Field Notes: Repair

November 24, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Random, Repair

From Places Journal:

“Building” is a powerful metaphor that has long structured how we think about progress and accomplishment. What might be the new metaphors, the new rubrics, for an epoch of repair? How might professions premised on growth and consumption — new buildings, new landscapes, new cities — adapt to the new urgencies of reuse, preservation, and degrowth?

Image: Vacant lot, Second Avenue and Second Street, New York City, July 2024. [David Gissen], Places Journal.

Field Notes: Repair explores these questions and more through an ambitious eight-part narrative survey, featuring observations from nearly 100 scholars, designers, planners, activists, and artists. Contributing authors take us to locales around the world, from Belgrade to Chicago; Delhi to the Blue Pacific; Johannesburg to New York City, Malmö, and London, among many others.

In the installments, you’ll discover thoughtful, nuanced, and urgent calls for practices of repair, reuse, preservation, maintenance, and care. Some are hyper-practical, concerned with the lifespans of artifacts and structures. Others revise or propose philosophies of repair that might address the overlapping crises of climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice. More than a few acknowledge that repair can only take us so far. “Field Notes: Repair” follows an earlier series in Places, Repair Manual.

Longer Crossings Kill More Pedestrians

September 26, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Cars, Human power, Pedestrians, Random, Traffic, Travel, Walking

Pedestrians face the greatest risk of automobile collisions when crossing a street: the longer a crossing, the higher their exposure is to oncoming cars. Despite the relevance of crossing distance, few studies have considered its variance within or across entire cities. Given that, we probed pedestrian crossing distance at the municipal scale, leveraging both OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery to quantify crossing distances at roughly 49,000 formal crossings (those parts of the roadway designated for pedestrians to cross), both marked and unmarked, at intersections and at midblock.

We measured formal pedestrian crossings throughout a dense European city (Paris [France]), a dense American city (San Francisco [CA]), and a less-dense, more car-centric American city (Irvine [CA]). This granular approach—covering roughly 49,000 total crossings—identified inter- and intraurban spatial patterns in the distribution of pedestrian crossing distance, including clusters of long crossings that likely deter walking and increase its risk. By overlaying recent pedestrian–vehicle collisions on these novel data sets we found that longer crossing distance correlated with increased likelihood of collisions, raising the salience of traffic-calming interventions.

Read more: Moran, Marcel E., and Debra F. Laefer. “Multiscale Analysis of Pedestrian Crossing Distance.” Journal of the American Planning Association (2024): 1-15.

Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy

September 20, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Work

“Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages.

We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development.

Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.”

Read more (open access): Hickel, J., Hanbury Lemos, M. & Barbour, F. Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy. Nat Commun 15, 6298 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y

Interview for “Planet: Critical”

September 20, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Podcasts, Video

Earlier this year Rachel Donald interviewed me for her podcast “Planet: critical”. Here’s the video. Also check out the other episodes, there’s lot of interesting stuff there. https://www.planetcritical.com.

Low-tech Magazine: Article Readings

September 20, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Podcasts

One of Low-tech Magazine’s readers, Arie James Dallas, has started making audio versions of articles. Three articles are available at the moment. Find their playlist here.

Wild Craft: Wooden cargo ships of South India

September 9, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Books & Reference, Random, Sailing ships, Shipping, Travel, Wind Power, Wood, Woodworking

Giant wooden cargo ships that braved the oceans for thousands of years are still being made in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Even as metal motorised ships became the norm, some shoreline communities in South India continue to craft this wooden cargo ship. In a blend of reason, creativity and hard work the communities engineered their past to forge a future. This book traces the transition of this tradition over time.

The authors have created a photo documentation using hundreds of images that capture the shipyard’s atmosphere to offer a narrative and the manufacture of these ships at each step of their construction. It analyzes the conditions of their economic viability and how it has evolved over time. Through visual anthropology this book offers a narrative of wooden cargo ship building and craftsmanship in south Asia.

The open access book can be downloaded from https://www.ifpindia.org/bookstore/wild-craft/.

There is also a video about the project: Of Wind and Wood. Sustainable cargo ships in France and in India.