control

Article: Critical Imagination
Military check point in the street, Kimihurura Neighborhood, Kigali, 2017.

Contemporary Urban Paranoia

Why We Should Look into the Surveillance Camera The permanent spatial state of exception in the urban environment is a much-discussed topic in postmodern discourse, yet a critical re-assessment of the contemporary situation is needed. The global proliferation of urban enclaves, and in consequence their ghettoization, indicates an urgent need for social sustainability.1 There is […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Ethical Autonomous Vehicles by Matthieu Cherubini - Amateur Cities

Ethical Autonomous Vehicles

We tend to assume that humans are able to respond wisely in dynamically changing conditions. That a driver could make a choice whether to kill one person to save five other lives, when he finds himself in an infamous trolley dilemma, but how would a machine make such a moral decision? Driverless vehicles might prioritize […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Borders - Ania Ruminska - 2014

Borders

The red-white border brutally cuts through the landscape on the premise of protecting cyclists on a path that meanders for its largest part right in the middle of nowhere. Protecting from what? – one might ask. Perhaps from forgetting that they have left the city and the rule of order that reigns there. To what […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Ziggurat, East, Summer

Vacant spaces are often considered ownerless. Detroit’s Fisher Body Plant 21 has been abandoned for more than 30 years. When Scott Hocking constructed a ziggurat structure out of 6,201 wooden floor-blocks inside of it, it’s devalued and deteriorated state has been called into question. It seems to have awoken a desire to control that space. […]
Article: Critical Imagination
James Brown - Cage Free

Cage Free?

I live in Westmont, New Jersey, a small town in South Jersey just outside of Camden and not far from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Westmont and its neighbouring town of Collingswood boast an urban lifestyle without the expense of Philadelphia; and the main thoroughfare of Haddon Avenue that runs through both of these towns has shops, cafes […]