i've been mapping things with sound waves

simon evans : "the world"

proselytizing ON. planning

zoning is a tool used to organize spaces for the lives of most people

it achieves this by limiting how intensely and for what purpose land can be used

this to me sounds like a very vague and blunt domain, if planning is to be sensitive to the way large-scale physical considerations interact with human development on the individual scale. It is perhaps time that zoning starts to incorporate further innovations on connecting the micro and macro scale.


FoR CONSIDERATION:

Maurice Godelier on what is economic
the economic can be characterized as a system [a group of structures interlinked by certain rules (laws)] that is made up of structures [a group of objects by certain rules (laws)]. The economic system is also part of a larger totality, namely social life.

errr...

according to plato and classical economists, it is the material wealth of society. In other words, it is the production distribution and consumption of goods. However this definition of what constitutes economics excludes an enormous part of the reality of the economic field, namely the production and exchange of services. An alternative definition of economics states that it is the science of human behaviour that studies the relation between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses. In this way it is the science of rational action, where coherent ends are defined and rational means are used to attain these ends. Defined in this way, economics means all purposive actions are economic in principal, but no action is economic in fact. (is the relation between mother and child economic, because rational means are used to obtain objectives [health, educations etc]?) therefore, Godelier defines economics as the theory of the production distribution and consumption of goods and services, as long as one does not reduce the significance and function of service to its economic aspect, or deduce that significance and function from this aspect. It is a matter of operating on multiple levels: the economic is both a domain of activities (production distribution and consumption of material goods) as well as a particular aspect of all human activities that do not belong in its entirety to this domain, but the ‘functioning of which involves the exchange and use of material means.’


how does this attempt at defining economics differ from the logic of corporate capitalism?
This definition is an attempt at finding a place for economics within human relations that respects its immensity but restrains it by incorporating porosity and also a negative space into its parameters.
Godelier perhaps envisions the economic sphere as separate from the cultural sphere or political sphere. to what extent is this true?

Traffic Circle

in-between-city article

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/728286--the-in-between-city-slouches-ahead

Field Trip Documentation: Hamilton, ON, Thurs., Nov. 19, 2009

A quick cut of footage captured from a recent field trip to Hamilton.

Lost Rivers

Sous les pavés la plage:
Beneath the concrete the creak



http://www.lostrivers.ca/index.htm

Financial Engineering: Building Global Cities

Tara Perkins

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009 12:00AM EST Last updated on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009 2:47AM EST

One month after he released Ontario's 2008 budget, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan met with chief executives from the country's major banks, insurers and pension plans at the Toronto Club.

He told them he was concerned about job losses in Ontario's manufacturing industry, and wanted to help offset the pain by strengthening Toronto's financial sector.

The fruits of that discussion are being released Wednesday, at a time when Bay Street leaders say Canada has a brief window of opportunity to capitalize on its new reputation as a relative haven for banks and financial stability.

The so-called Toronto Financial Services Working Group – which was struck after the meeting and is led by Janet Ecker, president of the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, and Don Drummond, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank – had asked Boston Consulting Group (BGC) to come up with a strategy.

The resulting report, to be made public Wednesday, makes a series of recommendations that BCG says could create up to 40,000 jobs and add $5-billion in annual gross domestic product over five years.

The goal, the report says, is to transform Toronto into one of the two most important financial centres in North America and one of the top 10 globally by 2015. The city currently ranks 13th.

“This is the time,” Ms. Ecker said in an interview. “We need good-quality jobs, and this is a good way to get them. Secondly, we have global attention.”

The report focuses on four priorities: creating a global Toronto-based institute for risk management; entrenching Canada's position as the leading hub for mining, metals, and energy financing and trading; becoming a global leader in retirement finance; and building skilled financial services activity clusters.

The working group is already seeking to dampen possible criticism that the recommendations are beneficial to banks and the country's most populous city at the expense of other sectors and regions.

“This economic impact will be a net benefit to Canada – this is not about shifting jobs between provinces,” the report notes.

Between 2003 and 2008, it says, manufacturing employment in the Toronto region fell 3.5 per cent a year, while financial services jobs grew 4.3 per cent. The sector now employs 220,000 people directly, and a total of 350,000 indirectly, making up more than 12 per cent of the jobs in the region.

That growth generated a gain of $6.2-billion in GDP over five years, more than compensating for the $3.8-billion lost from manufacturing, the report says.

Many of the factors that caused Ontario to become an industrial power have shifted away, Mr. Drummond noted. But Toronto is home to two of the top 10 global life insurers and three of the world's 25 biggest banks.

A key recommendation of the report sees the establishment of a global risk management institute that would serve as a think tank and an educational centre, potentially offering academic degrees in risk management.

Another would see Toronto beef up its position when it comes to financing the resources sector. About 7,000 Canadians, including investment bankers, research analysts and traders, are employed in this sector.

The report sets a goal of grabbing 70 per cent of the world's market share when it comes to energy, mining and metals listings. Canada's stock exchanges currently have 43 per cent of energy listings and 55 per cent of mining listings.


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BCG is a leading business and image consulting group with offices in over 60 countries around the world.

Janet Ecker WAS the Education Minister and Minister of Finance under Mike Harris and Ernie Eaves respectively. She is currently the president of Toronto Financial Services Alliance.

What are the social, economic and cognitive pathways that establish the GLOBAL REPUTATION of a city, how is this measured? How concrete or speculative is this?

What are activity clusters? What happens at the TORONTO CLUB, and why isn't we present at their meetings?

Excerpts of Ivan Chtcheglov - Formulary for a New Urbanism

This is an ESSENTIAL TEXT!

written by Chtcheglov as a member of the Lettrist International at the age of 19, always considered by Guy Debord as visionary and foundational text for the urban vision they were going to continue to develop in the future with the Situationist International.
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SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology.

***

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. There was a certain charm in horses born from the sea or magical dwarves dressed in gold, but they are in no way adapted to the demands of modern life. For we are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.

* * *

We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual — whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world — such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

* * *

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

LISBOA

We crossed from Almeira, the red X’s of the Ponte 25 d’abril shuttering. Lisbon sprawled in a soft gray and terracotta. Elegant lights emboldened the presidential palace and other monuments from a glory now clearly past. The waves of the Tejo lapped not softly but from this vantage point looked like a most common element, sparkling but no less gray. The dimming light of the day pulled my eyes along the river to its mouth. It dawned on me then that the hill before was suffused with stucco erections when this was a civilization, and the gold from all the colonies glittered innocently in the present.

Where can we place this great civilzation of conquerors and explorers now? The recent graduates of the most esteemed university in the land sat drinking beer at 10am, the escapades of the night before lingering in their easy and drunken conversation. They have turned their ship around and swallowed it, navigating the dark channels of the mind and body not guided by something so universal as the stars, but by the swirling illusions of tradition in a world culture that no longer emanates from them.

Somewhere Urbanism

Chance arrangements of twigs, pine needles, and a murky puddle have been traced to compose a crude map developed for a city without topography or history.

Mapping and Liminal Spaces

Here at Body Cartography we think of mapping as a “creative enterprise that describes and constructs the space we live in” and cartography, as a practice of diagrammatically representing the physical and social world,

It is important to understand the map as a tool that mediates ones engagement with some unknown or partially known complex (the world, a city, buried infrastructure, social networks). As such it is necessarily selective; information is chosen to communicate a clearer picture of relevant elements that narrow choices and enable actions. As J. B. Harley notes, in traditional cartography, the method for narrowing and re-presenting the world in graphic form is rational and scientific; the goal being to translate as accurately as possible elements of the physical world. He challenges this claim to objectivity by arguing that maps are texts, not objective truths, stating that you must read in between its lines to see clearly the political and historical use of maps as a custodian and weapon of power in the form of knowledge (Harley). To this end, he writes “the freedom of rhetorical manoeuvre in cartography is considerable: the mapmaker merely omits those features of the world that lie outside the purpose of the immediate discourse.” (deconstructing the map) In this spirit, it is important to emphasize the voids in mapping and the map itself in order to reveal its ideological framework: how these ask us to see the world as well as live in it.

the creation of space

The big social groups (consisting of classes, parts of classes, or institutions ... ) act with and/or against each other. From their interactions, strategies, successes, and defeats grow the qualities and “properties” of urban space.

—Henri Lefèbvre

PRAGA

REDEVELOPMENT/DEVELOPMENT

WARSAW

BEACH HOUSES

alex's mind map for bodies in the city

Unplanned Neccessity

Teddy Cruz - What adaptive architecture can learn from Shantytowns

Ted Cruz is an architect who looks at boarder territories for inspiration. The above link will take you to an article that contrasts two types of urbanism, San Diego vs. Tijuana. They are geographic neighbors but their built environments seems to be polar opposites. San Diego is made out to be highly planned, with Tijuana being free form and adaptive.