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
You Don't Need To Do The Farmhouse Home Aesthetic When You Decorate An Article by Kate Wagner www.bustle.com It took two decades for HGTV and its ilk to streamline the process of creating design hegemony — to perfect the concept of having multiple shows congeal around the same aesthetic rather than let them exist at the whims of their individual hosts, as was more the case in the 2000s. While previous eras of design (think midcentury modernism) were spearheaded by architects, interior designers, and other tastemakers, in the late ’90s, capital-A Architecture lost interest in the home — deconstructivist ideas and new, high-tech forms were better suited to museums and universities — and a coalition of real estate developers, home improvement and furniture stores, and TV decorators stepped in to take their place. The worlds of high culture and popular consumption in residential design have never been more separate, and, in this critic’s opinion, both suffer as a result. culturearchitecture