Helping people make places better.
“Raise your hands if you trust Facebook, if you trust Google, if you trust government.” It was spring 2017, and I was leading a debate with young people in Canberra. “Has anybody heard of Cambridge Analytica?” Heads shook. I explained behavioural communication. How Cambridge Analytica built “psychographics” from Facebook data to measure personality and motivation – what you …
Continue reading "A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT FOR THE DIGITAL AGE."
Angelic structures hang overhead. Unlit wings crossing corridors of black cabs and emblematic red buses, awaiting electricity to declare that Christmas was coming. Collars pulled closely move quickly through autumnal air to the sound of occasional siren and constant conversation. London is sensuous. It demands you feel it like a beat poet, view it like a …
Victorian England. From the shadows of wealth grew poverty. Slums slumped against symbols of civic pride, cowering next to towering town halls funded through rich merchant princes, whose elitist rule was insufficient to deal with too many people in too few houses with too little infrastructure. Enter municipality. With darkness came electric light, with disease …
On the 19 February 1879, construction began on Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building. On 28 July 1923, it was the turn of Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. These dates are recalled, because people mark such beginnings. We make them visible. Ribbon-cutting, sod-turning, plaque-mounting – ways to say to stakeholders, this starts now: it will be money well spent. …
Continue reading "SKILLS, STRATEGY AND INVESTING IN THE VINEYARD"
On April 30 1911, the Commonwealth Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, launched a competition for a new city. It would be a city for whom trade would not require river or sea port, but face-to-face conversation and exchange of ideas. A city whose wealth would come not from what would be mined, but from the mind: …
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