politics

Last week's Economist contains a provocative discussion of The Big Sort. Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. I've long been interested in the phenomenon of demographic clustering. See for example, the essay that I co-wrote with Anne Friedberg for the Networked Publics book. According to this model, mobility is leading individuals to cluster in communities of other like-minded individuals. In Bill Bishop's book, and the Economist article, the concern is with the consequences of such clustering for politics. Americans increasingly don't talk to people with political views unlike themselves. Instead, we live in liberal urban environments or conservative exurbs or whatever community turns us on. I don't suspect Europe is going to do much better. The EU has changed dramatically in the last two decades and, with the freedom of mobility that Europeans enjoy, old ties like language and family are going to dissipate over time, in favor of a similar clustered world.

The consequences for politics are relatively clear, if distrubing, but this "big sort" also has consequences for urbanism since politics is such a huge part of thinking about cities. So when we think of dredging up Jane Jacobs yet again for models of thinking about the city, let's remember the ideological context and the larger complexities of such situations.

Larry Lessig has a twenty-minute video up on his site about why he favors Obama over Clinton. 

Lessig makes the choice between the two clearer than ever.

I'm reworking part of the Networked Publics book and ran across a post by Mitch Kapor titled "architecture is politics." Compare this with my earlier post about Lawrence Lessig's use of the term architecture in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Again, as any reader of Mark Wigley's The Architecture of Deconstruction knows, such references are far from idle.

As readers of this blog now, I'm thoroughly bored by idle speculations in architectural form (as if we still needed that). Kapor's post is useful in reminding us that architecture has a much more important role to play in society and that its future is tied to how we think of the Net.