June 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Cooperative Housing in Germany
During one of our site visits at a development precinct in Orestad, the southern suburbs of Copenhagen, I had a conversation with two German colleagues who were involved in cooperative housing. The conversation included a discussion about sustainable development. There is apparently a public discussion in Germany along the following lines. Individuals interested in constructing buildings that...
1 tag
On harmonising architecture with nature
On the last day of the conference I heard a presentation from Nina-Marie Lister from Ryerson University, Canada entitled “Ecological Urbanism in the Contemporary Metropolitan Landscape”. This is an interview with Nina-Marie I found online, which is a good outline of her ideas and area of interest. The presentation related primarily to integrating nature into our cities but it had me thinking...
1 tag
Informatics
During a discussion with a colleague from Napier University in the UK, I was introduced to the idea of ‘informatics’. According to Wikipedia, this is “a broad academic field encompassing human-computer interaction, information science, information technology, algorithms, and social science” or “the study of the processing, management, and retrieval of information”. Our discussion related to the...
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On climate and the character of a city
Travelling from Sydney to Copenhagen last week I travelled for nearly 24 hours and most of the time we were in darkness. Arriving at 6:30am, it didn’t occur to me until late in the day that this was midsummer and the days were more than 17 hours long. This reminded me of a paper I read about the differences between the civil and the common law. It suggests that the civil law originated around the...
1 tag
Danwei work units in China
Last Friday we (all the EURA 2011 conference participants) were in the Copenhagen Town Hall for a formal reception. I met a colleague from the UK who does a lot of work in China. I asked about the Danwei work units that I wrote about briefly in my paper Emissions Trading in a Cold Economic Climate. These work units were self sufficient systems built around a factory. The factory provided the...
