The neighborhood Hoograven in the Dutch city of Utrecht is in need of a fix up and last week newspaper De Volkskrant reported about the plans (article here & here). This article drew my attention for several reasons. First of all, because of the two people that were hired to make the plans: Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. I have to admit that I had never heard of them before, but according to the lead of the article, these two Venezuelans are “well-known for their unorthodox slum…
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How can we make science and technology contribute more to sustainability and development? A bunch of researchers from the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex have taken an initiative called ‘Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto’, which “aims to challenge the mainstream models of science and technology for development that have become integral to government and international agency policy”. Central in their New Manifesto will be the following “3Ds” : Directionality –…
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In the early ‘80s, the sociologist Ulrich Beck spent some months on the hills surrounding Munich and wrote what became the academic best-seller Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Sage 1992). 20 years (and 80.000 copies) later, together with my colleagues of Safety Science and – I believe – most of students in the field of risk studies around the world, I was inaugurating the beginning of my PhD studies by reading his book. In the following months – and , I couldn’t know then, in the following…
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“Freedom is both the means and end of development”, says economist Amartya Sen. He and philosopher Martha Nussbaum have had immense influence on debates about global justice, poverty and development since the 1980s, with their ‘capability approach’. The core idea: development is about expanding people’s positive freedoms or human capabilities that allow them to lead the lives they have reasons to value. Lives in which many different things can and will be important. Poverty and…
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A major argument I make in my book, Who owns You? is about the nature of the natural genome as a “commons.” It seems to me utterly clear and uncontroversial that that there are some things that simply cannot be claimed by any individual as their “property” in any meaningful sense of the term. The strongest analogy I make is to radio spectra, which can be monopolized only over short distances as long as someone else has a transmitter of identical strength. Brute force cannot…
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