flâneur

Arjun Karanam

7 followers · 7 following · 298 views

on the atlas — 5

highlights — 10

  • "In return they have more responsibility – to plan streets with their neighbours, to arrange their own energy provision, and so on. That part sounds radical to some people – but it's really just how cities were built for centuries."
    The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future
  • Play the City brings together groups of locals to make choices about various aspects of land use and infrastructure design within an interactive game environment, which requires compromises to be made at different stages for the game to progress. This approach aims to discover what city dwellers actually want in their living environment, while also sparking collaborative decision-making and conflict resolution using cards, boards and interactive videos.
    The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future
  • Some Latin American colleagues, meanwhile, warned of negative parallels between the free rein being given to residents and what they saw as the chaos of places like the higgledy-piggledy favelas of Brazil.
    The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future
  • The initial template for Almere was laid down by the world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, via his award-winning practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas began by creating a distinctive three-tier city centre. This concentrated car parking underground, complemented by ground-level shopping and leisure facilities now rendered free from traffic. The triple stack design was completed by an upper layer of planted green spaces on the rooftops of the ground-level buildings, on which houses and small blocks of apartments sit.
    The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future
  • "Designers agreed on one thing: Almere should not be high-rise, anonymous, monotonous," she says. For her, the huge diversity of houses all across Almere would simply not have been possible if conventional developers had been in charge.
    The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future
  • Over the past 15 years, for example, the Homeruskwartier neighbourhood has provided a canvas for around 1,500 self-builders to give free rein to their imagination, creating a cornucopia of individualised homes set within tree-lined boulevards, parkland and waterways, accompanied by local schools, markets and community facilities.
    The Dutch city testing the future of urban life - BBC Future
  • The Federal Express deadline was approaching on Sunday and the engineers still weren’t done. (Federal Express wouldn’t be renamed to FedEx for many years yet.) Then someone had a brilliant idea: we would ship US Sprint a blank tape with our usual letter listing the changes in the release. And so we did.
    Working in the software industry, circa 1989 – Jim Grey
  • You mean we can write one codebase with no OS- or hardware-dependent IFs and no separate routines, and run it on any machine that can run the JVM? Voodoo!
    Working in the software industry, circa 1989 – Jim Grey
  • Because of all this, projects always turned into awful death marches with lots of late nights and weekends in the weeks leading up to the release date. Burnout was high. But few people quit over it because we thought it was just how it had to be.
    Working in the software industry, circa 1989 – Jim Grey
  • Finally, software subscriptions were not a thing yet. Companies paid for software entirely up front and got to use the release they bought forever. They had to pay again for major upgrades. Some smart companies spread their payments out over a period of years, but the license was still perpetual.
    Working in the software industry, circa 1989 – Jim Grey