rethinking the city

It's time for a radical shift in the way we think about cities and urbansim.
Here are my 10 points for a new urbanism

1. the city is not a place
2. technology is not a tool
3. mobility isn't about movement
4. what you see is not what you get
5. here is not now
6. our bodies do not hold us
7. reality isn't what you can touch
8. our identity is not ours
9. space is not a container
10. media is not the message (c. mcluhan)

Sometimes Off vs. Always On

from Marko Ahtisaari's blog

Time is the ultimate scarce resource in the information age. It is the subject of endless pop song wish lists ranging from turnin’ it back to makin’ it (or dis moment) last forever. The desire to stop time has always been with us and the conveyor belt lyrics of today have a deep ancestry. Witness the recently deceased Pakistani master singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan:

Throw out the clocks, My lover comes home, Let there be revelry. My lover comes home, Let there be revelry.

In this excerpt from a characteristically moving qawwali "Mera Pia Ghar Aaya" (“My Lover Comes Home”) Nusrat interprets the same theme. As is often the case in sufi qawwali the object of love remains ambiguous between the divine and the human. Either way, we’d like the clocks thrown out.

The same could be said of the ubiquitous mobile devices that connect us. In Finland the everyday word for mobile phone is kännykkä meaning “extension-of-the-hand.” “Because we carry our always-on cellular prostheses,” Derrick de Kerckhove notes, “it is the world itself that has become always on.” These technologies have become so embedded they are invisible. Almost. These technologies still interrupt us. They make us in principle always available. In the rush to connect we have not designed what it means to disconnect, to tune out.

The challenge: How do we design to be sometimes off in a world that is itself always on?

string and storytelling

Richard Aedy: David, when did we invent string?

David Turnbull: Well the precise point in time of course is impossible to identify but the most secure dates for the earliest evidence of it is 26,000BC in impressions on baked balls of clay found in central Europe roughly where Czcchoslovakia is now.

Richard Aedy: It seems like a very kind of mundane idea string but it actually turned out to be quite important didn’t it?

David Turnbull: I think it was more than quite important and apart from mundane I think it was revolutionary. A woman called Elizabeth Barber, wrote a book five years ago called Women’s Work in which she had a throw away line, the string revolution. From my perspective, humble though string may be, it actually provided the possibility of everything that now constitutes the basis of civilisation. It’s humble in the sense that it’s merely fibre but it’s revolutionary in two senses. In the sense that it overthrows the orthodox understanding of the history of technology which is based on the 5% of the remains we’ve found to date, all of which are made of stone, hence the usoe the term lithic as in Neolithic, Paleolithic and so on.

We organise our understanding of the history of technology in terms of how big a stone, how cleverly shaped and formed they were. Whereas no stone was all that useful unless you had the capacity to join things together. And this is what string does for you, string makes baskets, it makes nets, it makes cordage, it enables you to haft things, join things, weave things, make things and in fact 95% of all our original technology was made either of plant fibre or wood. Nearly all of which has entirely evaporated, just gone to dust in the record.

Richard Aedy: So string was the first joining technology basically and from that profound implications?

David Turnbull: From that we were able to make cloth, textiles, from that we were able to make nets, from that we were able to make baskets. And the fundamental characteristic of such technologies is that enables you to move, it enables you to feed yourself, enables you to trap small birds. And the whole history of the origins of technology now needs to be rewritten in the light of what you might call ‘soft technology’ as opposed to what we’re stuck with at the moment which is basically ‘hard technology’ which has also shaped our understandings of how technology works today.

Richard Aedy: And story telling is the thing that provides the information or did in the past, is that what you’re saying?

David Turnbull: Story telling is how a particular piece of technology becomes seamlessly integrated into our cultural practices.

Richard Aedy: So if we tell stories about a piece of technology then we understand it, and we’re comfortable with it, and we can use it?

David Turnbull: That’s right?

Richard Aedy: And if we don’t tell stories about that piece of technology it’s going to bewilder us.

David Turnbull: And it’s also the case it’s how be bring technologies into existence we, as it were, dream them into existence, we tell ourselves stories about how things could be, should be. Much of modern high tech is a form of narrating into existence in a sense – tell a story to see who catches it.

Richard Aedy: So you think this is still happening now David?

David Turnbull: Oh absolutely.

Richard Aedy: We didn’t abandon this along the way?

David Turnbull: No, no, it’s an essential component of all human culture throughout time.

Richard Aedy: Storytelling.

David Turnbull: Storytelling.

Richard Aedy: And a big part of it was because of technology.

David Turnbull: Storytelling and technology go together I think.

interview from The Buzz Monday 27 May 2002

Inside Out

from Ana Rewakowicz's website
In the “Travelling with my inflatable room” video piece, for a period of a month and a half (September/October) I travelled in a van carrying the inflatable room - "Inside Out"(a rubber latex imprint of my previous apartment in Montreal) and set it up at different urban (local parks, underground abandoned basements, private and public backyards, unoccupied buildings, street corners) and rural (parks, campsites, abandoned villages, no man’s land) locations across Canada(Montreal/Vancouver/Montreal) in an attempt to live out of it. In the world today nothing is far or near. Being abroad no longer means being away from home. The idea of home and belonging shifts as we move into the fast development of technologies and globalization.