey of what it says on the tin.
... Well, maybe the one way it might be even more transparent and dHandy, broadly accessible, straight-to-the-point survey of what it says on the tin.
... Well, maybe the one way it might be even more transparent and direct is changing the title to Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix ItWhy We Should Abolish It :), but I know publishers always choose the subtitles.
Mostly, the arguments here are things I'm well-beyond convinced of and truly feel most people, across a variety of political persuasions, could get behind. But one I know I'll be chewing on with ambivalence for a while is his case about economic stagnation.
In short (and I swear I'm trying to accurately and fairly condense his argument here): * Certain cities at certain times become hotspots of technological, economic, and cultural innovation / opportunities * These hotspots naturally draw ambitious specialized workers from lower-opportunity areas, leading to a virtuous cycle of knowledge spillover, leading to multiplier effects that then draw working class people across all sectors and levels of specialization; more efficient labor capitalization => more growth (not just in the hotspot region but nationally as well) => more good * Decades of restrictive zoning have led to a housing crisis that shuts the gates on this natural demographic osmosis; middle class and working class alike are locked out by a housing market that'd eat up far more than the increased earnings of being in a high-opportunity area.
This is where his cringey Lib-Optimism side shines through the brightest, and what makes it truly uncomfortable is that ... I can't really disagree with the broad outlines of the argument, and I definitely share all his policy goals? But to make one of the main pillars of the book's anti-zoning argument, alongside and co-equal with "it's created a supply/affordability crisis", "it perpetuates inequality and segregation", and "it's environmentally unsustainable" ... "it prevents workers from most efficiently chasing the currents of increasingly liquid, highly-concentrated capital"? Well, for one, it doesn't really answer the question, "what about the people who get left behind after we abolish zoning and the brain drain kicks into overdrive?" Not that I think people should be forced to stay in lower-opportunity areas because of the housing crisis (as they currently are), of course. But... at the very least, there is a gut-level plausibility to the idea that the affordability crisis might, paradoxically, exert some force against accelerating inequality, by disincentivizing entrepreneur-types and specialized workers from concentrating in the flashpoint cities and instead working their economic magic in a less intense but more distributed way... right? And that it's an idea that might even call out for refutal in some readers' minds? Even if in reality, he's not unsympathetic to the plight of those who would get left behind in a properly liquid market of human and housing capitol, the fact that it's the mobile, aspirational working class cast as the sympathetic hero leaves... a certain taste in the mouth.
To reiterate, these are just quibbles about the messaging and arguments Gray and his editor choose to prioritize developing in the limited page count available. But, it'd be negligent of me as a left-ish person on the internet if I didn't do my part in stifling good policy ideas with sanctimonious nit-picking and in-fighting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...more
A tall glass of water in the desert that is Housing Discourse on twitterdotcom; pragmatic, informative, balanced, direct, and lots of other good adjecA tall glass of water in the desert that is Housing Discourse on twitterdotcom; pragmatic, informative, balanced, direct, and lots of other good adjectives....more
I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about parenting, teaching, and city planning for someone who isn't a parent, teacher, or plaI feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about parenting, teaching, and city planning for someone who isn't a parent, teacher, or planner, but nothing prepared me for the kind of synthesis that they get here and my brain's still buzzing from it.
In these 10 speeches, "education" is nothing more and nothing less than the process by which the young develop the sense of agency and investment in The World, which of course means not just social arrangements and institutions but the built environment as well.
It's one thing to hear gooey advocacy for things like Experiential Learning and Child-Centered Development, and a totally different thing to hear someone as tough and pragmatic, and with such a broad range of both research and teaching experience, as Colin Ward take on these topics.
To take his thinking seriously is to feel the discomfort of seeing some cherished consensus opinions subjected to hard skepticism, like the idea that bigger education budgets will necessarily improve outcomes, or that there can or ought to be a guaranteed minimum level of content or competency that school systems can guarantee all reasonably able-minded students will leave with.
Most heretically: he even challenges the idea that work - like, real work, not just "studying hard" or whatever - robs youth of their childhood and distracts them from the loftier rewards of learning. He's fully aware of industrial nations' sordid history of child labor, and his arguments are accordingly careful and subtle... but not apologetic. To work is to be human, and Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism isn't arriving any day soon. Work, at its best and in reasonable doses, allows people to realize their own power to shape the world in some small way and integrates them as a valued (not merely tolerated or coddled) member of a community. [NB: I don't want to oversell this point and neither does Colin Ward - real jobs often don't live up to that ideal, especially ones that teens are able to get in the current economy]
The future of education that Colin Ward envisions here is one that's going to be a little bit loose, heterogenous, and counterintuitive compared to the current orthodoxy, but he emphasizes that the alternative is continuing to invest in a basically scholastic model of mandatory, full-time knowledge dumping, with constant supervision and no freedom of movement, that many young people already feel entirely alienated from (not to mention many of the teachers themselves).
Anyway, now to file for that time off request so I can binge everything this guy has ever published. ...more
Is it a technical architectural/agricultural book? A work of academic anthropology?
A coffee table book? A polemical zine?
It's all of these, without Is it a technical architectural/agricultural book? A work of academic anthropology?
A coffee table book? A polemical zine?
It's all of these, without committing to any one genre in particular. I'm going to go ahead and say that it's primarily a Vibe Book, and on the level it definitely succeeds.
Some things it accomplishes or communicates well:
* It just looks freaking cool (visually-striking art and photography, helpful diagrams, playful-but-still-readable typesetting and layout choices, etc)
* Documents the substantial harms of the conservationist mindset across the world, in how it obstructs and villainizes sustainable indigenous practices
* Treats the indigenous cultures it profiles with respect and curiosity rather than just mining them for their best ideas or for pity in documenting their plight in the face of modern industrial incursions
* Illustrates over and over again the false binary of "stewardship" and "exploitation". It's easy to be skeptical of the idea that altering the landscape in a way that provides for human needs could also serve to increase native biodiversity and restore habitat (in no small part because it's so often used towards the ends of dishonest green-washing by the likes of timber companies), but Lo-TEK makes it vivid and irrefutable.
So there was potential here for it to be a 5 star book, and I do think there's a 5 star book buried in the real book somewhere. But for all the lavish attention to detail paid to its visual design, the writing is... astonishingly bad. Audaciously bad, even, given the book's pricetag and the primary author's academic pedigree.
Writing so bad it could take as its subject matter something as rich and under-documented as "indigenous design", and then render it almost unreadable except in ≤ 20 minute bursts.
Entire academese-clogged paragraphs go by sometimes without imparting a single nugget of content that isn't either tautological, regurgitating some terms and proper nouns that'll never be followed up on, or just restating vague assertions and value judgements from elsewhere in the chapter.
In its weakest stretches, you feel like you're reading an undergrad midterm paper frantically jerry-built the morning of, with one eye permanently glued to the word count indicator, by a student who attended the lectures but only skimmed the assigned readings.
As exasperating as the filler can be, at least it has the virtue of being easily parsed as you scan ahead and find where the thread picks up again; better at least than the parts so incoherent it completely derails your brain faster than it can register as skippable.
As an example, try out this sentence from chapter 2 -
"By working with nature's innate intelligence, this indigenous innovation has evolved sophisticated and resilient water-based infrastructures."
Now read it again, and try to answer even the most basic questions about its content - what is acting, what is being acted on, and how.
You can't. It's like a linguistic version of the "Name One Thing In This Photo" meme. The "copyediting"/"proofreading" firms in the credits deserve to be sued for malpractice. There's a shoddiness to the text on a sentence-by-sentence level that's totally incongruous with the painstakingly sumptuous presentation.
Now, if Lo-TEK positioned itself as a humble coffee table book and visual reference, then hauling out the junk text and straightening out what's left would leave the reader with a satisfying, well-contained package. But Lo-TEK insists on also being taken seriously as An Urgent Manifesto and viable roadmap for action, and I just don't think there's any amount of editorial magic that could elevate it to the level of rigor that type of project demands.
Not that I pretend I'm qualified to weigh in on whether these kinds of Lo-TEK solutions could feasibly scale to support all ~8 billion people on the planet today. In fact, I almost think it'd be counterproductive - if you accept that the current system is fundamentally unsustainable, then all that needs to be demonstrated is that they can and should be more widely implemented than they are now. Instead, what strikes me as the fatal flaw in the specific way this book frame its thesis is this:
Lo-TEK conceives of designs as being inextricable from their designers' culturally-binding myths, while at the same time reveling in the idiosyncratic indigenous mythologies that "produced" the very designs it holds up as models for us to learn from.
If sustainable designs really do need grounding in "sustainable" myths in some tangible, material way – as opposed to a whimsically speculative thinky-winky way – how do we get there from where we are now? And if not, why distract from the engineering and ecological principles that make the indigenous case-studies worthy of emulation by emphasizing all the inessential, culturally-specific superstitions attached to them? Maybe it's unfair to characterize the book as asserting that the only way forward is to purge our collective cultural memory of things like scientific skepticism and monotheistic human chauvinism, then install a mythology manufactured to be more compatible with species symbiosis in their place... but it doesn't take any pains to steer the reader towards a more substantial/nuanced/pragmatic reading either.
In the end, it all feels somehow of a piece though with the unmistakeable, unwavering Vibe of the book - its particular way of being overstuffed and starry-eyed is both its charm and its downfall. I don't know.
* I learned a lot.
* I think we need to collectively engage with its ideas.
* I'll probably place it somewhere where people are likely to flip through it. Just... hesitate before loaning it to be read cover to cover. ...more
I'll concede, it may have been arrogant of me as a total dilettante in economics to approach a book this specialized and as deep in original research I'll concede, it may have been arrogant of me as a total dilettante in economics to approach a book this specialized and as deep in original research and expect a stirring page-turner – I mean, there's "micro-histories", sure, but then there's "200+ pages on San Francisco's municipal bond market in the latter half of the 20th century."
Not that there's nothing in here for those of us who aren't economic historians - I learned a ton about the nuts and bolts of municipal finance, about the power dynamics of rating agencies, and the curious subculture of bondsmen. But however much the jacket and title might signal a "Popular Non-Fic History with strong narrative elements that stokes the reader's indignation" genre approach, the tone is closer to the understated analysis in a well-executed government committee report (more astute reader's could've probably inferred this right away just by noticing the high ratio of pages dedicated to citations vs. the main text). It's compelling stuff, but maybe only just enough so to get a half-chapter in each night to ease you into sleep.
That said: a worthy topic, and what I hope will be the first of many more city-specific "How the sausage gets made"-type exposés I'll get around to...more
No other theorist/commentator I know of, in any field, flickers between the extremes of sobering tough-love realism and ludicrous galaxy-brained specuNo other theorist/commentator I know of, in any field, flickers between the extremes of sobering tough-love realism and ludicrous galaxy-brained speculation quite like J. L.
If there are others who pull this off, I'm clearly missing out. ...more
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, an
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments.
ItBWtCL is a pithy, casually-but-astutely observed essay on the (then-)current state of the desktop computer market and how we got there. Like a really good blog, but one that doesn't strain your eyes and has great typesetting, it's more about coming to familiarize yourself with the author's peculiar voice and perspective of the world than it is a properly historical, or even editorial, work. Drifting from topic to topic with plenty of detours, it's a work that only got properly published because of Stephenson's guaranteed audience; still, I ended up wolfing it down in a single sitting, so clearly part of me thinks there's something irresistibly compelling about it.
Here are some reasons I think that's the case, most of which boil down to "Neal Stephenson is a broadly, instantly likable writer who knows what he's doing and is very good at it": - The book goes the perfect level of depth into its technical subject matter: it's all accessible enough to make non-techies want to learn about this stuff, and funny/opinionated enough that the rest of us don't mind re-hashing it - Stephenson has a god-like ability for catchy, instructive metaphors - This is the first pro-Free As In Freedom software writing I've stumbled across that makes its case from a purely pragmatic, rather than ideological, standpoint. Sure, his dire predictions about the sustainability of a corporate duopoly on operating systems may have been proven wrong by the developments of the last ~20 years, but I think his analysis is still insightful - This essay, and in particular, the section "Interface Culture", passionately affirms the idea that something is at stake here besides the peacocking vanity of hackers. Like the best criticism, it draws non-obvious but compelling connections between a social phenomenon and higher principle - here, that of engaging with reality in its unwieldiness rather than settling for a mediated, reductive experience. (And naturally, this is flattering to my peacocking hacker-lite vanity) - Did I mention that it spiritually dovetails with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and directly quotes / riffs on David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram? It's like this thing was focus-grouped specifically so that I would love it ...more
What happens when you try to condense a coffee-table book into the size of a chapbook.
A writing style that feels sort of like a series of opening parWhat happens when you try to condense a coffee-table book into the size of a chapbook.
A writing style that feels sort of like a series of opening paragraphs from wikipedia pages.
A few compelling, unique ideas buried among the completely-obvious-to-anyone-who-has-ever-thought-about-design-and-culture-at-roughly-the-same-time ones.
Some dryly ironic juxtaposed images (which the text itself either brilliantly or frustratingly under-comments on, depending on your preferences)...more
Not sure how it might come across to anyone who's only one or the other (or neither), but as a bike-riding urbanism zealot *and* a Talking Heads fan, Not sure how it might come across to anyone who's only one or the other (or neither), but as a bike-riding urbanism zealot *and* a Talking Heads fan, this was satisfying in a humble, casual way. There's a neat kind of symmetry on display here where the format of these short essays reflects the way the mind naturally drifts while bike-riding through a city, skipping between particulars of the immediate environment, generalities about the bikability of different environments, reminiscences of the last you were in that city for your gallery exhibition, observations on the famous, well-connected people you're constantly being shuttled between... Well, wait, ok, fine: maybe some parts of this book are more universal than others, him being David f*@#-ing Byrne and us just being plain-old us, but if you can get past the blasé attitude he adopts towards the glamor of his own life, these represent some revealing and sometimes even affectingly intimate windows into the life and brain of DB....more
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