boxman / tags / cities

Tagged with “cities” (5) activity chart

  1. Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

    As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

    These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West’s examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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  2. Cities, Design and Climate Change

    With cities contributing upwards of 75 per cent of global carbon emissions, urban design is increasingly important when planning for climate change. This discussion examines the creative urban design solutions coming out of the world’s cities. Saskia Sassen is Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at LSE and NYU. Jonathon Porritt is the chair of the sustainable development commission and founder and director of Forum for the Future.

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  3. Stewart Brand’s ‘Ecopragmatism’

    In the 1960s, Stewart Brand became one of the country’s first and most famous champions of a new ecological awareness. His Whole Earth Catalog spoke to a generation of hippies and back-to-nature commune dwellers.

    Now, at 70, Stewart Brand is calling on environmentalists to reframe their understanding of the problem — and solutions. It’s too late for back-to-nature, he says. Global warming is beyond that.

    To survive now, Brand says, we need nuclear power, genetic engineering, giant cities. We must manage nature or lose civilization.

    This hour, On Point: In the face of global warming, Stewart Brand redefines green.

    http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/10/stewart-brands-ecopragmatism

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  4. Elements of a Networked Urbanism by Adam Greenfield

    Over the past several years, we’ve watched as a very wide variety of objects and surfaces familiar from everyday life have been reimagined as networked information-gathering, -processing, -storage and -display resources. Why should cities be any different?

    What happens to urban form and metropolitan experience under such circumstances? What are the implications for us, as designers, consumers and as citizens?

    http://2009.dconstruct.org/schedule/adamgreenfield/

    Adam Greenfield lives in a city and thinks you probably do, too.

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  5. Our Urban Future: the death of distance and the rise of cities

    Improvements in transportation and communication technologies have led some to predict the death of distance, and with that, the death of the city. In this lecture Professor Ed Glaeser will argue that these improvements have actually been good for idea-producing cities at the same time as they have been devastating for goods-producing places. What, then, does the future hold for our cities?

    Speaker: Professor Edward Glaeser, Professor of Economics at Harvard, and Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston; Chair: Howard Davies

    (Nov 13, 2008 at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE))

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