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"Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people's checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it. "
"David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities, is the latest entry in his life-long interest in uncovering the intersection between capitalism and urbanization. It’s a collection of previously published, but updated and revised, essays and articles. They are all particularly important to our understanding of both the long fall out of 2008’s economic crash and the rise of urban revolts in Egypt, Greece, New York and elsewhere. "
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Who creates what Harvey calls the “collective symbolic capital” that turned Williamsburg into a real estate bonanza? Well a lot of it comes from the collective labor of the thousands of artists, intellectuals, street musicians, freelancers, community-garden tenders, and everyone else who makes the area desirable. The real estate developers, then, act as a parasitic force on our common-labor, growing rich building the condos that will destroy the communities that are the product of our labor and life-activity. It strikes me that universities act in similar, though less self-destructive, ways. It is all of our labor and intellectual production that gives NYU its reputation, which it then trades on to consume ever more of Greenwich Village, raise money, and develop in the future.
"Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered. "
" Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. "
"In an article this month in PLoS ONE, Bettencourt and his team created a way to measure how exceptional cities are by comparing their characteristics with what mathematics would predict for their size. The team then ranked the exceptionality of 300 U.S. cities based on personal incomes, gross metropolitan product (GMP), number of patents and number of violent crimes. "
I used to think that a topic like -- oh, let's see, US-China friction -- was controversial, or climate change, or Google-v-Microsoft, or McNamara-v-Rumsfeld. That was before I innocently stepped into the crossfire concerning the effect of "star-chitects" like Frank Gehry on the urban landscape.
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