EN EU ES

Sheet 04 · What we're interested in

What we keep coming back to.

A

Streets and transport

Four young people cycling side by side along an empty motorway in Amsterdam on a car-free Sunday, January 1974. Essay Energy and Equity Ivan Illich, 1973 (Le Monde), book 1974 Illich's case that past a certain speed, vehicles take more time and freedom than they give, and that a free society moves at the speed of a bicycle. Pedestrians cross a Washington street among Model T cars and a streetcar, 1920. Podcast episode The Modern Moloch 99% Invisible, Roman Mars, 2013 How American streets, once shared by children, walkers and streetcars, were handed to the car, and how motor interests invented the crime of jaywalking. Pedestrians walk across a St. Louis street among early cars and streetcar tracks, about 1915. Book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City Peter D. Norton, 2008 The history behind that episode: between 1915 and 1930, US city streets were taken from pedestrians and streetcars and redefined as places for cars. Robert Moses points at a model of his proposed Battery Bridge in 1939. Book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Robert A. Caro, 1974 The biography of Robert Moses, the unelected official who built New York's bridges, parkways and expressways for almost fifty years, and who paid the price. The brick water tower of Jones Beach State Park rises above a full car park. Podcast The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan, 2024 A year reading The Power Broker together, a few chapters at a time, with guests from Robert Caro to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Giant container cranes at the Port of Oakland, with ships at the quay behind. Podcast episode Containers: The Ships, the Tugs and the Port 99% Invisible, Alexis Madrigal, 2017 Alexis Madrigal on how the shipping container remade the ports of San Francisco Bay, and with them the work and the geography of world trade.
B

Cargo bikes and micro-hubs

A rider on a loaded delivery cargo bike in a graffitied street in Hackney Wick, London. Report The Promise of Low-Carbon Freight: Benefits of cargo bikes in London Ersilia Verlinghieri, Irena Itova, Nicolas Collignon and Rachel Aldred (Possible and the University of Westminster's Active Travel Academy), 2021 GPS data from 13,735 pick-ups and drop-offs by London's Pedal Me: on the same jobs, cargo bikes were on average 1.61 times faster than vans. A rider beside an electric cargo bike with a large insulated box used for a butcher's deliveries in Toronto. Report Delivering Last-Mile Solutions: A feasibility analysis of microhubs and cyclelogistics for urban freight delivery in the GTHA Janelle Lee, Carolyn Kim and Lindsay Wiginton, Pembina Institute, 2019 Whether delivery micro-hubs and cargo bikes can cut freight costs and emissions, modelled for the Toronto and Hamilton area, with advice for firms and city councils.
C

Who owns the delivery

Article Glovo and its Riders: An Unbalanced Relationship Paul Iano, ARGIA, 2019 The first of a four-part series on Glovo's business model: three months as a Glovo rider in Vitoria-Gasteiz and dozens of interviews with other riders. The reason Eraman exists. A paper notice on a red London phone box calling Deliveroo and Uber Eats riders to strike. Essay Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy Trebor Scholz, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office, 2016 The short founding text: the people who work through apps could own and govern them, as cooperatives, instead of Uber and its kind. Glovo delivery riders with yellow backpacks waiting on bicycles in a Madrid street. Report Fairwork Spain 2025 Ratings: Insufficient progress in protecting work on digital platforms Fairwork Spain team, Fairwork / Oxford Internet Institute, 2025 Glovo, Just Eat, Uber, Cabify and three other platforms working in Spain, scored against five principles of fair work.
D

Tools we build on

Three delivery routes drawn as dotted and solid lines from one depot over a street map. Tool VROOM (Vehicle Routing Open-source Optimization Machine) VROOM project, maintained by Verso, since 2015 Open-source route optimisation for real delivery problems: time windows, several vehicles, pick-ups and drop-offs, solved in milliseconds. Screenshot of the OSRM web demo showing a long route across a world map with turn-by-turn directions. Tool Project OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) Project OSRM, since 2011 A fast open-source routing engine on OpenStreetMap data, with car, bike and walking profiles. Martin Kleppmann, one of the essay's authors, speaking on stage at Berlin Buzzwords 2014. Essay Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan, Ink & Switch, 2019 The case for keeping the main copy of your data on your own devices while still working together in real time.
E

Data spaces

The Berlaymont building in Brussels, seat of the European Commission, under a clear blue sky. Report DSSC Blueprint Data Spaces Support Centre (EU Digital Europe Programme), version 3.0 The EU's reference guide to building and governing a trusted data-sharing space: business, governance, legal and technical building blocks. A real-time arrivals display at a Metromare trolleybus stop between Rimini and Riccione, Italy. Report PrepDSpace4Mobility acatech and EIT Urban Mobility, 2022 to 2023 Mapped Europe's mobility and logistics data ecosystems and proposed shared building blocks for a common European mobility data space.
F

Technology from the left

A circle of white swivel chairs with orange seats facing wall screens, a recreation of the Cybersyn operations room. Podcast episode Project Cybersyn 99% Invisible, episode 230, 2016 How Allende's Chile wired its nationalised factories to a control room to steer the economy in real time, until the 1973 coup. President Salvador Allende shaking hands with workers in overalls, among a crowd, in 1972. Podcast The Santiago Boys Evgeny Morozov, 2023 The long version of the Cybersyn story: Allende's engineers and a British cybernetician against corporations and spy agencies, and how close they came. Stafford Beer, white bearded, pointing at a diagram on a blackboard during a lecture. Book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile Eden Medina, 2011 The history book behind Cybersyn: how Chile tried to run its nationalised industries with cybernetics, and what that says about technology and politics. The grey cabinets and control desks of a BESM-6 Soviet computer on display in a museum. Book Red Plenty Francis Spufford, 2010 A novel woven from history about the Soviet dream of an economy planned by mathematics and computers. The link is a free seminar on it, with the author's reply. A red bus marked 'Lucas Aerospace Workers Road-Rail Bus' standing on railway track in 1980. Movement The Lucas Plan Lucas Aerospace shop stewards, 1976 Aerospace workers who, facing redundancy in 1976, wrote their own plan to turn arms production towards socially useful products, like this road-rail bus. Aerial view of a huge Walmart distribution centre with rows of truck trailers in open country. Book The People's Republic of Walmart Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, 2019 Giant firms like Walmart already plan huge parts of the economy inside themselves. Could that planning be made democratic? Cross sections of four undersea fibre optic cables, from heavily armoured to lightweight, beside a coin for scale. Book Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future Ben Tarnoff, 2022 The internet is broken because it is privately owned and run for profit; the case for a network run publicly and democratically, from the cables up. Small solar panels mounted over a doorway and along a fence in front of an old house. Magazine Low-tech Magazine Kris De Decker, since 2007 Forgotten and low-energy technologies, from heat to transport, published on a solar-powered website that goes offline when it has been cloudy for too long. Striking tech workers with picket signs outside the New York Times building. Magazine Logic(s) Logic(s) Magazine, since 2017 A magazine about technology seen from below, by the people who build it and the people it is done to. Now once a year.
G

Debt, money and words

A small clay tablet covered in cuneiform script recording a loan of silver. Book Debt: The First 5,000 Years David Graeber, 2011 An anthropologist's history of debt from Mesopotamia to today: credit came before coins, and barter economies never existed as the textbooks tell it. Drawers of metal letterpress type with a composing stick holding set lines of text. Book Contradictionary: A Bestiary of Words in Revolt CrimethInc., 2013 A dictionary of words in revolt, in the tradition of The Devil's Dictionary: capitalism's language turned inside out, entry by entry. A May 1968 poster of a figure behind bars inside a television set, captioned 'Libérons l'O.R.T.F.' Book The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord, 1967 221 theses on a society where life is lived through images and their consumption, here in Ken Knabb's free translation. A 19th century carpenter's workbench with saws, planes, chisels and a wooden toolbox. Book Tools for Conviviality Ivan Illich, 1973 Tools that grow past a certain size end up controlling the people who use them; Illich's call for tools people can use on their own terms.
H

Modernism, housing and building

The red and cream arches and towers of the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna. History Red Vienna Social Democratic city government of Vienna, 1919–1934 From 1919 to 1934 Vienna's socialist council built homes for workers on a vast scale, paid for by a tax on luxury. The Karl-Marx-Hof is a kilometre long. The rooftop swimming pool of block A at Wohnpark Alterlaa, a 1970s subsidised housing estate in Vienna. Article People's palaces Alexei Korolyov, Monocle, 2021 Vienna never stopped: most of the city lives in subsidised housing, and two thirds of new housing land is reserved for it. Some estates have pools on the roof. A Frankfurt Kitchen with blue cabinets, a window counter and a stool, in the Ernst-May-Haus. Podcast episode The Frankfurt Kitchen 99% Invisible, 2023 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's compact fitted kitchen, designed for Frankfurt's public housing in the 1920s, and the remarkable life of the architect who drew it. El Lissitzky's poster of a red wedge piercing a white circle on black and white ground. Artist El Lissitzky El Lissitzky, 1890–1941 Painter, designer, typographer and architect who carried abstract art into posters, books and exhibitions for the revolution. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919. Popova's fabric design of red stars inside overlapping black circles. Essay Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design Christina Lodder, Tate Papers 14, 2010 In 1923 Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova went to work at a Moscow textile factory and turned Constructivist painting into fabric and clothes for everyday life. An open Isotype book showing road-sign pictures in red and black. Tool Isotype Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath and Gerd Arntz, from 1925 The picture language for statistics made in Red Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath and Gerd Arntz, where rows of symbols count people and things. The ancestor of every infographic. Aerial view of the Bijlmermeer's long honeycomb blocks and canals in 1973. Podcast episode Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1) 99% Invisible, 2018 The Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam's modernist city of the future in honeycomb slabs: how it failed, and how its residents made it work. Aerial view of the Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis, 1960s. Podcast episode The Pruitt-Igoe Myth 99% Invisible, 2012 The 33 towers of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, whose demolition was called the death of modern architecture, and the myths about why they failed. Aerial view of the dense block of Kowloon Walled City in 1989. Podcast episode Kowloon Walled City 99% Invisible, 2012 Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong: some 33,000 people on two and a half hectares, built without architects, until its demolition in 1993. The vaulted, chandelier-lit hall of Komsomolskaya metro station in Moscow. Book Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings Owen Hatherley, 2015 Twentieth-century communist Europe read through its buildings: avenues, housing estates, metro stations and memorials from Berlin to Moscow. A section of hemp concrete wall, showing the plant fibres in the lime binder. Building 15 social flats in hemp concrete, Boulogne-Billancourt North By Northwest Architectes for Immobilière 3F, 2021 Eight storeys of social housing near Paris with sprayed hemp concrete walls, which keep the flats at an even temperature and humidity without any cooling.
I

Limits and resilience

Green undergrowth and flowers grow among burnt dead tree trunks after a forest fire. Book Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling (eds.), 2002 How ecosystems and societies move through repeating cycles of growth, rigidity, collapse and renewal, nested inside one another from the small to the large. Portrait of climate scientist Kevin Anderson in a blue patterned shirt. Talk Climate Talk: Blowing Through Our Carbon Budget Kevin Anderson, 2024 The climate scientist who will not soften the numbers: how much carbon budget is left for 1.5 °C, and how fast the rich world is blowing through it. Stacked bales of crushed plastic drink bottles at a recycling yard. Documentary Plastic Promises: Coca Cola's Recycling Lie ENDEVR Documentary, 2022 Coca-Cola's decades of promises to recycle its plastic bottles, tested against what actually happens to them. A red king crab, a crab-shaped relative of hermit crabs, running across the seafloor of Kola Bay. Article Evolution keeps making crabs, and nobody knows why Clare Watson, ScienceAlert, 2023 Carcinisation: the crab body plan evolved separately at least five times in decapods, king crabs and porcelain crabs among them, and some lineages lost it again. Looking up the trunk of an old Douglas fir in the University of British Columbia's research forest. Talk How trees talk to each other Suzanne Simard, TED, 2016 The forest ecologist who fed trees radioactive carbon and traced it moving through fungal networks in the soil, from old trees to young ones and between species. Some of her wider claims are now debated.

Read something we should know about? Send it to us.

Write to us →

See it in use

Projects →