Interesting Things on the Internet: February 1st 2021 Edition

• A personal rant — the UK and a failure of governance. "There’s also the suggestion of “oh I suppose you could do better could you?” and the answer to that is “yup”. You dear reader, you could do better. In fact a dead cat and a traffic cone could also provide better governance, since they would sit still and not get in the way, and thus make a neutral contribution rather than a negative one."
• Good twitter thread on new municipalism from Matt Thompson. Expect some blog-all-dog-eared-notes to drop soon from his book on collective housing too.
• The meaning of £20: A majority middle-class media rarely reflects the reality of poverty. "As my friend Sweyn noted on Twitter, Radio 4’s PM contextualised the value of the ‘uplift’ well — it accounts for around 13% of the total income of the families affected." I think people would view the Universal Credit discussion differently if the headlines were about a 13% cut, rather than a £20 cut, and we shouldn't be arguing over it anyway.
• The open city. I liked the idea of thinking about the boundaries between areas of the city in this. Something to throw into the mix in my 15-minute city experiments.
• The Three Languages You Need to Take a Project from Dreams to Reality. Come for the excellent explanation of the different audiences that projects need to communicate with; stay for the lovely summing up of why projects like any of my Liverpool Hannah Links are special.