localism

When designing for a known person or group, infrastructure and access to technology may be prescribed. Typically the context must be understood in order to know what is suitable. For example Australia has a high level of smartphone market penetration, and if targeting residential gardens, there are a likelihood of highcspeed Internet access. This would allow for the use of rich media and high levels of interconnectivity.

Communities on the other hand, such as Northey Street City Farm or Permablitz Brisbane, are limited in time and money to invest in additional technology or infrastructure. In these instances it is important to understand what technology community members already use or what infrastructure is already in place, and how is it currently used. With this understanding, the ability to repurpose, or make use of technology as part of a design, will become clear. Understanding the role technology plays in the lives of gardeners, and when they have access to technology, will result in a more inclusive design (Heitlinger et al., 2013).

We place civic ignorance at the top of our anti-patterns collection because civic ignorance is at the core of everything that human beings do to each other that is harmful.

Civic ignorance takes different forms; it is their sum total and the perfidious interaction among the various forms that creates the Agnosphere, the ubiquitous shroud that fights civic intelligence on all fronts.

It is often quite “natural” and occurs in all of us to some degree. It is most menacing in its professional varieties, when well-resourced and self-serving elites intentionally cultivate ignorance. Historically, in the United States, the tobacco companies were the most treacherous and whose campaigns can be credited with thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths. Currently the climate change denial campaign is the most prominent and much of the intentionally spread misinformation can be traced back to a handful of dedicated billionaires.

How it Works

Civic ignorance is assured in many ways — in general, that's what we're trying to show with our project. Fixating on certain hard-and-fast "truisms" is important. Blaming the other person is important. On an individual level, not even listening to a argument that runs counter to your own is effective since that avoids any real consideration of the issue. From an institutional level, access to information and communication should be controlled by elites. The items on the public agenda should be restricted — but it should not seem like this is the case. Finally, critics of the system should be marginalized or ignored.

Evidence

Links

All of the anti-patterns are related to this!

References

Agnotology book

Economic benefit is derived cumulatively across a landscape, with distributed pockets of sustainable and environmentally-ameliorative activity, rather than highly-intensified activities in larger-scale concentrations. Sources and forms of contribution are diverse and aim to develop financial potential with a minimal footprint.

The ideal is therefore a landscape in which settlement is concentrated in efficient, strategically positioned pockets, linked by good infrastructure designed against principles that preserve and improve the environment. Areas of concentrated settlement should be designed and developed with the objective to improve the environment, for example through water conservation and re- forestation, as well as to limit the need for transport of essential goods, in that as much as possi- ble should be produced locally. As new technologies are developed and become more affordable, it becomes easier for individuals or families to become more self-sufficient, particularly given the great availability of information that the modern world allows us. Instead of focusing on big industry, we should focus on strengthening our own capabilities and limiting what we need from elsewhere.

(note that the Discussion is still in work.....)

Street Music blurs the distinction between producer and consumer of music as well as the distinction between formal and informal venues for music production and consumption. 

Although street bands, including many of those found at Honk Fests, can be found at protests (including the Infernal Noise Machine (image below) that supported the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999), their actions are often political to a large degree by virtue of their publicness in an era of electronic or other formalized or mediated forms of music consumption. 

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-MLvzLlou4 for Environmental Encroachment's performance of Hashia.

Thanks to a member of the Bucharest Drinking Team and to Bob of Environmental Encroachment for their thoughts on the current breed of "new street bands" including their history and motivation. 

This pattern is still in an exploratory stage. It will contain ideas  from Street Science by Jason Corburn, Local Knowledge in the Age of Globalization by Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson, and "Improving Civic Intelligence for Habitat Protection & Rehabilitation" by Prateek Trivedi.

This is from Prateek's report: 

When considering the application of any ‘modern’ or scientific environmental management, one must take into account the indigenous knowledge of the resident communities. As Alison Field-Juma wrote, “Re-examination of indigenous natural resource management systems has shown that far from being static they have embodied the responsiveness, resilience and complexity of the ecology upon which they are based.”