I have just returned from a fascinating conference at MIT on Security and Human Behaviour and am now preparing for the EU Green Week conference in Brussels. This post explores an issue common to both conferences: paranoia. The security of central interest to the MIT conference was that of people using the Internet. The titles …
Category: hypermobility
Feb 09
The world’s biggest mega transport project
In December 2007 I delivered a Working Paper entitled Managing risk in a hypermobile world to the OMEGA Project – a project dedicated to thinking about Mega Projects in Transport and Development. I began thus: Transport projects facilitate new connections between trip origins and destinations. In so doing they disturb previous patterns of connection, often …
Apr 16
The Achilles heel of eco-towns
Dear Sir Simon Jenkins (4 April 2008) exposes the Achilles heel of all the proposed eco-towns: transport. But he is a trifle hard on the motives of the original proponents of the garden cities and new towns. Relieving the squalid, densely packed, inner city slums by providing houses in new settlements, with gardens, in which …
Aug 21
On becoming Vashti: reflections of a novice blogger
My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Writing in 1909, not only did he anticipate television, the Internet, video conferencing, email, Amazon, Google and Globalization but, more significantly, the impact that they would have on our lives. It is a short story about a world …