New Tech for Participatory Planning: Grade A for a grey day

The Open Planning Project hosted New Technology for Participatory Planning – an ‘unconference’ last Friday, and what a grade A way to spend a grey day at the end of the week. The crowd was a pretty even split of techies and planners – the Regional Planning Association co-hosted. So the room was full of [...]

NYPL Live: Capitalism and the Future

From grass-roots to ski-slopes, we’re shifting seamlessly from posts about London’s Bigger Picture to skip off to the New York Public Library Live event this evening (Tuesday 7pm): The Aspen Institute presents Capitalism and the Future, a light pre-dinner aperitif from the Institute’s President, Walter Isaacson, Black Swan author, Nassim Taleb, Harvard economist, Niall Ferguson, Google’s [...]

Reporting Back from The Bigger Picture (3): Got any small change?

Here’s the third and final installment of Ben Reizenstein’s round up from The Bigger Picture, part of nef’s Day of Interdependence, which took place last weekend in London: 
I don’t catch the name of the woman who is suddenly standing next to the queue, talking to us, her captive audience, about local currencies in the Welsh [...]

Reporting back from The Bigger Picture (1)

While Turnstone is off to polish a class syllabus, and a massive master (Ms?) list of the trickle-turned-into-a-flood responses to our question about women in tech, it gives us great pleasure to hand the mic over to a guest contributor.
We dedicate the next three posts to a detailed review of the new economics foundation’s Day [...]

The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence

Last week, a reader of the Turnstone blog posed the question, what’s the next big thing for New York? Zooming out from the Mayoral election myopia for a second, we were looking around for answers to this question, and came across this, from the New Economics Foundation in the UK:
On October 24, London’s South Bank [...]

“How To Stay Free” at the University of Trash

Of all the flyers we receive, the ones with headshots of grinning neo-conservatives don’t usually grab our attention first.
But sure enough, our artist friends, Daniel Lichtman and David Baumflek sent out an invitation to attend the first of their three discussions, “How to Stay Free”, about art practice in an age of neo-liberalism. Part [...]

Many a True Word Designed in Jest: iPanic

Wow, talking of suites of services for the downturn, Holly Brubach of Frogelson Lubliner just published this illustrative suckerpunch in the New York Times.

Shoptastica: Ranking Ranqueen

Back in the golden age of reckless shopaholism, we published a story in The Economist about why shops still exist, now you can buy everything online. We still collect gems about ridiculous shops that really don’t make the list of essential convenience stores: Recently, a friend told us about Tokyo-based Ranking Ranqueen, a concept store [...]