39. Slowdown landscapes: The defiant garden produces social justice as well as strawberries
Afternoon walk, Farsta 14 June 2020 Small green pieces of urban farms, repairing vacant lots in in Los Angeles and Brooklyn Lest the remove to Jarman’s small pieces of isolated beach suggests a self-sufficiency too easily elided with individualisation, a form of privatisation even, the emphasis on loosely joined becomes a fundamental patterning dynamic. At core, we […]
38. Slowdown landscapes: Gardening tools, for convivial conservation
Morning walk, Enskede 15 July 2020 Beyond wilderness and ecosystem services and towards shared spaces; Gardening and scale, complexity, and uncertainty; Death to summer lawns; Derek Jarman’s garden in a desert in Eastern England, Erskine’s in an Arctic Sweden; Deploying strategic chickens. Outlining a ‘convivial conservation’ in their recent book, The Conservation Revolution, Bram Büscher and […]
37. Slowdown landscapes: ‘The Aer and Smoak dissipated’; learning from 1661, and from 50,000 years
Morning walk, Ljusterö 20 July 2020 What we might learn from John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, from 1661, about the use of green infrastructure to defeat pollution; And what we might learn from nature-based infrastructures of the last 50,000 years 2020’s ailments are deeply rooted, yet have somehow all manifested themselves in the air we breathe. Or whether we […]
35. Slowdown landscapes: The small, unfinished, adaptive everyday
Afternoon walk, Enskede 23 June 2020 The scale of things, and an emphasis on the small details of everyday infrastructures; The incompleteness of cities ensures its making and re-making; An alternative architecture framed at the scale of interaction design. Formal architecture is barely present in Olalekan Jeyifous’s work, just as the close crop reveals little in […]
36. Slowdown landscapes: One-minute City—Fifteen-minute City
Morning walk, Enskede 8 May 2020 Or, the 15-metre city outside your front door is as important as the 15-minute city around you; Allowing the street to decide what it wants to be; How to get to the 15-minute City. This careful emphasis on the small scale, and the slower dynamic, suggests an engagement with the […]
34. Intermediate technologies, and ‘Small is Beautiful’ non-grid everyday infrastructure
Morning walk, Granö 28 July 2020 Revisiting EF Schumacher’s intermediate technologies framework from ‘Small is beautiful’ (1973); Susan Leigh Star’s boring invisible infrastructure; Jeremy Till’s ‘interconnected living agents’ The various spaces and infrastructures described in these Papers try to sidestep the growth versus de-growth debate, instead pursuing an alternate form of renewable growth—a slow growth, a dynamic […]
33. Slowdown landscapes: the mood-worlds of the Slowdown
Afternoon walk, Ljusterö 20 July 2020 Olelakan Jeyifous and Simon Stålenhag offer competing visions for Slowdown mood-worlds. Ben Highmore’s evocative phase “mood-world” provides a way in to describing these aesthetics, patterns, infrastructures and scenarios as they are forming, given the word-pair’s usefully open sense of pliability, contingency, and movement. Interestingly, bearing in mind Van Eyck’s playgrounds, […]
32. The inspired inefficiency of technology done properly
Afternoon walk, Ljusterö 18 July 2020 How Silicon Valley doesn’t know what technology can be, and how this leads to Uber and Jump destroying bikes in a bike-shaped crisis; Or, why Y Combinator? The horror of Blitzscaling versus the promise of the East Kolkata Wetlands as nature-based technology and infrastructure. And just how boring is the […]
31. Tilling the soil for slow-growth, and embracing uncertainty
Afternoon walk, Enskede 10 August 2020 Complexity and contradiction in decision-making; the problem of the centrality of economics, expertise, and ‘the data’; Blitzscaling versus slow growth; moving beyond evidence, towards practice and participation, embracing uncertainty and context; fighting for the slowdown “Be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you think and how you see […]
30. The quietly radical importance of everyday infrastructures
Afternoon walk, Tallkrogen 8 August 2020 There is no normal, there are everyday social infrastructures; Night trains are not just night trains; Isabel Wilkerson on caste as infrastructure, Simon Baron-Cohen on empathy; Planning remains socially distant from reality COVID-19 thrives on the inequalities and fractures in our systems. Yet the way the virus spreads also demonstrates that […]