A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, this heightening it meaning. The city is like poetry it compress all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
– E.B. White on NYC
Category: 53 CR – The value of public space
Will Self: Walking is political
The Stoic philosopher Epicurus maintained that free will was only an illusory sense we experience when the actions necessitated for us by circumstance fortuitously coincide with what we happen to want – it’s my belief that this perfectly characterises the psychotic spatial awareness of the vast majority of contemporary urban dwellers; while the existential threats afflicting women, and the state-sanctioned ones that impinge, in particular, on young black men in British cities, have been internalised even by those – the white, the middle-aged and the middle class – who have no reason to be so trammelled.
Source : The Guardian
Coca-Cola in Africa
But Coca-Cola’s strategy goes deeper than the coat of red and white paint. The corporation is responsible for sales infrastructure, supplying signs, ice boxes, refrigerators (if electricity is available) and bottle openers. It encourages owners to pair the beverage with local snacks to create “combo meals.” It helps — usually just a man with a push-cart — make their routes more efficient. It teaches business skills and promotes entrepreneurship.
Source : Polis
It’s time to love the bus – Dream City
Paris Review – The London Library, Orlando Whitfield
The library is a place of safety for the bibliophile, and a cooling refuge for the city-heated mind.
Source : Paris review
Berlin off the road for the BMW-Guggenheim-Lab “Urban Impressions
Come talk about individual and collective comfort in an urban laboratory funded by multinationals when their quality of life is found jeopardized by an aggressive capitalism appears to be fairly … inappropiate.
Collected Reading 