Category: Urban

The Fauxtopias of Detroit’s Suburbs

McDonald's neon sign :: Henry Ford museum

Starting with a painstaking replica of his childhood farm built on a plot of land not far from his Dearborn estate, Ford created what has since grown into a major regional tourist-attraction called Greenfield Village. Today 1.5-million people annually visit this place which boasts the world’s largest concentration of historical buildings moved from their original locations to a new site. Today, there are nearly 100 historical buildings “preserved” in the walled 240-acre compound, many of them chosen and situated to represent a typical American village somewhere between 1870 and 1910. There’s a town square, a courthouse (where young Abe Lincoln practiced law), a general store, and a chapel. Seersuckered historical interpretors as friendly as Mormon missionaries prowl the streets in straw hats, pouncing on unsuspecting tourists:

It’s a living diorama of nostalgia. Visiting Greenfield Village is like wandering through Mitch Albom’s cloying fantasy of “the good old days.” If you don’t watch out, you might get serenaded by an impromptu BARBERSHOP SEXTET.

via The Fauxtopias of Detroit's Suburbs | sweet juniper!.

My Own Piece of Dirt

Trinity House

Some of America’s first urban workers lived in a unique type of Philadelphia home called a Trinity. Examples date from 1720. Trinities were built to house the artisan classes flocking to a burgeoning city; but while these workers moved on to populate America, the Trinity House didn’t follow them. But the Trinity and the narrow streets that contain them warrant a closer look.

A Trinity, as the name suggests, consists of three rooms stacked on top of each other – and that makes the whole house. A Betsy Ross stair punches through, basically an elongated spiral stair that is so narrow and steep that, instead of a railing for balance, you haul yourself up using a vertically mounted steel bracket.

via My Own Piece of Dirt | Metropolis POV | Metropolis Magazine.

The Death and Life of Detroit

Ransom-Gillis House, Detroit

This is a more intimate Detroit than I—than most of us—have consumed in the media. Detroit takes up an outsize space in the American psyche, with Eminem and Clint Eastwood proclaiming the auto industry’s resurgence in dewy Super Bowl ads; with glowing recovery stories pairing the words “Midtown” and “hipster”; with apocalyptic (and accurate) images of Dresden-like streets; and with a millionaire mayor touting the most ambitious plan in modern history to reshape a U.S. city. Viewing it through those media lenses is like peering through a kaleidoscope or maybe at a Rorschach test: A city in recovery. A city in free fall. It depends on who’s telling the story. 

via The Death and Life of Detroit.

The Power of Fear in Networked Publics

Increasingly, the battles over identity are moving beyond geek culture into political battles. The same technologies that force people into the open are being used to expose people who are engaged in political speech. Consider, for example, how crowdsourcing is being used to identify people in a photograph. It just so happens that these people were engaged in a political protest.

Radical transparency is particularly tricky in light of the attention economy. Not all information is created equal. People are far more likely to pay attention to some kinds of information than others. And, by and large, they’re more likely to pay attention to information that causes emotional reactions. Additionally, people are more likely to pay attention to some people. The person with the boring life is going to get far less attention than the person that seems like a trainwreck. Who gets attention – and who suffers the consequences of attention – is not evenly distributed.

And, unfortunately, oppressed and marginalized populations who are already under the microscope tend to suffer far more from the rise of radical transparency than those who already have privilege. The cost of radical transparency for someone who is gay or black or female is different in Western societies than it is for a straight white male. This is undoubtedly a question of privacy, but we should also look at it through the prism of the culture of fear.

"The Power of Fear in Networked Publics".

Happy Birthday, Rome!

Oculus

During the Roman Republic, several dates were given for the founding of the city between 758 BC and 728 BC. Finally, under the Roman Empire, the date suggested by Marcus Terentius Varro, 753 BC, was agreed upon, but in the Fasti Capitolini the year given was 752. Although the proposed years varied, all versions agreed that the city was founded on April 21, the day of the festival sacred to Pales, goddess of shepherds; in her honour, Rome celebrated the Par ilia (or Palilia). (The Roman a.u.c. calendar, however, begins with Varro’s dating of 753 BC.)

– via Founding of Rome on Wikipedia.