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The idea of what it means to live in and contribute to a ‘human scale city’ is an ongoing hobby interest of mine, partly because Australia is still so badly fixated on the opposite: an automotive scale.
Over the weekend I was introduced to the work of Danish architect Jan Gehl, who has spent most of his career advocating a reorientation of urban planning towards human needs. Researching Gehl led me to a documentary called The Human Scale (on Youtube). The film lays bare the urban planning blunders of our past – and those we continue to repeat. It’s fascinating to learn how it’s only in recent decades that we’ve developed the tools needed to truly advocate for improving the human experience in our cities.
From around the end of the Second World War, urban planning in the West largely revolved around optimising traffic flow. Vast areas were bulldozed to make way for roads, car parks and flyovers; small and medium-sized buildings were replaced by oppressive corporate towers. A good city was one that prioritised the efficient flow of vehicles and impressed with dazzling, modern structures.
De-prioritising the car and downscaling architecture is only part of returning a city to a human scale. It’s also about reclaiming public spaces from private interests and reshaping them through the experience of locals. It means shifting from a single heroic vision of a ‘city masterplan’ to a more iterative evolution of what cities can become when planners listen to the needs and aspirations of its residents.
I loved this bit about why ‘neutral’ public spaces are so important for cities: “If we can have spaces where most of us feel invited, so you’re not in their space or they are not in your space, but everyone is in our space, then we have this possibility of meeting across different layers of society, different ‘users’ with different lifestyles. Being in an urban environment has something to do with being able to cope with the meeting of perfect strangers.”
Making a city of human scale means different things in different contexts. The film shows that for people in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for example, it means designing streets to accommodate traditional rickshaws over private cars. In Christchurch, New Zealand, it means curbing corporate influence when setting new building height limits.
Since The Human Scale was published in 2013, the idea of community-led placemaking has received a lot more academic attention. If you’re interested in learning more, a great resource is the NYC-based Project for Public Spaces, which calls for “an end to the violence that real estate developers have inflicted on our skyline, parks, public areas, and cityscape with the proliferation of dramatically over-scaled buildings that ignore the historic context of our city.”
Watching The Human Scale not only deepened my interest in this relatively new field, it also came at the perfect time: I have a trip to Europe coming up in May – travelling by train from Scotland through the Benelux to Germany – and I’m excited to see how these concepts are being applied (or not) in the various cities we visit.
– Kai
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Apps & Sites
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I think if I were to start over with my paid Google Apps account, I’d consider Proton. I knew of their privacy-focused email offering, but their product has evolved into a full suite of apps that include calendar, drive, VPN and a password manager – a very compelling package. They recently also launched their macOS desktop client. I find the idea of shifting away from Gmail and the many, many Docs I have super daunting, but one day I will make the move...
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Podcast listener community
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Looking for new podcast recommendations? With Goodpods you can see what your friends are listening to, browse topic specific best-of lists, bookmark shows/episodes for later, and follow and interact with show hosts.
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LookAway (for macOS) gently reminds you to take a break from staring at your screen. Plenty of customisation options allow you to modify break intervals and their duration. LookAway knows when you’re in meetings and also pauses or resets the timer when you’re not working. Friends of DD enjoy a 30% discount.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Voice-based language training
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Many people think AI will make learning a new language superfluous. Well, here’s a way AI can make it easier: LingoLoop is a voice-based language trainer (with some cute (?) 3D characters) to help you learn new languages by having ‘natural’ conversations about everyday topics. You also get the chat transcripts to make sure your grammar doesn’t suffer. Currently supported: English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian – with more languages coming soon.
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Worthy Five: Michael Honey
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Five recommendations by tech worker turned environmentalist Michael Honey
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An Instagram account worth following:
Emma Flukes rides bikes through parts of Tasmania you’ve never heard about. Her pragmatic capacity to suffer through difficult landscapes under her own power is inspiring.
A podcast worth listening to:
Guests on The Sharp End talk about serious and sometimes tragic accidents in the outdoors – climbing, backcountry skiing, canyoning. We find out what they learned from the experience, and how they’d avoid making the same mistakes again. I love the knowledge-sharing and attitude of self-reflective inquiry.
An activity worth doing:
Swimming in the ocean. There is no better way to engage with the reality of your bodily existence than to convince yourself to get into that cold water and be thrown around by the waves. In the afterglow you feel like you’re capable of anything. And with a good wetsuit, you can do it any time of year.
A book worth reading:
James Bridle’s Ways of Being is “a book about AI, non-human intelligence, ecology, biological computing, more-than-human relations, and much else”. It encourages us to expand our narrow understanding and to regard our fellow beings with humility and solidarity.
A video worth watching:
This 1998 video of Björk in a Spanish villa recording studio talking about and demonstrating her process is a wonderful time capsule of a great, original artist at the height of her powers.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Michael Honey in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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A better relationship with your clothes
Cheap, mass-produced clothes were bad for the planet even before SHEIN turbo-charged the fast fashion industry, sending up to 92 million tonnes of fabrics to landfill every year. With light-hearted and practical advice, Lauren Bravo will “help you change your mindset, fall back in love with your wardrobe and embrace more sustainable ways of shopping – from the clothes swap to the charity shop. Full of refreshing honesty and realistic advice, Lauren will inspire you to repair, recycle and give your unloved items a new lease of life without sacrificing your style.”
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What killed capitalism
Many of you will already know Yanis Varoufakis and his progressive thinking on economics and politics. (He is the former finance minister of Greece.) In his latest book, “Varoufakis shows how the owners of big tech became the world’s feudal overlords – replacing capitalism with a fundamentally new system that enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrite the rules of global power. But as Varoufakis also reveals, technofeudalism contains new opportunities to thwart and overturn it, bringing into focus more clearly than ever the revolution we need to escape our digital prison.”
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Overheard on Mastodon
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A group of 737s is referred to as a ‘negligence’.
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Food for Thought
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If you’re interested in placemaking and what it means to create human scale cities, this (free – or illeagelly free) documentary on Youtube explores the the consequences of conventional urban planning and showcases examples from around the world where cities are shifting towards more livable, human-scaled environments. At the heart of human scale placemaking are questions such as: What is a good urban habitat? Do our cities invite for human interaction, inclusion and intimacy? How can me measure happiness in a city?
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There is a group of economists that promote the so-called Modern Monetary Theory, which believes that governments can spend money much more freely (largely disregarding debt), as long as inflation is kept under control. In this podcast interview, economist Stephanie A Kelton breaks down the core ideas of MMT for laypeople like myself and makes a really compelling argument for an economy that is always able to spend big on essential services that improve people’s lives.
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I always enjoy Ed Zitron’s thoughts on the tech world. In this piece he (along with others I shared here recently) warns of the impact of Generative AI on the internet: its normalisation of automated content, the erosion of unique online experiences and the risk of centralised control by a few dominant platforms. “Yet what’s happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they've found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms. ... We’re watching the joint hyper-scaling and hyper-normalization of the internet, where all popular content begins to look the same to appeal to algorithms run by companies obsessed with growth.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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The surreal-looking photos of the Great Pyramids by Egyptian photographer Karim Amr have made the rounds recently. They are truly stunning, but his entire account is so worth browsing! Beautifully captured moments from the Middle East.
(via)
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Thomas Jackson is an Australian artist and illustrator specialising in Australian wildlife, and in particular birds. He usually starts with smaller works and then translates them into large scale public murals.
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Explore the winners of the World Press Photo Awards 2024. “The 24 winners, six honorable mentions, and two jury special mentions were selected by an independent jury out of 61,062 entries by 3,851 photographers from 130 countries.”
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The versatile Match is a real workhorse of a font: “The strong, confident and loud Ultra and Black styles. On the other end are the elegant Thin and Light styles. In between are the more silent and strong workers, delivering a good performance for reading texts.”
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Notable Numbers
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Amazon is cutting several hundred roles in its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although it accounted for just 16% of Amazon’s revenue last year, AWS alone contributed 67% of the company’s ~$37 billion in operating profit.
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US public libraries are the primary battleground for proposed book bans: the number of titles targeted for censorship at libraries rose by 92%. In 2023, some 4,240 book titles were challenged – a 65% increase from 2022.
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On 18 March, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station on the east Antarctic plateau documented a remarkable event. They recorded the largest jump in temperature ever measured at a meteorological centre on Earth. According to their instruments, the region that day experienced a rise of 38.5C (101.3F) above its seasonal average: a world record.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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