Surveillance Technology Is Changing Our Brains

Security cameras. (Pixabay License).

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

The eternal, essential apartment: Apartments have been built for over a millennia from four story blocks in Rome to apartments in Teotihuacan, Mexico. History shows these buildings have made it easier for people to live in cities and contribute to what makes them vibrant. Apartments have also evolved into structures used for rethinking cities and today they are thought to be one of the solutions to our climate crisis. (Ashley Gardini | JSTOR Daily)

Reckless driving needs more enforcement: Iowa Law professor Greg Shill argues that street design alone isn’t enough to curb reckless driving and enforcement of behaviors such as speeding, drunk driving, and seat belt wearing need to be a priority as well. Activists have noted that traffic enforcement is uneven and some racial groups are targeted more than others. But documented drop offs in enforcement have coincided with greater numbers of crashes on state highways. (Greg Shill | The Atlantic) (This is a gift link so should be available to everyone)

Surveillance technology rewiring our brains: Research published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness shows that surveillance technology that now exists everywhere in our built environment has rewired our brains and how we navigate social situations. The researchers found the human evolutionary ability to recognize other human’s gaze has been heightened and suggest this change could increase mental health issues such as social anxiety disorder and psychosis. (Kiley Seymour and Roger Koenig | The Conversation)

Where the wildfire ends: The urban wildfires intensified by hurricane-speed Santa Anna winds in the Los Angeles region this past week should not be categorized as wildfires burning a house in the forest but rather more like conflagrations which use buildings to fuel more intense fires. Our understanding of the fires could help us figure out sustainable ways to rebuild and how to avoid future disasters that are likely to be more frequent with the conditions created by climate change. (Henry Grabar | Slate) See also: Excellent LA Times article with two fire experts on the topic.

Modular homes for Western states workers: Employers in the Western United States are using prefabricated and modular homes to fill housing needs for their employees as the national shortage continues. Families that would have left expensive cities like Jackson Hole are now getting some help and the cost of construction is much cheaper as labor shortages abound. (Hanna Merzbach | Marketplace)

Quote of the Week

“The range of energy literacy was quite wide from one home to the next. And when I went somewhere as an energy coach, it was never to moralize about energy use. I never said, ‘Oh, you’re using way too much.’ It was always working on it with the households, depending on what people need for their homes.”

 Joseph Llewellyn, a researcher with MIT’s Senseable City Lab in MIT News discussing a successful program to reduce energy poverty.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re at Mpact in Philadelphia chatting with King County Metro’s Rachel DeCordoba about her work educating the next generation of transit riders.

(Editor: Sorry the links are a little late this week. We’ll be back to our regular weekend schedule next time)