Category: technologie
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Powering forward
Read in ‘The Metropolitan Revolution’ (2013) of Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley: The US economy is broken. How to repair it? Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley wrote a book about ‘how cities and metros are fixing our broken politics and fragile economy’. It is similar to Benjamin Barber’s ‘If Mayors Ruled the World’, only…
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Inchoate
Heard in New York City on Wednesday 21 October 2015: Sharon Zukin, professor on urban sociology at the City University of New York (CUNY), was our guest on the morning of 21 October 2015. She told us about CUNY, how this local university of some 500.000 students was structured, who owned it (public, the state,…
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Remote worker
Read in Het Parool of 20 May 2015: I was asked to give a lecture on open planning for a team of politicians from Bavaria, Germany. They were visiting Amsterdam, hoping to learn more about local policies on biking. After my speech on globalization, information technology and planning (!), the team would make a…
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Startup delta
Read in The Economist of 25 July 2015: > It’s called a ‘briefing’. Subject: Silicon Valley. In The Economist of 25 July the message was: “the tech boom may get bumpy, but it will not end in a repeat of the dotcom crash.” It was a description of how the Greater San Francisco region is…
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On the road
Heard in B.Amsterdam, Amsterdam Slotervaart, on 4 June 2015: The evaluation of the Highspeed train public tender by the Dutch politicians has ended last week. What a disaster. Big mistakes were made. Market failures. Technical failures. The Dutch state failed. Still missing those fast trains in The Netherlands. More lucky we are on the road.…
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Big mistake
Read in ‘Red Plenty’ (2010) of Francis Spufford: What’s wrong with Russian society? Also with the West? Only after reading ‘Red Plenty’ of the British writer Francis Spufford I really understood. It’s the withering of social sciences. Spufford’s book, which I can recommend everybody, is a lively, dramatised history of the postwar years of the…
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Hypertrophic castles?
Read in The Economist of 23 May 2015: Last week’s Special Report of the London based business weekly The Economist was on India. How is the new president Modi doing? The man from Gujarat who won the elections in this 1,3 billion people’s republic in 2014 promised to turn his vast country into a modern…
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Smart slums
Gelezen in The Wall Street Journal van 19 maart 2015: Afgelopen weekeinde verscheen van de hand van Marjolein van de Water in de Volkskrant een interessant artikel over Facebook in Brazilië. In ‘Facebook trekt sloppenwijk in’ beschreef de journaliste hoe het Amerikaanse internetbedrijf het tweehonderd miljoen tellende land in Zuid-Amerika tegenwoordig ziet als een ideale…
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Een sociale economie
Gelezen in The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014) van Jeremy Rifkin: Na het lezen van het nieuwste boek van Jeremy Rifkin is me duidelijk geworden dat het kapitalisme zoals wij dat kennen op zijn einde loopt. Karl Marx krijgt alsnog gelijk. Door het samenvloeien van informatietechnologie, logistieke technologie en energietechnologie tot één ‘Internet of Things’…
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IJzeren eeuw
Gezien in het Amsterdam Museum op 8 maart 2015: Tot 2 augustus 2015 is de tentoonstelling ‘De IJzeren Eeuw’ te zien in het Amsterdam Museum in de Kalverstraat. Kort na de opening ging ik er kijken. De eerste zaal is veelbelovend: aan de linkerkant hangen kleurrijke negentiende eeuwse schilderijen die vooral terugverwijzen, aan de rechterkant…