Category: book reviews

How to Study Public Life: Methods in Urban Design by Jan Gehl

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought this was going to be a methods book on Public Life studies. And it is, but that is only a small part of the book. There is description of the goals and process of public life study, and a set of case examples of how certain methods were used in actual public spaces around the world. I wish there was more detail here and more description of how many people were involved in various aspects and what some of the common pitfalls of this research tend to be. That would have made this a better methods book.

The rest of the book is occupied with celebrating and recounting the career of co-author Jan Gehl. There is an unexpected though interesting literature review of public life studies starting with Jane Jacobs up until about 2012. Each scholar and many of their books get individual treatment here with regard to their contribution to the field and where they expand on past scholars’ work. If you are interested in diving into this field, this is a go to resource.

All in all, it’s an odd book bringing together a lot of loose ends that it seems like Jan Gehl and his co-author Birgitte Svarre had been meaning to publish. The book is beautifully designed and an accessible read; I just wish it spent more time on the “how” in the title.

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Cities for People by Jan Gehl

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an update to Jan Gehl’s classic Life Between Buildings. Readers of the earlier work will have an opportunity to review the core principles that Gehl has espoused for decades, only updated with full-color photographs from cities around the world—many of which Gehl has worked in but also with many returning from LBB—including Gehl’s obsession with Venice and the Piazza del Campo in Siena. The book does expand it’s arguments by talking about more contemporary building trends with a deep-dive to the triumphs of Gehl’s hometown of Copenhagen, particularly it’s successful increase in bicycle-friendliness.

This is the other area of expansion: Gehl adds on to his livability arguments with new sections on sustainability and healthiness, which reaffirm the needs for cities to be first and foremost for pedestrians. He also touches on developing world contexts and worries about trends there in vehicular traffic crowding out pedestrians and cyclists, making the same mistake developed countries made and are only now undoing. For urban planners and architects, there is a new “Toolbox” section at the end, which collects his principles and diagrams into a few pages for easy reference.

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Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Why did I wait so long to read this book? Fortunately, it holds up well, even in the places where it explains computer lingo—a flaw of many other novels from that era. I was worried when I opened the first page that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. There is a pace to the writing which is nosebleed-inducing at the onset. But once you commit, it feels more like what you would expect from a good thriller.

But let’s talk about the world Stephenson creates/portends. My favorite neologism in the book is “loglo,” which represents the blinding spectacle of light radiating from towering electric roadside signage in every direction. These advertise franchulates, which represent customer service points for franchised corporates that are now sovereign territories as well. Much of the United States government has been privatized. Most notably the Library of Congress and the NSA/CIA have merged and corporatized into the CIC, which employs people as stringers to vacuum up intel for its repository. Stringers make royalties off the intel they collect through the sublime melding of sousveillance and surveillance—it’s libertarian without being liberating. The evolved form of this practice is realized in “gargoyles,” which are essentially stringers with wearable computers and augmented reality googles not unlike Google Glass. Here we come!

The Metaverse is a virtual world, roughly like what Second Life aspired to be, gargoyles are plugged into both simultaneously. Those that have the means—largely “hackers”—have avatars in this world and conduct business here, but it’s only accessible to those with the means of technical chops, finances, and infrastructure to connect and participate. Only a small fraction of the world’s population enjoys the benefits that come from being part of the technological priesthood that “inhabit” the Metaverse. The Third World is largely untouched and referred to as a kind of distant other. There is no mobile computing revolution yet for them—then again it appears that a good bit of East Asia has collapsed—so who knows what happened.

This was too much fun to read, and heartily recommended to the few souls like myself who have not picked it up yet. It was originally meant to be a graphic novel, but even as simply a novel it’s a very engrossing and imagery-rich work, full of creativity and intelligence.

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Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A carefully argued book written by a savvy anthropologist. The main thrust of the book is the assertion that free software hackers or programmers practice a unique form of liberal politics through their “free” labor in creating a common or public good in the form of free software (she focuses on the Debian operating system), and in stewarding the legal freedom that users and contributors enjoy by using such software. Biella argues that several aspects of this technical and philosophical or ethical work lead to its success and have changed the way people think of intellectual property and public goods in other fields.

Biella does a great job of taking the reader through a history of free software and into the lives of free software programmers/hackers through their IRC chats, code snippets, jokes, and personal histories. As far as ethnography goes, this is a very accessible read. There is still a lot of jargon, both social scientific jargon and technical jargon, but the writing is clear. Her choice to use in-line parenthetical citations also helps to flag jargon that is meant to speak to a specific academic audience, letting the lay reader off the hook a bit.

It’s definitely a must-read for students of intellectual property law, software history, digital culture, and media activism

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The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is Katherine Losse’s memoir about working at Facebook. It’s a fascinating look into the personal politics and ideologies of Facebook and Silicon Valley. She is employee 51 at the company, working in customer service after seeking a change of pace following her disenchantment with the PhD in English she was pursuing. She works her way up, playing the game and buying into the mission, and eventually tops out as Mark Zuckerberg’s ghost writer. Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, Dustin Moskovitz all show up in the text and we get windows into their personalities. It’s the author’s detailed notes on these individuals and the growth of the company internally which serves as the key contribution of the book.

Unfortunately, the writing is a bit awkward. The personal anecdotes, glimpses of love, and social outings are all documented through the lens of how Facebook is changing how we relate, emote, and think. Her reflections and philosophizing get repetitive. I don’t think her observations are necessarily inaccurate but they feel belabored in the book. She also feels compelled to explain a lot of internet culture and hacker jargon, which interrupts the flow of the story. In the end, I enjoyed the story but feel like it could have used a heavier hand in editing as it tries to be both a memoir and an ethnography, and feels a bit off center as a result.

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