Ooh yay! My interview is up on the "Existential Hope Podcast"! A lovely conversation about how we can imagine and demand a better future!
https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts/ada-palmer-on-how-speculative-worlds-can-help-us-demand-a-better-future
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Oslo requires all construction machinery to be clean
Oslo is pioneering the use of battery-powered machinery in construction to reduce noise and pollution. In October 2024, two-thirds of machine hours were powered by electricity - as of this month, a new mandate requires electric machinery on all building sites. Sweden and The Netherlands are now considering similar moves for their own urban projects. The Guardian https://buff.ly/4jwfRmT
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Highway-turned-stream in Seoul is an environmental win
An open sewer in the 1930s that became an elevated highway in the 1960s, Cheonggyecheon Stream was converted into a pedestrian recreational area 20 years ago. Now a major tourist attraction and cultural corridor, it also cools the surrounding neighbourhoods, reduces air pollution, and helps control monsoon floods. Wildlife, including 666 plant and species, has returned. The Guardian https://buff.ly/4auWJSg
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I have a cold so no “Inventing the Renaissance” thread today. Resting. Meanwhile enjoy this painting of the Judgment of Paris with the goddesses looking mind-bendingly medieval. (Bargello museum, Florence.)
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A decade-long transformation in Ethiopia's Gambella region has revolutionised water access for 235,000 refugees and host communities. The shift from emergency water trucking to a solar-powered utility system has slashed water costs more than ten-fold, while increasing daily water production from 700 to 4,000 cubic metres. The project demonstrates how humanitarian responses can evolve into sustainable solutions. UNICEF https://buff.ly/4hagqBa
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Friends, let's visit the largest, most famous disability access ramp on Earth...
with a twist! About how our feelings about a bit of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s POV, but what questions we ask 1/?
(Countdown to "Inventing the Renaissance"
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“Inventing the Renaissance” is a history of histories of this (not so) golden age. Much of making history is simply adding new POVs to the braid as historians ask new & more diverse questions w/ each generation. I hope you’ll enjoy my effort to show the process at work! 25/25 https://buff.ly/4j6qkoS
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Was Piero the Gouty demanding the obsequious submission of the priori (like summoning the Senate to the White House) or a disability accommodation just this once? Both, is the answer, but the same questions won’t get to both, it takes different historians asking different questions & comparing. 24/?
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… exactly fifty-fifty: half showing evidence for sefless servants of the state, half scheming tyrants. You can read the papers in this incredible book. We always worry about bias in history, but one part of bias is: What question were you asking in the first place? 23/? https://buff.ly/3PTXXgn
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Years ago I attended a conference on “The Medici: Citizens or Tyrants?” Dozens of scholars presented evidence for the family’s sincere, humble service to the republic, or for their princely power-hungry cunning. ALL the presentations had GREAT evidence, and in the end they came out… 22/?
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Diversity celebration or tyrant’s monument? It’s the same piece of architecture but feels completely different depending on what question we ask about it: Why was it built? For power? For chronic pain? Yes. Both. 21/?
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So Lorenzo’s descendants built Earth’s most famous disability access ramp…
…the Vasari Corridor, the elevated walkway I discussed last week as conquering Duke Cosimo I’s project of architectural domination, a tyrant’s assassin-proof walkway piercing the city’s heart 20/? https://buff.ly/3E8bAG0
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The long interior descends at a gentle grade with minimal turns and staircases, mostly stair that a horse can climb—horse ramps and riding horses or donkeys indoors at a walk was another proto-wheelchair disability tool, one architecture had to plan for with things like horse stairs. 17/?
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This is why the Vatican has so many weirdly shallow staircases—popes are old so the Vatican was a palace expecting to always host a disabled monarch, so it’s full of built-in accommodations, the most complex and fascinating accessible architecture case study in the world. 18/?
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Speaking of disability accommodations, eventually the Medici built a ramp. This ramp. It connects from the floor where the priori were, passes through the bureaucratic offices and all-important guild HQs, sloping at an easy grade down to the living-quarters level of the family palace. 16/?
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And it’s not chance that it was the first Medici pope, Lorenzo’s son Leo X, who finally installed a donkey-powered elevator in the papal fortress Castel Sant’Angelo. Leo was elected young, still fairly fit, but had memories of his parents’ condition getting worse, and knew his would. 19/?
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Books where the Medici are the bad guys (tyrants who corrupted the republic!) will make this incident proof of Piero’s haughty decadence. But I know can’t do those stairs on a pain day, and we could equally call it a disability accommodation. He’s still called “Piero the Gouty” to this day. 15/?
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Mature Medici—Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo, Lorenzo’s mom Lucrezia Tornabuoni had it to—all had to save their endurance for performing fitness in the streets, being seen walking to or from the cathedral or church or the Palazzo Vecchio where wary eyes judged them… 10/?
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…collapsing back into their beds & servants’ arms (period wheelchairs) the instant the door closed. It was carefully stage-managed agony, and accounts from visitors describe Lorenzo walking alongside their horses, joining dances and parades—performance of fitness to hide his increasing weakness 11/?
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And if you remember my post about the very, very tall towers of the Renaissance, imagine with me the agony of answering the summons to visit the Priori (ruling council). A great honor! But a good floor higher than the tower I lived in that was up 111 steps! 13/?
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