Peer2Politics

It’s been a bit more than a year since I and my urbanist comrades accomplished one of the most exciting things ever - well, at least as far as urban planning goes. Following about 10 months of work during evenings, weekends, and holidays, in October 2014 we finally published Pro Helsinki 2.0, the alternative master…

While the term “ecosystem services” may sound like a corporate antithesis to the course of natural order, it is actually an umbrella term for the...

June 18, 2013: Check out the alpha of the full interactive version of PermaCities! This will be a fully featured open source online game with a revolutionary resource, social welfare, and transportation model, multiple missions, and dozens of new buildings and businesses. Release is scheduled 2013 pending success of our upcoming crowdfunding campaign. In the meantime, you can play the HTML version below. 

In the past, participatory planning used to be regarded as an annoying factor in the already intricate procedures of urban planning. Fortunately, today participation seems to permeate through a variety of city projects. This time around, the good news comes from Berlin. Self-Made City is a bilingual (German-English) book by the German Jovis. As the title insinuates, the reader is given the chance to page through a panorama of self-made housing projects all situated in the city of Berlin, most of them built during the last decade.

Panayotis Antoniadis is a senior researcher at ETH Zurich. During his graduate studies he contributed in the design of distributed scheduling algorithms for high-speed switches and the study of incentive mechanisms for peer-to-peer systems, including file sharing, shared virtualized infrastructures, community wireless networks, and delay tolerant networks. Since 2012, he is pursuing an interdisciplinary research agenda on the role of social software and wireless networks for building sustainable and convivial hybrid neighborhood communities. With colleagues from the field of urban planning, he has proposed a novel social learning approach based on an under development hybrid experimental framework, the NetHood toolkit,http://nethood.org, which operates outside the public Internet and allows local communities to own, customize, and operate their own ICTs according to their own values and objectives. Panayotis received his Ph.D. degree from the Athens University of Economics and Business in 2006, and until 2012 he was a post-doc researcher at UPMC Sorbonne Universites in Paris.

In the circles I travel, there is a lot of discussion about the importance of streets and their design to our communities. In short, for many decades there has been too little attention paid to the effect of streets on pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, merchants and their customers, on children. Instead, the overwhelming thrust of thinking about these critically important public spaces has been placed upon their role as conveyances for motor vehicles.

We live in a world where cars can fold into themselves and may soon be levitating. However, this rapid pace of innovation in the automotive sector is not yet crossing over to cities at large. Cities are traditionally slow and resistant to change.

A few weeks ago, Wouter Vanstiphout was asked to speak for ‘Strelka Talks’ – a cool new initiative by the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, for which they invite speakers from various field for a 30 minute video talk on “critically important topics concerning contemporary cities and urban development.”

There seems to be a prevalent trend in media and political commentary about the Canadian province of New Brunswick where I live and am from; that the province is falling behind, in decline.