Month: November 2002

Motorists out of control

Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, asks “who dares to stand up to the motorists?”

The motoring lobby had been protesting, like so many schoolboys banned from baking their conkers, that concealed speed cameras were a rotten swizz. Or, as the AA put it, “unfair”. The Sun said they were “sneaky”. They did not, drivers complained, give them a “sporting chance” of slowing down, before speeding off again.”

Forty years ago Jane Jacobs showed how speeding traffic destroys street life (in The Death and Life of the Great American Cities) and also how you can win it back by slowing the traffic down. In those forty years we’ve learnt nothing. Worse, we’ve surrendered our streets to the cars entirely and now we have to put up with their owners whinging continually about ‘hidden’ speed cameras while the pedestrians cower, stranded on the pavement.

Making of the Macintosh

I’ve used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they’re pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of grim, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase is like me: old gits with hair growing out of their ears. We’re stuck in our ways and we can’t change now so that’s that. The nice people at Stanford University Library are attempting a proper history of the machine’s early days (as part of a larger project documenting Silicon Valley itself). There’s some genuinely fascinating material here – memos, early sketches, engineering drawings, first person recollections. Thanks to LinkMachineGo for linking to The Making of Macintosh. Incidentally, I learn that, over the years, I’ve owned five of the Ten Worst Macs Ever. I’m selling two of them: an ugly all-in-one Performa 5320 and a lamentably underpowered IIvx, in case you’re interested.

Proof for posterity

Via warmbrain and Karlin Lillington I learn about a marvelous idea from supporters of Project Gutenberg: Distributed Proofreaders. It’s got to be worth a few minutes of your day to proof a page or two of OCR output for the utterly worthy archive of out-of-copyright literature (whose collection is receding into the past as fast as the US Supreme Court can push it). Incidentally, I remember writing about Project Gutenberg in 3W Magazine about nine years ago.

Mememap

Er… Something tells me I’m a bit slow off the mark here but this mindmap of current memes looks pretty useful. I was just struggling to name the ‘space’ described by the map but, of course, the map pretty much takes care of that itself and, like all good maps, is irreducible. So I won’t bother. I bet you could plan your next business venture/career change using this.

Grocery heroes

The people at Ocado seem to have got it about right. With the help of a substantial investment from Waitrose, they’ve built a home delivery service that doesn’t require you to know exactly how to spell ‘brocolli’, that delivers for nothing if you spend over £75, that allows you to book slots in one hour increments and that delivers at 10 p.m. if you forget about Olly’s football practice and can’t be in when you said you would… If grocery delivery is going to work it’ll probably be these guys.

The Economist on migration

I’ve just finished reading The Economist’s blockbuster survey on migration. More very good work developing the newspaper’s line on the liberalisation of migration as a benefit to both nations (receiving and sending) and peoples (likewise). As I have said before (in August and in September), this issue is more important than we think and we allow the politicians to hijack it to meet their short-term (very short-term in this context) needs at our peril. Europe’s population is about to enter a very long decline. Even the new entrants from the East cannot slow the long term fall since their birth rates are already too low. Meanwhile, the only Western nation bucking the trend, the USA, could easily have 500 million inhabitants by mid-century. The economic implications are obvious.

While the USA and the emerging economies grow strongly, slow-growth Europe can only fall further and further behind. You don’t need to share The Economist’s free trader stance to recognise the stark stupidity of turning away willing, young workers at the border while our economies stagnate. We can only hope that the penny drops for European Governments before the current flow of eager migrants has lost interest and moved on to more attractive destinations. Reversing a nation’s (or an entire economic bloc’s) stance on immigration is not easy with the emotional stakes so high but the implications of getting it wrong – a shrinking and ever-more-irrelevant European economy – are too grim to contemplate.

Architects and housing

The orthodoxy is that the last time professional architects were allowed to design housing on a large scale in Britain they did more damage than the blitz, snuffing out historic street patterns and fracturing communities in their fervour to ‘improve the lives’ of the poor.

But experts (demographers, mostly) tell us we’re going to need 3.8 million new homes in the next couple of decades. Old people and single person households are to blame. We’re currently replacing our housing stock so slowly that every house that’s currently standing will need to keep doing so for about 1,000 years to cope even with current demand. We need those architects.

An exhibition at the RIBA shows a dozen or so medium-to-large housing projects designed by a new breed of ‘architect-planners’, people sensitive to social and human context as well as to the purity of form. Keywords for the projects on show are ‘sustainable’, ‘flexible’, ‘self-organising’, ‘human scale’.

The signs are encouraging: there’s nothing programmatic, ideological or arrogant about these schemes – although inevitably much that is fashionable. Mistakes will still be made but in this more modestly-scaled work, they should be self-limiting. Feedback loops will be short enough to encourage constant revision of the master plan and prevent the decades of blight that overcame the huge post-war housing estates.

Some projects are even flexible enough to be continuously reworked in response to new demands – walls can be erected to add rooms as kids arrive, a lift punched through the ceiling as occupants age and can’t use the stairs – all without planning permission or a structural engineer.

A new house building boom is about to begin and, on the strength of this exhibition, it might turn out to be a renaissance for the professionals.