19. The waters draw back, only to return
Afternoon walk, Växholm 21 May 2020 The first waves of COVID-19 have revealed much; The ‘flailing states’ produced by the Anglo-American model; The ambient double-consciousness of the Cold War as an analogy for living with the pandemic; Writing as control If the first part of a tsunami to reach the coast is the trough of the wave […]
A second batch of Slowdown Papers
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 16 April 2020 Dear readers — Many thanks for subscribing to the Slowdown Papers. I won’t intrude into your inbox much, but this is just to note that I’ve published a second batch of Papers, numbers 13–18. They build on some of themes from the first set, of course, but take some of […]
18. From Lockdown to Slowdown: Tokyo as Slowdown City
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 8 April 2020 Polka dot city Tokyo as an exemplar of ‘Slowdown’ theory, as the world’s largest and smallest city, and as a case study for others post-Covid-19. “Slowdown is not an end of history or the coming of salvation. We are not heading toward a utopia, although life for most people may […]
17. From Lockdown to Slowdown: Region-Country-Continent
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 7 April 2020 The changing dynamics of a deeper ‘slowdown’, hinted at by the coronavirus-induced ‘pause’, could change the distribution and dynamics of production and consumption, making and manufacturing, across city, region, and nation, with outcomes not only for sustainability, resilience, and wellbeing but also politics. In a world where everything connects, this […]
16. From Lockdown to Slowdown: Neighbourhood-City-Country
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 14 April 2020 The Slowdown brings the return of the ABC-City, neighbourhood markets, crowds in the city, and greenness on the edge of town Some decades after the garden city movement in Sweden, the influential Sven Markelius, Chief City Planner of Stockholm during the 1950s, promoted the ABC City (ABC-stad) concept — ABC, derived from Arbete […]
15. From Lockdown to Slowdown: House-Playground-Street
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 16 April 2020 Circling around our homes and their environs due to coronavirus-induced loops, how do the patterns, edges, and dynamics of neighbourhoods change in the Slowdown? Aldo Van Eyck’s Amsterdam playgrounds as a polka dot pattern of distribution. So, recalling Saarinen, if we manage to carve out productive and appealing workspaces from […]
14. From Lockdown to Slowdown: Home-Work-Farm
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 17 April 2020 As Covid-19’s Great Pause forces a blurring of home, work, office, classroom, studio, and shop, we get a glimpse of the patterns, spaces, and rhythms of a deeper slowdown. We start at the scale of Saarinen’s chair outlined in the previous paper. In Stockholm, approximately half the city’s population is […]
13. From Lockdown to Slowdown
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 8 April 2020 “Chair-room-house-environment-city plan”; how the coronavirus could change the strategy for our patterns of distribution of workplaces and work, from home to town to countryside to nation. For years, research has pointed to a clear link between the patterns and dynamics of our development — you all know the list — and the increased emergence and […]
A note on the Slowdown Papers
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 4 April 2020 Readers — Dark Matter and Trojan Horses is about strategic design practice and thinking. I’ll explain more about that at some later date, highlighting and unpacking some of the key concepts, projects, and case studies. For now, you can see the collected articles here. But I wanted to take this […]
12: Between the roots and the stars
Afternoon walk, Stockholm 3 April 2020 Another green world lying just beneath ours; what our response to the coronavirus can learn from the night sky after Katrina, a 6000 year-old eel machine in Victoria, and a spruce tree in Sweden. ‘The Day The Earth Caught Fire’ (1961) and ‘The Quiet Earth’ (1985) There is a long tradition of […]