The MESH Cities book is available as a PDF download. Get it here from Doc Send.
From the prologue:
“The MESH Cities project investigates how computer-driven technologies change cities. It’s not a delirious celebration of 21st-century information technology. Nor is it a sombre critique of computing’s darker side. Instead, it tracks how people, companies, and institutions wield new tools to design our cities—both as they exist today and as they might exist tomorrow. Comprehensive designers matter now more than ever. Without them, we won’t make it to the next century. That’s not hyperbole. The planet can’t support ten billion people—not unless we design better cities. Design thinking is an act of agency in defiance of creeping nihilism.
If we dedicate our economic resources towards designing and building better communities locally, we employ a vast range of people from labourers to manufacturers, health care workers to educators. A strategy like that will solve many of the world’s big problems—from the inside out.
This MESH Cities dictionary is based on a series of online posts made on www.meshcities.com from 2010 to 2020, the period where intelligent cities entered the contemporary discourse.
MESH Cities is an expression of urban optimism. It is influenced by, among others, Buckminster Fuller, William McDonough, Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Donald Norman, Dieter Rams, Jane Jacobs and Paul Romer. These people share a trait: they’re makers. Their creations capture the pulse of a specific time and place, weaving together disparate ideas to solve problems we didn’t even know we had. They didn’t respond to markets, they invented them. They are the thought leaders of Mobile, Efficient, Subtle, and Heuristic (Human) cities of tomorrow.”
