Peer2Politics

• "There are over 400 cities in the world today with a population of more than one million urban residents and close to 20 cities with a population of more than 10 million. Indeed, over half the world’s population now lives in cities, and by 2050 seventy percent of the world’s population will live in cities. This remarkable urban growth has created vast policy and planning challenges related to infrastructure, governance and environmental sustainability. Examining the relationship between “smart cities” and civil society, this collection explores the contours of a new era in urban design.

While technological innovation is often seen as the answer to modern waste problems, what can we learn from the historical methods used by great ancient societies such as the Aztecs of Mexico?

There seems to be a prevalent trend in media and political commentary about the Canadian province of New Brunswick where I live and am from; that the province is falling behind, in decline.

 Point A is a developing network of urban, income sharing, egalitarian, democratic, ambitious, and engaged intentional communities in the cities of the American East Coast.

A few weeks ago, Wouter Vanstiphout was asked to speak for ‘Strelka Talks’ – a cool new initiative by the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, for which they invite speakers from various field for a 30 minute video talk on “critically important topics concerning contemporary cities and urban development.”

"Anonymity is nothing new in cities. What is more unusual and perhaps even contradictory is the convergence of sociability and anonymity in the city. Through an analysis of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, we consider the growing value of systems for sharing and combining individual efforts on the Internet into collective tasks. If we look at the historical development of relationality, this may lead us to challenge any simplistic identification of P2P collaboration with anonymity. What is the potential of P2P for urban development, democratization and innovation? P2P has to be seen as an objectoriented sociality, where person-fragments cooperate around the creation of common value. What connects individuals who participate in open and shared knowledge? How does this collaborative logic seen in software and design projects connect individuals to some transcendental collective goal? How might building a universal operating system, constructing a universal free encyclopedia or constructing an open source car reshape the way we construct our cities?"

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

"There are over 400 cities in the world today with a population of more than one million urban residents and close to 20 cities with a population of more than 10 million. Indeed, over half the world’s population now lives in cities, and by 2050 seventy percent of the world’s population will live in cities. This remarkable urban growth has created vast policy and planning challenges related to infrastructure, governance and environmental sustainability. Examining the relationship between “smart cities” and civil society, this collection explores the contours of a new era in urban design.