Perhaps it is the fresh eyes of being somewhere new, but perhaps it is what I always feel on continental Europe, but one thing its hard not to notice the emphasis in the built environment on supporting living well out in the open. This might be the prevailance of trees, of manually built/scaled street infrastructure (steps, walls, pavements, built of hand-sized rock) and the low-managed edge spaces and greenery in this infrastructure. But it is also the adventure parks, the river swimming infrastructure (changing cabins), open access forest with foraging minutes from the city, the BBQs. True, other cities have […]

  Ongoing research: not endorsements of content. * Indy Johar: “Transitioning towards a 21st Century economy” – https://twitter.com/indy_johar/status/1328611058798440448 . “The capacity to think & act for the long term is a modern privilege for the few. In an age of persistent precariousness, we the many was stuck in short termism and mal-consumption to feed and sustain our fragilities” – https://twitter.com/indy_johar/status/1328611058798440448 (see also: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org) How to structure interdependence as condition. Simple stack diagramming and intervention targeting (levels) as well as stack transitions / outcomes (red line). * Patricia Reed: “End of the world pedagogies” Making and Breaking – https://makingandbreaking.org/article/the-end-of-a-world-and-its-pedagogies/     “INSUPPRESSIBLE FRICTIONS […]

  Brexit is a useful lens through which to look at infrastructure for a number of reasons. The intersection of national identity, movement of people and the structural forces this unleashes — in which the actual structural role the EU plays is now somewhat incidental to the discussion. Not to mention the splitting of political institutions into hither to un-figured groups, and the swirling morass of how the resources and power are distributed and felt across the country, there is also the way in which the Brexit campaign created and utilised what I would call an infrastructural form of politics. […]

How to think beyond the rationalised / rationalising frame of infrastructures as they are generally characterised from systems perspectives? Speaking on the Talking Politics podcast (28 November 2018) about fear, faith, hope and religion, US philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes an important case for the importance of the non-rational when considering how institutions might structure the political and its boundaries, especially when considering forms of rationalisation such as policy. Discussing the question of faith in the future in situations where the widespread practicing of religion has become absent, particularly in Europe, the host David Runciman points out a view “from inside […]