News
“Society in mind”
Sometimes words taken from another language can provide a useful little perspective shift on a topic. Tsundoku, the Japanese word for “the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them” gave a tiny bit of a rallying cry for those of us who buy books left and right, the Danish “hygge,” which roughly translates to “a quality of cosiness” became a decoration trend and life style for many homes. During the pandemic, the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rekindled “samfundssind”, a compound noun of “samfund” (society) and “sind” (mind) to bring citizens together and encourage them to put “the good of the greater society above your own personal interests.”
“Rurbanization” could bring agriculture in cities
Good piece at WIRED, on scientists investigating how designers and planners can ruralize cities, greening roofs, and empty lots. If we bring some of what we grow nearer to where we live, can we enhance our connection with food? Can we make food more accessible? Can we improve local ecosystems?
Public data commons
Earlier this year, Open Future published their views concerning a public data commons and presented it as a public-interest framework for B2G (Business to Government) data sharing in the European Data Act. It is quite a long read and might seem somewhat incongruous to a blog about fab cities, but it’s an important issue well covered here. Important because, regardless of which visions or ideals one promotes for cities (and society more broadly) everything is more and more digital. What’s digital produces data. Data is easy enough to collect and can be assembled as insights and knowledge. Who controls it matters. A lot.
We’ve monocropped our streets
An excellent article by Clive Thompson on how we’ve monocropped our streets , to the extent that they are now used almost exclusively for cars. He argues that it’s time to rewild. We’ve spoken about this before with our post “Rewilding” infrastructures, the idea that much like various projects are giving fields, estates, and farms back to nature, letting them grow as they would without our interference, now some voices are proposing that cities also need to “go wild again.” Thompson starts with the example of Utrecht.
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