Recorded in the wake of Tuesday's election results, this episode got a bit emotional. Fred Scharmen—designer, researcher, and assistant professor at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning in Baltimore—joins us to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of a technocratic urbanism, and whether the former king of cat memes can really offer anything to cities. Our conversation is largely in response to Fred's recent piece for Archinect, "Architects: If You Don't Start Disrupting Urbanism, Silicon Valley Will Do It for You.", with reflections on how technology and media are responsible for our current political climate.
Listen to episode 88 of Archinect Sessions, "Disruption":
Shownotes:
Y Combinator announces its 'New Cities' initiative
Ben Huh's post on Medium, announcing his role with YC
Keller Easterling's piece on oppositional and affirmative modes of engagement, and humor
Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (page 135 to be exact) explains how humans tend to make decisions based on how easy it is to retrieve certain information, more than their judgment of the actual content of that information. He writes, "Merely reminding people of a time when they had power increases their apparent trust in their own intuition." He cites this psychological experiment showing how emotion and previous experience affect one's risk assessment.
3 Comments
Meme Neo-PoMo user-generated cities.... this is much worse than I thought!
Agree its exciting that new powerful industries (and money) may be interested in architecture (or not), but I haven't seen any interest in designer opinions, not in language, value or method. It's basically Trumpism. Though with Trump, at least you have some idea of taste!
The reason I am criticizing the AIA (and the regulatory structure, although it is funny to hear them immediately fall in line with Trump after he throws a 500 billion "infrastructure" bone) is that "reputation" doesn't seem to include the real buildings architects are creating, which is actually where SV could help. Create a new system that values architecture. For some reason the AIA became more interested in preserving its structure instead of quality in design. I've seen some disgusting elitism at the AIA office in NY that would make your head turn. These days if you want to get registered you have to sit through hours and hours of meetings that have nothing to do with practice or promoting architecture to the public.
Still, SV haven't created anything, and their language shows no value for the principles or design or architecture, so I'm afraid they are already doomed (or we are).
I read the original article about this cities initiative, I read Fred's article, I recorded and listened to this podcast, and *I still don't understand* what they are trying to do. What is "an open, repeatable platform for rapid city-forming". Are they talking about buildings?
Apologies, I'm way behind on my listening but had to point out that cities have been subject to memetecture for some time now. "Live, work, play" was a popular (and now played), driving the creation urban neighborhoods that are fun to live in. This of course marginalizes those individuals who make play possible.
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