organization:rockefeller foundation

Minnette de Silva: the brilliant female architect forgotten by history | Cities | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/dec/14/minnette-de-silva-the-brilliant-female-architect-forgotten-by-history

CORR for the title: forgotten on purpose by men (not by history)

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Against all odds, the 1940s pioneer of Sri Lankan modernism became one of the world’s most famous women architects. So why are her buildings not celebrated today?
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Shiromi Pinto

Fri 14 Dec 2018 07.30 GMT
Last modified on Wed 9 Jan 2019 15.50 GMT

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Minnette de Silva and politician Georges de Silva at the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace.
Minnette de Silva and politician George de Silva at the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace. Photograph: PAP

The second house designed by Minnette de Silva, once one of the most famous female architects in the world, stands in Alfred House Gardens, a leafy street in Colombo, Sri Lanka, tucked away from the fumes of nearby Galle Road.

Raised on columns, the house shelters within a limestone boundary wall, its iron gate patterned with leaf shapes. A yellow oleander tree and red bougainvillea spill over the gate, almost entirely obscuring the house that was built for family friends the Pierises in 1952. Inside are De Silva’s trademark features: open courtyards and verandahs alive with trees, shrubs and a pond; a walled garden; a parking space that once doubled as a play area; and a staircase sweeping up to the second floor, where the bedrooms and kitchen are located.

#architecture #femmes_invisibilisées

Hostile architecture: an uncomfortable urban art – in pictures | Cities | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2018/aug/21/hostile-architecture-an-uncomfortable-urban-art-in-pictures

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Hostile architecture: an uncomfortable urban art – in pictures
Bollards in a covered corner next to the entrance of a Carrefour supermarket in Paris. Photograph: Julius-Christian Schreiner
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Julius-Christian Schreiner’s Silent Agents series, shot in London, Paris, Innsbruck and Hamburg, depicts examples of ‘hostile architecture’: subtle interventions in urban spaces designed to hinder people’s use of them

#urban_matter #aménagments_urbains #dispositifs_anti_sdf #architecture

The 100 million city: is 21st century urbanisation out of control? | Cities | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/19/urban-explosion-kinshasa-el-alto-growth-mexico-city-bangalore-lagos

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Projections suggest cities will swell at an astonishing pace – but whether that means our salvation or an eco-disaster is by no means certain

by John Vidal
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Mon 19 Mar 2018 07.00 GMT
Last modified on Fri 13 Apr 2018 14.03 BST

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The 1960 street map of Lagos, Nigeria, shows a small western-style coastal city surrounded by a few semi-rural African villages. Paved roads quickly turn to dirt, and fields to forest. There are few buildings over six floors high and not many cars.

No one foresaw what happened next. In just two generations Lagos grew 100-fold, from under 200,000 people to nearly 20 million. Today one of the world’s 10 largest cities, it sprawls across nearly 1,000 sq km. Vastly wealthy in parts, it is largely chaotic and impoverished. Most residents live in informal settlements, or slums. The great majority are not connected to piped water or a sanitation system. The city’s streets are choked with traffic, its air is full of fumes, and its main dump covers 40 hectares and receives 10,000 metric tons of waste a day.

#urban_matter #démographie #population #urbanisation

Welcome to a new kind of war: the rise of endless urban conflict | Cities | The Guardian

►https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/30/new-war-rise-endless-urban-conflict-saskia-sassen

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Consider why the deaths of 6 million people in rural Congo are rarely mentioned, while 13 killed in London is global news

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#Saskia_Sassen

Tue 30 Jan 2018 11.00 GMT
Last modified on Tue 30 Jan 2018 11.01 GMT

In the 21st century, the search for national security has become a source of urban insecurity.

The traditional security paradigm in our western-style democracies fails to accommodate a key feature of today’s wars: when our major powers go to war, the enemies they now encounter are irregular combatants. Not troops, organised into armies; but “freedom” fighters, guerrillas, terrorists. Some are as easily grouped by common purpose as they are disbanded. Others engage in wars with no end in sight.

#urban_matter #villes #villes_en_guerre #villes #agglomérations

New anti-homeless architecture : Seattle uses bike racks to block rough sleepers | Cities | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/24/anti-homeless-architecture-seattle-bike-racks-block-rough-sleepers

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Police cleared a homeless camp before the transport department filled the pavement with unneeded bike racks – a clear case of hostile architecture which does not address the problem, say campaigners
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Josh Cohen in Seattle

Wed 24 Jan 2018 07.30 GMT
Last modified on Wed 24 Jan 2018 08.24 GMT

Seattle anti-homeless bike racks

Returning after a two-day business trip, Seattle resident Jeff Few noticed something odd on a stretch of pavement underneath Highway 99. When he had left his Belltown condo there had been a homeless encampment. Now the tents and the men, women and children seeking shelter there were gone, with 18 new bike racks installed in their place.

#équipements_anti_sdf #urban_matter #planification_urbaine et bien sur #vomir #obscé,ité #égoïsme #fin_du_monde #inhumanité et...

PIATA : A New Way of Doing Business - The Rockefeller Foundation
▻https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/piata-new-way-business

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#Piata, le nouveau partenariat qui veut transformer l’agriculture africaine #Rockfeller, #Fondation_Gates et #Usaid... #agra étant déjà un partenariat impliquant Rockfeller et Gates

Last week at this year’s African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), the Rockefeller Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the Alliance for Africa’s Green Revolution (AGRA) launched a new $280 million Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA).

PIATA is a five year partnership that will spur an inclusive agricultural transformation for at least 11 countries in Africa, to increase incomes and improve the food security of 30 million smallholder farm households. Countries include Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique.

Agriculture in Africa is the continent’s heartbeat—its most important sector, and its ticket out of poverty. With rising public investments in agriculture, increasing yields and better prospects for farmers, the past decade has yielded significant progress.

#agriculture #business #agro-industrie

Unbuilt Moscow: the ’new Soviet’ city that never was – in pictures | Cities | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/mar/08/imagine-moscow-city-new-soviets-design-museum-in-pictures

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Unbuilt Moscow: the ’new Soviet’ city that never was – in pictures
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As the centenary of the Russian revolution approaches, the designs of top Soviet architects for the capital’s future reveal their visionary aspirations

Imagine Moscow is at the Design Museum in London until 4 June

#moscou #soviétisme #ex-urss #urss #architecture #réalisme_socialiste @union_soviétique

Real Farming Report - Whose seeds are they anyway? - The Ecologist
▻http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2988494/real_farming_report_whose_seeds_are_they_anyway.html

http://www.theecologist.org/siteimage/scale/0/0/402737.jpg

It is tempting to believe that Svalbard and Navdanya can coexist happily. When facing the apocalypse you can’t be picky in your choice of partner, and they represent two sides of the same coin after all. Both are protecting seed diversity: it’s simply that one does so in its original place, the other in a new location.

For Vandana Shiva though, Svalbard is symptomatic of a dangerous shift in agriculture: it’s going hands-free. By locking seeds in what are essentially long-stay (exceedingly cold) ‘car parks’, they are open to being patented in the future: “While living seeds need to evolve ‘in situ’, patents on genomes can be taken through access to seed ‘ex situ’,” she warns.

Projects that aim to map the genetic data of seeds held in gene banks rob farmers, "of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to “code.”" adds Shiva.

Svalbard’s samples cannot be accessed by anyone other than their national depositor, but the vault is sponsored in part by two multinational agribusiness megaliths - DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred and Syngenta - as well as the Bill Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. Concerns over what they stand to gain are understandable, and conspiracy theories are rife (though whether there is any fire behind all the smoke remains to be seen).

Money is - as ever - also at the heart of the debate. The Crop Trust, which funds the world’s gene banks, states: “These crop collections are also often threatened, most typically by inadequate funding”.

Yet, the same is true of small-scale farming. People Need Nature’s Miles King states that in the UK: “farm subsidies are available only to farmers with more than 5 hectares, which excludes the producers it should be supporting”.

#semences #conservation_in_situ #privatisation #appropriation

Bernard Dionysus Geoghegan: The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences (2012)

▻http://monoskop.org/log/?p=9200

The Cybernetic Apparatus examines efforts to reform the human sciences through new forms of technical media. It demonstrates how 19th-century political ideals shaped mid-20th-century programs for cybernetic research and global science sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Through archival research and textual analysis, it reconstructs how and why new media, especially digital technologies, were understood as part of a neutral and impartial apparatus for transcending disciplinary, ethnic, regional, and economic differences. The result is a new account of the role of new media technologies in facilitating international and interdisciplinary collaboration (and critique) in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Chapter one examines how political conceptions of communications and technology in the United States in the nineteenth century conditioned the understanding and deployment of media in the twentieth century, arguing that American liberals conceived of technical media as part of a neutral apparatus for overcoming ethnic, geographic, and economic difference in the rapidly expanding nation. Chapter two examines the development of new media instruments as technologies for reforming the natural and human sciences from the 1910s through the 1940s, with particular attention to programs administered by the Rockefeller Foundation. Chapters three and four examine the rise, in the 1940s and 1950s, of cybernetics and information theory as an ideal of scientific neutrality and political orderliness. These chapters demonstrate how programs sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, MIT, and other institutions shaped linguist Roman Jakobson’s and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s efforts to redefine their fields as communication sciences. Chapter five considers how critics of cybernetics, including Noam Chomsky, Claude Shannon, and Roland Barthes, critically re-evaluated the claims of cybernetics to redefine the relations between technical research and the human sciences.

A Dissertation
Northwestern University & Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2012
262 pages

Author
Related paper by the author: From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus (Critical Inquiry 38, Autumn 2011)

#cybernétique #libéralisme #médias #sciences_humaines

Food Politics » AGree : “Can’t we just all get along ?”
►http://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/05/agree-cant-we-just-all-get-along

une nouvelle fondation visant à faire de la politique agricole/nutritionnelle

AGree is a bold new initiative designed to tackle long-term agricultural, food and rural policy issues. AGree has significant funding from eight of the world’s leading foundations for at least the next eight years…We also recognize the interconnected nature of agriculture policy globally and we seek to break down traditional silos and work across issue areas.

The funders? These are heavy hitters: Ford Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and The Walton Family Foundation.

Dark side of giving : The rise of #philanthro-capitalism - Economic Times
►http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-03-25/news/29188722_1_rwanda-agra-agriculture

Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (#AGRA) — an initiative driven by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda #Gates Foundation, the oldest and the largest philanthropic repositories, respectively, in the world? The Gates Foundation alone has committed $264.5 million to AGRA.
“They are using the pitiable condition of the African people to get a foothold into the continent,” explains Som Pal. “Their large philanthropic resources are being utilised to further the interests of business.” In countries with weak governance mechanisms, like in Africa, it becomes a lot easier.
(...) There is its growing stranglehold in the policy-making space across emerging markets, especially in education, healthcare and agriculture.
The $23.1-million investment by the Gates Foundation in #Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of GM seeds, is a small example of a trend.

#OGM #cdp