In a memorandum titled “More than Quality” the Dutch Arts Minister Halbe Zijlstra has announced savage cuts to the country’s arts budget. Among media arts & technology organizations to lose their structural funding are such long-term friends and partners of ours as STEIM, Waag Society, V2, Submarine Channel, and Mediamatic. This means that pretty much [...]
A study by Transportation Alternatives found that up to 45 percent of traffic in an area of Brooklyn was caused by cars circling the streets looking for parking. And in 2006, UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup calculated that, within a year, vehicles searching for parking in a small business district in LA consumed [...]
Three years ago German photographer Thomas Kalak published a book called Thailand – Same same, but different!. Featuring all manner of bamboo scaffolding, knotted aerial lines, hand painted signs, or converted plastic bags, the book celebrated the Thais’ exceptionally gifted art of improvisation. The strange objects and arrangements reminded Kalak of art world “ready-mades” from [...]
Cycle Commerce: The Red Blood Cells of a Smart City
[The chart above is from the online catalogue of cargo bikes at Nutzrad] India’s many millions of bicycle and rickshaw vendors embody the entrepreneurship, sustainable mobility, social innovation, and thriving local economies, that a sustainable city needs. As an ecosystem, they’re also part of the metabolism that makes a city smart. That said, cycle commerce [...]