Status Updates From Last Futures: Nature, Techn...

"There is a certain irony that the most recent global building booms - the brand new cities of the oil-rich Arab countries and the vast Chinese urbanisation of the early twenty-first century - despite their often outlandish formal inmovation and unprecedented scale, have taken as their ultimate model the dissipated, car-dominated suburbia already established in the US and across the world."

"Overall, ecological architecture [in de 70s] became widely synonymous with small-scale buildings, materials like timber or even mud-brick and a generalised anti-industrialism - to a large extent, it was giving up on the political terrain of large-scale change and waiting for the collapse."

Exact mijn gedachten toen ik me door Jane Jacobs' boek heenworstelde: "For all her emphasis on the economics of cities, there is little acknowledgement in Jacobs of the fact that state provision of housing could provide protection from the failures of market housing, or that people could be vulnerable to gentrification and other urban processes that do not themselves originate from the tainted hands of the planners."