Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber: Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade (2009)

“The artist book by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber is based on an unpublished orginal text by French philosopher and urbanist Henri Lefebvre which is printed as a facsimile. This central text is contextualized and interpretated by accompanying commentaries and texts by Ljiljana Blagojevic, Zoran Eric, Klaus Ronnberger, and Neil Smith.

The text from Henri Lefebvre was submitted as part of a proposal with French architects Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud for the International Competition for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement in 1986, sponsored by the state of Yugoslavia. In his urban vision for New Belgrade—the capital of former Yugoslavia founded in 1948—Lefebvre emphasizes the processes and potentials of self-organization of the people of any urban territory to counter the failed concepts of urban planning from above. For Lefebvre, at this late point in his life, the promises of both modernist capitalist as well as state socialist architecture and city planning had failed. Yet, Lefebvre viewed New Belgrade and Yugoslavia as having a particular position in what he has elsewhere called “the urban revolution.” As Lefebvre states, “because of self-management, a place is sketched between the citizen and the citadin, and Yugoslavia is today [1986] perhaps one of the rare countries to be able to pose the problem of a New Urban.””

Edited by Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber (Urban Subjects)
With contributions by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Ljiljana Blagojevic, Zoran Eric, Klaus Ronnberger, and Neil Smith
Publisher: Sternberg Press, with Fillip, Vancouver, 2009
ISBN 9781933128771
160 pages

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DJVU (6 MB, updated on 2013-12-8)

James Gleick: The Information. A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011)

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011
ISBN 0375423729, 9780375423727
496 pages

review (Freeman Dyson, NY Books)

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PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-17)

Timothy Vollmer: State of Play: Public Sector Information in the United States (2011)

This topic report examines the background of public sector information (PSI) policy and re-use in the United States, describing the federal, state and local government PSI environments. It explores the impact of these differences against the European framework, especially in relation to economic effects of open access to particular types of PSI, such as weather data. The report also discuss recent developments in the United States relating to PSI re-use, such as Data.gov, the NIH Public Access Policy, and new open licensing requirements for government funded educational resources.

Publisher: European Public Sector Information Platform, Feb 2011
Series: Topic Report, no. 25
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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