The spatial dimension of democracy Since the time of the Greeks, democracy has been understood to have a spatial dimension and so, by extension, an element of scale. Plato measured the polis, the unit of democratic citizenship, at five hundred citizens, an extremely tractable size for a community that seeks to express itself through direct engagement. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan democracypoliticscommunity
What kind of world it's going to be The wonderful thing about living in a world of our own creation is that we get to choose what kind of world it's going to be—at least in principle. But the promise is meaningful only if a broad enough "we" can be engaged in the process. At present, mechanisms and democratic institutions for making collective decisions about the deployment of technology are hopelessly cumbersome. How can anyone make a sensible choice without being able to weigh one alternative against another? Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape democracypoliticsclimatechoice
A concept of style It is a concept based not on the classification of various physical features of architecture and urban design but on the problem-solving process itself. We have seen that the final outcome of a design process is strongly determined by at least three aspects of that process: the subject matter of the organizing principles which are adopted, the manner in which these principles are interpreted and reinterpreted in the context of the problem at hand, and the sequent of applying such organizing principles. Consistency in style among the output of designers can thus be understood as a habitual way of doing things, of solving problems. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking It was all change until the very last second style