Crucially, at street scale, on-street parking is not allowed, which opens up the streetscape for people, on foot and on bike, for conversation and activities, and yes, for moving goods and people around but as a secondary ‘enabling’ activity to the life of the street itself.

https://medium.com/slowdown-papers/18-from-lockdown-to-slowdown-tokyo-as-slowdown-city-822dc0b6f3cc

As an occasional listener to the various Asymco podcasts and somebody very much interested in new forms of mobility, I was taken more than a bit aback by this.

Dediu revealed himself as a founder in Bond which is the same company as Smide. I remembered him having somebody from Smide on in one of the first episodes of the Micromobility podcast but there was never any disclosure then or after about Dediu’s connections there.

A lapse in disclosure and some backroom action is not a big deal and nothing much seems to have come from this, but it is a good reminder that everything you see online (not just the posts on Instagram) is fake.

I talked about the topic with Peter a bit and thought it to be a natural extension of his work in the connected devices spaces and their recent visit to Casa Jasmina in Torino.

I hope to get around to reading it soon since right now I have no desire or opportunity to live in a connected home. The housing stock in Berlin is old and does not lend itself well to connectivity. Our current house has a central water heater but even then most faucets are heated locally using electricity. Internet connectivity (let alone Fiber to the Home) is hard to find in many houses and you can count yourself lucky if you can get a Kabel Deutschland connection.

I think I would like to take the best of what these technologies can bring but they probably only make sense if you innovate in the other layers of a house as well as in what is built and the way it is built.

If you look at the six Ss, connectivity consists of things at the manufactured level of Stuff (cheap consumer grade electronics from China). It latches onto the Space Plan and I would guess it has considerable effects on that and would benefit from changes in that plan. More problematically it pierces these layers and as such deteriorates the structural integrity of the house further. Connected things need to either interface with the Services layer or call for new Services to be deployed throughout the house. These move from the inside out but also from the outside —Skin layer— in when it comes to things like solar power and geothermal connectivity.

It seems an interesting though complicated time to be an architect. The API and expectation surface of a house is exploding while the margins and expertise of your average architecture practice leave a lot to be desired.

What would then seem obvious is that we need systematic and generative ways of creating our dwellings in which the inhabitants of a house are participants as much as the traditional experts are. It seems like connected homes will make more sense and sense made of them when you consider the movements of self-built buildings and open source dwellings.

In een anderhalve maand lang durend programma haalt BMW ongeveer elke spreker uit het TED/nieuwe media/architectuur-circuit naar de locatie. Er worden presentaties gegeven, gesprekken geïnitiëerd en workshops gedaan. Dit alles in een keet op een leeg stuk grond met wat schermen, krijtborden en post-its. De standaard-ingrediënten van co-creatie. Het woord ‘lab’ zelf is een excuus voor grote bedrijven om iets onafs te kunnen presenteren. ‘Het is geen zooitje, het is een lab.’

Aanvankelijk wilde de organisatie het Lab op de Spree-oever in Kreuzberg neer zetten. Dat bleek —zoals zoveel in Berlijn— omstreden. Lokale autonomen waren bang dat het lab de gentrificatie verder zou versnellen en dreigden met geweld. In overleg met de stad week BMW toen uit naar het toeristische Pfefferbergcomplex in Prenzlauerberg, een deel van de stad dat niet verder gentrificeren kan.

BMW die stedenbouwkunde predikt is een beetje als McDonald’s die de Olympische Spelen sponsort. Het kan maar het heeft iets potsierlijks. Berlijn kan een gesprek over zichzelf op dit moment goed gebruiken. Het goedkope paradijs waar ze bekend om stond is grotendeels weg, huurhuizen worden in rap tempo geliberaliseerd, panden verkocht aan speculanten die hun geld niet meer op de beurs kwijt kunnen en de lege plekken die over zijn opgevuld met bouw- en supermarkten. Het stadsbestuur is te druk met zichzelf en talrijke schandalen om een coherente visie over de stad te vormen dus moeten anderen het maar doen.

BMW weet dat helaas niet te leveren. De professionele forumbezoekers op het lab hebben andere belangen dan de Turkse dames op Kotti die protesteren voor sociale huren. De belangen van alle betrokkenen zijn te groot om de gesprekken relevant te maken. Het resultaat ziet er gelikt uit maar de angel is er bij voorbaat al uit. Jammer, want in deze stad waar mensen elkaar aan het verdringen zijn zou wat meer Jane Jacobs geen kwaad kunnen.

But even more striking is the following paragraph that positions this change as one of the factors that influences the change of population within certain cities:

When the Millennial generation’s desire for more public transit and walkable neighborhoods clashes with political/policy gridlock, the result is skyrocketing real estate prices in the nation’s few non-car-centric cities. This can have a powerful displacement effect on lower-income residents. The more walkable a neighborhood, the more expensive it is. (Consider Manhattan, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, large swaths of Brooklyn, and Center City Philadelphia, among others.) This forces low-income and immigrant communities into the suburbs where, paradoxically, those least able to afford a car may be forced to get one. — GOOD

Public transport here of course is complementary with walkable neighborhoods but also with a lively urban fabric with enough cultural, leisurely and other things to do within easy reach. In short people who can afford it want to live in the nice parts of the city (and who can blame them). This proces has already happened in Amsterdam and is now taking place in Berlin (see the previous piece on the protests) somewhat more violently.

Theoretically political/policy gridlock is fixable, but I’m bearish on political change in Europe and Germany where all our attention is directed towards the maladies plaguing the continent and the political system is historically autocratic and unresponsive.

It seems that the occupy style encampment has become quite a popular way of making a point. The crop of professional protesters and squatters that congregate around these camps are not very inviting towards deeper engagement. If you have no deep interest in the issues at hand, you might go over and read a couple of the pamphlets, but probably not much more.

The creative workers I know who like myself work and/or live in Kreuzberg are not very concerned with the issues plaguing these people. Most of them are in fact in direct competition with these people whose home rents are being spiked and liberalized. As soon as the renters are moved out, their houses are very rapidly turned around, sold on the overheated Berlin real-estate market to investors and then rented out at several times inflated prices.

This agrees with my personal experience that rents in Kreuzberg are on the rise and not at all slowly (they may be the only thing in Germany that indeed does change rapidly). The urban tides are shifting and most of these people have no footholds to stay in what was their home for the past decades. Those that know how and why things are changing closely guard that knowledge. The housing corporations have refused talks with afflicted renters and their organizations. In Germany knowledge translates quite directly into power and those that possess it are usually not very squeamish about employing it for personal gain.

“It is not the fault of foreign artists or party tourists; they too would prefer to pay less rent. It is caused by the mass sell-off of publicly-owned apartments, combined with the deregulation of rent prices.”— Joel Alas

Tourists are few and far between and those that make it out here seem to have a purpose about them. It was noticeable when I took some Dutch friends for breakfast around here that the proprietors’ reactions bordered on the annoyed. Rightly so. The part of Berlin where I’m living has been doing fine and does not need to become a tourist/expat infested over-gentrified hipster slum.

We invite new arrivals to go to the same places everybody else is settling in —I hear Wedding is going to be the next big thing— and please don’t bother us. We may hold out another comfortable ten years over here.

This Monday I finally made it out to the Finanzamt with a fully filled in form for Steuerliche Erfassung (or something). After that I went to the Agora Collective to get my stuff. It is a great place, but I don’t want to be fixed in a coworking space. There are a myriad reasons why that is not a great fit, but being able to shape and own your own workplace is built-in in most offices and is purposefully left out of coworking.

Then I moved into the contur & konsorten office on Adalbertstraße with my stuff. A Burogemeinschaft with 10 people where everybody has their own independent desk, with its own walls and bookshelves, a place to put my professional library and hang my posters. In short: a place to call my own. In a total coincidence I am now a staircase neighbour of my friends at the Maker’s Loft which could lead to more serendipity in the future.

The office is smack on Kotti, the most important urban maelstrom in Berlin. It is a place where many large streams of traffic and people meet with the U-bahn transport hub (connecting U1 and U8) and the roundabout connecting the main thoroughfare of Skalitzer Straße with the Kottbusser Damm. Betahaus, co-up, the Maker’s Loft and many other creative places are within throwing distance and the area sports equal amounts of hipster cafés and Turkish eateries with the addicts holding their own on the main square. They can be a hassle, but their presence is inseparable from the conditions that made that part of Kreuzberg exactly what it is: a free-haven for people looking for cheap housing be they immigrants or artists —or both.

Tuesday was spent at the new office in presentation prep with the evening closed off by meeting with the local Open Knowledge Foundation chapter. It was a fruitful discussion exchanging various ideas on how to boost the openness movement in Berlin.

On Wednesday, I took a leisurely train ride to Amsterdam which seems to feel shorter and shorter the more I get in the rhythm. That day the long awaited Code 4 video launched. I’m immensely proud of the work we did and I don’t think there’s anybody who has pulled off a game like that anywhere in the world, so it might be well worth a look:

A more detailed write-up on that project is forthcoming.

Thursday I continued working on my presentation at the Open Coop. I also ripped the video of minister of economic affairs Maxime Verhagen endorsing open data from the NOS site, because their site sucks.

Friday was the big day of Social Cities of Tomorrow where I got the honor to be the first to present our case of ‘Apps for Amsterdam’ to the assembled audience. It was a wonderful event put together by our esteemed friends and colleagues of the Mobile City: Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal who have been leaders in this field for the better part of the past ten years. The keynotes by Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill were superb and they remain a source of inspiration for our creative work.

I feel like I have to remark on two things that I thought of during the conference:

The entire day was infused with a critical stance against open data and transparency within government. Usman Haque served the opening volley with a criticism of indiscriminate data transparency and an approach to further civic engagement by giving people the tools to collect data themselves. After that Dan Hill also added some criticism against traditional methods of social change.

I agree with their points and criticisms and I would have liked to address them but that was impossible in the time given to me to present our case. I would like to say that if anybody in the Netherlands has been deeply involved on all levels in the government transparency movement and is acutely aware of the problems, issues and realities of data transparency, it is probably us ¹. Besides that we have employed most of the techniques Dan Hill presented during the last couple of years: shaping decision making processes, deploying long lasting interventions and using the sleights of hand required to realign large organizations and work with far too many people.

We have been and will be hard liners for the cause of government transparency out of necessity and conviction. I will always defend that data that has already been collected by government and carries no issues of privacy or national security with it, belongs to the public and should be accessible by the public.

The other issue is that the conference should was probably most valuable to the people in the Netherlands who are not as current on design and technology as I have come to take for granted. The lack of reflection was painfully clear in some of the questions asked by the audience. This is a common issue, but I have seen it often in the past during Mobile Mondays or the lecture Manuel DeLanda gave in Amsterdam.

Dan Hill talked about going from the matter to the meta level and back again and all three keynoters showed that they are very capable of doing that. In the Netherlands I have found that many practitioners struggle a lot with the matter and they don’t have the time or the interest to ascend to the meta level, even though that would feed back positively into their material undertakings.

I have been looking for collaborators in the Netherlands who look beyond their narrow field and manage to recombine multiple theoretical and practical strands back into their work but there are very few. I hosted the UX Book Club Amsterdam a while, but found that most attendees there took their field of design too narrowly and the field of UX too seriously. Similarly the Berlage Institute is doing a postdoctoral course ‘to explore the forces that shape the built environment in the contemporary world’ which is limited to architects. I don’t know anybody who believes that the problems that will plague our cities in the next fifty years will be solved drawing from the monoculture of architecture school.

It is as if most people in the Netherlands are trapped within the operational closure of their own practice.

I don’t know where I would fall, but I struggle every day with striking a balance between theory and practice and I think if you do not feel that struggle you should take a long hard look at what it is you are doing.

After Social Cities of Tomorrow we had a party at our offices in the Open Coop because they officially incorporated as a cooperation and are set to do great things. The party was rather tremendous and good parties are key to getting things done in Amsterdam.

And now it is Sunday while I am typing these notes and because of a lack of gourmet coffee, it is off to the Hubbub studio in Utrecht to be the murder board for Kars’s LIFT presentation.