Sunday, October 25, 2009

On housing innovation in New Orleans

Though a bit too focused on Brad Pitt, The Atlantic had a spot on housing in New Orleans this week. Check it out!
"If you look at the way ants behave when they’re gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you’ve ever seen—they’re zigzagging all over the place, they’re bumping into other ants. You think, ‘What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything,’” says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and sustainability and has worked with neighborhood organizations here. “So it’s easy to look at New Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What’s going on here?’ But if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it’s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.”
Actually, sounds a lot like how I spent my last two years.

1 comment:

Craig Smith said...

You know what would be really neat? Since your blog is called "Where is Mark?" you should have like an interactive map or something on one of your sidebars that shows where in the world you actually are at the moment.

By the way, how's life?