Robert Sullivan, in his NYT op-ed piece entitled The City that Never Walks, discusses how New York City has lost its vanguard position in terms of urban innovation. Sullivan focuses on its pedestrian friendliness (or lack thereof), and shows how other cities have been eclipsing New York in their new ideas and approaches to urban [...]
Monthly Archives: January 2007
U-Turns in Seoul
You can make U-turns in Seoul at any time from the middle lane; here’s a photograph that shows this quite clearly. And here’s a larger version, which shows it even more obviously. The Wikipedia article about U-turns contains some insight into the rules regulating these turns in some areas of the world. Also, this photographer [...]
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Visual Complexity: complex system visualizations
Visual Complexity is a collection and clearinghouse for hundreds of depictions of complex networks, from all over the Internet. Among the many categories, there is one devoted entirely to transportation networks. Here is the goal of the site, in their own words: VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the [...]
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Lego City of the Future
The citizens of Oslo were asked to build the City of the Future using Lego bricks. It’s incredible what can emerge from a group with no specialized Lego expertise (no Lego Master Builders, as far as I can tell). Quite the wisdom of the crowds.
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Unusual City Names
The title pretty much sums it up; this is a list of cities with weird names. And judging by the choices, I think it might have been compiled by a twelve-year-old. A brief selection: Chicken, Monkey’s Eyebrow, Raisin Center, Dexter by the Sea.
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Jane Jacobs Radio Interview
Jane Jacobs, activist, thinker, and author of, among many books, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, passed away a little more than half a year ago. Here is an interview with Jacobs from New York Public Radio, from 2000. In it, she discusses the ‘organic’ nature of cities, among other things. You can [...]
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Metropolitan Cardiac Authority
The t-shirt with an urban perspective on physiology.
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Time-Lapse Cities
Everyone likes time-lapse photography. Here is a collection of time-lapse films where the growth and development of cities can be clearly seen. First, a building being constructed in London: [youtube = http://youtube.com/watch?v=EYBYOxKf8rk] Here is a link to another building being built, over the span of eight months (the beginning part reminds me of Mike Mulligan [...]
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City of the Future Contest
The History Channel recently ran a contest entitled The City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge, where architecture firms were challenged to present their views of what New York, Chicago and Los Angeles should look like in 2106. Polis has more about the contest here (with a discussion of which entries took into [...]
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Global City
The Global City Wikipedia article discusses the world’s most important cities (no doubt a contentious issue). An interesting read, especially the part that lists those cities with ‘evidence of world city formation’.
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