Lately I’ve been wondering a lot about what distinguishes a good developer from a great developer, and when a developer becomes a city-builder. Last year I was invited by Lendlease’s new Green Utilities division (now branded as Podium) to tour several of their large urban regeneration projects in … Read More
Cloud Computing vs District Energy
Infrastructure: a bunch of people who need the same thing (power, water, or the ability to get to work) find a large scale solution. Cloud computing is another version of this. For a nice writeup on the case for the cloud, see this post on James Hamilton’s excellent blog. To summarize James, most … Read More
“Anything Which Can Be Destroyed in an Action Movie”
A fun piece from John Oliver on infrastructure, which he defines as “anything which can be destroyed in an action movie”[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8 The message, which you have no doubt heard before, is that we should spend more on infrastructure. What John Oliver misses is … Read More
The Happy City
In his book, Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design, Vancouver urbanist, Charles Montgomery, argues that the happy city, the wealthy city, and the low carbon city can be the same place. He describes how the social and energy connections created by living closer to one another can … Read More
Infrastructure: The Hidden Life of Great Cities
A data scientist rooted through millions of tweets to find words associated with either "geek" or "nerd". His name is Burr Settles and he works for Duolingo, a crowd sourcing translation platform. Settles plotted his results on this infographic. We’re not sure how many of these alternate words we … Read More
