[sudoroom] Friday Filosophy

[Marina Kukso]

i'm sure there are many mike davis fans at sudo room!

i would also be interested in learning more about architecture and urban
planning as it relates to these kinds of issues. i recently got
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/pastoral-capitalism and have been enjoying it
greatly ^_^

- marina

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Felicia Betancourt
<fmbetancourt at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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