On PhD outcomes
But if I had to name the very best outcome of the PhD (besides being greeted with ‘Welcome back, Dr Mewburn’ while boarding aeroplanes) is that I am not afraid to appear stupid. When I discover my ignorance, I know how to fix it. I’ll just research the shit out of it. People should fear my mad skills of research.
Job vs Career
‘A job is what you do for other people. A career is who you are’, Mark said. He told me that a career mission is driven by a desire to solve a particular set of problems. Your job is just whoever happens to be paying for you to do your mission at any one time. A career potentially spans many of these mission oriented jobs.
Inger Mewburn (The Thesis Whisperer), in How to be an Academic
Darkest Hour
Watched Darkest Hour last weekend. 5-star movie in my opinion, with a great quote to finish it up: Read more…
Climate in the city
Facebook has reminded me today that four years ago I updated my ‘research page’* on this website, where I wrote about the seed for my PhD thesis. That seed was my wanderings through different climate zones and my fascination about the ways climate shapes people’s lives, although most of the time people don’t think about it. Read more…
City design, and the need for flexibility
The problem with the history of city design is that it is all about master planning, ignoring resilience theory, with the underlying unspoken intention of creating the ideal city that never needs to be changed
Soft city of illusion
In Seeing the Better City by Charles R. Wolfe (2016)
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the second great misunderstanding that lies at the root of most urban degradation today: widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter crime.
Speck, Jeff (2012) Read more…
Induced demand is the name for what happens when increasing the supply of roadways lowers the time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion. Read more…
I think people are suspicious of schemes that offer them nothing in return. We should get rid of automobiles, but in a positive way. What we need is more things that conflict with their needs—wider sidewalks, more space for trees, even double lines of trees on some sidewalks, dead ends not for foot traffic but for automobiles, more frequent places for people to cross streets, more traffic lights—they’re an abomination to automobiles, but a boon to pedestrians. And then we should have more convenient public transportation.
We constantly sacrifice all kinds of amenities for automobiles. I think we can wear down their number by sacrificing the roadbed to some of our other needs instead. It’s a switch in values.
(Jane Jacobs) Read more…
