Richard Watts at ArtsHub announces a new arts precinct planned in the former Collingwood TAFE. Australia loves ‘precincts’, which seem to be largely understood as a single-use mini-neighbourhood (and which I would argue is a quintessentially suburban concept of how a city works). Besides, Collingwood TAFE is essentially a single building; why not call it a hub?, or a centre? However, it’s a very large site, occupying almost an entire city block, and any provision of land at sub-market rates currently does good for diversity in the uber-expensive Australian cities, so precinct away.

The Atlantic Cities has a wonderful article on the pedestrian staircases linking up Cincinnati. The stairways have, apparently, become hubs of crime and many have been closed, while neighbourhood groups have sprung up to restore them. The photos warmed my heart enormously, because my hometown is full of staircases like these, just as narrow and steep, and one of the favourite things I do with my expatriated friends when we’re back in Rijeka is literally run up and down them (up is for stamina, down is just pure joy). It is interesting how social problems in Cincinnati have caused this slightly extreme urban landscape to be so quickly declared off-limits and unsafe. It made me wonder if social inequality has some kind of inverse correlation to landscape beauty: the more you have of the former, the less allowance can be made for the latter.

In the corner where we fight for children’s independent mobility, the British National Trust publishes a cute little list of things to do before you’re 11 3/4. It’s a sad thing that this needs to be stressed, but heck: children need independent exploration. It’s important for their intellectual, physical and psychological development.

Meanwhile, Chinese scientists create the influenza virus in the lab. The pressure is mounting on the US to close Guantanamo Bay as the total hunger strike of the inmates continues. The US also rejects the idea that the pesticides, banned yesterday by the EU, have caused the collapse of bee populations globally and suggest it’s better not to do anything until we’re sure. The collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh, which has claimed 429 lives as of this morning, has sparked a pressure campaign on fashion multinationals to force their subcontractors to treat their workers better, through better pay and more control. Very interesting, as fast fashion has become a global industrial force, and created entire landscapes of mass labour, production and accommodation in near-slave conditions. The images of this landscape are likely to remain a mark of our time the way industrial slums defined the 19th century.

In the ‘cool new things happenin’ corner, here’s an article on iFixit, a company that teaches adults and kids how to fix electronics, in order to boost science education in the US (they say kids are even more interested than adults). Improv Everywhere design a performance/reality theatre service in which they help texters walk on the street while they text. Global Press Institute is an organisation trying to replace clueless foreign correspondents with local women reporters, on the grounds that they simply know more, and should be given a voice. As a literate woman who once dated an aspiring foreign reporter dude, who told me he wanted to write about my country (of which he knew nothing) in order to give me and my people a voice, I say: go Global Press.

Here is also a little essay on Berlin’s Stumbling Blocks, the best public sculpture and also memorial I have ever experienced.

Meanwhile, on the more trivial side of things, IBM makes a nano-animation with atoms, which is very cute. And Warren Buffett opens an account on Twitter.