High Rise (J.G. Ballard)
“ High-Rise was and is a barbed satire on urban planning. When the novel appeared in 1975, it skewered Britain on the verge of the Margaret Thatcher years when the gospel of free markets impoverished the public sphere, and when the Docklands district would go through cycles of real estate boom and bust. Ballard undercut the pretensions of star architects and top-down planners, anticipating Michel de Certeau’s commentary, in The Practice of Everyday Life, on the limitations of panoptic views of cities compared to the actual experience of walking the streets. The building’s architect Anthony Royal (Irons) lives on the top floor and views his creation as a “crucible for change,” but it is the middling folks lower down whose anger fuels spatialized class warfare and turns his social experiment to disaster. “ - Carl Abbott LARB
The Innovator Delusion (Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel)
“It is, simultaneously, both absolutely necessary and usually neglected. This is a cruel irony, since maintenance is the key to ensuring that the benefits of technology are felt in their full depth and breadth... Maintenance preserves order. It is the constant war against entropy—the second law of thermodynamics, which states that, over time and without intervention, every system will decline into disorder and randomness. Although you wouldn’t know it from histories that fixate on innovation and inventors, much of human history is, in fact, stories of stability: of how societies coordinate labor to maintain the large-scale public systems we’ve relied on since ancient times.”
