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Christina Vagt: Neighborhood Design
Neighborhood Design
(p. 81 – 96)

Christina Vagt

Neighborhood Design
Buckminster Fuller's Planning Tools and the City

PDF, 16 pages

The article deals with the epistemological context of neighborhood design in the works of Richard Buckminster Fuller. Following the development of neighborhood planning models in 20th Century U.S. only briefly, the article wants to confront the concept of neighborhood technologies and social mathematics with a media history of environmental design and game theory, stress the central role of diagrams and graphics for this history and ask about its place within a broader history of gouvernmentality.

  • mathematics
  • sociology
  • history of science
  • simulation
  • modeling
  • media technique
  • two cultures
  • algorithms
  • urbanism
  • networks
  • swarm model
  • game theory
  • biology

My language
English

Selected content
English

Christina Vagt

Christina Vagt

studied cultural sciences and history at Humboldt-University in Berlin. She is assistant professor at the department of literature, Technische Universität Berlin (Berlin Institute of Technology). From 2005 to 2007 she had a scholarship by the German Research Foundation, as member of the graduate school History of Media – Media of History (Universities of Weimar, Erfurt, Jena). From 2008 to 2009 she was scientific staff of Praxis für Ausstellung und Theorie, Berlin for the exhibition Arbeit. Sinn und Sorge at Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden.

Other texts by Christina Vagt for DIAPHANES
Tobias Harks (ed.), Sebastian Vehlken (ed.): Neighborhood Technologies

Neighborhood Technologies expands upon sociologist Thomas Schelling’s wellknown study of segregation in major American cities, using this classic work as the basis for a new way of researching social networks across disciplines. Up to now, research has focused on macrolevel behaviors that, together, form rigid systems of neighborhood relations. But can neighborhoods, conversely, affect larger, global dynamics? This volume introduces the concept of “neighborhood technologies” as a model for intermediate, or meso-level, research into the links between local agents and neighborhood relations. Bridging the sciences and humanities, Tobias Harks and Sebastian Vehlken have assembled a group of contributors
who are either natural scientists with an interest in interdisciplinary research or tech-savvy humanists. With insights into computer science, mathematics, sociology, media and cultural studies, theater studies, and architecture, the book will inform new research.