Pages

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

What Is Living and What Is Dead In Social Democracy? Tony Judt

 
Zurich's Hauptbahnhof - A great example of a main train station (from my flickr photos).

I just finished reading Tony Judt's fascinating article What Is Living and What Is Dead In Social Democracy? from the New York Review of Books (December 19, 2009).

The article is especially interesting to me because is uses transportation, particularly privatization of transport services, as an example to explain the need for considering social benefits rather than very strict adherence to market-based economic considerations. Judt's example of private shops in a public railway station is excellent.

I read about the article in the equally interesting opinion article The Public Works by Nancy Levinson in Places. The article outlines how some of Judt's ideas could be thought about by designers (architects, engineers, and planners).