The New York Times: It was dusk on the opening night of Burning Man, and the makers and misfits were touching up their art projects and orgy dens. Subwoofers oontz-oontzed as topless cyclists draped in glowing LEDs pedaled through the desert. And Paul Romer, a reigning laureate of the Nobel Prize in economics, sat on a second-story porch at the center of it all, marveling at a subtlety of the street grid.
4 comments:
This is an interesting idea of applying a festival’s structure to that of the developing world, but I am not really sure how effective it is. At first, it seems like this nobel prize winner (who is very eager to identify himself as such) is trying to claim the idea of gridding a city, which is really funny because people have obviously used this system for hundreds of years. Now maybe it is the details and the specific way of achieving it that he is calling out and not just the grid itself, but still, it seems weird. I think the most useful thing in this article is the way they talk about the underlying order that people do not see that allows the chaos and anarchism to flourish. This is pretty similar to the idea of theater technicians making magic happen onstage. If you do it right, people will not notice that it is a stage trick or anything like that, and will just be enthralled by the show itself, which is really our goal as technicians. At least it is to me.
It was very fascinating to see the economist's observations of the structure of Burning Man. Many people that I met this summer go to burning man and it was incredible to hear what they had to say about it. The festival acts as its own self sustaining economy. It pops up and is brought down as if noting ever happened. I do wish I could learn more on what the oversight and planning from a coordinator or manager (if there even is one) about the gathering, rather than just the perspectives from of the participants. In a desert, I wonder how dehydration, heat stroke and overdose from drugs are mitigated and handled. I'm sure it is a big concern for many people, however with concerns as such, oversight and overhead planning is usually beneficial. It was really interesting to see this world through the eyes of someone so academic and structure based in a world that is ever changing and non-concrete.
Reading different stories and perspectives about Burning Man is always incredibly interesting to me, since I feel like everyone has such a different yet similar perspective from one another. It is especially interesting to hear how the anarchist and communal mindset that is so prevalent at Burning Man permeates into the mind of someone who is a Nobel- Winning Economist, because those two ideas inherently juxtapose one another, although I think while Romer believes that anarchy doesn’t scale, I would say it still does, because Burning Man does still exist in a way that is “just safe enough that people can joke about dying without actually dying”. Burning Man is built on the concept of creativity, freedom, and exploration, but there are always going to be limiting factors on these ideas when it happens in the physical world. Burning Man will never cease to amaze me, since it is a city that is virtually built overnight and still seemingly has minimal fatalities or injuries given the scale that it is on.
This article was fascinating. Through reading many articles about Burning Man over the past few years on the GreenPage, I have always been amazed about how the structures and inhabitants of Burning Man seem to appear from nothing and then return to dust when it is all over. Hearing it classified as a sort of urbanization phenomenon is a take I don’t think I have ever heard. The ability to see patterns across wildly diverse examples is likely what lead Romer to see the parallel between drawing a street grid and the possibilities held in framing it in the desert. I enjoyed hearing about his idea of application of rules, regulations, and government to these possible cities. The development of Burning Man from a place of anarchy to a space of “superordinate civic order” is another fascinating component of this story. Actually bringing Black Rock City to order allowed for a space in which structure felt invisible but it allowed for a safer space for people to exist. I found the differentiation between people living close to the land rather than close to one another to be an interesting idea in the development of ideas and a processes that our society defines as “progress”.
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