Archinect - News

Will India's 'smart city' initiative exacerbate social stratification?

2015-05-12T14:29:00-04:00

Recently, the Indian cabinet green-lit a £10 billion scheme that will be divided equally between building 100 smart cities, and rejuvenating another 500 cities and towns over the next five years. Yet many experts and planners fear that such “insta-cities”, if they are made, will prove dystopic and inequitable. Some even hint that smart cities may turn into social apartheid cities, governed by powerful corporate entities that could override local laws and governments to “keep out” the poor.

Amazon's new Dash button and the value of running out of toilet paper

2015-04-03T18:35:00-04:00

Dash fits squarely into the current age of smart-home technology... It is not simply a matter of practical efficiency but of a proactive, preëmptive way of living, in which inefficiency is the worst kind of waste. The way we manage our chores is a measure of our worthiness. No one wants to live in a stupid home... And only a chump would ever run out of toilet paper. But what if there is actual value in running out of things?

Amazon released their new Dash devices yesterday and many people thought it was an April Fool's joke, partly " the idea seemed to poke fun at Amazon’s omnipresence, making it visibly manifest with little plastic one-click shopping buttons adhered to surfaces all over your home." But the device, which would enable you to re-stock a certain product with the push of a little button, is real and coming. The video is below –– it's a bit unsettling.

In his New Yorker piece, Ian Crouch notes the imminent arrival of products that will be able to reorder supplies, ie. a washing machine that will sense when the detergent is low and order more. Crouch darkly imagines "a washing machine, haywire and alone in a basement somewhere, constantly reordering supplies for itself long after we’ve all been wiped off the Earth." He suggests that being bothered to have to stop may actually be important, in part in making us feel bad about the way we consume and the amount we waste.

Crouch's article seems to ...

The Internet and the Future of Loneliness

2015-04-02T15:37:00-04:00

...the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd. -Laing