The Highline Park Takes to the Sky

This week the Highline Park opened in New York City’s west side, spanning the section from Gansevort Street to West 20th Street.

The Highline is an elevated railway line built in the 1930’s and later abandoned in the 1980’s. It with was stated to be demolished. Nature took over and the tracks of the Highline became overgrown with shrubs and wildflowers. The haunting images of this peaceful, neglected, elevated oasis brought neighborhood activists to campaign against its demolition and fight for its preservation and transformation for use as a public space.

In 1934 when the Highline was built it operated freight trains from Penn Station at 34th street and ran all the way to to St. John’s Park Terminal, at Spring Street. It was designed to go through the factories and warehouses on Manhattan’s west side, allowing transit to transport meat, produce and other raw and manufactured goods by connecting directly to the buildings and avoiding street-level traffic.

The Highline Park retains the memory of the trains by keeping the railway tracks, beautifully weaving in and out throughout.

The plants chosen are wildflower varieties that naturally grew when the Highline was abandoned. The elevated park still runs through buildings and in sections one can still see old factories with shattered windows, draped in graffiti and barbed wire, but there are also new and elegant views. Now the new Standard Hotel straddles the section at Washington Street, and we see high-end boutiques and restaurants where once stood industrial yards and meat packing plants, marking the neighborhood’s change.

Making use of sweeping views of the Hudson, large reclining benches span a section of the promenade, allowing guests to lay in the sun or watch it set in the west. The Highline is unique among parks, the only similar re-construction of an elevated train line is found in Paris at the Promenade Plante (the planted promenade).

While the park now only extends to 20th street plans are to complete the entire length of the Highline leading up to 34th Street at Penn Station. (The lower section that stretched from Gansevort to Spring Street was not saved and was lost in demolition.) Currently the stretch leading up to 30th street is stated to open in 2010, while the fate of the ending railway yard lines from 30th to 34th street are still up in the air – since this section is owned by the MTA and Related Companies, a private developer. A public hearing is being held in the city today, Wednesday June 10th, on the fate of the railway yard.

Friends of the Highline, the non-profit organization responsible for the preservation of the Highline and its transformation into a public park says:

“The High Line is a monument to the industrial history of New York’s West Side. It offers an opportunity to create an innovative new public space, raised above the city streets, with views of the Hudson River and the city skyline. Its conversion is a global model for the reuse of transportation infrastructure, offering greening opportunities, alternative transportation options, and social and economic benefits to meet changing needs in post-industrial urban environments.”

Evolver Town Hall Expo and Activism in New York City

St. Marks Church courtyard

On Sunday afternoon at St. Mark’s Church in New York, nonprofits, government organizations, local businesses and active individuals all gathered to address the environmental and economic issues that are affecting New York City, and by extension, the world at large. Titled “Evolver Town Hall”, the volunteer organized event featured workshops, panel discussions, music, art and food, and aimed not only at exposing current issues but giving people the ideas, information, connections, and contacts they need for getting involved within their community.

No Impact Man

The Keynote speaker of the day was Colin Beaven, aka The No Impact Man. In 2006 Colin Beaven launched a year-long project in which he, his wife Michelle and their then two-year-old daughter Isabella, experimented with living with as little environmental impact as possible. Colin Beaven began the project because he grew tired of complaining about public policy and feeling disempowered in the face of government. When the United States went to war with Iraq, Colin Beaven, instead of criticizing events in public protest, decided to see how much change he can affect by focusing on himself and his own family:

“And so, at first,” writes Beaven in his blog, “when the politicians said that they were executing the Iraq War to protect the American way of life—my way of life—I was offended and angry. But then I realized how many resources I use in my life, including oil. I used so much that a war might actually be necessary to protect that way of life, to make sure there was enough to supply my endless consumption. If I expect to be allowed to use so many of the world’s resources, aren’t I partly to blame if my government fights to secure those resources?”

The result became a year-long adventure in minimizing waste, going off the power grid and eating locally.  The many trials and errors of his project were documented daily on his blog, No Impact Man, and provided a narrative vehicle for engaging the public on issues of food system sustainability, water scarcity, climate change and energy and material resource depletion.

Evolver Town Hall panels

The series of panels hosted at the Evolver Town Hall included talks on “Taking Back the Commons”, “Collective Consciousness” and “Real Food and Water”, among many others. The organizations that were present include: Sierra Club NYC, Regenerative Culture, Vertical Farms, Rooftop Food, Eco Eatery, Just Food, Trust for Public Land and Green Edge Collaborative, among many others. Some of the prominent writers that were present include Daniel Pinchbeck, who is also the co-founder of Evolver, and Douglas Rushkoff.

Complementary Currency

Media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff presented on the panel concerning “Complementary Currency”. Douglas Rushkoff has recently completed a book tilted “Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and What You Can Do To Take It Back” which traces the origins of corporations back to the Renaissance and the founding of chartered monopolies. In his work Rushkoff argues that our current way of life evolved through a series of steps by which the corporation has infiltrated all aspect of our daily lives. In his talk, Rushkoff, along with representatives of Time Interchange of NY and the Woodstock Time Bank, attempted to present alternative ways to create and share wealth.

Complementary currency is a term referring to currency that complements the National currency. It is often used locally, by a community, on the value of real resources, or often it is time based, where the unit of account is the hour; such that if I do something for you, I have a credit of an hour and can use that credit with someone else, creating a community currency based on sharing time, skill and resources.

Bernard Leitaer, the Belgian economist and author said in an interview for the magazine Nexus:

“Time dollars are helping in a lot of communities where conventional money is scarce (…) It’s working, it doesn’t cost anything to the taxpayer, it doesn’t create a huge bureaucracy, and it encourages the solution of the local problems by and with the very people who know most about them.”

What is money? Most textbooks, Leitaer says, only define what money does:

“I define money, or currency, as an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. It’s therefore not a thing, it’s only an agreement – like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal. And most of the time, it’s done unconsciously. Nobody’s polled about whether you want to use dollars. We’re living in this money world like fish in water, taking it completely for granted.”

The ideas presented in the panel is that money is one of the highest leverage points for change in society. Complementary currency can be just one suggestion for challenging our relationship to money, and therefore also our interactions with those that we exchange with.

To find out more about the Evolver Town Hall, and various ways to get involved see here.

North Korea, Revealed by Google Earth & Citizen Activists

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/technology/23link.html

Citizen activists have been pooling information about North Korea in order to reveal the locations of hidden prisons and other sites of interest in the humanitarian effort to effect greater transparency on the isolated regime.

“Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts,” the Wall Street Journal reports, citizen activists “affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe.”

Curtis Melvin, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University in Virginia, has been using the Google Earth platform as well as information from various sources, including former members of the U.S. military who once studied the country professionally, to create a more informative map of the country. “Once you start mapping the power plants and substations and wires, you can connect the infrastructure with the elite compounds,” Mr. Melvin says. “And then you see towns that have no power supply at all.”

Melvin’s work, and the work of other individuals, illustrate how collective intelligence, coupled with available technology, has a shrinking effect on our world; that the spread of knowledge cannot be contained and that governmental secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet. “Google has made a witness of all of us,” says Mr. Brownback (Senator of Kansas). “We can no longer deny these things exist.”

Joshua Stanton, who maintains the website Free Korea has mapped out the confines of Camp 22, a labor camp and detention facility on the northeastern tip of North Korea.

“Camp 22 is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children. We can only see one portion of the camp with Google Earth’s high-resolution photography.”

image of camp 22 from http://freekorea.us/camps/22

Revealing maps and documented information about labor camps and other secret facilities has aided Human Rights activists such as David Hawk, who, working for the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, has published a paper titled “The Hidden Gulag” based on these findings.

“The media have also failed to tell this story. The few reporters who go to North Korea seldom venture far from the capital, Pyongyang. When they do go, Internal Security Bureau minders drive them all along pretty much the same circuit of palaces, tombs, and monuments. None ever gets within miles of Camp 22, and few ask. Still, they bring us back footage of tombs and monuments and strident quotes from their minders and tell us how much more we now know about North Korea than we did before. Until the international media decides to cover the story of Camp 22, it will remain out of sight and out of mind.”

Other community efforts for the free distribution of information include WikiLeaks which aims to reveal unethical behavior in governments and institutions worldwide. The site maintains disclosed documents that are “classified, censored or otherwise opaque to the public record” and relies on readers to alert their community and the press about revelations found here.

The Free Culture World: Open Platforms, Community and Participation

shanghai, photo by andy doro

On Monday, writer David Bollier was at the Courant Institute at New York University to promote his new book “Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of their Own” (free press). The book is a history of the free culture movement and the sharing economy. It is about how the phenomena of free and open source software and the growth of non-market creativity are disrupting the corporate structure-holds and re-shaping politics and culture.

Bollier talked about how today we are experiencing a hybrid world, one in which mass media and centralized control is finding itself in a dialogue and negotiation with the macro-economic, cultural force of open access advocates and citizen activists whose efficient, user-driven creativity on open platforms is driving new market structures and leveraging change in the way we access information.

Bollier defines the sharing economy vis-a-vis open source in all of its manifestations: open business models, open access journals, open code, open education, etc. – all of these changes to the way we share information and to our cycle of discovery and innovation, are creating what Bollier calls a new “commons”, a virtual open space common to us all. Unlike the commons described in the “tragedy of the commons” (where individuals acting in their own self-interest destroy a shared limited resource disregarding their own long-term interests) the online commons is an infinitely extensible resource and sharing the space in an open, decentralized way actually drives innovation and expands the richness of the commons.

The commons, Bollier says, is a new social metabolism in our cultural ecosystem for governance and law. Cicero said “freedom is participation in power” and perhaps, Bollier suggests, in our current globalized and digitized world we see a new kind of citizen emerge. A citizen who asks for open access, the freedom to participate, the need for transparency, and for social equity. We see activists and citizen bloggers exposing things neglected by mainstream media and, in a way, forcing mainstream media to take notice. The creation of the Creative Commons license grew out of a need to re-address the current copyright acts and, to an extent, the monopoly on culture. In a variety of ways, along a spectrum of initiatives, the “Commoners” (as Bollier refers to this new type of citizen) is asking for a discourse on open access.

hell's kitchen, photo by andy doro

Bollier’s ideas are reminiscent of another book along similar themes. In his book “Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant Lot Gardners are Inventing the Future Today” Chris Carlsson writes: “As capitalism continues, colonizing our thoughts and desires, new practices are emerging that are re-defining politics and opening spaces of unpredictability in the detritus of modern life.” Chris Carlsson identifies an emerging group of people, drawn together by shared values, alternative living arrangements and non-economic relationships, that are forming a communal solidarity to confront the everyday commodification of capitalism. They are forming networks of activity that refuse the measurements of money; but instead of opposing technological advancements they are engaging with technology in creative and experimental ways. Carlsson chooses the term “Nowtopians” but the idea is similar to Bollier’s.

The Nowtopians, Carlsson explains, are a new form of Utopians, who seek to create a contemporary commons out of vacant lots and open bandwith. “Really, really free markets”, writes Carlsson, “anti-commodities, festivals and free services are imaginative products of an anti-economy provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and inventive people.” Growing out of the communal movements of the 1960’s, the be-ins and the Green Revolution, this group of Nowtopians are searching for an Exodus out of capitalist society and are building communities within the shell of our current system.

“Fragmentation and crises”, Carlsson writes, “are besetting the world order and the government and economic institutions on which this order is based are becoming increasingly dysfunctional while losing creditability.” The Nowtopians are tinkerers and experimenters, DIYers (do it yourself-ers) who support an open source technosphere and an alternative food system (local, seasonal, organic as opposed to mass produced). Their social alternative to a meritocratic society is to embrace co-ops and collectives.

While Bollier focuses more on digital innovations and his book does not extrapolate as far as Carlsson’s, he does explore how Commoners are engaging with market structures by often building new markets on top of the commons (we see this in the bankability of social networks like Twitter and Facebook). And, despite an uncertainty on how the growth of an open society will relate with or change current systems of power, there is nonetheless an exploration taking place in both of these books on how the market economy is adapting or prevailing to the change. Furthermore the conversation extends to ecologists and futuroligsts.

In his book Peak Everything Richard Heinberg predicits: “once we accept that energy, fresh water and food will become less freely available over the decades we see that while the 20th Century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of scale, scope and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st Century will see contraction and simplification.” If one thing has resonated out of this new openness of information it is perhaps a greater understanding of the delicate balance of a global ecology and maybe the understanding that no nation is completely independent, and that all the world’s resources are shared.

astor place and broadway, photo by andy doro

Grassroots Art Collectives go to Washington, talk about Public Art

This week art collectives were invited to the White House to discuss public art and “the issues related to the disappearance of common access to public space”. The Wooster collective was just one of 60 organizations dedicated to grassroots art initiatives that met with officials in the Obama Administration “to listen and learn what the administration was thinking in regards to the arts, to ask questions, and then to participate in working sessions” on issues they felt passionate about.

The role that public art plays in city life is an interesting topic to explore, especially the relationship between commissioned public works and spontaneous street art. Public art often enriches a community’s positive sense of identity and helps enhances roadsides, pedestrian corridors, and community gateways; but spontaneous street art can also have a strong influence on a community, and street art is universal. Its experimental nature, outside the realm of cultural institutions, can challenge perceptions of public space and can open dialogues with the surrounding environment. It is interesting to see the White House taking an interest to meet with artists and artists collectives to open up a dialogue about the arts, and the importance of public art to education, civic life and community building.

Endangered Languages

There are maybe over 6,800 known languages in the world today, and many more dialects. Already over 400 of these languages are close to extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left (Busuu in Cameroon, Chiapaneco in Mexico, Lipan Apache in the United States, Wadjigu in Australia, etc.) and 3,000 or so others are endangered. Linguists classify languages on a scale ranging from “safe” (learnt by all children in the group, and spoken by all its members) to “critically endangered” (only a few old speakers). On that scale, “endangered” comes in the middle, meaning that children no longer learn the language and only adults speak it.

One such endangered language is the language of the Kalash. It is a Dardic language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian group. Currently about 5,000 people speak Kalasha and is considered critically endangered by UNESCO.

Until the latter 20th century, Kalasha was an undocumented language. More recently, through the work of a Greek NGO and local Kalash elders seeking to preserve their oral traditions, a new Kalasha alphabet has been created. Taj Khan Kalash has also been influential in the development of the new alphabet and creating The Alphabet Book, a primer used to teach the alphabet to the Kalash children.

The Long Now Foundation, which is a foundation that focuses on thinking for the extended future, has began an extensive catalogue of the world’s languages. An article in the Wall Street Journal pointed to the fact that emerging technologies do not represent many of the world’s languages.”The idea of having your cultural identity represented in this technology is increasingly important.” If each language is a “window to the world”, when languages are lost so is the culture and wisdom of a people.

For more information on the Kalash, see here: http://kalashapeople.org/

Local Economies and the Church of Life After Shopping

photo by yovel schwartz

I mentioned the Reverend Billy yesterday and I thought I would write more about him:

The New-York based activist, Reverend Billy is an Elvis-inspired, white-suit-clad iconoclast and self-ordained minister of his own Church, the Church of Life After Shopping. As reverend he preaches the evils of consumerism. But with a 40 member choir and a feature film under his belt, “What Would Jesus Buy”, Reverend Billy is not just a fringe comedian, he has become a recognizable figure and now he will be running for mayor of New York City.

Simultaneously mocking the religious right and consumerist culture, Reverend Billy acts like a televangelist as he preaches his dogma of local business first and how to empower communities to fight against the corporate landscape. He pushes for “community finance” – neighborhood banks that lend to local business, allowing profits to stay in the community, and he is campaigning on a community-first platform, under the Green Party ticket.

“Our actions to support independent business, unions, and sweat-free labor are rooted in the struggles of particular communities emblematic of larger struggles.  In particular, many of our actions focus on New York’s East Village, internationally recognized as a site where flourishing shops and culture are seriously threatened by a rapid influx of chain stores.  Currently, between 2nd Avenue and Avenue D and Houston Street and 14th Street there are less than 10 chain stores, making it one of the last few commercial sites in Manhattan where independently owned business predominate. The struggles to defend the East Village therefore set precedents for communities around the world.  In protecting and strengthening neighborhood diversity, we build critical case studies that emboldens healthy neighborhoods everywhere to fight their own extinction.” (~Reverend Billy)

photo courtesy of mushon zer-aviv

As reported in the Wall Street Journal:
Sure, it sounds kind of dreamy, but such systems are already in place in the neighborhoods large and small. Small businesses thrive, but they are often at the mercy of big banks who giveth and taketh credit according to shifts in economic cycles. “The Wall Street experience is parallel and equal to the destruction of neighborhoods through chain stores,” Reverend Billy says. Basic economics are on the Reverend’s side. For every dollar spent at a chain store, studies show only 50 cents stays in that community. By contrast, 90 cents of every dollar spent at a local business remains in the local economy. “It’s a little reductive, but people recognize there’s a truth in it,” Reverend Billy says. “Neighborhoods are economic powerhouses.”

Although he has little chances of winning the bid to be Mayor of New York City, Reverend Billy is using the political platform to bring attention to his cause. Although he strikes up his fair share of controversy he is also bringing to the forefront the issue of the importance of building local communities, an issue that the mainstream media is starting to take notice of, as evidenced in this recent NYT article about a car-free community in Vauban, Germany.

Viral Video Evades the Censors in China

A viral video in China has been raising eyebrows and causing much discussion. The video is about a mythical creature called a “grass-mud horse”, a name which, when written is quite benign, but spoken takes on a different meaning – and sounds like a terrible curse. The video has evaded the Chinese censors which frequently block internet keywords that could be seen as a threat to the government; thus the video has reached notoriety for its mocking of the repressive regime.

In the video the grass-mud horses are facing a problem, invading “river crabs” are devouring their grassland. “In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds very much like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been “harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’s regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.” The viral video and the phenomena it is causing in cyberspace was written about in the New York Times.

From the New York Times:

“The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.

Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down was bullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers had written in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’s monitoring project at the University of California, called it “the most vicious crackdown in years.”

It was against this background that the grass-mud horse and several mythical companions appeared in early January on the Chinese Internet portal Baidu. The creatures’ names, as written in Chinese, were innocent enough. But much as “bear” and “bare” have different meanings in English, their spoken names were double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings.

So while “grass-mud horse” sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus the beast not only has dodged censors’ computers, but has also eluded the government’s own ban on so-called offensive behavior.”

to read the full article see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?_r=4&hp and thank you to andy doro for pointing the story out.

Direct Action and the Legacy of the Bhopal Disaster

On December 3rd, 1984, an industrial disaster occurred at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, releasing 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas (MIC) and other toxins and exposing over 500,000 people. It is estimated that over 8,000 people died within the first 2 weeks of the disaster but the legacy of the toxic contamination continues to plague Bhopal as generation after generation of people are born with birth defects and suffer serious maladies as a result to the exposure.

A proper clean-up of the affected region was not adequately performed. Contaminants are still present in the water of at least 16 villages in the area surrounding the plant. At the time Union Carbide offered $370 million for the disaster but the company, later bought by Dow Chemicals, refused to release information about what toxic gasses were leaked from the plant in order to help local doctors find cures for those infected; to this day Dow Chemicals cites the information as a “trade secret”.

image courtesy of Getty images. Demonstrators parade an effigy representing former Union Carbide Chief Warren Anderson during a demonstration in Bhopal, 03 December 2006

The terrible heritage that has been left to the region and the unaccountability of the corporations involved has forced survivors to take direct action.  The victims demand their Prime Minister to fight for the people of Bhopal in the face of the corporations. 25 years after the tragedy they still ask that relief can be given to the families affected, information be disclosed so that doctors can more effectively treat victims, and that environmental clean-up and access to clean water is provided.

The organizations Students for Bhopal and Bhopal Survivors were in Brooklyn yesterday at the Change You Want to See gallery to speak about their cause. They also showed excerpts of the new film by the Yes Men in which the activists pulled a hoax on the BBC, claiming they were representatives of Dow Corporation and at long last claiming responsibility for the Bhopal disaster.

They Students for Bhopal are traveling to different schools around the US and are heading to the Union Carbide subsidiary of Dow Chemicals in West Virgina, where lawsuits have also been taken against the corporation by local residents for environmental pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. The Students for Bhopal are fighting to raise awareness about Corporate crimes. In Bhopal activists and survivors took part in a 37 day march and took such direct actions as fasting, chaining themselves to the offices of the Prime Minister, organizing a “die-in”, writing letters to the Prime Minister in blood and sending him heart shaped cards urging him to “have a heart” and help the victims of the tragedy.

For more information see http://thetruthaboutdow.org/and for ways to help see here: http://www.bhopal.net/ and http://www.bhopal.org/

Growth of Open-Source City Government

In an effort to actively affect urban life citizen activists have been pushing for the development of open source / open data projects in government. As noted in a recent O’Reilly article it follows that “the conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities” so there is a push to drive our cities towards open, crowdsourced and participatory government.

As noted in the article:

“Take for example the case of the New York City MTA, which currently operates at a budget deficit of $1.2 billion, and has been trying and failing for almost 20 years to implement a realtime tracking system for the city’s buses, at a cost of millions. As the MTA sees it, their two options are 1. pay for a gigantic, centralized, monolithic tracking system or 2. don’t have bus tracking. (And with their current budget shortfall, it seems like option 2 is the only real choice for them).

What if, instead, they entertained the idea of implementing an open bus tracking system, one that relied to some extent on aggregated individual input from bus riders? What if they then crowdsourced ideas on how best to do this? And finally, what if they cooperated with the people who came forward with ideas, to make it easy for them to implement them?

Very quickly there would be some semblance of a bus tracking system in New York City–not a perfect one, but one that could be iterated on and improved on by all until it was robust enough to be relied on by residents of the city. That would at the very least be better than the complete lack of bus tracking the city has now, and it would cost the city nothing to initiate.

To the MTA of course this is unthinkable. They refuse to even make their timetable information public via API, citing legal and security concerns, and seeming to harbor a feeling that there’s money to be made from that data.

To be fair, some government agencies are more forward thinking that this, a few even going so far as to link out to third party applications built using their publicly available data. Most though fall closer to the MTA in their stance toward open data and third party applications. And so the damper is kept on these kinds of innovative solutions to our cities’ problems.

Of course these new sorts of user-built services are beginning to pop up anyway, even without the blessing of the city agencies they help. Programmers, on their own, are exploiting every possible resource to build applications that help people make better use of their city. The result in the case of the MTA is a variety of applications, built without the approval of the MTA, that exist to make the MTA’s service better.

These services are being built and used whether the cities want them or not.

Imagine now what would happen if cities did throw their weight behind this kind of innovation? The landscape of those cities would change virtually overnight, with legions of new applications springing up to provide residents with every sort of information conceivable, making their decisions more informed, making their movements more coordinated, and ultimately making the cities themselves work better.

This change would happen at a fraction of the cost of any proposals for change currently being considered by cities around the world. And much of that cost, for development and operation, would be offloaded from the city itself to the individuals building and using these services.”

The author illustrates that changes are already happening to the distribution of information and whether or not city governments actievely support them interested developers will continue to create new technologies to affect city life and push towards more transparent systems that encourage collective participation and move away from propiety stystems to give greater power to individual citizens.

For more inspiration see: http://diycity.org/