АРХИТЕКТУРА (Инженерно-строительное дело - 624; Строительство и строительные работы - 69)

If the hype is to be believed then the next big thing is the Internet of Things. But is it what you think it is? Because the Internet of Things is not about things on the internet. A world in which all our household gadgets can communicate with each other may sound vaguely useful, but it’s not really for us consumers. The Internet of Things serves the interests of the technology giants, in their epic wrangles with each other. And it is they who will turn the jargon of «smart cities» and «smart homes» into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In this piercing and provocative essay, Bruce Sterling tells the story of an idea that just won’t go away because there’s too much money to be made and a whole world to control.

On their bland campuses, the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook dominate the world, removed from the mess and the prying eyes of the real city. But while their products are discussed endlessly, their urbanism has rarely been. So what does it look like? To date, the Silicon Valley campus has served as a backdrop to many a sun-kissed founder photoshoot, but there is little understanding of the distinctive urban personality that separates the village of Facebook from the town of Google, or the truly urban Twitter (which recently decided to move to San Francisco’s notoriously un-gentrifiable Tenderloin). This investigation of the private towns of Silicon Valley examines the tech campus as a typology and attempts to discover what urban design says about companies we think we know.

As growth was the defining condition of the 20th century, so scarcity is set to define the 21st. Already it pervades political discourse and shapes our reading of the economy and the environment. But scarcity is not just the inevitable result of growth and resource exploitation — every innovation results in new scarcities. Scarcity is constructed daily through the creation of desire, it is designed. The authors of this timely essay set out to establish a more sophisticated understanding of scarcity. Moving beyond the idea that lack and inequality are simply laws of nature, they argue that scarcity can be challenged. The message for architects and designers — experts in working with constraints — is that scarcity is a process, and one that can be productive. This essay asks us to throw out our simplistic Malthusian graphs and escape the stranglehold that scarcity has on our imaginations.

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava joined forces through their blog airoots/eirut in 2006. They have since written extensively on urban themes and are working on projects involving architecture, planning, pedagogy and technology. They run the Institute of Urbanology in Mumbai and Goa and are co-founders of urbz.net, an experimental platform for collaborative practice in urban development.

Space is a technology. Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural — mobile, monetized networks. For the world's power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realize. If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still — as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space — architects. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in economics, the social sciences, informatics and activism are developing what might be called spatial software as a political instrument to outwit politics as usual.