Last year it was Berlin, a reunited city. See post: You are now free to move about the cabin. This year it’s Nicosia in Cyprus, still divided. All being well I’ll be able to include some pictures, videos and commentary on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Bibliography Pullan, Wendy. 2013. Spatial discontinuities: Conflict infrastructures in contested cities. In W.…More
Design hermeneutics revisited
What’s the difference between an artwork and a design? The worst insult you can give to a work of art is to ignore it. The worse thing you can do to a design is to treat it as a work of art — i.e. not to use it. This is an argument advanced by philosopher Nicholas…More
What have the arts to do with ethics?
Ethics checklists, committees, codes of practice and approvals came late to the arts. The place of ethics in the practical arts and their study looks like an afterthought, as if peripheral to the act of creation. After all, art has to begin at least with the freedom to say and do what you want. The ethical may come later to…More
Academic writing and publishing online
This is a metablog: a short blog post about blogging, a blog that links to other blogs, and it links to a PDF that is a print friendly collation of a selection of other blogs on the subject of blogging — from this site. That’s not unusual. I ran a workshop yesterday called “Developing a writing and publishing…More
Brand melancholy
Who would want to brand their city as melancholic? I’ve just caught up with the Guardian’s city brand barometer. One of the parameters by which they measure brand success is “buzz”: “a combination of social media (Facebook likes and Twitter sentiment analysis) and media mentions.” They don’t measure melancholy, but if buzzing is frenetic activity, then it’s opposite is…More
Poiēsis
Planet Earth is a giant spherical communications machine with a diameter of about 84,000 kilometres. Well over 1,000 satellites orbit between the earth’s surface and this outer (geosynchronous) layer. Nature and artefact seem to merge due to the scale, ubiquity, sophistication, and conceits of contemporary techno-science, especially if we add to the global communications infrastructure the prospects of geo-engineering intended…More
Nature into the city
Parks, gardens, tree-lined streets, balconies, atria, glasshouses, allotments, bird feeders, green walls, nature reserves, aviaries, zoos: these are amongst the most obvious ways that planners, designers and citizens bring nature into the city. But something similar happens via certain marginal urban practices, that by their very nature construct and re-construct the city as wilderness, bringing the values…More
Re-making the city
Cities play host to a range of spatial activities that are at the edge of civility. Such practices are inconvenient to some, often hazardous, opportunistic, unofficial, and occasionally entertaining. Think of graffiti, skateboarding, rooftopping, parkour, free running, begging, busking, sleeping rough, demonstration, and occupation. Such marginal spatial practices appropriate places and city paraphernalia in ways other than their sponsors, designers, legislators, and polite civilian users intended.…More
Making nature
Biophilic design is design that is sympathetic to nature. Designers who want their buildings and landscapes to exhibit biophilic qualities have at least 70 attributes to draw on, e.g. use natural colours, water, plant motifs, natural shapes and forms (like shells), allude to growth and other natural processes, introduce natural and filtered light, connect with history, the…More
Windowphilia
Windowphilia is a fondness for windows — or fenestraphilia, or parathyrophilia. A Google search doesn’t reveal much about either term, but biophilia is in common usage, and in the OED. I’ve been reading the book by Sue Thomas called Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace. (Technobiophilia hasn’t yet made it to the OED.) Her book endorses the role of digital technologies in expanding…More