[sudoroom] Friday Filosophy

[Felicia Betancourt]

Thanks eddan.com !  Sadly I missed today's class, but I'll be there next
week.  The example given (reproduced below) reminds me of Mike Davis'
deconstruction of Los Angeles in City of Quartz.  Architecture and urban
planning are a great place to start, especially for someone like me who is
self-taught in these areas.

One suggestion: how about "Technical Arrangements as Forms of Imposed
Order" to distinguish political, top-down constructs from organic,
bottom-up systems???  Just my 2 cents.

Also, it might be fun to use Nassim Taleb's trichotomy (omg, that really is
a word!) of fragile:robust:anti-fragile as an analytical tool as we explore
these technical arrangements.


On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Eddan Katz <eddan at eddan.com> wrote:

> Technical Arrangements as Forms of Order
>
> Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has become used to the
> normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some
> of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the
> overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of
> clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural
> peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In
> our accustomed way of looking at things like roads and bridges we see the
> details of form as innocuous, and seldom give them a second thought.
>
> It turns out, however, that the two hundred or so low-hanging overpasses
> on Long Island were deliberately designed to achieve a particular social
> effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and
> other public works from the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, had these
> overpasses built to specifications that would discourage the presence of
> buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by Robert A. Caro in
> his biography of Moses, the reasons reflect Moses's social-class bias and
> racial prejudice. Automobile owning whites of "upper" and "comfortable
> middle" classes, as he called them, would be free to use the parkways for
> recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public
> transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could
> not get through the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of
> racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses's widely
> acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a
> proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.
>
>
cheers,
felicia
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