Weekly Roundup 117 – 20th to 26th May

FEATURE REPORT/ ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

‘Infrastructure’s big tent’
Authored by Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane

Following in the footsteps of the UN-Habitat, many similar seminars and unconferences have emerged around the world, supported by various organizations. Washington – DC celebrated the Infrastructure Week from 15th – 19th of May. Some of the key learning outcomes this year were that infrastructure renewal will come from bottom up, digital technology will touch every category of infrastructure and infrastructure equity should be about people and not just capital investments.

Read the whole piece here.

Published by Brookings Institution.



ONLINE PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK

‘Writing Cities’
Published by LSE Cities

‘How do views shape words? How do words shape cities?’

A collection of essays by graduate researchers across LSE, MIT and Harvard as an outcome of the ‘Writing Cities Workshop’. Each chapter offers explorations of the spatial and temporal scales of urban transformations, centring on the authoritative and oppositional acts that simultaneously make the city. e. The authors address the politics and experience of urban change by travelling imaginatively between the past and the present, the abstract and the specific, the global and the local, the human and the material, and the social and the technological. Divided into the categories of ‘Writing politics through motifs, writing history through artefacts, writing culture through technologies and writing vision through images’, the anthology presents a concise view of the multiple hues of academic writing on the city.

Read the publication here.

VIDEO/PODCAST OF THE WEEK

‘New York’s streets? Not so mean any more: Janette Sadik-Khan’
Created by TED Talks

Cities are entities that are shaped by planning – where the extent and the nature are completely dictated by the local conditions. In this Talk, Ms. Khan talks about her experience with re-planning sections of NYC, especially Times Square. At the end of the exercise, as evinced by data, Times Square became one of the top retail areas on the planet, while NYC itself is now celebrated as a city that is bicycle-friendly. Ms. Khan calls for a re-imagination of the streets as the way forward.