Toluu : cityofsound

Choking to death in the suburbs [smh.com.au]
"Planning, mostly run by women, does the words and pictures; making and announcing plans (such as the Metro Strategy) that never hit the ground. Public Works, by contrast, has no strategic capacity, no cerebellum, but just builds things - roads, tunnels, bridges and rail lines. This, you will be unsurprised to learn, is generally a boy thing. So our cities are shaped not by planners but by ad hoc resource allocation decisions; a bridge to this marginal electorate, a tunnel to that donor developer. And it is this quasi-planning power that the feds hope to usurp. More power to them. One metro line carries as many people as a 20-lane freeway. A clean, leafy, tower-flanked Parramatta Road would be a vast improvement on the filthy drain we have now. Far from destroying the pretty village-like pockets, a decent rail system will preserve them by concentrating development where it is most beneficial."

Quadrant falls victim to its own reasoning [smh.com.au]
"The hoaxer wrote that "buried" in the footnotes of a scientific paper was the remarkable story that the CSIRO had been deterred from commercialising a great breakthrough in genetic engineering "because of perceived moral issues among the public". The paper exists. So do its authors. But it is not about genetic engineering, and as those familiar with scientific publications know, such papers never have footnotes. Windschuttle didn't check the paper or ring the CSIRO. He says: "We're not a science journal." But in any case, he doesn't believe Quadrant has to check the facts in its articles. Though he has flayed historians for small errors in obscure footnotes in the past, he doesn't believe his handling of the article falls short of his own standards. "I am not the author in this case. I'm the editor." The hoaxer reported on his or her blog: "So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn't even check the putative author's credentials."
British trains may be speeding up [Economist.com]
"But political enthusiasm will not suffice unless high-speed rail is commercially viable. The signs are positive, a

DAYTUM
"Daytum is a home for collecting and communicating your daily data. Begin tracking anything you can count and display the results immediately... or just look around and see what other members are recording." Very lovely. I have a Felton annual report, so fantastic to see this.
The Edge question: Leading thinkers predict the future [guardian.co.uk]
Ian McEwan: "Even if we did not have profound concerns about climate change, we would need to be looking for different ways to power our civilisation. How fortunate we are to have a safe nuclear facility a mere 93 million miles away and fortunate too that the dispensation of physical laws is such that when a photon strikes a semiconductor, an electron is released. My hope is that architects will be drawn to designing gorgeous arrays and solar towers in the desert – as expressive of our aspirations as medieval cathedrals once were. We will need new distribution systems too, smart grids – perfect Rooseveltian projects for our hard-pressed times." Eno was in a bad mood when he submitted his entry.
Setting Up Superstores and Climate Change [Victoria Transport Institute]
See the PDF: "This short paper by economist Jean-Marie Beauvais describes the results of a study indicating that shopping at large, subu

Digital guru Clay Shirky's media forecast and predictions for 2009 [The Guardian]
"A self-confessed 'pretty unlikely early adopter', the digital guru Clay Shirky still proved to be uncannily prescient about the impact of the web - which is why Tom Teodorczuk is getting his media forecast for 2009" Good set of predictions from Shirky.
3030 NEW GRAPHIC DESIGN IN CHINA [SHIFT]
"Once you find the cover of the book, you can recognise that this is about China"

Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning [The Goodspeed Update]
"For the Masters of Community Planning degree I received from the University of Maryland I wrote a final paper titled, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning. (PDF) I decided to focus on the history and theory of participation to guide the development of a new model. How have urban planners engaged with the public in the past? What academic theory and professional values guide conventional (offline) participation processes? I then use my findings to describe both why and how the Internet should be used by urban planners. I translated the paper’s ideas into a series of blog posts published Summer 2008."
Internet Tools for e-Democracy in Urban Planning [The Goodspeed Update]
"This page describes how planners could use internet tools to enhance the practice of planning. Used efficiently, Internet tools could enhance the quality of public debate about planning issues, engage and mobilize previously apathetic citizens, and facilitate the planning process. While face-to-face communications and traditional public engagement methods like public meetings and published reports will continue to be important, they can and should be supplemented with online information and communication."