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Materials for the course “Rethinking urban policies 30 years later”
On November 24, 25 and 26, 2010 The course “Rethinking urban policies 30 more years later” was held, directed by Joan Subirats and Josep M Montaner, and in which I participated in a round table on the role of technologies in cities (document,video and presentation) and also coordinating a session in which we used different…
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Baltimore, The Wire and David Harvey
One of the chapters of the book Megacities I was writing about a few days ago is entitled Spaces for utopia and is written by David Harvey. The introduction to that chapter includes just one page on the case of the city of Baltimore and reading those few lines gave me the feeling that I…
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Megacities. Exploring a Sustainable Future
Megacities is one of the latest editorial novelties of < a href="http://www.010.nl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">010 Publishers and focuses on one of the most characteristic phenomena of our time: the rise of a new urban scale, the megacities. A term with different edges and very prone to confusion but which, beyond the conceptual debate, explains some of…
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The silent urbanization of Africa
The Economist published a few a few days ago one of his Daily Charts, dedicated this time to visualizing the dimension of the growth of main cities in Africa, following data from the latest Habitat report State of African Cities 2010, Governance, Inequalities and Urban Land Market. The Guardian also posted his own visualization selecting…
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Three readings on geopolitics in times of exposed diplomacy
These are days of bare diplomacy. The cablegate opens the doors to the ins and outs of international geopolitics. Piecemeal information, as befits this era of flashes of decontextualized and ephemeral information. I propose three readings in order of interest. From geopolitical-fiction bordering on humor to a review of the emerging world, going through the…
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Google TV and net neutrality
After my last and controversial post on net neutrality networkin which I voluntarily emerged as devil’s advocateI am going to give a little “cane” on this subject again. I know my message in all of this is not popular at all and that it is much easier to embrace and defend net neutrality at all…
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Hallucinating with Wikileaks
There are many of us who we are “hallucinating” with Wikileaks. Since I had the use of reason, I began to question the words and values of many politicians and diplomats, but the Wikileaks leaks are having a point of no return for me in this regard. From now on I will value the realism…
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BIODIVERSITY and MDG: Searching for balance
The awareness in nature conservation is increasing, governments through theMillennium Development Goals (MDG) want to improve human welfare attending some of the principal endemic problems of our century: poverty, hunger, health, education and sustainable development. The propose is an inventory of targets and deadlines to improve the situation of millions of people that are living in…
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erre erre
Political bets are often governed by populist performance and, without a doubt, sport in Spain sells. If Madrid organizes an Olympics,Spain a soccer world cup oValencia one day of Formula 1 everyone will be very handsome in the photos and for posterity. A real pity that lately we have never won. Spain and Portugal promised…
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What to expect from the Cancun Conference on climate change?
The teacher Naomi Oreskes of the University of California in 2004 led a research effort to assess the< strong>degree of consensus on climate change in the international scientific community. To do this, he took a statistically significant random sample, 10%, of all the scientific articles that had been published in the last ten years on…