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One of my favourite Twitter nuggets from last week is this short excerpt of a keynote by Marco te Brömmelstroet, a scholar of urban mobility. The whole talk is excellent but just the two minutes of this short snippet will make you look at street intersections in new ways.
te Brömmelstroet shows a busy Amsterdam intersection without any traffic lights to highlight the benefits of having to negotiate your way through it. It seems chaotic and dangerous at first, but when you zoom in, you see stress-free people engaged in constant conflict-solving and information-sharing with all of their senses.
According to te Brömmelstroet, when people engage with others in this ‘dance’, they automatically get to enjoy a long list of benefits: a higher sense of influence, integration and neighbouring, a shared emotional connection, a sense of community, citizen participation and place, among others. Most importantly though, it seems to increase the level of trust between one another – between a random, diverse bunch of people. How about that?
The typical office worker living in or near cities starts their day by getting into a car parked in their garage to drive to the city, where they find a parking spot that’s ideally in the same building as their workplace. At the end of the day, they do it all again in reverse. During almost all of their ‘outside’ time, they haven’t actually been outside at all. Most of their interaction with others has been outsourced to or mediated by machines – from traffic lights to parking ticket machines. There is hardly any in-person conflict resolution required. As people working in tech know too well, human interaction is increasingly designed out of our lives.
The more I follow urban mobility experts on Twitter, the more I realise that we’ve designed our cities upside down. The car-as-a-default mindset is so deeply entrenched in our thinking that we can no longer imagine a functional society in which cars do not dominate the streetscape.
For more fresh perspectives and some really wholesome, future-positive content (a future powered by low-key, accessible technologies that already exist), follow some of these urban mobility accounts on Twitter: Brent Toderian, Hayden Clarkin, Dutch Cycling Embassy, Cycling Professor and 21st Century City. – Kai
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Become a Friend of DD for $1.80/month →
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Community Operations Made Easy SPONSOR
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The future of community engagement
Building a community-first business is hard. There are countless different tools to manage, on top of creating content and engaging community members. Burb is the only toolset you need to operate and grow membership communities and courses on Slack, Circle, and Discord.
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Apps & Sites
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Instead of designing individual Keynote slides, Gamma works like a stream of cards that you just keep adding to. Various content modules are compiled into a free-flowing vertical document that feels less restrictive than typical slideshow tools.
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Language-learning community
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A DD reader had only nice things to say about Busuu, a platform that helped her learn German while staying in Berlin. Other languages are on offer, including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, taught through a mix of online courses, community exchange and live tutoring by native speakers.
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ManyBooks was established back in 2004 to provide an extensive library of books in digital format for free to anyone on the internet. Today it hosts over 50,000 free ebooks with many classics, but also new indie titles added daily.
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A wonderful visualisation project that shows how far you can go by train in Europe within five hours of travel. Paris’ and Frankfurt’s reach, for instance, are really impressive and show how accessible Europe really is by public transport.
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Worthy Five: Rebecca Magee
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Five recommendations by menstrual cycle and climate educator Rebecca Magee
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A concept worth understanding:
I heard climate activist India Logan-Riley say that they see Earth as a trans woman, and I have been thinking about it non-stop since. There’s so much beautiful diversity on our planet that dominant binary worldviews suppress but that is essential to sustaining life on Earth. And honestly, the joy I feel when I think about it is probably why it’s stayed in my mind.
A book worth reading:
Womancode by Alisa Vitti is a great starting place for women and menstruators, ready to expand their body literacy. And especially now in the times of post-Roe here in the US, it is essential that we give menstruators the health education they need and deserve.
A recipe worth trying:
Abhyanga, or Ayurvedic self-massage. Times are hard, and I’m so grateful to have this in my toolkit to soothe my nervous system. After experimenting with all the oils, I recommend organic refined sesame oil.
A podcast worth listening to:
This interview with author and activist Sherri Mitchell on the Hurry Slowly podcast will expand your mind. In the episode, she shares deep wisdom on what this time is on Earth and how we can rise to meet it.
A piece of advice worth passing on:
I don’t remember where I saw it, but I’ve been repeating to myself: ‘Any pace is a good pace.’ Since I work in climate – and I’m in an early stage of business where there is an infinite amount of work – the feelings of urgency have amplified the feeling I’ve always had of being behind. I’m working on letting go of that thought and any urge to rush, and this advice reminds me I’m right on time.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Rebecca Magee in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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A love letter to language
Writer and sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris is obsessed with something seemingly trivial – the warning message found inside Kinder Surprise eggs – and uses it as a springboard to uncover the complexity and diversity of language. “With the help of the international community of language geeks, he shows us what the [Kinder Surprise] message looks like in Ancient Sumerian, Zulu, Cornish, Klingon – and many more. Along the way he considers why Hungarian writing looks angry, why no one actually speaks Arabic, and the meaning of the heavy metal umlaut.”
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Techno-solutionism & the future of transportation
Paris Marx with a timely book about Silicon Valley’s vision for the future of transportation and why many of its promises – autonomous cars, ride-hailing services and underground tunnels to name a few – are implausible and potentially dangerous. “The book argues that rethinking mobility can be the first step in a broader reimagining of how we design and live in our future cities. We must create streets that allow for social interaction and conviviality. We need reasons to get out of our cars and to use public means of transit determined by community needs rather than algorithmic control.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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To all the haters talking shit about me behind my back, keep doing what you’re doing. I absolutely could not emotionally handle hearing any of that.
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Food for Thought
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A great piece with the right mix of advice and inspiration to help you be more useful and comfortable in situations of disagreement. “The highest compliment from someone who disagrees with you is not, ‘You were right.’ It’s ‘You made me think.’ Good arguments help us recognise complexity where we once saw simplicity. The ultimate purpose of debate is not to produce consensus. It’s to promote critical thinking.”
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This is one of those ‘can’t unsee’ reads: public spaces in our towns and cities have a huge range of use cases, but our language almost exclusively considers them from the perspective of drivers. “When we block traffic from a street, like for a sports event or a street party, we say that the street is ‘closed’. But who is it closed for? For motorists. But really, that street is now open to people.”
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Even if you’re not based in the US, the impact of the recently passed bill tackling climate change will be felt globally. Hank Green provides a really good breakdown and assessment of the bill, including its shortcomings. He shows how the money allocated smartly links subsidies to the creation of local jobs. All up, a pretty inspiring piece of legislation. I just wish it also included incentives and subsidies for EVs other than cars.
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Over the span of a decade, photographer Trevor Traynor took portraits of newsstand owners in their shops. “Drawn in by the vibrant colors and organized product placement, this series began its journey providing an instant time stamp via magazine covers and headlines.”
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The colourful, detail-rich artwork of Hawaiian artist Jon Ching is inspired by the interconnectedness of nature. “His work is a surreal imagining of what limitless wonders and combinations nature can produce.”
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For his series Sonic Sculptures, Martin Klimas positioned splatters of paint over the diaphragm of a speaker and then played a variety of dynamic music. “The vibration of the speaker sends the paint aloft in patterns that reveal themselves through the lens of his Hasselblad.” Top: Terry Riley; Bottom: Miles Davis.
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The quirky Ortank typeface explores the confines of geometric shapes. “Its goal is to ally the radically simple with some classical influence, coming from the lineale grotesque style.”
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Notable Numbers
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Germany’s temporary 9 Euro ticket deal has come to a successful conclusion. The special summer ticket provided access to all public transport, anywhere in Germany, for just €9/month. 52 million tickets were sold – equal to more than 60% of the country’s population – with an estimated CO2 emissions saving of 1.8 million tons.
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Indonesia will enforce laws on digital content moderation with tight response time and harsh fines. A newly revealed working document quotes a fine of $33,000 per violation and dictates that once companies are notified of a takedown notice, they have 24 hours to take down content, and just four hours to take down content labelled as ‘urgent’.
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France will now pay €4,000 (nearly US $4,000) to anyone swapping their old polluting car for a cleaner, more efficient, and more city-appropriate electric bicycle.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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