The Value Of Futurism - A Futurist Shares His Vision

Mitchell Joachim on the VALUE OF FUTURISM

Douglas Castle Presents a Futurist with a Unique Perspective.

As I have mentioned many times before in THE NATIONAL NETWORKER NEWSLETTER ,
we must either plan for the future or create it. Ignoring trends is simply not an option.

[Note: After you have read this article, please take a moment and jump over to THE INTERNATIONALIST PAGE blog. Here is the "teaser," followed by a truncated link... World peace through strategic interdependence. Growing entrepreneurship. Frightening trends http://twitlik.com/HeadlineTrends ]. And now we return to our regularly scheduled program...

Dear Friends:

I received a letter of great interest from a new acquaintance last week.

Andrew Seidler, the Associate Editor of BigThink asked me if I would be interested in re-publishing some fascinating videos containing some very penetrating and somewhat sardonic-sounding observations by fellow futurist Mitchell Joachim, a Professor of Architecture at Columbia University.

I have a strong affinity for Joachim and his philosophy. He is not only a man of ideas, but he is an advocate of thinking practically - something of a lost art in our excessively politically correct, conformity-obsessed, cause-of-the-moment culture (how about those hyper-hyphenations?).

Mr. Seidler's letter to me follows, with embedded hyperlinks to some very interesting video presentations. I am quite grateful to Mr. Seidler for bringing these quanta of intelligence to my attention so that I could share them with you, my readers.

Incidentally, I would recommend that you visit http://www.bigthink.com/. They have something of interest brewing there. In addition, I have added BigThink to our link list on this blog.
______

Hi Douglas,

I thought that Global Futurist might be interested in this extremely interesting clip from an interview that Mitchell Joachim, architect/’futurist’/and professor at Columbia, just did with BigThink.

In the interview, Joachim, who was recently named one of Wired Magazine’s “15 People the President Should Listen To” and winner of the History Channel and Infiniti Design Excellence Award for the City of the Future, offers an extremely engaging critique of our common notion of “sustainability,” arguing that the notion is ultimately too dry, un-evolving, and lackluster to be a valid ideal for the future:

http://bigthink.com/mitchelljoachim/the-bland-mediocrity-of-sustainability

Joachim also discusses the practicality of being a ‘futurist,’ and coming up with ‘big,’ elaborate solutions in an age confronted with issues –like the climate and energy crises-as large as ours:

http://bigthink.com/mitchelljoachim/the-practicality-of-big-idea

Mitchell also outlines his work to redesign the infrastructure based on New York—and eventually other cities—to create an urban system that is entirely self-sufficient (the video includes images and graphics from Joachim’s designs):

 http://bigthink.com/mitchelljoachim/a-self-sufficient-new-york

I hope you find these videos helpful and insightful. If you would like to link to them or embed them into your site, please feel free to do so. If you have any questions about Mitchell Joachim, or Big Think, please feel free to contact me at Andrew@bigthink.com or at our office at 212-242-0617.

Best regards,
Andrew

Andrew Seidler
Associate Editor,
BigThink
Office: 212-242-0617
Mobile: 917-902-1215
http://www.bigthink.com/

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

NOTE: This Article originally appeared in Douglas Castle's blog, THE GLOBAL FUTURIST, at http://theglobalfuturist.blogspot.com/. Douglas castle would like to thank Mitchell Joachim, Andrew Seidler and BigThink for making the content contained herein available.



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