The Filter^

Street Cleaning

Sifting through old papers I came across a clipping from The Times, presenting the case for Street Cleaning (related to street clutter):

In its £4.5 million redesign of the street, Kensington adopted the principle of “shared space”. Pioneered in the Netherlands, it rejects the concept that pedestrians and traffic must be strictly segregated. The idea is that cars, cyclists and those on foot will coexist more safely when the boundaries between them are blurred.

The principle extends far beyond just reducing the ugly clutter of railings, signposts and markings; it fundamentally alters the way we view shared space (nb not public vs private) through individual responsibility to exercise their own risk perception. Not only can we make the roads more aesthetically pleasing, but in doing so we can make them safer.

Congestion Charging

Two interesting perspectives on road pricing, from two interesting thinkers. Firstly Tim Harford asks why climate change (a potential, future problem) receives far more attention than traffic congestion (a real, current problem):

If climate change ever begins to have the same impact on our lives that congestion does today, it will be a dark day indeed. Think about the delays; the uncertainties; think about the lengths big-city dwellers have to go to in an effort to avoid traffic. Then think about how severely the climate would need to change before it had the same effect on your daily routine.

Secondly John Adams (with a letter in The Guardian), says that road pricing is not the solution:

Congestion pricing is not the answer. It will simply disperse the problem into those parts of the country currently least congested, encouraging yet more sprawl and low-density, car-dependent land-use patterns.

Whilst I'm at it, I should update my original post on John by linking to a city-planning trial run to remove traffic lights. According to The Telegraph:

"We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt,...It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk."

Banksy Strikes

"Art terrorist"/anarchitect "Bansky" has stencilled a witty and provocative piece in Bristol (see here). But this being the World Cup take a look at this gem. Here's his manifesto, worth quoting in full:

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who  was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
 

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a  barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and  childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and  thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in herhand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their  appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity

Source: Imperial War museum

 

Quote of the Day

You won't have the time or money to sue anyone with a pocket deep enough to be worth suing.

Guy Kawasaki's advice to (young) entrepreneurs on the importance of patents.

Protect and Survive

Or if Ricky Gervais isn’t enough, why not kick of your shoes, relax and listen to Peter Donaldson advising you to “stay in your own house” should Britain have received a Nuclear attack in 1975? Click the Audio link here.

Join the Debate

Keen? Look through the transformational government, and the Dutch 10 point e-citizen charter. Lots for constitutional architects to ponder. Deadline for responses is Thursday, send them to William or myself.

Urban Monkey

Video Nation has a nice example of of le parkour, filmed in Liverpool.

What can we learn from E-stonia?

I've posted a short article discussing the use of technology in Estonia at Ideal Government Europe.

Also, the Cabinet Office will launch the Transformational Government plan tomorrow. Minister John Murphy will be blogging at Ideal Government, so make sure you stop by and participate in a rare occasion where political debate is facilitated in such an open atmosphere.

Petty Crime

I've just written a short, anecdotal article called Petty Crime for the Ideal Government Project - the ethnographers of bureaucracy.

Video: Funnies

Check out this video - it's a Trigger Happy style example of anarchitecture, and very funny.

Also, this video is an awkward reminder of The Office, and why alcohol and bosses don't mix.