[sudoroom] Friday Filosophy

[Tony Barreca]

Great link, Marina.  Thanks!

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Marina Kukso <marina.kukso at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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-- 
Tony Barreca
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonybarreca
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