A 1961 book by writer and activist Jane Jacobs. The book is a critique of 1950s urban planning policy, which it holds responsible for the decline of many city neighborhoods in the United States. The book is Jacobs’ best-known and most influential work.

Notes for attendees: The book is fairly large and well worth reading in its entirety. If you are thinking of attending, please try to have read at least the Introduction and Chapter 2. Chapter 7 is also a short helpful index to the section which follows it.

Reading link: The Death and Life of American Cities.pdf

Tomas is a Lecturer at University of Kent and a Collaborating Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London. He is building programming tools that integrate with modern data sources (open government data, data published by citizen initiatives) and let users easily create analyses and visualizations that are linked to the original data source, making the analyses more transparent, reproducible, but also easy to adapt. His early work on the project can be found at http://thegamma.net.

Tomas’ many other interests include open-source and functional programming (he is an active contributor to the F# ecosystem), programming language theory (his PhD thesis on “coeffects” develops a theory of context-aware programming language language), but also understanding programming through the perspective of philosophy of science.