Wednesday, October 21. 2009
This week, the FCC is expected to reveal the details of its Net Neutrality plan, which Chairman Julius Genachowski has discussed numerous times over the past month.
Now, a coalition of 23 of the world’s largest Internet and technology companies are formally offering their support for the new rules in a letter to the Chairman, posted to the Open Internet Colaition website.
Signed by Eric Schmidt of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Evan Williams of Twitter, and other industry leaders, the group once again articulates the pro-Net Neutrality argument:
“For most of the Internet’s history, FCC rules have ensured that consumers have been able to choose the content and services they want over their Internet connections. Entrepreneurs, technologists, and venture capitalists have previously been able to develop new online products and services with the guarantee of neutral, nondiscriminatory access by users, which has fueled an unprecedented era of economic growth and creativity. Existing businesses have been able to leverage the power of the Internet to develop innovative product lines, reach new consumers, and create new ways of doing business.
An open Internet fuels a competitive and efficient marketplace, where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail. This allows businesses of all sizes, from the smallest startup to larger corporations, to compete, yielding maximum economic growth and opportunity.”
While the major players on the Internet are seemingly united behind net neutrality, it could take “many months” for the rules to be formalized according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s because cable companies and ISPs will also have an opportunity to argue their case that a completely open Internet with no ability to cap bandwidth usage and costs is bad for business.
In any event, it would seem that a battle that has been many years in the making is finally about ready to take center stage.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun
Personal comment:
C'est drôle, Google, Facebook & co parlent un peu comme si le web leur appartenait (et qu'il fallait le protéger), non? Cela laisse un sentiment contraire au propos qui est développé par ces "grands acteurs", nouveaux consortiums data-médiatiques.
For the upcoming exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum Rotunda 250 artists, architects, and designers were asked to imagine their dream intervention in Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda. JDS' Julien De Smedt has created a proposal that begs to be realized. A spiraling orange trampoline mesh descends from the top of the rotunda, inviting guest to traverse, rest and play. Brilliant!
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Via Archinect
A week or so back, a bright guy I met at PICNIC named Lincoln Schatz asked me if I mightn’t list for him a few things I’d been reading lately. I got about halfway through before I realized that I was really compiling a manifest of books I’d been consulting as I put together the pieces of my own.
So this is for you, Lincoln – but I bet it’d also be particularly valuable for readers who are coming at issues of networked urbanism from the information-technological side, and would like a better grounding in sociological, psychological, political and architectural thinking on these topics. (There’s also a pretty heavy overlap here with the curriculum Kevin Slavin and I built our ITP “Urban Computing” class around.)
Not all of these were equally useful, mind you. Some of the titles on the following list are perennial favorites of mine, or works I otherwise regard as essential; some are badly dated, and one or two are outright wank. But they’ve all contributed in some wise to my understanding of networked place and the possibilities it presents for the people who inhabit it.
Two caveats: first, this is very far from a comprehensive list, and secondly, you should know that I’ve provided the titles with Amazon referral links, so I make a few pennies if you should happen to click through and buy anything (for which I thank you). At any rate, I hope you find it useful.
UPDATE 19 October 20.49 EEDT
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. Please do bear in mind that, as I noted, this is not a comprehensive list of interesting urbanist books, but an attempt to account specifically for those works that have been influential on my own thinking. With a very few exceptions, I’m no longer looking for new insights, but for ways to consolidate and express those deriving from my encounter with the works listed.
That said, I’ll continue to update the page as I either remember titles that ought to have been included in the first place, or in fact do assimilate new points of view.
- Alexander, Christopher, et al.: A Pattern Language
- Ascher, Kate: The Works: Anatomy of a City
- Augé, Marc: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
- Aymonino, Aldo and Valerio Paolo Mosco: Contemporary Public Space/Un-Volumetric Architecture
- BAVO, eds.: Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City
- Bachelard, Gaston: The Poetics of Space
- Baines, Phil and Catherine Dixon: Signs: Lettering in the Environment
- Banham, Reyner: The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment
- Benjamin, Walter: Selections from The Arcades Project
- Benkler, Yochai: The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
- Borden, Iain: Skateboarding, Space and the City
- Brand, Stewart: How Buildings Learn
- Canetti, Elias: Crowds and Power
- Careri, Francesco: Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice
- Carter, Paul: Repressed Spaces
- Crawford, J.H.: Carfree Cities
- Davis, Mike: Planet of Slums
- De Cauter, Lieven: The Capsular Civilization
- De Certeau, Michel: Chapter VII, “Walking in the City,” from The Practice of Everyday Life
- DeLanda, Manuel: Part I, “Lavas and Magmas,” from A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
- Design Trust For Public Space: Taxi 07: Roads Forward
- Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio: Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City
- Dourish, Paul: Where The Action Is
- Flusty, Steven: Building Paranoia
- Fruin, John J.: Pedestrian Planning and Design
- Gehl, Jan: Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space
- Goffman, Erving:
• Behavior in Public Places
• Interaction Ritual
- Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin: Splintering Urbanism
- Greenfield, Adam (that’s me!): Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
- Hall, Edward T.: The Hidden Dimension
- Hammett, Jerilou and Kingsley, eds.: The Suburbanization of New York
- Hara, Kenya: Designing Design
- Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri: Empire
- Haydn, Florian and Robert Temel, eds.: Temporary Urban Spaces
- Holl, Steven, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Questions of Perception
- Hughes, Jonathan and Simon Sadler, eds.: Non-Plan
- Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson: “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places“
- Iwamoto, Lisa: Digital Fabrications
- Jacobs, Jane: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- Kaijima, Momoyo, Junzo Koroda and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto: Made in Tokyo
- Kay, Alan: “User Interface: A Personal View,” in The art of human-computer interface design (Laurel, ed.)
- Kayden, Jerold S.: Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience
- Kieran, Stephen and James Timberlake: Refabricating Architecture
- Klingmann, Anna: Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy
- Klooster, Thorsten, ed.: Smart Surfaces and their Application in Architecture and Design
- Latour, Bruno:
• Aramis, or: The Love of Technology
• Reassembling the Social
- Lefebvre, Henri: The Production of Space
- Lynch, Kevin: The Image Of The City
- McCullough, Malcolm: Digital Ground
- Mollerup, Per: Wayshowing: A Guide to Environmental Signage Principles and Practices
- Miller, Kristine F.: Designs on the Public
- Mitchell, William J.:
• City of Bits
• Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
- Moran, Joe: Reading the Everyday
- Mumford, Lewis: The City In History
- MVRDV: Metacity/Datatown
- Neuwirth, Robert: Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
- Nold, Christian, ed.: Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self
- O’Hara, Kenton, et al., eds.: Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies
- Oldenburg, Ray: The Great Good Place
- Qiu, Jack Linchuan: Working Class Network Society
- Raban, Jonathan: Soft City
- RAMTV: Negotiate My Boundary
- Rheingold, Howard: Smart Mobs
- Rudofsky, Bernard: Streets for People
- Sadler, Simon: Archigram: Architecture without Architecture
- Sante, Luc: Low Life
- Sennett, Richard: The Uses of Disorder
- Senseable City Lab: New York Talk Exchange
- Solnit, Rebecca: Wanderlust: A History Of Walking
- Suchman, Lucy: Plans and Situated Actions
- Tuan, Yi-Fu: Space and Place
- Varnelis, Kazys, ed.: The Infrastructural City
- Wall, Alex: Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City
- Waldheim, Charles, ed.: The Landscape Urbanism Reader
- Watkins, Susan M.: Clothing: The Portable Environment
- Whitely, Nigel: Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future
- Whyte, William H.: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
- Wood, Denis and Robert J. Beck: Home Rules
- Zardini, Mirko, ed.: Sense Of The City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism
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Via Adam Greenfield Speedbird
Personal comment:
Adam Greenfield, théoricien et essayiste des questions liées à l'"urban computing", l'"ubiquitous computing", etc. publie ici une bibliographie liée à son prochain livre. Beaucoup de choses connues et de "usual suspects", mais aussi quelques noms qui le sont moins, tout au moins pour nous. Bonne ressource à creuser, si nécessaire.
Intéressant également de constater l'approche "ouverte" qu'adopte Greefield par rapport à son prochain livre, publiant régulièrement des informations ou des extraits à son propos, questionnant la "communauté" de son blog sur les thèmes abordés, etc.
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