open cities

What are 'open cities' (and we don't mean the game...):
Open Cities Africa
Open City | London's architecture education organisation » Open City
OPENCities - Wikipedia
refugee open cities
Smart cities are decades away: but open cities are within reach – The ODI
OpenCity

To what extent is your city 'open'?

Here's an example:
Jay Doubleyou: open cities: gdansk

And another:

Major Mayors of Europe – Bart Somers

He has been mayor of Mechelen since 2001, minister-president of Flanders and MP in the national and regional parliaments – he is Bart Somers

Island of tolerance in ocean of distrust

Mechelen is by far one of the most diverse places in Europe. The city is home to over 120 nationalities, representing numerous religions and thanks to the efforts of its mayor, it has become a beacon of hope that different societies can work together for the common good. The first large number of non-european migrants arrived in Mechelen in 1968, mainly from Morocco. Their descendants represent around 16% of the city’s total population. Nearly 20% of the citizens of the Flemish city identify as Muslim. Yet, despite far-right politicians claiming that migrants are here to destroy our way of life, nothing of the sort has happened in Mechelen.

If you ask Bart Somers on how he approaches the topic of migrants, he will answer that there are no migrants in Mechelen – instead everyone is first and foremost a citizen of the city, who is unique and completely different from everybody else. This individualistic approach has allowed the mayor to cement Mechelen’s place in world rankings as one of the most tolerant and open cities in the world. His success in the matter is further exemplified by the sheer numbers of Muslims that left to fight for ISIS in 2015. That number was zero. Despite the fact that Belgian muslims were on average more prone to leave the country to fight in Syria.

Mechelen was also the only city in Belgium which specifically asked for permission to house Syrian refugees and the mayor’s team developed an in-depth programme of integrating them in Belgian society – including language lessons, cultural and societal courses etc. He believes that while some citizens were opposed to the idea at first, by working and helping the refugees, residents of Mechelen learned to overcome their fears and prejudices and in the end welcomed everyone fleeing the horrors of war.

Major Mayors of Europe – Bart Somers | TheMayor EU

Here's an interesting bit of text:

The Open City 

Richard Sennett 

The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society's divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. 

Cities fail on all these counts due to government policies, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. The city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. Perhaps those nice words -- clean, safe, efficient, dynamic – are not enough in themselves to confront critically our masters...

Microsoft Word - The Open City.docx

Here's the talk:



(1) Open City | Lecture by sociologist Richard Sennett - YouTube
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art and nature

BBC Radio 4's longstanding series looks at how humans have interacted with the natural world:
BBC Radio 4 - Natural Histories

A new series has looked at artistic and natural artefacts and how they
BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Innovation

A couple of episodes:

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth on challenges by Romantic artists and naturalists to grapple with cloud patterns, from Constable's fine art to a new science of meteorology

BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Innovation, Masters of Spectacle

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth focus on the drama captured in de Loutherbourg's Coalbrookdale by Night, which shaped early impressions of Britain's Industrial Revolution

BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Innovation, Observing the Air

With a little more here:
https://futurecity.co.uk/portfolio/a-cloud-index/


This is from the Science Museum:

Together, art and science help us to interpret, study and explore the world around us.

Examining this ongoing relationship, The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter looks at the interaction between scientific progress and social change, how machinery has both influenced and threatened the human body and how tools that go beyond human senses can capture the unseen.

See iconic artworks, including works by Hepworth, Hockney, Lowry, Constable, Boccioni, Turner and contemporary artists Cornelia Parker and Conrad Shawcross.

The exhibition brings together loans from Tate, National Gallery, V&A, National Museums Scotland, the Estorick Collection and more alongside rarely displayed objects from the Science Museum Group’s Collection. Through four sections and twenty stories, discover how we have questioned our relationship with society, our bodies, the environment and found patterns in nature, as we continue to interpret and explore the world around us.

Book now to discover these fascinating stories through textiles, film, photography, paintings, sculptures, models and scientific objects.

---

• In partnership with BBC Radio 4, a landmark 20-part radio series is airing now and is available as a podcast on BBC Sounds. 
• An accompanying book published by Transworld is available from the Science Museum Shop.
   

Header image: Coalbrookdale by Night, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 1801 (Science Museum Group Collection) 

The Art of Innovation
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the church of the flying spaghetti monster

Important information:

Pirates and global warming

A misleading graph that is claimed to correlate the number of pirates with global temperature

According to Pastafarian beliefs, pirates are "absolute divine beings" and the original Pastafarians.^[10] Furthermore, Pastafarians believe that the concept of pirates as "thieves and outcasts" is misinformation spread by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages and by Hare Krishnas. Instead, Pastafarians believe that they were "peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will" who distributed candy to small children, adding that modern pirates are in no way similar to "the fun-loving buccaneers from history". In addition, Pastafarians believe that ghost pirates are responsible for all of the mysteriously lost ships and planes of the Bermuda Triangle. Pastafarians are among those who celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19.^[41]

The inclusion of pirates in Pastafarianism was part of Henderson's original letter to the Kansas State Board of Education, in an effort to illustrate that correlation does not imply causation.^[42] Henderson presented the argument that "global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s".^[10] A deliberately misleading graph accompanying the letter (with numbers humorously disordered on the x-axis) shows that as the number of pirates decreased, global temperatures increased. This parodies the suggestion from some religious groups that the high numbers of disasters, famines, and wars in the world is due to the lack of respect and worship toward their deity. In 2008, Henderson interpreted the growing pirate activities at the Gulf of Aden as additional support, pointing out that Somalia has "the highest number of pirates and the lowest carbon emissions of any country".^[43]

Flying Spaghetti Monster - Wikipedia

Is this a parody?



Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

From a couple of weeks ago:
Documentary follows Pastafarians as they strain for recognition | World news | The Guardian
I, Pastafari Documentary Film Fund | Indiegogo
I, Pastafari: A Flying Spaghetti Monster Story (Documentary Trailer 2019) on Vimeo
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open cities: gdansk

How mono-ethnic is Poland?

The tradition of a mono-ethnic Poland is relatively new, and it has two main contributors—Hitler and Stalin...
Turning Muslims Away, Poland Welcomes Ukrainians - WSJ

Interwar Poland was a multiethnic state despite the official rhetoric promoting its image to be that of a monoethnic nation-state. According to the 1931 census, national minorities accounted for thirty-one per cent of Poland’s population of thirty-two million (that is, almost ten million). However, a recent reassessment of this apparently massaged number sets the figure at 35.4 per cent (that is, over eleven million) (Chałupczak, 1998: 22; Tomaszewski, 1985: 31-51). In a nutshell, ethnic Poles constituted two-thirds of the population while the national minorities – the remaining one-third.
Kamusella: Polish Minorities

Looking at today:
Poland's Hidden MulticulturalismThe conspiracy theorists who have taken over Poland | Christian Davies | World news | The Guardian
Opinion | Poland Digs Itself a Memory Hole - The New York Times

And there's been a big bust-up in Gdansk:
Open House in Gdansk

After the killing of its mayor:
The murder of Gdansk mayor Paweł Adamowicz reflects Poland’s increasingly toxic political climate
‘We feel orphaned’: Polish city mourns Paweł Adamowicz | World news | The Guardian
2019 Foretells Political and Social Turmoil in Poland | Jewish Culture | Hamodia

Much of this has to do with how we remember our history:
Charlottesville: The ideological battle dividing the world is perfectly illustrated by this fight over a Polish museum — Quartz

And it's very much in the news now:
The populist rewriting of Polish history is a warning to us all | Estera Flieger | Opinion | The Guardian

As are other museums:
Poland's Ministry of Culture Again Accused of Trying to Control Progressive Institution
Poland’s Ruling Party Puts an Extraordinary Museum of Polish-Jewish History Into Limbo | The New Yorker

Within the context of remembering the outbreak of the last war:
WW2 commemorations expose differences at heart of Europe | World news | The Guardian

It's a beautiful, open city:



Google Image Result for https://s.iha.com/00113741246/Gdansk-Architecture-of-old-town.jpeg



File:Gdańsk kamienice przy Długim Targu.jpg - Wikimedia Commons



Gdansk Waterfront | Gdansk Poland - 09/12/2017 | Charlie Jackson ...
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the great divergence

THE FOUR GREAT INVENTIONS:
Four Great Inventions - Wikipedia
(1) The 4 Great Inventions that changed the world (China) - YouTube

There were more, as these videos show:
Made In China: Chinese Inventions That Changed the World

And yet a big question for our times - and one which has been asked for the last centuries - is how 'The West' came out on top:
Jay Doubleyou: is the west better than the rest?
Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity | TED Talk

Although now the question is whether that predominance is being lost - with panic over 'slipping education standards':
Jay Doubleyou: the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states
Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China | TED Talk

It gets interesting...

EUROCENTRISM:
Eurocentrism - Wikipedia
Amazon.com: Eight Eurocentric Historians (9781572305915): J.M. Blaut, James M. Blaut: Books
What is Living and What is Dead In Eurocentrism?

When and why did the West gain its current economic advantage over the rest of the world? This topic is the source of an animated debate within the academy today. Jack Goody, a noted social anthropologist, analyzes these questions and offers his own views in his new book, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate.

The participants in this debate often have been divided into two broad camps. On the one side, which I will call here the Europeanists, are those who consider the West's attainment of economic advantage as having been the result of fundamental societal advantages, generally institutional or cultural. Factors often cited include limited power of the state, respect for property rights, the spirit of individuality, positive attitudes toward wealth accumulation, and separation of scientific and technical advances from religious control. According to this group, the bifurcation between the East and the West occurred early—at least before 1700 and in some ways centuries before that. While Goody identifies many authors within this group—including [End Page 497] Douglas North, Robert Thomas, and Eric Jones—he cites David Landes and his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations as representative of this position.

The opposing group, which Jack Goldstone has called the "California School," explicitly rejects the assertion of what they would term "cultural superiority" by the Europeanists, characterizing it as overly broad, Eurocentric, and built on faulty assumptions about both the West and the rest of the world. Goody cites J. M. Blaut, Andre Gunder Frank, and Kenneth Pomeranz as exemplifying this group. Their position is that any specific assertions of European cultural advantage can be disproved by examining individual cases, and that the economic advantage gained by the West either can never be shown to have specific causes or was caused by narrower, more technical explanations. Two examples of this latter type of explanation are bullion flows to Europe (Blaut and Frank) and the ready accessibility of coal and iron in Britain (Pomeranz). Consistent with these views, this group argues that the bifurcation between the West and the East occurred later (after 1750 or even 1800) and took place in a world economy where China was a major, possibly dominant player.
Project MUSE - Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (review)
The Theft of History (Canto Classics): Jack Goody: 9781107683556: Amazon.com: Books

THE GREAT DIVERGENCE:



Great Divergence - Wikipedia
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.: Kenneth Pomeranz: 9780691090108: Amazon.com: Books
On the Rise of the West:Researching Kenneth Pomeranz’sGreat DivergenceRICARDO DUCHESNE
Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence | Reviews in History
Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective

Some more videos:

The Great Divergence-Why 1033) - YouTube

(1) Kenneth Pomeranz on writing The Great Divergence - YouTube
The Great Divergence on Vimeo

MING DYNASTY:

It would seem that none of the conventional explanations tells us in convincing fashion why technical progress was absent in the Chinese economy during a period that was, on the whole, one of prosperity and expansion. Almost every element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory cause to the Industrial Revolution in north-western Europe was also present in China. There had even been a revolution in the relations between social classes, at least in the countryside; but this had had no important effect on the techniques of production. Only Galilean-Newtonian science was missing; but in the short run this was not important. Had the Chinese possessed, or developed, the seventeenth-century European mania for tinkering and improving, they could easily have made an efficient spinning machine out of the primitive model described by Wang Chen. A steam engine would have been more difficult; but it should not have posed insuperable difficulties to a people who had been building double-acting piston flame-throwers in the Sung dynasty. The crucial point is that nobody tried. In most fields, agriculture being the chief exception, Chinese technology stopped progressing well before the point at which a lack of scientific knowledge had become a serious obstacle. 

Why indeed? Sinologists have put forward several partial explanations. Those that I find most persuasive are the following. 

First, China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights. The Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise—to take over certain activities, to prohibit and inhibit others, to manipulate prices, to exact bribes. At various times the government was motivated by a desire to reserve labor to agriculture or to control important resources (salt and iron, for example); by an appetite for revenue (the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs is a leitmotif of Chinese history); by fear and disapproval of self-enrichment, except by officials, giving rise in turn to abundant corruption and rent-seeking; and by a distaste for maritime trade, which the Heavenly Kingdom saw as a diversion from imperial concerns, as a divisive force and source of income inequality in the ecumenical empire, and worse yet, as an invitation to exit. This state intervention and interference encountered evasion and resistance; indeed, the very needs of state compelled a certain tolerance for disobedience. Still, the goal, the aim, the ideal was the ineffable stillness of immobility. When in 1368 the new Chinese emperor inaugurated a native (Ming) dynasty to replace the defeated Mongol invaders, he ascended the throne in Nanjing as the Hongwu (“Vast Martial”) emperor. Let not the name deceive the reader: Hongwu’s goal was anything but war. He wanted rather to immobilize the realm. People were to stay put and move only with the permission of the state—at home and abroad. People who went outside China without permission were liable to execution on their return...

Landes 2006 Why Europe and the West JEP.pdf
Why was there no capitalism in early modern China?

Although there are other traditions...
Daoism and Anarchism:  Critiques of State Autonomyin Ancient and Modern China:  John A. Rapp 

See also:
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology - Wikipedia
Amazon.com: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Paradigm) (8601200454550): David Graeber: Books
Review: “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” - Sean Norton - Medium
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utopia for realists

There are several established ideas out there:
Jay Doubleyou: pointless work, artificial intelligence and the universal basic income
Jay Doubleyou: the future of work
Jay Doubleyou: the future of work: “capitalism will abolish laundry day” >>> or: “fully automated luxury communism”

A book came out in 2016 which brought these together:

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek

It offers a critical proposal that it claims is a practical approach to reconstructing modern society to promote a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas:

• a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody
• a short working week of fifteen hours
• open borders worldwide with the free movement of citizens between all states

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek
Here's a positive review:

Utopia for Realists is an excellent contribution to the politically imperative utopian literature. It deserves to be read alongside Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work or Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future. It is fabulously well-researched and engagingly well-written. It’s also extremely accessible.

‘Utopia for Realists?’ - a review | openDemocracy

And here's a not-so-positive review:

Apart from the fact that human needs are infinite, so that today’s predictions of the end of work will prove as awry as those of previous centuries, a universal basic income is no more likely to succeed than communism. Behavioural psychology confirms what even the young Marx, a basic income-for-all sceptic, knew in his bones: we humans believe that reward should follow proportionate effort. It is our just desert. Trying to reconfigure our core hard wiring so we don’t object to anyone anywhere getting a guaranteed income for no better reason than they are alive could only be devised by a fifth columnist anxious to consign liberalism to oblivion. Bregman himself worries in the book – his candour is refreshing – that he could be wrong, but dismisses the anxiety. He was right to be worried.

But his joyful dissection of much of the purposeless work thrown up by modern “bullshit” capitalism hits home. As he argues, too many of today’s jobs are ephemera, creating little or no value and making their holders despair, and if they ceased there would be little or no discernible fall in our living standards. “Work”, in terms of executing a craft or attempting to make the world a better place, is becoming the preserve of too few. How much better if we recognised the fact and opted for leisure? Alternatively, and much more realistically, how about creating more purposed companies and more purposed work? There is more than enough to do.

The third plank of Bregman’s utopia, on top of an impossibilist universal minimum income and an unlikely 15-hour week, is a world of open borders. The best help we can give the poor in the less developed world is to give them unfettered access to our land of plenty, he argues, so they can bootstrap themselves upwards, making both them and us wealthier. I understand that open borders and being welcoming to strangers is a great statement of common humanity – and that immigration is an economic benefit. But no society on earth can welcome unlimited numbers of strangers, keen to enjoy the benefits of whatever civilisation, without having made a contribution to it. Human beings believe that dues should be paid. Far better to manage our borders and let in as many immigrants as we can rather than open them indiscriminately.

Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman – review | Books | The Guardian.
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class is the big issue in the united kingdom: part three

'Class' defines us in Britain:
> It's our calculator.
> It starts very very early on.
> It's something politicians can be very insensitive about.
> And it's something which fascinates the media:
Jay Doubleyou: class is the big issue in the united kingdom: part one

Is Brexit a class war or culture war?
Jay Doubleyou: culture wars

The question is quite heated:
Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the culture wars
Jay Doubleyou: 'I have met many people who earn way more than £30,000 and have literally no discernible skills, not even one.'

And there's a lot of history involved:
Jay Doubleyou: social realism and the kitchen sink drama

Here's a posh TV series and a posh school:
Jay Doubleyou: the british class system

And here's the other end:
Jay Doubleyou: low literacy levels in britain
Jay Doubleyou: "drunk stupid brits"
Jay Doubleyou: neets
Jay Doubleyou: immigration part 2

We can compare with other countries:
Jay Doubleyou: neets - again
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