On WorldChanging Chris Coldeway discusses a recent talk by Stewart Brand on how cities learn. In 1994, he wrote the excellent book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built: The redoubtable Stewart Brand gave a talk at GBN last night on global urbanization, expanding the “City Planet” material he first outlined at a Long […]
Stewart Brand, who’s excellent book How Buildings Learn, and was mentioned here earlier, recently gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation as part of their seminar series. The talk is now available on their website as a (large) mp3 file.
From an article in the Portland Tribune: Brand, whose current lecture is titled “The Future of Cities as if the Past Mattered,” makes a distinction between long-term planning and long-term thinking, favoring the latter because we can’t know the future. … “Institutions max out at 40 to 50 years; some universities have lasted a thousand […]
Edward Wolf offers a trio of books reviews about planetary transformation and systems at Worldchanging in Straight Talk for the Planetary Era: Diplomats from 193 countries prepare to hammer out a global climate treaty in Copenhagen. But few expect this year’s activism, politics, or diplomacy to change the game. The 21st century to-do list keeps […]
On the EcoTrust web magazine People and Place Howard Silverman compares Stewart Brand‘s concept of Pace Layering with Panarchy in Panarchy and Pace in the Big Back Loop: “The back loop is the time of the Long Now,” writes Resilience Alliance founder Buzz Holling. It is a time “when each of us must become aware […]
The entire 35-year archive of Whole Earth Catalogs, along with its Supplements, and descendant magazines – CoEvolution Quarterly, and Whole Earth are now available on the web. The Whole Earth Catalog,was published in 1968 by Stewart Brand, it and its related magazines embodied a certain type of Californian environmental thinking. A key concept was systems […]
Futurist Paul Saffo recently gave a talk “Embracing Uncertainty – the secret to effective forecasting” at the Long Now foundation. The talk (mp3) and Stewart Brand’s summary are online on the Long Now Foundation website. The talk is similar to his article in Harvard Business Review Six Rules for Effective Forecasting (see also Podcast interview). […]
The website Edge, has Kevin Kelly‘s Speculations on the future of science based on a talk he gave to the Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, of the Foundation, introduces Kelly’s article: Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a […]
Photographer Ed Burtynsky has proposal a “The Gallery of the Long Now.” It would compliment the Clock of the Long Now project, now underway. The idea for the clock was hatched over 20 years ago and the goal is to build a clock that can run–by itself–for 10,000 years. The plan is for it be […]