Created: February 20, 2020
Modified: February 20, 2020
Modified: February 20, 2020
Seeing Like A State
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- The theme of the book is that top-down control necessarily involves abstraction, and often, changing existing systems so that they are more 'legible' to abstraction. This is often at the expense of important properties not included in the abstraction.
- Top-down control also usually targets a limited set of goals, which often miss out on many important purposes the system previously served.
- Examples:
- Scientific forestry
- High Modernist urban design: Le Courvoisier vs Jane Jacobs. Brasilia.
- Villagization in Tanzania
- Soviet collective farming