Too often, people feel checked out of politics — even at the level of their own city. But urban activist Alessandra Orofino thinks that can change, using a mix of tech and old-fashioned human connection. Sharing examples from her hometown of Rio, she says: “It is up to us...
Archive for category: Massive Small Leader
Nabeel Hamdi: Participatory Practise
Noted author Nabeel Hamdi has consulted on participatory action planning and upgrading of slums in cities to all major international development agencies, and to charities and NGOs worldwide. Here he describes how the central principle of participatory practise is at the core of all of the ideals that we...
Street Films: The Better Block
Massive Small is a huge fan of the work of Jason Roberts and Better Block – this short documentary shows what their projects look like on the ground.
Housing without Debt
It is now more or less universally accepted that there is something fundamentally wrong with our housing economy. Not just the centralised industrial production models we use to produce housing: our dependence on a few large development companies to buy the land, beat their way through local community resistance,...
David Snowden: Managing under Conditions of Uncertainty
Snowden here gives an excellent primer to the principles of complex adaptive systems. These ideas are foundational to Massive Small. Key Quotes: “We need to see technology as a tool that can augment human intelligence rather than as something that can seek to replace it. This requires us to see it in...
Alejandro Aravena’s Philosophy: Bring The Community Into The Process
Alejandro Aravena shows how taking an unusual approach to design – inspired by the favelas and slums in Chile – can pay off socially, environmentally and economically. He was asked to build homes for 100 families in Chile with a very small budget, approximately 10,000 dollars per family. By...
How can we transcend slum urbanism in Africa? – Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town – UN-Habitat
In this lecture, Edgar Pieterse, professor at the University of Cape Town and the founding director of the African Centre for Cities, puts forward the concept of the underlying logic of slum urbanism. This logic in turn manifests in an overall urban form that can be characterised as ‘extreme...
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