Growing interest in applications of blockchain technology in city planning has sparked a drum roll of city tokens, city DAOs, decentralised city projects, city white-papers and city dreams. Vitalik Buterin’s blog post Crypto Cities collates some of these. Instead of adding to or reviewing the expanding list of projects, I want to contribute some themes and concepts from urban theory that can help position and frame the possibilities. Social scientists, economists, geographers, historians, des...

Growing interest in applications of blockchain technology in city planning has sparked a drum roll of city tokens, city DAOs, decentralised city projects, city white-papers and city dreams. Vitalik Buterin’s blog post Crypto Cities collates some of these. Instead of adding to or reviewing the expanding list of projects, I want to contribute some themes and concepts from urban theory that can help position and frame the possibilities. Social scientists, economists, geographers, historians, des...

Creating new financial and governance systems is a political and social act, not a technocratic solution to an accepted problem, not a technical tool, although that’s where it starts.Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott (1998) opens with the story of the invention of scientific forestry in 18th Century Prussia and Saxony. This is a model and a metaphor for the simplification and manipulation of the world by powerful institutions with sharply defined interests (such as nation states). In the ...

Creating new financial and governance systems is a political and social act, not a technocratic solution to an accepted problem, not a technical tool, although that’s where it starts.Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott (1998) opens with the story of the invention of scientific forestry in 18th Century Prussia and Saxony. This is a model and a metaphor for the simplification and manipulation of the world by powerful institutions with sharply defined interests (such as nation states). In the ...

Architects design buildings, but it is fair to talk about (and expect) their participation in shaping housing-and-ageing outside of architecture. After all, these are professionals who have never self-excluded from graphic design, branding, copywriting, sculpture, social science, economics and philosophy. Architects also engage in shaping housing-and-ageing beyond design in the same way that every person does – by talking about hopes, fears, differences, assumptions, beliefs. Further, their d...

Architects design buildings, but it is fair to talk about (and expect) their participation in shaping housing-and-ageing outside of architecture. After all, these are professionals who have never self-excluded from graphic design, branding, copywriting, sculpture, social science, economics and philosophy. Architects also engage in shaping housing-and-ageing beyond design in the same way that every person does – by talking about hopes, fears, differences, assumptions, beliefs. Further, their d...

During the vaccination phase of the pandemic someone very close to me fell into a pit of links and mailing lists. I had understood, abstractly, that misinformation and conspiracies breed in the Venn overlap of wellness, isolation and the web, but I hadn’t appreciated the real-life costs and anxieties that are the result. It doesn’t just stay anon. Whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s patient explanations of algorithmic devilry allege a Facebook business model that puts fractions of percentage poin...

During the vaccination phase of the pandemic someone very close to me fell into a pit of links and mailing lists. I had understood, abstractly, that misinformation and conspiracies breed in the Venn overlap of wellness, isolation and the web, but I hadn’t appreciated the real-life costs and anxieties that are the result. It doesn’t just stay anon. Whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s patient explanations of algorithmic devilry allege a Facebook business model that puts fractions of percentage poin...

Density and lightness. Seriousness and irreverence. Intensive labour and exuberant joy. You can have these in the same breath.This is what density and lightness look like in artist Case Simmons’ 2021 Clouds on Chains series: To start with, two decades browsing the infinity of images on the web. Searching via multiple engines for an object, word, tenor, colour. The images that appear are shaped by what others have searched for before. The lightness of the absent-minded muscle memory of a billi...

Density and lightness. Seriousness and irreverence. Intensive labour and exuberant joy. You can have these in the same breath.This is what density and lightness look like in artist Case Simmons’ 2021 Clouds on Chains series: To start with, two decades browsing the infinity of images on the web. Searching via multiple engines for an object, word, tenor, colour. The images that appear are shaped by what others have searched for before. The lightness of the absent-minded muscle memory of a billi...