Comments on: Bruce Sterling Interview: Cities

By: Flying_Monkey

Flying_Monkey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hmm. Sterling was once ahead of the game, now he’s even been behind the average urban geographer, it seems. Bill Mitchell, who died the other day, was talking about this 20 years ago. Or maybe it’s just that SF is being bypassed before it’s written?

And there’s a hell of a lot of rather more insightful work on ‘slums’ than this… “Why we allowed ourselves to let that happen, I dunno, but it’s the truth.” Wow, really? I’d read Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums instead of listening to this kind of ‘insight’…

By: johnlancia

johnlancia — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Well, J.G. Ballard he is not.

Also, I’d love to see him show up at a Ladytron show.

By: orwellian

orwellian — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Cities that segregate their citizens into ghettos tend to go broke.”

There’s quite a lot of sense in that sentence. Very true. I just read an article about how NYC had built public housing and gave it to Acorn and other organizations who sold the buildings to the residents dirt cheap. The residents haven’t paid property taxes and NYC needs the income but doesn’t want to foreclose on poor people and kick them out of their homes to collect.

By: Chris Arkenberg

Chris Arkenberg — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Flying_Monkey, this was a short, informal Q&A with limited space to print. It was meant to be an overview, not an in-depth exposition. Personally, I always find interesting bits in Sterling’s comments that lead me in new directions, whether or not the topic itself is new or simply being revisited from a different angle.

By: ultranaut

ultranaut — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Random fact:
The theme for Burning Man this year is Metropolis.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, if anyone knows how to strike fear into every small business person around the globe. Well, maybe you are right, it could be the financiers. It’s got to start somewhere right?

How exactly does Bruce Plan to fix the problem?

Prozac? Limited access to the media?

I’m not sure if I comprehend this particular article as anything more than more terror for the masses…

By: willwarner

willwarner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I really love this idea of bankers forming urban, male, insular, misogynist, misanthropic, hostile, highly politicized communities, very much like fundamentalist Muslim jihadi terrorist cells. That comparison is completely new to me.

As for video billboards, I’ve bent over backwards to eliminate television from my life entirely, and I think those things are going to be like the bus speakers in “Fahrenheit 451″ that destroy any non-consumerist thoughts that arise in the heads of anyone listening, only ten times worse. I’m still hoping every first world nation is pretty much going to wind up using zoning to ban them outright, if only because they’re so distracting to drivers.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

‘Oh, it’s all about those nifty little navigation apps. They’ve got the means, motive and opportunity right now. But you don’t really need AR to do digital mapping of cities. AR comes more into its own with artsy, confrontational, bend-your-reality stuff. Like the’ …??

By: Xopher

Xopher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hmm. While Bruce Sterling’s career has certainly been electric, from the rest of that sentence I suspect you meant eclectic.

By: Stefan Jones

Stefan Jones — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Well, he designed a lamp, so he had an electric career as well.