Sunday
01Mar2009
Facebook + ReTweet = Interesting Article About Size & Scale
Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 7:48PM
Just prior to going to bed at the end of the weekend, I was surfing a bit (Ryan Lanham's Facebook profile, looking at common friends, etc.) and noticed on Ryan's profile a re-tweet from Dave Snowden's FB listing, which led to me to this excellent BBC News article...
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[ Snip ... ]
What has become completely irrelevant is any idea of scale based on us human beings.
It's said that such things can work with streamlined efficiency, but somewhere along the line we seem to have lost our sense of the scale of what works for people and groups of people.
Instant communications systems, incredible ways of using steel and glass have made it possible to build bigger and bigger buildings, larger merged organisations, wider alliances, huger institutions. And some of it's a disaster.
[ Snip ... ]
Grandiose ideas, big projects. Thinking big always seems so attractive, but it can be a crucial mistake. The vast projects built after the war to relieve the dismal slums of the past are the lawless sink estates of today; in many ways they don't work as well as the old insanitary huddled cottages.
Garden of one's own
Baroness Mary Stocks was pointing out decades ago that the wide green communal spaces beloved of 1960s idealists were far less satisfying psychologically than the grotty little backyards where a family could keep its rabbits, its nasturtiums, its rusty pram that might or might not be needed again.
And it's not only modern schemes that can be too big. Look at some of the ghastly Victorian institutions.
[ Snip ... ]
Money talks
And in a globalised world, it tends to be the only way - that's the trouble. In the City there used to be such a thing as shame, but that was before it all went worldwide.
In Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, set in mid 19th Century New York, the banker Julius indulges in some shady business - and no-one will speak to him at the opera. Socially, he is ruined.
There's nothing like that now: the financial world, like so much else, is just too big. Who, in our world, is going to make even suspected fraudsters like Madoff or Stanford feel ostracised and despised?
"No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back," said anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Communes aren't in fashion right now, it's conglomerates and global empires. But in the end we can all relate only to a certain number of people; a unity more or less like a family.
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 Dwarfed by a skyscraper
 Want to go large on housing, schools, prisons, hospitals or simply pricetags? Bad idea - keeping a lid on size is the way to go, says Katharine Whitehorn. | |
[ Snip ... ]
What has become completely irrelevant is any idea of scale based on us human beings.
It's said that such things can work with streamlined efficiency, but somewhere along the line we seem to have lost our sense of the scale of what works for people and groups of people.
Instant communications systems, incredible ways of using steel and glass have made it possible to build bigger and bigger buildings, larger merged organisations, wider alliances, huger institutions. And some of it's a disaster.
[ Snip ... ]
Grandiose ideas, big projects. Thinking big always seems so attractive, but it can be a crucial mistake. The vast projects built after the war to relieve the dismal slums of the past are the lawless sink estates of today; in many ways they don't work as well as the old insanitary huddled cottages.
Garden of one's own
Baroness Mary Stocks was pointing out decades ago that the wide green communal spaces beloved of 1960s idealists were far less satisfying psychologically than the grotty little backyards where a family could keep its rabbits, its nasturtiums, its rusty pram that might or might not be needed again.
Few estates retain communal gardens |
And it's not only modern schemes that can be too big. Look at some of the ghastly Victorian institutions.
[ Snip ... ]
Money talks
And in a globalised world, it tends to be the only way - that's the trouble. In the City there used to be such a thing as shame, but that was before it all went worldwide.
In Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, set in mid 19th Century New York, the banker Julius indulges in some shady business - and no-one will speak to him at the opera. Socially, he is ruined.
There's nothing like that now: the financial world, like so much else, is just too big. Who, in our world, is going to make even suspected fraudsters like Madoff or Stanford feel ostracised and despised?
"No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back," said anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Communes aren't in fashion right now, it's conglomerates and global empires. But in the end we can all relate only to a certain number of people; a unity more or less like a family.
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