INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE URBAN

INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE URBAN

Discussion _ reception —  The idea that the world is created by people in history, both consciously and through cumulative unintended effects, represents the bulwark of the modern secular social sciences. From this foundation, scholars have argued that fundamental features of our world that we often take to be natural, from race and gender to politics and the economy, are actually products of human making. This is the basis for the twined concepts of social construction and human agency.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

6:00 PM – 08:30 PM

Institute for Public Knowledge – New York, United States
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA

Meeting Forces Larger Than Ourselves: Amulets for Infrastructure

Good Luck Infrastructure: Amulets and Ornaments

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first round of Amulets for Infrastructure, image FOP 2012

Next week we head to Kyoto, Japan to kick off Amulets for Infrastructure. Over the last couple of weeks we fashioned our first series of paper amulets for the project (described further here).

For us, the Amulets for Infrastructure project is less about the idea of “luck” sometimes associated with the concept of amulets or talismans, and more a reminder of ancient knowledges that tell of the power of nonhuman forces to shape and sometimes unseat human plans, including human-built structures and infrastructures.  With Amulets for infrastructure, we hope to help extend awareness that future infrastructures and built environments need to be designed and used with geologic earth forces in mind.  This awareness is something that a number of people have said was “forgotten” in the design and building of infrastructures directly affected by the earthquake and…

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