31st Street Transit Co-operative

Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood has been without accessible bus service for over a decade. The CTA’s 31st st. bus route was eliminated as a ‘cost-cutting measure’ in 1998, leaving schools, businesses, and residents isolated from the city’s expansive transit network. The Little Village community, LVLHS, and the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization spent years mounting an unsuccessful campaign to reopen/expand the CTA’s 31st St. route; as of the recent cuts in bus service throughout Chicago, which have resulted in the loss of nine express routes and over 1,000 transit jobs, it has become clear that progress is impossible unless members of the community take control of their transit options.

(more on  chicagoiww.wordpress.com )

P2P (peer-to-peer) urbanism.

Definition prepared by the “Peer-to-peer Urbanism Task Force” consisting of Antonio Caperna, Michael Mehaffy, Geeta Mehta, Federico Mena-Quintero, Agatino Rizzo, Nikos A. Salingaros, Stefano Serafini, and Emanuele Strano.

Peer to Peer Urbanism on Dorfwiki

Peer to Peer Urbanism on Dorfwiki on line community.

Michel Bauwens interviews Nikos Salingaros

MB. The peer-to-peer relational dynamic represents the basic human freedom for humans to connect to each other and to engage in actions without permissions. It can flourish in global cyber-collectives, but also on a local scale, particularly in the interstices of the mainstream system, in places where control is the weakest. Because of this paradoxical effect, it is possible to consider slum dynamics as a peer-to-peer system, which is the point of view of new urbanists like Michael Mehaffy, Nikos Salingaros, and Prakash M. Apte. They are defending the collective intelligence and value creation that have been constructed organically by slum dwellers. Another aspect is worth mentioning.

...about P2P Urbanism

P2P Urbanism may be understood as that collection of urban interventions carried out cooperatively by, amongst others, inhabitants, professionals, NGOs, public agencies, researchers, activists, artists, sociologists, and urban scientists meant to study, construct, and repair the city in a way that anyone may choose, participate, share, and modify theories, methods, and implementation technologies at any one time.

more on:  http://www.biourbanism.org/p2purbanism.htm

P2P-Urbanism World Atlas begins!

Cityleft and the P2P foundation are working to track down and map P2P urban interventions world-wide.

According to the ongoing debate on P2P urbanism we are filtering urban interventions according to the following statement: P2P Urbanism may be understood as that collection of temporary, long-term as well as digital urban interventions carried out cooperatively by, amongst others, inhabitants, professionals, NGOs, public agencies, researchers, activists, artists, sociologists, and urban scientists meant to study, construct, and repair the city in a way that anyone may choose, participate, share, and modify theories, methods, and implementation technologies at any one time.

AP2PS 2010

The Second International Conference on Advances in P2P Systems

October 25 - 30, 2010 - Florence, Italy

http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/CfPAP2PS10.html

Three ways of exclusion, three ways of autonomy

Michel Bauwens

 

We just recently discovered the work of the Croation Pulska Grupa, organizers of the post-capitalist city conference in 2009. Their take on the local situation widely transcends these limitations, as in the following text, which counterposes urban alienation and self-building autonomy. “Such political decisions created a precarious situation in which the population of the coastal region is now facing enormous increases in real-estate prices, a lack of affordable housing, and job deficits outside the tourist season. Moreover, the people on the coast are also under permanent threat of losing their property if the urbanist plan–on which they have no influence–happens to include their land in a future golf terrain. Such insecurity is the direct result of a state repression that is based on three forms of exclusion:

Nikos Salingaros on Peer to Peer Urbanism

Interview with Michel Bauwens.

Q1: We've been covering some of your work on a new 'peer to peer' urbanism in our blog. Perhaps we can explore this connection further. First of all, do you agree with that assessment of your approach being in line with the peer to peer ethos. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to your current thinking and practice. Finally, could you also what you think of my characterization of your work as neotraditional. What I mean is that premodern and what I would call 'trans'modern thinking are both concerned with the primacy of value and the immaterial, and that freed from the modernist rejection of all things traditional, we can now have an open mind and freely draw from thousands of years of human experience.