News
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.
The future of public parks
At The New Yorker, for the 200th anniversary of Frederick Law Olmsted, Alexandra Lange meets with landscape architect Sara Zewde and goes over some of Olmsted’s legacy. Like many important figures from the past, his life and work can look contradictory to contemporary eyes.
Robotically Fabricated Structure
Intriguing project led by the Adel Design Research (ADR) Laboratory at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Called a “Robotically Fabricated Structure,” it might actually be more interesting for the algorithm component than the robots.
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