Misha Lepetic is a consultant and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology, energy and social venture, with current interests in urban design and food policy. A BA in Music from Swarthmore College led to several years of professional DJing in South America, whereas an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University has resulted in less exciting but perhaps more productive pursuits. Lately, his idea of an exciting Friday night has been parsing complex compounds in classical Sanskrit. Email: misha.lepetic@gmail.com
by Misha Lepetic There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say Up in the skyway ~The Replacements An empty downtown, with boarded-up shops and desolate sidewalks, is truly a sad sight to behold. It is also symptomatic of much larger forces, namely the flight from the urban core into the suburbs that wound…
by Misha Lepetic There wasn't a damn thing I could do or sayUp in the skyway~The Replacements Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance…
by Misha Lepetic Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land. ~ John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath” Received wisdom relies on simple categories to survive and persist. In this sense, certain numbers are repeated until they are virtually canonical. If we could come up with a taxonomy of success…
by Misha Lepetic “In the dime stores and bus stations, People talk of situations, Read books, repeat quotations, Draw conclusions on the wall”~ Bob Dylan Cities ceaselessly fascinate because of the problems they have solved over time – grand socio-infrastructural dilemmas such as property rights, water, sewage, electrification. But as cities grow and evolve, these…
by Misha Lepetic “If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings” ~ Jeff Mulgan Recently I had the good fortune to catch “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” at the IFC Center here in…
by Misha Lepetic There are only two kinds of freedom: your freedom to do what you like, and our freedom to determine what kind of a society we want to live in.~Gerald Frug One phenomenon that the Occupy Wall Street movement has crystallized in remarkable fashion is the unapologetic negotiation of the physical occupation of…
by Misha Lepetic If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.~Emile Zola The underground – and particularly the urban underground – has always been a preferred site for writers and commentators to project their dystopian visions. After all, the underground has always implied illegality or illegitimacy – the underworld, while…
by Misha Lepetic “Cultures aren’t fixed or fixable. They are barely measurable… Culture is not so much what you plan but what you get away with.” ~ Marcus Westbury One could do worse than to think about a city as an endlessly frustrating exercise in the ongoing, suboptimal allocation of space, capital and – let’s…
by Misha Lepetic Memory is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.~ Walter Benjamin Whenever I live in a city for a particular amount of time, I find myself increasingly subject to a peculiar desire. It is perhaps not so much a desire as, in…
by Misha Lepetic Financial markets have a very safe way of predicting the future. They cause it.George Soros, Der Spiegel Purpose-built cities are nothing new, especially when an authoritarian government seeks to establish a new capital far from the distractions and chaos of the commercial capital. Recent and well-known examples include Abuja, Naypyidaw and Brasilia,…
by Misha Lepetic Anyone who can be replaced by a machine deserves to be. ~Dennis Gunton A noteworthy popular intellectual trend in recent years might be called “How Everything Works, In Spite of Itself.” Roughly, the trajectory can be described by James Gleick’s Chaos, which appeared in 1988; M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity in 1992; and…
by Misha Lepetic The world has not been at any time different than it is now. – ślokavārtika Lewis Mumford, perhaps the 20th century’s most broad-ranging and eclectic thinker and critic concerned with the American urban experience, is remembered mostly as a messenger of modernism. Certainly, his open contempt of architectural ornament and of the…
by Misha Lepetic “Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.” – Proudhon Back in undergraduate days, when, if it is to be believed, my prose was even more incomprehensible than it is now, I wrote a paper on the economic history of…
by Misha Lepetic I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974, p4 In the headlong…
by Misha Lepetic “The architect is primary… is the real cornerstone of any culture, of any society.”Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958 What is the responsibility of the architect or designer within the contemporary context of urbanism? If we’re to begin with the preceding quote, taken from an interview with an astonishingly anti-urbanist Frank Lloyd Wright, it…
by Misha Lepetic “Any energy not recycled becomes some form of pollution” – Andy Lipkis Much as the 20th century taught us that central planning failed our nations, the 21st century will teach us that central planning will fail our cities. It is commonly known that sometime in the last few years, we have passed…
by Misha Lepetic By now the scrappiness of the emerging economies’ entrepreneurial class has become a recognized trope of the folklore of globalization. Starting with Muhammad Yunus’s initial investments in the microfinance concept, to Tata Motors’ Nano, Western observers are being treated to an ever-increasing flow of news celebrating how doughty innovators are operationalizing elegant…