Archive for the ‘ Utopia ’ Category

Jane Jacobs, Gentrifier

This article by Benjamin Schwartz lambastes Sharon Zukin, Michael Sorkin, and Jane Jacobs’ middle class view of the gentrifying neighborhoods they fetishize, specifically the West Village of the 1950s. It’s excellent. Basically, he accuses all three of idealizing a particular neighborhood at a particular point in time  and striving to freeze that tumult into a [ READ MORE ]

Joburg, World Class City

A scan from, I believe, a South African newspaper with the mayor of Johannesburg about the city’s claim in advance of hosting the World Cup that it is a world class city. [ READ MORE ]

World’s strangest housing communities

[via Metafilter] Some peculiar housing communities. But why would anyone in their right mind name a housing complex after the movie Alphaville? [ READ MORE ]

Romer on Charter Cities

I just came across this article in Prospect Magazine by Paul Romer on Charter Cities. Though there are serious risks of neocolonialism, I find the idea extremely intriguing. It may just have to shape my future research, after all, they do depend on container ports. [ READ MORE ]

Utopia Britannica

  • September 25th, 2009
  • Posted in Utopia

A website that chronicles utopian efforts in the British Isles from 1345 to 1945. [ READ MORE ]

Japanese Worker’s Paradise

The NYTimes has this article about the island of Hime. [ READ MORE ]

My Right to the City utopian preamble

About a month  and a half ago, the Right to the City reading group gave me the responsibility/opportunity to develop a utopian statement of principles that could function as our group’s preamble to our recommendation to the Right to the City Alliance for the use of stimulus funds. My charge was to incorporate a tight [ READ MORE ]

Left Forum forward

I spent the weekend at the Left Forum. It was my first time, and it turned out to be a most curious developmental experience. After an exhausting Saturday, I felt lost and out of place. I’d been to panels on dialectical thinking (with Bertell Ollman, who was delightful), prison reform (with Robert Hillary King, one [ READ MORE ]

New start?

I may be high on lack of sleep and caffiene. And that may be a good thing. I finally finished Thomas Hughes groundbreaking but slightly tedious Networks of Power yesterday. The two page epilogue and an article by Bernward Joerges have set me on fire. It’s not the writing so much as the realization that [ READ MORE ]

Mixed on Bonnard

Last night I started reading Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia. It took me in the unexpected direction of a discussion of artistic form, design, and manufacturing. He seems to be arguing that quality applied art emerges from the merger of form and function and that modern industry must find a way to recover the [ READ MORE ]

A final science of man has no room for the unplanned

Daniel Cloud, who teaches philosophy at Princeton (via a Columbia degree) and runs two hedge funds, blames our hubris in predicting human behavior for the current crisis. What really produced the change in economics that led to disaster was the simple fact that you could now get away with saying certain kinds of things in public. [ READ MORE ]

Visions of Servant Capitalism

Geoff Mulligan at Prospect offers this sober assessment of the directions in which capitalism may evolve as a result of the crisis. He identifies a number of existing trends, e.g., FOSS, cooperatives, personal carbon accounts, and socialized health care, and concludes with the claim that it is time to use our imagination. I wholeheartedly agree. And [ READ MORE ]

Rat Park

[I may have missed a couple of days, but I'm back with a vengeance.] I saw a reference to Rat Park today in the NYTimes. It was used to suggest that perhaps New Yorkers have sufficient space to play and activities to pursue and are thus no longer drinking as much, but the implications are [ READ MORE ]

Victory City

  • December 7th, 2008
  • Posted in Utopia

A utopian vision for future reference: Victory City. [ READ MORE ]

New York Times predicts the future

The New York Times reports that pranksters have distributed a faux NYTimes dated a year into the future that describes a liberal utopia. If, like me, you were unlucky enough not to get a copy, there is an accompanying website that mimics the Times’ actual site. Apparently the paper was put together by the Yes [ READ MORE ]