Reviews for Science, Technology, and Political Change

The average rating for Science, Technology, and Political Change based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-23 00:00:00 Hogey Hogey Light argues that, at the height of the Cold War, many of the intellectuals in military planning who had worked on strategies for winning a nuclear war and then winning hearts and minds in Vietnam, moved to "solving" urban crises of blight and disorder. In order to accomplish these goals, they recommended military techniques and technology to be applied to urban planning. Through military contractors like the RAND Corporation, they set up in cities burearcracy. While eventually they folded since they were too expensive and did not mesh well in undisciplined cities with limited resources that had to take into account values beyond efficiency. Light focuses her study on NYC, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. Key Themes and Concepts -Light focuses on four areas of military strategic implementation: 1) "defensive dispersal" of industry (in case of nuclear attack) and indirectly support of suburbanization. 2) Use of "systems analysis" for service delivery. 3) Geo-coded mapping data 4) Cable television (triumph of privatization and potential for reaching trouble making poor of the ghetto through cultural warfare. -Originally, intellectuals were lured out of fields like social sciences, physics, and more to have the "best and brightest" who could solve any problem, in a top down approach. -The failures of Urban Renewal opened up military contractors to enter into urban planning. -Unlike military contractors, NASA had more direct impact on local cities planning. -Defense planners believed that transfer of technologies would solve crumbling cities, and partly, they had to justify much of the immense spending on defense, as the US government somewhat rarely directly invests in development of civilian technology beyond basic research.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-10-16 00:00:00 Kimberly Phillips Very relevant to my own studies (the application of computer model in urban planning by Canadian ecologists). It seems like the unchecked techno-optimism of cold war academics certainly spread across disciplinary as well as national boundaries.